Tuesday 1 December 2015

Meta-self-hate: feeling bad about feeling bad about feeling bad…

One of the core expressions of my mental health problems is a very high sensitivity to emotional input. In particular, my family members bypass any sort of firewall I have around, and my emotions kick off pretty much immediately.

I am also terrified of disappointing my family, of disagreeing with them.

So every time I have tried to articulate a contrary (emotionally sensitive) opinion to my wife, every time I have received criticism, has always always been accompanied by an emotional meltdown. And I can't let go of them — criticism I receive keeps on coming up for days and days after they were articulated, and I worry about disappointing my wife days after she stopped thinking about whatever the stimulus was.

So today, she said something along the lines of “But sweetie, you have to let these things go!!”

...

A few minutes later, I was all in tears because I am unable to let these kinds of things go, and thus my inability to not brood over things is a personal failure and feeds my self hate. After all, now I had received criticism for not being able to let things go, and there's no way I am able to let that go.

1 comment:

  1. Another brilliant post (of course).

    The other day I thought it was a highlight that I was described as "very very metatextual". But being metalevel when thinking about depression can get bad, it's certainly true.

    ReplyDelete

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