Hi friends. I've been working on recovery from the parental abuse, neglect, abandonment, endangerment, exploitation, scapegoating, parentification and gaslighting about it all, by four abusive parents (two bio, two step). And I had an epiphany a few days ago about how my unhealthy caretaking of others was hurting me and preventing me from caring for myself.
That probably sounds obvious to anyone who doesn't struggle with being a people pleaser. But for me, spending a lifetime under the collective thumbs of tyrannical, abusive and manipulative adults, it's not. Being shamed from childhood to wait on, care for, fix and parent parents, has left me with a cavernous, gaping obsession to be whatever anyone wants me to be, whether it's safe or healthy or not. And as you might guess, people who exploit and manipulate that in me, are not expecting healthy things of me.
They want me, as their child, to parent them, to be responsible for their every whim but then to also be obedient to them as a slave would be. That constant impossible paradox, of being both subject to and responsible for has made my head slowly implode, over the years. Neither one of those are healthy or safe. I was their child and they were the parents. They had a duty of care to me, not the other way around. And then factor in having to be subject to and yet care for "stepparents" and I've become one endless people pleaser, never taking care of me and letting others trample every boundary if they wanted.
I never dealt with this. I just kept gaslighting myself into thinking it was all my fault. I kept a poker face about what had happened and tried to squash it all down. And I succeeded. Till I didn't. Whenever someone around me, especially someone I was in a close relationship needed something, I thought it was my job to provide.
What I have learned is two-fold. (Mind this involves adults, not my children. That's a different situation) First, I need to determine if what I'm being asked to do is reasonable, safe and good for me and if I can actually do it. I've jumped in way over my head because I felt I should. And I should be politely asked to do it, not expected. And even if all those things occur yet I still don't want to, I don't have to.
And then what I learned recently is that I don't have to help and that the other person isn't even asking. My husband gets loudly irritable sometimes. And I just figured out why it upsets me so. Because I think I not only have to stick around and listen to it, I have to fix it. Somewhere in my taken advantage of brain was planted the idea that I cannot just walk away. That is selfish. I have to do everything in my power to fix the problem even if the person is treating me disrespectfully and making it clear they don't want help.
I explained this to my husband the other night when he couldn't find his glasses. He was surprised and said "you mean all this time, you felt you had to fix it? It's not your problem, it's mine. It's not your job to take care of me. I'm an adult. You don't have to do anything." But because I was never allowed, with my parents, to do that, because whenever someone had a problem I was supposed do know and fix, to care for them as if they were a needy two-year-old, because I was the scapegoat, the sacrificial lamb, I just expected that everyone felt that way about me.
It was a real ah-ha moment for us both. So now when I feel that old pull to stay in someone's else's problem, I ask myself who owns it, do they really need help (or are they just trying to make it my problem), can I help without getting hurt, and do I want to. If I can't answer yes to all of those, then I have to walk away.
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