I’ve had a bit of a rough go with it in terms of being raised in a bad environment, not properly socialised properly early in life, and to top it off my partner of 7 years just ended things because of some pretty nasty issues between us that I felt were perfectly fixable.
Everything as it is, I’ve started having issues with feelings of being disposable. Like I don’t matter, like I’m nothing and I can’t expect people to stick around, like they’re waiting for a reason to abandon me.
On a logical level that doesn’t hold much water, but at this point I’m starting to wonder how to fight these feelings if they come from very factual places. How can I justify the thought that I inheritly have worth, if the reality of the situation is that I keep being treated like garbage.
I’m doing all the right stuff, seeing a psych, prioritising recover, actually have a pretty decent inner voice going, but the feelings are still really strong and it’s hard to fight them. I’m not really sure how to handle this.
To an extent, embrace it.
You’re disposable to other people?
Other people can be disposable to you.
Other people treat you like you are inadequate?
Their cruelty is their deficiency that makes them inadequate to you.
If people do not respect you, your boundaries, your minimum requirements, reject them.
Not out of malice or a misplaced sense of revenge.
Out of a safety mechanism for yourself, to prevent you from becoming too attached to people who are likely to fuck you over.
Become more self-reliant, become more functional without depending on others who extract more from you than they give in return.
You are not nothing, other people are not nothing.
I’m not saying ‘fuck everyone, everyone is awful, you don’t need anyone!’
But every particular person is much less necessary to be a part of any other particular person’s life than you would think.
There is a happier, more stable middle ground between total rejection and closing yourself off from the world entirely, and gloming on to anyone who even just once shows you the slightest kindness.
You’ve got a lot of experience with shitty people, shitty behaviors, shitty patterns.
On the one hand, that’s immensely traumatic and destroys your self image, and that needs help to recover from, process, understand.
But on the other hand, its given you a strong sense of red flags that shitty people display.
After you’ve processed the harm that’s been done to you… evalute your past experiences, formulate them into a kind of fucked up training guide for the kinds of people to be wary of, not become attached to or dependant on in the future, for behavioral hard nos, that you must make clear explicit boundaries against.
Become a greater degree of self-reliant, capable of existing and doing more and more things, experiencing more things, on your own. This will bolster your sense of self, and it will give you practical tools to avoid bring abused in the future.
That’s not to say to look all gift horses in the mouth; helpful people with good intentions do exist, and can benefit you.
But you need to learn who you really are, what your values really are, what boundaries you really need to feel like a stable and competent and respect worthy individual.
Its a journey that lasts untill you die, not a goal that you just a accomplish at some point.
Keep doing the right stuff, you’re already on the right track. Learn, not so much to love yourself unconditionally, but instead, how to respect yourself.
Develop a fair standard that you hold yourself and others to equally. Be forgiving to both yourself and others for minor deviations from that, but be wary of those that repeatedly deviate from it, or massively transgress it.
In defining yourself, you gain identity, confidence, and practical means to avoid being exploited again.