Mental Wellness Support Group

[Gryffindorian]

I was having a really bad evening. I've mentioned in this thread that I have family members who drop in unannounced and stay as long as they want at the apartment I share with my brother. They have no concept of personal boundaries and privacy.

I was having an uneventful but otherwise relaxing afternoon this Presidents Day. I had started my home fitness routine when I heard footsteps up the stairs, followed immediately by my nephew opening the door, followed by my sister "Lena." I stopped what I was doing as they came in, having had to postpone my workout. I had absolutely no idea they were coming over. More to my dismay, I was told my other sister "Annie" and other nephew were coming too. "Oh great, forget my plans for a quiet evening," as I sat dejected, scrolling mindlessly through social media.

When Annie and my nephew arrived two hours later and Lena and her son were about to leave, I figured this would be two more hours of agony, so I left the apartment without saying anything and drove off to get dinner.

Why, you might ask, do I put up with such rude and intrusive behaviors? Because the moment I say something to assert myself, I'm the villain, the Anti-Christ, the bad guy, the a-hole. So I'ma just shut my mouth and keep the peace.

Don't mind me. I'm just a guest in my own home.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I was having a really bad evening. I've mentioned in this thread that I have family members who drop in unannounced and stay as long as they want at the apartment I share with my brother. They have no concept of personal boundaries and privacy.

I was having an uneventful but otherwise relaxing afternoon this Presidents Day. I had started my home fitness routine when I heard footsteps up the stairs, followed immediately by my nephew opening the door, followed by my sister "Lena." I stopped what I was doing as they came in, having had to postpone my workout. I had absolutely no idea they were coming over. More to my dismay, I was told my other sister "Annie" and other nephew were coming too. "Oh great, forget my plans for a quiet evening," as I sat dejected, scrolling mindlessly through social media.

When Annie and my nephew arrived two hours later and Lena and her son were about to leave, I figured this would be two more hours of agony, so I left the apartment without saying anything and drove off to get dinner.

Why, you might ask, do I put up with such rude and intrusive behaviors? Because the moment I say something to assert myself, I'm the villain, the Anti-Christ, the bad guy, the a-hole. So I'ma just shut my mouth and keep the peace.

Don't my mind me. I'm just a guest in my own home.

I can relate to this on so many levels............. Been here

 

[Commander Troi]

I was having a really bad evening. I've mentioned in this thread that I have family members who drop in unannounced and stay as long as they want at the apartment I share with my brother. They have no concept of personal boundaries and privacy.

I was having an uneventful but otherwise relaxing afternoon this Presidents Day. I had started my home fitness routine when I heard footsteps up the stairs, followed immediately by my nephew opening the door, followed by my sister "Lena." I stopped what I was doing as they came in, having had to postpone my workout. I had absolutely no idea they were coming over. More to my dismay, I was told my other sister "Annie" and other nephew were coming too. "Oh great, forget my plans for a quiet evening," as I sat dejected, scrolling mindlessly through social media.

When Annie and my nephew arrived two hours later and Lena and her son were about to leave, I figured this would be two more hours of agony, so I left the apartment without saying anything and drove off to get dinner.

Why, you might ask, do I put up with such rude and intrusive behaviors? Because the moment I say something to assert myself, I'm the villain, the Anti-Christ, the bad guy, the a-hole. So I'ma just shut my mouth and keep the peace.

Don't my mind me. I'm just a guest in my own home.

Then be the bad guy! That kind of behavior is unacceptable.

 

[fireproof78]

I was having a really bad evening. I've mentioned in this thread that I have family members who drop in unannounced and stay as long as they want at the apartment I share with my brother. They have no concept of personal boundaries and privacy.

I was having an uneventful but otherwise relaxing afternoon this Presidents Day. I had started my home fitness routine when I heard footsteps up the stairs, followed immediately by my nephew opening the door, followed by my sister "Lena." I stopped what I was doing as they came in, having had to postpone my workout. I had absolutely no idea they were coming over. More to my dismay, I was told my other sister "Annie" and other nephew were coming too. "Oh great, forget my plans for a quiet evening," as I sat dejected, scrolling mindlessly through social media.

When Annie and my nephew arrived two hours later and Lena and her son were about to leave, I figured this would be two more hours of agony, so I left the apartment without saying anything and drove off to get dinner.

Why, you might ask, do I put up with such rude and intrusive behaviors? Because the moment I say something to assert myself, I'm the villain, the Anti-Christ, the bad guy, the a-hole. So I'ma just shut my mouth and keep the peace.

Don't my mind me. I'm just a guest in my own home.

Keeping the peace at the expense of your mental health is not peace.

I would encourage you to set boundaries based on what you need. It is not easy and to those with no boundaries it will appear a bit assholeish but it isn't.

 

[Gryffindorian]

Thanks, all. I was thinking last night, if only I could afford to move to a different city or a different state altogether, I would. I love my family as a whole. It's just difficult to deal with them sometimes.

Annie is the more reasonable sister. I suspect Lena has an undiagnosed personality disorder and would go apesh*t if I even brought it up. She's extremely sensitive and gets very defensive (and offensive) if she feels she's being criticized or attacked.

 

[Bynar0110]

I don't fear death.

 

[Gryffindorian]

I don't fear death.

I imagine if I were to get tangled up with dangerous thugs threatening my life, this is what I would say. "I'm not afraid of dying. What I'm afraid of is dying alone, so I'm taking y'all mothaf*****s with me!" as I pulled the pin from the grenade. Then somehow it didn't work, so I had to run like hell for my life.

 

[SJGardner]

Currently trying to secure an appointment to the private clinic in Vienna that most members of our self-help group were considering (and some have already visited, with rave reviews). Let's just say that I'm absolutely overwhelmed by the sheer number of time slots I can apparently choose, dozens every day, even as early as 8AM tomorrow. This is just so unusual for my cynical and ever-suspicious East-Central European mentality where you're lucky to get an appointment three weeks from today and it's far from guaranteed that you actually get called by the doctor within an hour of your scheduled time slot (my former endo, for example, was notorious for simply scheduling every customer on a given day for the same early morning time slot, serving us in order of arrival, then leaving a few hours in to serve her state practice in the city hospital until early afternoon), that I decided to postpone making an appointment because it just sounds too good to be true.

If it actually is the way it looks, then it all depends on when I can schedule appointments with a local psychiatrist to renew my diagnosis and with the diagnostics center down the corner for my blood work. Fingers crossed.

 

[Fantasy Lover]

I hate being an introvert and having autism, it makes meeting new people hard. I'm in an neighbourhood that occasionally host activities, but I don't go there because I have no one to go with. And I don't want to go alone, I'm afraid that if I go alone no one will talk to me and I'll feel excluded.

But I don't want to be alone anymore, I'm bored in my weekends because I don't have anything to do and I can't always count on my friends because they also have their own lives and friends. It sucks

 

[Bynar0110]

So amused with everything anymore. It hard to take anything seriously or be afraid.

 

[Commander Troi]

Laughing at the absurdity is what keeps me sane some days.

 

[NCC-73515]

Sometimes you have to bow to the absurd

 

[raneclowd]

Sometimes you just have to laugh at the absurd (or ignore it)

 

[SJGardner]

Spending the day with my parents for a family event once again ended with the expected results and the inevitable confirmation that I'm just a horrible person who doesn't deserve goodwill, let alone love and support from anyone.

An innocent comment I made about a certain historical figure having been LGBTQ devolved into an extremely heated argument where my father just kept ranting about how true LGBTQ acceptance and equality could only be achieved if people's sexual orientation and gender identity were completely private because that would allow us to judge them "only on their merits", and no matter what I said, he just kept repeating the accusation that I (and by extension, the LGBTQ community) wants to reduce people to their sexuality and we would erase all of their achievements to talk only about who they had sex with, and that he doesn't want to erase their sexualities, but he doesn't care about that, he only cares about what they achieved. Eventually it just devolved into him just immediately shooting down literally anything I tried to say with repeating "but why reduce them to who they have sex with?", over and over and over, until I just couldn't bear it anymore, and...

Well, I lost my cool, I couldn't contain my rage and just started to flat-out scream an incoherent stream of whatever profanity-laden personal insults just came out of my mouth, calling him a bunch of hurtful things that really shouldn't be printed. So naturally, it ceased being an argument in that moment and became a child discipline situation. I was (justifiably) called an absolutely insensitive, disrespectful, petulant child, he expressly told me that he "wasn't interested in my six hundred ninety-third empty and meaningless apology", that he's fed up with his child so obviously never having loved him, and that he'll talk to me again once I learned how to "communicate in a way other than an intellectually challenged child with rage issues". My mother kept implicitly bringing it up for the rest of the day, like when we discussed conflicts with my grandma's side of the family, and she just cryptically said "sometimes we love our relatives even if they don't love us back", then very pointedly looked at me for five whole seconds, and so on.

I just... why am I the way I am? Why can't I just keep my mouth shut? Why do I have such a fragile narcissistic ego that I immediately just melt down the moment somebody doesn't agree with the entirety of what I say? My parents were right all along, I don't deserve to be loved as long as I'm such a horrible, arrogant, petulant, narcissistic toddler. How could anyone even tolerate a person like me? I hate myself so much. I wish I could be someone else.

 

[raneclowd]

... who doesn't deserve goodwill, let alone love and support from anyone.

Of course you do!

 

[Avro Arrow]

My parents were right all along, I don't deserve to be loved as long as I'm such a horrible, arrogant, petulant, narcissistic toddler.

I get where this negative self-talk comes from, but it not true. You do deserve to be loved. And respected as an individual. And while I don’t know you personally, you don’t seem like any of those things that you listed, so I doubt those are true either.

This doesn’t at all sound like a situation where someone was merely not “agree[ing] with the entirety of what [you] say”. This sounds like your parent attacking your very identity. And from the way you have told your story, this is not the first time. It is understandable to “lose your cool” when your own parent, who is supposed to love and support you unconditionally, constantly attacks who you are.

And please forgive me for saying so, but from what you have relayed, your father sounds like a bigot. His position of “nobody’s going to accept the LGBTQ community unless they go back to being 100% closeted” is just bigotry, just like anyone else who wants to erase that group from the public sphere.

This is not advice, so please don’t treat it as such. However, I will just share my (potentially unpopular) opinion: if family members are toxic, it is OK to cut them out of your life. I know people can change (it does happen!), but the way things are right now, it doesn’t sound like your father is really good for your mental health.

I hope I am not out of line. I know I don’t know your full situation, and am just basing it on what you’ve written here. Just please remember that you deserve to be loved, respected, and supported. And although your thoughts may say otherwise, you are not a terrible person. I hope you find the support and acceptance that you truly deserve.

 

[SJGardner]

I get where this negative self-talk comes from, but it not true. You do deserve to be loved. And respected as an individual. And while I don’t know you personally, you don’t seem like any of those things that you listed, so I doubt those are true either.

This doesn’t at all sound like a situation where someone was merely not “agree[ing] with the entirety of what [you] say”. This sounds like your parent attacking your very identity. And from the way you have told your story, this is not the first time. It is understandable to “lose your cool” when your own parent, who is supposed to love and support you unconditionally, constantly attacks who you are.

And please forgive me for saying so, but from what you have relayed, your father sounds like a bigot. His position of “nobody’s going to accept the LGBTQ community unless they go back to being 100% closeted” is just bigotry, just like anyone else who wants to erase that group from the public sphere.

This is not advice, so please don’t treat it as such. However, I will just share my (potentially unpopular) opinion: if family members are toxic, it is OK to cut them out of your life. I know people can change (it does happen!), but the way things are right now, it doesn’t sound like your father is really good for your mental health.

I hope I am not out of line. I know I don’t know your full situation, and am just basing it on what you’ve written here. Just please remember that you deserve to be loved, respected, and supported. And although your thoughts may say otherwise, you are not a terrible person. I hope you find the support and acceptance that you truly deserve.

You're not out of line at all. Thank you for the kind and encouraging words.

This has been a really hard day for me. Incidents like this wound me and make me doubt everything about myself, not to mention feeling angry and disappointed that in my desperate attempt to defend myself, I caused myself harm. I feel it really hard to forgive myself when if someone else told me stuff like what I told my father, I'd be completely justified in cutting them out of my life.

 

[TrickyDickie]

Just before we got hit with Covid, my wife and I both sensed a shift in planes....universes. That has happened to us quite a lot, over the years. Sometimes we come from the same plane to the 'new' or latest one, and sometimes we come from different ones. It was different this time. I very distinctly remember sitting down with my wife just a few years ago....maybe 2 or 3 at the most....and watching a video of Pitbull doing 'Mama Said Knock You Out'. He was even getting the audience to join in. He was wearing a black suit, white shirt, and had brown lens sunglasses....more toward the aviator shape than round. It was not L L Cool J. Where I came from, this was always Pitbull's song. It was kind of his trademark song. But now, it is all changed. My wife knows it as always being L L Cool J's song.

But, we are together on the fact that for both of us, C-3PO never had a silver leg. We saw the first 3 Star Wars movies in theaters, we both had them on vhs, and there was never a silver leg. It is comforting that there are still posters and other images that exist that show him with both gold legs.

It is especially strange, because at the end of the first movie, they honored the droids for their valuable assistance and totally refurbished them to like-new condition. Even if C-3PO had a silver leg before that, which he didn't, it certainly would have been changed back to gold at that point and remained for subsequent movies. Thus, the whole silver leg thing doesn't even make sense, especially from that point onward.

My wife and I both took care of elderly parents for a lot of years. Then potential employers did not want us. Then we developed health problems serious enough to take us both out of the work force, anyway.

Living on public assistance is not easy, it is very frustrating, and it carries a lot of stigma with it. We are not lazy people who look for handouts. Before we got sick, we both worked very hard. We even volunteered for two months after the tornado in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 2011.

The connection in all of this is that it seems like being out of the mainstream has given us the opportunity to notice things that we might not if we were busy with jobs. We stay almost hyper-aware every day and we have experienced many strange things, including tons of coincidences all the time that seem to go far beyond being able to be explained away as normal. And we have each other to compare notes.

Researchers in quantum physics are starting to seriously delve into the idea of parallel universes and I think that's good, because there's too much high strangeness going on that should not be automatically rejected just because it doesn't fit with a long-standing bias.

I feel that, at least in some cases, isolation can cause heightened perception of external reality.

People who experience things that are not 'normal' should not be told that it's all only in their head. That is NOT true in all cases.

 

[Gryffindorian]

Mandela Effect aside, I wish you and wife all the best.

 

[TrickyDickie]

Mandela Effect aside, I wish you and wife all the best.

Thanks. I feel that 'The Mandela Effect' is too simplistic and too dismissive. I believe that serious research is needed.

Oh well, on the C-3PO issue, for what it's worth, this is a poster from 1978. No silver leg: