I started out intending this to be about all the outlandish assumptions my brain tries to function under. Instead, its going to be about how difficult it is for me to accept help, or even praise.
First, it has come to my attention there were a few people unaware of the existence of this blog until now. For anyone in that class, I apologize. It was not a deliberate oversight, when I started this thing I thought I had mentioned it to anyone who might be interested. I was apparently wrong. Not in that the people who I missed weren’t going to be interested, I just missed some people somehow. Anyway, welcome to whatever this is.
Back to the actual topic of this post.
It is very difficult for me to accept help, or praise.
Thank you for your attention.
Edited to add: It has been longer since I looked at this blog than it has been for many of the people reading this so, out of morbid curiosity, I went back to start reading some of the older posts. I can’t do it. I started reading them and was okay until I started hitting posts about covid. Looking those over was not a good idea. Lesson learned
Edited further to add: The thing is, I’m kind of interested to go through those posts because I really don’t remember much detail at all between about March of 2020 and sometime in 2023.
Boy do I get having a brain that doesn’t want to accept help or praise.
I know my caretaker brain and your nurse brain probably have some overlap on the not accepting help part. “I am the one who helps!” It shouts in a very Walter White voice.
I can say also that after (years of) doing the work to make my brain a smoother operating and more powerful piece of my internal hardware I am now able to accept both help and praise. It still frequently feels weird, but I can.
And learning to accept both has been a small-but-significant piece of my transformation into someone who is happy, and the biggest piece of all of that was learning to like myself.
That piece – the liking myself piece – was, unfortunately, the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do, and I don’t really have a map or a how-to for it.
Something I remember being helpful at several different points along the path towards liking myself though was a kind of, as Curt might put it, ‘positive spiral’ version of the logic games I see your brain employing in several of your posts.
Start with the fact that I’m sure there are several people you like and respect who love you, and find you praiseworthy and want to help you any way they can.
Start with focusing on two of those things: first, that you respect these people, and second that they find you praiseworthy. Think about that for a second. You respect them. And they find you praiseworthy.
Sure, everyone has their bits of bad taste and blind spots, but once you see a ton of people you respect, all with different tastes and diverse opinions, converging on one opinion… Even it’s one you’re reluctant to look at like some bullshit about what a good person you are or some other kinda fucking lies like that… well… if you really respect all these people, you gotta take a second and look at their side of things.
Maybe look at it as a bit of an inverse of everyone’s favorite quote from ‘Justified’: “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”
If one person (you) thinks you’re an asshole, you might be an asshole. If all the people you love and respect think you’re a really good person, maybe you are?
And then let’s focus on the other side. The part where there’s people who love you who want to help you.
This one I did all kinds of things with. Sometimes I just continued to reject help (and honestly probably still do more than I should – it’s a rough one), but things that have been helpful have been – approaching it like I’m doing a favor for someone (“they’re making a big deal about wanting to help me so fine I’ll let them do this. Maybe they’ll enjoy it. Maybe they’ll shut up. Who cares. I’m doing it for them.”), approaching it like a way to prove to them that I don’t actually need their help and throw it back in their face (not a great one, but, honestly, it does get the ball rolling), approaching it like their “help” is going to actually slow me down but the company will be nice (so condescending), and – the best and most difficult one – accepting that there are people who love me in my life who are great resources of many kinds that I can utilize to make my life better, and who, most of the time, enjoy few things more than sharing their abilities with the people they love.
There are a lot of people who love you and desperately want to see you love yourself even half as much as we do. I know that seems fucking ludicrous because you have a brain feeding you different, poisonous, messages all the time (no, I’m not going to suck the poison out), but it’s absolutely true.
Love you.
Whew! What Ed said. To which I would add just one thing: those of us who love you and want to help will not always get it right. For myself, I know I have a “bias for action” that often leads me to jump on my horse and gallop like mad in absolutely the wrong direction. It’s taken me a long time to learn that the best way to help someone in need (and particularly in crisis) is not to just “DO SOMETHING!!!!!!!ZOMGPONIES,” but to listen and pay attention to find out what kind(s) of something(s) might actually help. It can be difficult sometimes, but the difference between that and my plan is that it actually works sometimes. All this to say, you and anyone else I may offer my so-called “aid” to have carte blanche to tell me when it isn’t working the way I hoped it would.
I’d consider ignoring 2020-2023. A lot of it sucked big baby bears.