Breaking Our Borders Episode 25- My Healing Journey

Hello, everyone!  Welcome back! I’m Dr. Michelle Border and in today’s episode I am going to talk about my healing journey. I have had several listeners say, I recognize my trauma and hear you about how I need to get on the healing journey, but how do I do that? Today I will tell you what I have done on my healing journey and what methods have helped me the most. So, let’s get started talking about that right now.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello everyone, welcome back. I'm Dr. Michelle Border, and in today's episode, I'm going to talk about my healing journey. I've had several listeners say, I recognize my trauma and I hear you about how I need to get on the healing journey, but how do I do that? Today I will tell you what I have done on my healing journey and what methods have helped me the most. So let's get started talking about that right now. I started taking antidepressants at the age of 32, and they helped me tremendously with my anxiety and depression. But from the age of around 37 to 40, I was on a downward spiral of sadness that I couldn't explain. What I know now is that at around the age of 37, I had decided I no longer wanted to be in my marriage, but was waiting to leave until my sons had graduated from high school. I didn't want them to have divorced parents and have to endure having two homes to go to. I tried to put my unhappiness in my marriage aside, and wait another seven years until my youngest son had graduated. But I wasn't able to just put my unhappiness aside, and it grew into a depression that caused me to struggle to get up every day, to go through the motions of life, to pretend I was happy when I felt dead inside. After three years of this darkness building, I decided I needed help in figuring out how to be happy enough to get through the next four years. I made an appointment with a counselor in hopes of finding out what was wrong with me, why I couldn't be happy enough to get through a few more years. And who knew, maybe she could help me figure out how to be happy enough that I wouldn't want to leave my husband. I was very fortunate to find a counselor that I connected with the first time. It doesn't always work that way, and I know that some people don't have a good experience with counselors the first or even second time, but I highly recommend keep trying until you find one that does work for you. My counselor was a blessing, someone I will be grateful for until the day I die. But that's not what I thought the first day I talked to her. I will call my counselor, Sue. Her first question to me was, why was I there? I explained my situation, that I didn't really want to be divorced, but that I needed help being happy with my husband again, and would she help me do that? I was shocked and a little angered that she laughed at me, literally laughed and said, I can't do that. Then Sue said, If you are unhappy with your husband and want to leave, things have not been going well for a while, and we need to figure out what's going wrong. She said we needed to discuss more about me, what I was feeling, and what caused me to have feelings of wanting to leave. When I got to the parking lot after that first session, I didn't think I would ever go back. Honestly, I was pissed that Sue wouldn't help me in the way I asked. I was paying her after all. She should do what I wanted. I desperately wanted things to be as they were years before, when I wasn't so unhappy in my marriage, and I needed her help to get those feelings back. What I didn't realize at the time was that I had never truly been happy in my marriage, or at any point in my life. It wasn't until I had several sessions of counseling that I started to understand what happiness was. In the first few sessions of counseling, Sue asked me a lot about my childhood. As I gave her details, I assumed she would think that my childhood was pretty commonplace, typical, and not anything to do with my marital problems, but the opposite was true. Sue opened my eyes to the fact that not only was my childhood not typical, it had a huge impact on the problems I was currently facing. She explained to me that my parents were narcissistic, physically and verbally abusive, and emotionally absent. This all led to me creating a personality that was formed in hopes of stopping the abuse. Sue also explained to me that the abuse was not my fault. I was not a bad kid that caused all the trauma. This fact blew my mind. I had built the border in my mind as a child that I was the cause for my parents' abuse and unhappiness. If I could be perfect, meaning if I just did everything right, then my parents would not always be so upset with me. I developed the border that I was bad, worthless, and a burden. At times I felt bad for my parents that they had been given such a shitty kid that brought them nothing but problems. This was the first step in my healing journey. Acknowledgement of what happened to me and that it was done to me, not caused by me. I remember one day after one of my early counseling sessions, I went for a walk to try to process the many thoughts and feelings that I was experiencing with the enlightenment of the counseling sessions. I was walking, listening to music, and I had a wave of emotion come over me that I can only describe as being like the scene in the movie Beauty and the Beast. When the beast takes Belle to the library, tells her to close her eyes, and then yanks open all the curtains to let the light in before telling her to open her eyes. I felt like my brain was that dark library. And then with the understanding that I was not the problem, that I didn't cause all the abuse, and that I was not a bad person, flooded my mind. It was like the curtains were opened and the light poured in. Tears filled my eyes, and I almost had to stop walking because I could barely see through the tears. They were happy tears because I had a clarity that I never had before about my past, and a relief that I was not the terrible person that my parents convinced me I was. The borders were broken down, and I could see that there was someone inside me that had not had the chance to become who she really is. The next step of my healing journey was more acknowledgement of what happened to me that caused me to be the person I became, and to decide whether these were traits that I wanted to continue. My trauma caused me to develop several coping mechanisms, such as hypervigilance, anxiety, depression, withdrawal, people pleasing, and perfectionism. These coping mechanisms then turned into personality traits that were ingrained in my mind and formed the person I became. The borders in my mind told me that I was bad, worthless, and a burden to others. If I wanted people to like me, I had to do everything they wanted, make them happy in order for them to like me, and I shouldn't burden them with any of my wants or needs. I needed to make myself nearly invisible, silent, and unnoticeable. This helped me avoid more abuse, but was carried into adulthood as behaviors I thought were normal. Due to my lack of self-esteem and confidence, and feelings of shame, I didn't think I could excel at anything, even though I was developing the trait of perfectionism in hopes of being good enough for others' love and acceptance. However, I believed I was not good at anything, so I had to work extra hard to get things right so that people liked me. I tried many things to prove my worth in hopes of being liked and accepted, from my grades, jobs, being a wife, a mother, a friend, a family member. But since I had so many abusive people in my life, I never thought I did a good enough job at any of it. It felt like being a hamster on a wheel. I kept running, but never gained any distance. My counselor helped me to see that I had not been able to form my own identity, strengths, or confidence due to the trauma I experienced as a child. It was time for me to recognize the personality I had developed to survive the abuse, and determine if those traits were mentally healthy for me. It took a while before I had the whole list accumulated and figured out. I talked with my counselor about this, read self-help books about childhood trauma, and journaled a lot to help me process all the thoughts and emotions. During this process of becoming enlightened to what happened to me, I started to feel a lot of anger and sadness. I was angry that for 40 years of my life I was led to believe that I was a problem, worthless, and not good at anything. None of this was true, of course, but my mind had been poisoned into believing that. I was also angry that I missed out on having loving, nurturing, and supportive parents. I saw the traits that I could have had if raised by those kinds of parents, and I felt cheated. I was sad that I would never have a close relationship with my parents. They could never be the parents I needed them to be. It was too late for that. I was sad that I had spent over twenty years with a man that treated me the way my parents did, that I was drawn to that behavior, and lost so many more years of happiness. I was even more sad to realize that he would not change, and I didn't know if I could live with him any longer. The next step in my healing journey was to accept what had happened to me. This means I had to decide if I was going to be a victim or a survivor. Victims know what happened to them, but use it as an excuse to continue their unhealthy behaviors. Survivors know what happened to them, figure out what to do to become a healthier person, and put in the work to become healthier. I wanted to be better, to be who I was meant to be, and feel happiness that I had never known before. My take on this is, yes, I was abused as a child. It messed up my mind, and I will probably spend the rest of my life coping with it. But I will find a way to persevere and be the best and happiest person I can be. After acceptance, I needed to figure out what I wanted to change about who I had become. I recognized that the border in my mind of that I had to please others to get them to like me was one I needed to change. I also needed to change how I thought about myself, feeling worthless, burdensome, and having no confidence. My counselor helped me with each of these, and I read more self-help books about it. But I have to be honest. After 15 years of working on my healing, I still struggle with some of that. It's hard to change the wiring in our brains that was programmed when we were in our earliest brain development. I have improved some of this, and that much has been well worth the work. I do feel more confident than ever before. I am aware of my worth, talents, and abilities, and I like who I am. Sometimes, in some situations, the old feelings arise. The negative voices talk to me, and I retreat on my healing path into the toxic darkness. The good thing is, I have learned some skills for stopping that spiral and remind myself of the life I want to have now. I call this step reconstruction. I figured out what I wanted to rebuild in myself without the impacts of trauma. Once I understood what happened to me and accepted that was the cause of the coping mechanisms and personality disorders I had created, it was time to reconstruct myself into a happier and healthier person. I discovered the book Will I Ever Be Good Enough, Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Abuse by Dr. Carol McBride. It had a huge impact on helping me understand what happened to me, as well as giving me ideas of how to heal. In one section, she talks about how to figure out who you really are and not the person your narcissistic mother forced you to be. She has questions to think about that allow you to discover feelings, opinions, and wants about your life. At first I drew a blank on some of the questions. How could I know what I think or feel when I was never allowed to develop my own thoughts or feelings? So I asked some of my friends that I felt comfortable talking to if they noticed any of these things about me and what they thought or felt about the topics. I kind of did some research on what people felt or thought about certain things, so I had an idea of what normal reactions were. Then I decided what I wanted to do. I needed exposure to things that others thought and felt because I didn't know what else there was. I found this process to be exhilarating. It was fun discovering me and having the freedom to be who I wanted, and not who I thought I had to be. Next, in my reconstruction phase, I had to relearn the unhealthy coping mechanisms and personality traits that I had developed. Again, I turned to some research to better understand each trait and what it was doing for me. I read self-help books, online articles, and continued working with my counselor for this. Coping mechanisms and unhealthy personality traits or disorders are used to cope with abuse. I was no longer in an abusive situation, so I needed to learn how to train my brain not to be in that fight or flight mode all the time. Once again, I need to be honest, this has taken some time and work. It's difficult to change what is familiar, even if it is unhealthy, to go away from things that you have done for 40 years and grab onto a new method. I didn't attempt to change everything at once. I looked at which trait controlled me the most and focused on that one. For me, it was people pleasing. Over the years I had done so many things for others and not express my own desires, in hopes of them liking me and keeping the peace. I decided I was going to start working on that first. To start, I thought about situations I had been in recently and asked myself, did I do that in hopes of making the other person happy with me, or because I really wanted to? Then I thought of situations where I didn't speak up for what I wanted and asked myself what I could have said to share my thoughts. I created a list of sayings that I was comfortable with for future situations, like, that sounds good, but could we try this too? Or would you be interested in trying this with me? I also thought about things I could say when I really wanted to say no to someone. Things like, I'm sorry, I don't have time for that right now. Or could we plan that for another time? Having ideas of what to say gave me a little more confidence when the time came to saying no. I basically had to teach myself some social skills that were not taught to me as a child. I developed the people-pleasing trait because I wanted to keep peace, but also because I thought it would make people happy with me, make them like me. I needed to understand that people will like me even if I don't do everything they want me to. I needed to understand that people will, or won't, like me for who I am, not what I do for them. The people of my past who wanted me to do everything they wanted, didn't really like or love me. They used me to have their needs met. These were not healthy relationships, and I didn't need those kinds of people in my life. As I started to stop people pleasing, I was pleasantly surprised that people who really cared about me were not upset with me, did not become angry with me or remove me from their life. The healthy relationships I had grew stronger, and I gained more confidence in who I was. I didn't have to pretend to be someone I wasn't, and people liked the real me. The next task I took on was how I saw myself. I had not seemed good in myself ever before, and had not realized many preferences that I had. I needed to discover who I wanted to be or who I really was.

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Dr.

SPEAKER_00 17:13

McBride's list helped with this as well. I looked at my morals and values, my likes and dislikes, and opinions and beliefs. It was like I was creating a new person. The person that I had always wanted to be, but was never free to become her. I think some of those traits were inside me. They just didn't have a chance to be expressed. Once I decided which traits I wanted to keep, which to stop, and which I wanted to adjust, the work began to make that happen. My personal way of learning is to understand how or why something happens, then figure out how to change the parts that don't work. I needed the understanding of what happened to me as a child to know what to do to change who I was. At this point, I knew that borders were created in my mind from my trauma, that I was a bad person, burdensome to others, and couldn't do things right. To counter these thoughts, I focused on things I had accomplished that proved those thoughts wrong. I thought about my educational accomplishments, having completed two degrees at that point. I thought about my career and how I had helped hundreds of children learn and grow in my classroom. Then I thought about my choices as a mother. I know I was not a perfect mother, but I was making better choices for my sons than my parents did for me. Lastly, I looked at myself as a person. I thought about the things I do that are good, helpful, and thoughtful for myself, my family, and my friends. I came to the determination that I was not a selfish, inconsiderate little bitch, as my mother often called me, who was not good at anything. But, to be honest once again, I could logically see this new truth for myself. But that didn't immediately break down those borders in my mind. Even fifteen years into my healing, I still sometimes feel some of those old feelings created by my mother creeping in. But now I'm able to divert those negative thoughts with positive ones. By changing the negative thoughts into positive ones, I was able to better believe them too, because I also had the proof to support them. I have worked on several different traits that I felt I needed to change on my healing journey. I mentioned people pleasing as one of them. I also needed to work on my communication skills. I needed to have a voice, to communicate my needs and be prepared for healthy conversations with others. I needed to have better confidence in my abilities and patience with things I wasn't good at. I learned to accept my faults and failures and celebrated my accomplishments. I set new goals for myself with confidence that I would achieve them. I also started to evaluate the relationships I had. I determined whether they were healthy for me. I distanced myself from ones that were not, and found that the ones that were healthy were becoming even stronger. And most importantly, I was becoming happier. I wish at this point I could say that I did all those things for a certain amount of time and voila, I was healed, and my journey was complete. Unfortunately, that is not the case. While I have definitely grown a tremendous amount from the depressed, beaten-down, hopeless person I was 15 years ago, I am not completely cured of my trauma. I don't know that I will ever be 100% cured and over it, but I have made huge strides in the healing process and have the desire to continue to work on being the happiest, healthiest, and best person I can be. So let me recap my healing process in a few steps. Step one is acknowledgement. This is where you have to decide what happened to you. What did it do to you? And what borders do you have now because of the trauma? Step two is acceptance. Accept that these are qualities you have due to the trauma. Realize it is not your fault, and accept that you can change anything you are not happy with. Step three is reconstruction. What do you want to change, strengthen, or stop about your qualities and your borders? Make a list of qualities you like and then ones you don't like about yourself. Decide if the ones you don't like need to be changed or stopped altogether. Then find out how you can change these things. You can get help with changing from a professional counselor, from self help books and articles, or by listening to podcasts about the topics you want to change. To change. I will add a journal prompt to my website, breakingarborders.com, that can help you think about what traits you develop due to trauma and what you would like to change about yourself.

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Dr.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

McBride's book about narcissistic mothers is also on my website under suggested reading. I hope hearing about how I have gone down the healing journey will help or inspire you on your journey. Thanks for listening today, and be sure to follow me on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. I hope you have a great week.