socialization and attachment

[u/Great_idea_fellow]

At this point in my healing journey, I have undergone a lot of therapy. i have so much clarity about why I act the way I do and how in certain spaces and around certain people that my p t s d just turns on to protect me.

The emotional hurdle that i'm struggling with most today is my disappointments in motherhood.

After all, that hard work to become a different version of myself, I entered motherhood, with a partner that in retrospect embodied all of the characteristics that I hope to never live with again from my family of origin.

My childhood was chaotic, my abusive parent isolated me and my loving father from anybody that cared about us and had significant rigid rules in the house to permit us from loving each other in healthy ways, because everything revolved around my surrogant. She purposely would start conflict to keep herself center stage. Leading to my wonderful dad accepting she needed me to move out of her house so her nephew could move into my room.

One of the memories that I am reflecting on is my first Mother's Day, recognizing after the birth of my child that my partner didn't love me and they were too resentful to even try. I drove 4 states over with a 3 month old baby all by myself and spent a magnificent weekend with my chosen mother who loved me and my child unconditionally. For the first time after their birth made me feel like I was succeeding at being a parent.

It's somehow upon returning home to various calls from my child's other parent complaining that we were taking too long to get home because I needed to get home to cook them dinner and take care of them. I fell into almost like a fog and would spend the next several years in the survival mode constantly feeling unloved uncared for an insignificant.

That is no longer my reality. i don't share space with anyone who's resentful about who I am, and who i'm not yet the sadness that I wasn't able to create this perfect childhood for my child, it just gnaws at me.

In some ways, I've forgiven my surrogant. She herself didn't have a real mom. She grew up in so much child abuse. She parented me the only way she knew making sure she was the center of attention as to not replicate the abuse of her childhood.

As an adult, I struggle at being the center of attention. i anticipate that my wants and needs aren't important because in my childhood, they weren't important and that was made worse within this last relationship. Because my ex was just like my surrogant, the world had to revolve around them, regardless of what I needed or my child needed all of our resources needed to go to them.

In response to all these traumatic memories, horrible mother's days and birthdays and holidays in which my ex made me feel less than the dirt on the ground. I'm in a different place and yet emotionally I can't move forward.

I have so much sadness and shame about the life that my child is living and how much all my efforts to be the healthier version of me didn't stop me from attracting someone just as unhealthy as my parent.

I just wish all this sadness would transform into acceptance like the weather, I can't change my x. They like my surrogate will never apologize for the harm they cause us or take accountability for the ways they've destroyed our life. I need to embrace in the same way that I learned to embrace with her. People who cause harm don't always see the harm they cause, because they are in pursuit of something that's much more important to them. Their own self preservation.

I know this is all enmeshed with my attachment style.

I could see the ways that I was just reliving my trauma in that relationship, particularly anytime that we were around my surrogant I compulsively drank, just like my old man, because her energy, it would put me in this mental space that I just wanted to numb the pain I was feeling and with distance, I've been able to see that where I wouldn't compulsively drink at home. I found other ways to numb the discomfort of now, as I live through this loveless marriage with someone who took joy in making me sad and destroying the things that mattered to me, because that would give them more power over me. it was my childhood on steroids.

In many ways, this feels like i'm climbing out of the last layer of trauma rendered into my existence through the abuse that my surrogant promulgated within my family of origin.

I have so much shame towards myself that I was so broken that I didn't take people's words and actions for value because the truth is in recovery. I have learned that people that love you just love you. They treat you with kindness, respect and dignity and those that don't. It's because they can't and you can't force someone to be someone who they're not.

how do you find grace to accept that people do things to you but it's not about you they just do things?