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Can you imagine making a decision without overthinking whether it is right or wrong?
Asking for an eldest child with anxiety who agonizes over ordering dinner as if the fate of the universe hangs in the balance.
What are the long term impacts of ordering chicken tenders?
Asking for an eldest child with anxiety who agonizes over ordering dinner as if the fate of the universe hangs in the balance.
What are the long term impacts of ordering chicken tenders?
Add in some psychological/emotional abuse where we are gasligh into believing the abuse is due to some decision we made and it shifts into “every bad thing that happens to me ever is because of some decision I made so I have to do better so I CANNOT decide - WHAT IF I’M WRONG?”
Sometimes we do the right thing and stuff still gets messed up. It isn’t your decision making. It’s life. Good or bad things happen, and although sometimes it IS because of bad decisions, it isn’t always AT ALL.
One of the hardest negative beliefs I have clung to is “Things are going badly because I make bad decisions and I’m messing it all up.” I see it a lot in the adult diagnosed people because our beliefs about ourselves are formed outside the context of neurodivergent mind.
When you don’t know why you can’t do the things you’re required to do or the things you want to do, you often come to your own conclusions. You take lots of negative feedback.
For many of us, the internalized message is that we are bad, and our decisions are too.
For many of us, the internalized message is that we are bad, and our decisions are too.
It has been very very helpful for me to sit down with a therapist and work through the trauma of that early belief system. In my opinion, if you don’t believe you can decide well, you are forever at the mercy of the opinions of people you involve.
There is always someone willing to make decisions for someone else’s life. But your life is yours and learning yourself well so you can make good decisions for yourself is a great goal to work towards. I am still on that journey, improving all the time.
I think the hardest part of all of it was how guilty I always felt. Breakup? Something awful I did. Disagreement? Probably something I said. Bad outcome? My shitty decisions at play again.
Nobody can bear up underneath the weight of all that blame and shame. Well, I couldn’t.
Nobody can bear up underneath the weight of all that blame and shame. Well, I couldn’t.
I’ve been thinking more about how little we have control over many of the stressful painful things that happen to us and how we try to blame ourselves so often. Maybe it’s because that’s the ONLY thing we have control over even though we’re doing our best to move the needle.
It took this year with blaming myself for my dog’s diabetes, for my mom’s cancer, for my relationships getting strange, and lastly for an international mail crisis to make me examine my thoughts. Like maybe I take TOO MUCH responsibility on because I grew up feeling unreliable.
I was like “hey, it took me until 25 to figure it out but I’m on board and I am going to make up for EVERY SINGLE THING I ever got wrong until you KNOW I’m reliable.” But after 11 years, nobody is left to blame me but me. *I* am/was the only one I needed to prove myself to.
Like how ridiculous that I took those things on that weren’t my responsibility to take on. And I can see how it reshaped my personality in a way I wasn’t liking. Before PTSD, I was very laid back. I am NOT very laid back at all now. But I’m getting to some medium I can live with
