I haven't done a WHOLE lot since leaving my Monday to Friday position at the radio group...and that's okay. I haven't had a lot of time to zone, just zone, and sort to figure out what's most important to me vs. what's most important to the world around me. Some things are in agreement. Some not so much.
I'm learning to be better to myself...which means the end of codependent behavior and a cessation to ego-saturating performance - something I don't often experience, but does happen from time to time. I feel like an idiot because I've found that even though I know the best or right way to treat a person and a situation, I slip into the role of enabler.
I am better at being responsible and reasonable with friends than I am with family, but I'm not always good at keeping from being that PARENT, provider, puts herself last type with friends either. And with family, I am especially terrible at being...regular.
Growing up in a volatile household where I didn't know, one minute to the next, whether something would fly across the room at one of us (be it object or comment) or if something I said or did would cause enormous upset and then home would be a war zone of yelling and accusation and slammed doors and hatred....or if my pleading mother really would hold it against me if I didn't appease my stepdad or his kids with following the obnoxious rules and wishes, I felt, they didn't deserve to have. Not for how they treated us. Me.
I learned to "keep everybody okay," to the detriment of my feelings, and RATIONALITY. It's not because I care to be a martyr. I do not. It's because, and this is truer than true, I am afraid to lose the people I love.
I began to turn to God a lot at a very young age....around 7, 8.....because his words provided stability and very clear boundaries and more understanding than I received at home - certainly more compassion. If I didn't have biblical stories, characters and principles to go to, I think I would be unreachable today; curled up in a closet, humming, rocking.
But, I did. Thank God I did, and had great examples of how people in pain took care of themselves, wound after wound, time and time again: They recognized God in their lives. They learned to view painful people through eyes of compassion. They relied on superhuman strength, that can only come from God, to move mountains. They acknowledged being broken and were willing to be made new.
I try to model after the people in the Bible to this day...but I don't always. I can't always. I still get scared and broken and all twisted up and don't know how to relate to people I'm in disagreement with when it comes to my deep needs and theirs. - Not surface stuff, and not core values, I'm good at disagreeing there!
Anyway, I'm in counseling to be less codependent, more able to let other people stand on their own two feet. Not mine.
