Fearing Peace
Self-Sabotage!
There are posts that go viral about the need to self-sabotage! It is common for people who have lived in trauma to experience this.
There is something to be said about people who cannot live peacefully and therefore feel the need to self-sabotage everything that causes them peace.
So, Let’s talk about it!
I was raised in chaos. Constantly waiting for the next bad thing to happen. Raised in a world of fighting to survive -whether that be through my drug addiction, dancing, living on the streets in Florida or just traveling all over the damn country alone. Constantly wondering what was going to happen next. So naturally when things feel calm or peaceful and I am not running off stress and anxiety, it causes anxiety.
When something feels too good. I panic and self-sabotage. Depending on the situation, what that looks like can be very different. Sometimes its shutting down completely, sometimes its complete exhaustion, sometimes it’s not being able to convince myself to cook dinner or wash the dishes, sometimes it’s picking a fight with my partner, or asking the same question a million times for reassurance. However it manifests itself, it’s almost always some form of my sabotaging the good that’s going on in my life. What is currently bringing me peace will always be the one thing that terrifies me.
Imagine your significant other bringing you flowers when they come home from work, and your first instinct is something is wrong. They are going to leave me, they are cheating, they did something wrong. Imagine your friends telling you they want to hang out and talk, and automatically assuming that means they are mad at you for something, imagine your dad calling to hang out with you, and you thinking that means he must be dying because he never wants to see you. This is the life I live.
When good things happen, I automatically think the worst and in relationships, it’s the hardest thing to handle. It makes me hard to love, hard to be with. Constantly getting close and then running away, constantly getting comfortable then shutting down, pulling people in and then immediately pushing them away. It’s a complete mind fuck for people and I know I’m doing it, but I have no control over it.
This is something I have put a lot of effort into trying to fix. I continue to try and keep my “crazy” at bay because I know that I am hard to deal with. I know that I am impossible to handle at times, and I know that my happiness depends on my ability to not self-sabotage everything in my life.
Unfortunately, this means holding a lot of my feelings inside. (Not healthy, I know) But sometimes, sitting with the things I want to say, rather than saying them gives me the time I need to process that they are just thoughts in my head and that doesn’t make them real. Other times, it allows me to stew on them, allows me to form these scenarios in my head that aren’t true, and gives me the ammunition I need to complete fuck everything up based on nothing but the imaginary situations I’ve convinced myself are true.
I am genuinely a walking red flag, that is constantly looking for red flags.
Or making red flags out of GREEN GREEN flags!!
Sometimes I feel like ill be this way forever, sometimes I think ill never be able to convince myself that random flowers are just that- random flowers, that sometimes a call to talk is really just a vent sesh my friends need, sometimes and I love you literally just means they love me, not I love you but…
Sometimes I just wish that living in chaos wasn’t something I craved at such an intense level that I literally don’t know how to live in any other way.
Sometimes I just wish peace was something I could enjoy instead of being something I feared.
