Ever traced any of your bad habits to your experiences from your upbringing?

Started by StayWithMe, October 02, 2019, 05:06:43 PM

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StayWithMe

I'll go first.

I'm usually late.  This comes from my parents being late for me.  When I complained, they would remind me that I'm not the only one in the family and they had other important things to do. So imagine having trouble getting to and from work.  Hanging around outside after hours.  Funny how my parent didn't my safety then.  but they would certainly worry about it when a friend picked to go out for the evening. 

I realize now that there are a lot of things that I tried to laugh off.  Being late was one of them.

Hazy111

Being late , can often be a "passive aggressive" unconscious act, retaliatory.  I am/was guilty of it. Procrastination is another cause, not wishing to act.

StayWithMe

Yeah, I agree.  You can weaponize just about any behavior.  I try to be very conscious when arriving at a certain time is important like for work, theatre, tavel.

But what I do find interesting is that those who price themselves on being on time weaponize their behavior as well.

I was once friends with a woman with whom it became clear that she did not honor commitments.  It became frequent that she would cancel the day before claiming sickness or being overbooked.  One time we traveled together.  That came about because she had plans with someone else and they pulled out.  We stayed in a small house.  On the day that we were due to leave we agreed with the owner that he would arrive at noon and check us out.  Se we cleaned respective parts of the house.  About 11:45, I was finished and decided to reaheat the food in the fridge instead of wasting it.

I offered to prepare something for my travel partner but her response was to get in my face and in a sing songie voice say "I'm not having lunch because I want to be ready for when the owner arrives."  I thought this was strange.  We were the customers, not the owner.  Ironically, the owner was late by 45 minutes.  I don't recall getting in his face.

In a year's time, we were no longer friends.  I was tired of her frequent cancellations.  I was glad that I was at a point in life in which I could feel confident about decisions like that.

Liketheducks

Not necessarily at "bad" habit.....but discounting myself.    Anytime I would stand up for myself, I was "unattractive"...."how DARE I speak to my parents like that"...etc.  For the record, I'm pretty non-confrontational....so my way of standing up for myself is SO mild it's been laughable.

I can complete an Ironman triathlon(and I have)....and my inner voice with say...."but, it wasn't fast enough" or "it was only a half ironman".

Seriously, at 51, I'd love to be able to own my strength.    I know I can muddle through just about anything thrown my way....but I don't ever feel like I've had a choice in the matter or that I'm particularly strong in my own right. 


Amadahy

I tend to over-do for others when in social situations. I have social anxiety and focusing on real and perceived needs of others takes the attention off me and is a result of the hyper vigilance in assessing the needs of others whilst giving absolutely no thought to my own desires. I really have to hold myself back from being a doormat. I think Nmom told me I was selfish so often that it's one way of disproving that.
Ring the bells that still can ring;
Forget your perfect offering.
There's a crack in everything ~~
That's how the Light gets in!

~~ Leonard Cohen

KD5FUL

This is a very interesting topic!

The bad habits that I have traced back to my childhood experiences are:

1. Codependency.  I had always maintained one-sided relationships with my family, friends, co-workers, and lovers until I got into therapy at 28 years old.  Most of the following bad habits are expressions of my codependency.

2. Going through my boyfriend´s phone/things.  I grew up hearing my parents (at times) tell me that they loved me and their actions never showed that.  As a result, I thought that every person who told me they loved me MUST be lying.  It was impossible for me to believe that anyone could love me and so I would actively search for evidence that they were doing something wrong. 

3.Crying when people would give me criticism or get angry with me.  Every time I heard criticism I would feel like I was a little girl again, hearing criticism from my PD parents.  I would cry at work, even when my boss was kind and giving me constructive criticism gently.

4. Over-reacting to people when they did anything that reminded me of PD parents.
I am still struggling with this one, big time.  I get triggered by a lot of things that my other people just doesn't understand. 

5.  I always arrive VERY early to meetings and appointments.  PD parents had the ¨hurry up and wait¨ mentalities and I have an enormous amount of anxiety if I am not 15 minutes early to everything. 

6. I go all out when celebrating my birthday.  Sometimes I will celebrate for a few days or a week. This is because when I was growing up my birthday was either completely ignored or barely acknowledged. 

לפום צערא אגרא

A victim of abuse who suffers in silence will suffer the most.

StayWithMe

I was teased quite often when I was younger for being fat.  Back in the '60s, adults would get away with calling children fat.  Parents would think nothing of it.  I asked my parents why do their friends call me fat and they said they did not mean anything by it.  One time my uncle told me that I needed to get rid of my heavy hips.

So I thought that it was ok to tease other people.  If I liked the person, what was the problem.  Fortunately, I grew out of that anti social behavior.

But what my parents and my mother's hateful mother harped on for the rest of the lives was how funny my hair looked.  It's a black thing and it's pretty bad when your parents are fair skinned.  "All that good hair....."  I really don't know what my parents were looking for.  It's not like they were on a crusade to help all black women with their hair.  I knew that it would be way too childish to start pointing at other women that my parents interacted ..... especially my mother wanted me to be friends.  this is one burning reason why I'd like to give that letter to my mother before she or I die.

IT did scar me to the point in which I was conscious about my hair and would make jokes about it.  Some people made it clear that they did not understand the point of what I was doing or saying. 

Sidney37

Yes!  I am a door slammer when I get really overwhelmed and feel like my boundaries are being broken.   DH and I finally realized that there were only two things I could do as a kid to get my uNPDm yo stop constantly picking  at me and verbally abusing me.  I could lock myself in the bathroom with the radio on and the shower running or I could get mad and slam the door.  If  I slammed the door she would get mad and sulk in her room. It made the abuse stop.  It's taken me a very long time to stop slamming the door when I am overwhelmed and stressed or feel like my boundaries are being violated.

foobarred

So. Many.  But the ones that are the most obvious are procrastination and insomnia.  When I was a kid I was soooo controlled, so overscheduled, every moment accounted for and every action scripted and posed to make sure the family looked good.  So by the age of 7 young me started to resent being made to do all this stuff I didn't want to do.  Open rebellion was out of the question, so I started dragging my feet on EVERYTHING, even going to bed.  By 15 I had raging insomnia and could spend hours locked in the bathroom, staring at the wall.  I'm 51 now and those two habits are still my default stress responses.

One other thing that I wouldn't call a *bad* habit - I used to read.  A lot.  As a way to escape, be somewhere where my parents didn't exist and I could control my own life.  That, too, has stuck with me, and is a favorite stress response.  The way I reckon, it beats drinking, and at least I got a nice vocabulary out of it.

T said I need to show grace towards those habits, to not get angry at them because at one time they served a useful purpose in my life.  Those tiny rebellions helped me maintain an identity, kept me from being completely engulfed.  But while on some level I can understand that, they still drive me crazy.

GentleSoul

Many!  I have been working on myself to learn what behaviours that I thought were perfectly ok are actually abusive and disrespectful.

Thank you for the point raised about weaponizing behaviours.  Very helpful to me.  I see in myself when I do/did it.  I see it in uPD hubby. He likes to delay me when he knows I have to be somewhere at a set time.  I Medium Chill it by in my head adding half an hour onto the time I want to get out of the door!  Works a treat for me.

Part of my recovery/update is to think before I act or say anything, how would I feel if someone did/said this to me.  Useful tool.

Thanks for this thread. 

DaisyGirl77

So many.  I had an epiphany just the other day about it.

1.  Money.  I have no idea how to handle money.  I now have a lot of credit cards & live paycheck to paycheck, no savings.  I've initiated the process of being financially healthy.  (VERY early stages yet, so I'm hoping it goes well.)

2.  Self-loathing.  I hate myself.  I started emotional eating somewhere between 1st & 2nd grades, which is when my school photos first show a marked difference in my weight.  Sweet things are my downfall.  I don't know how to treat myself well because my parents showed me they wished I wasn't around in a million different little ways that I thought *I* was the problem, not them.  Combine that with a variety of different abuses & it's no wonder I'm 175 lbs. over the top end of my ideal weight for my height.  I'm now in the process of slowly consuming what's in my pantry before introducing healthier things.

3.  Using mediums to escape.  My go-tos growing up were reading & music/singing.  I consumed probably over a million books from the time I was able to read on my own until fairly recently (maybe a couple years ago).  I've stopped reading so much as I now have friends I hang out with a lot.  I wasn't allowed to have friends outside of school.  I had to come straight home from school & do homework, eat with the family, then do the nightly ritual for bedtime, which was heavily enforced & was 8 PM.  Bedtime was not loosened until I fought (verbally, this time; they stopped with the physical abuse around 12) it before senior year started.  I paid a heavy price for it, but being able to finally go to bed when I wanted to was worth it.

4.  Self-sabotage.  Anytime things are going *much* too well for me, something's wrong.  My life should never be this smooth because my home life was NEVER easy (multiple fights/day, complete with yelling, door slamming, parents chasing me to my room to "finish" the fight because "how DARE I say I'm 'done', you're 'done' when we say you're done!", or fleeing the house for a few hours).  So I self-sabotage (wake up really late so I have to rush so as not to be late for work, for example) so there's a mini crisis to be had.

5.  Having difficulty expressing my needs in the moment.  My needs were always discounted or ignored completely, so I also learned that other people are more important than what I need.  I've been working on this in therapy for a while, so I'm finally at the point where I can identify what I'm feeling in the moment & say "I need space", but it's hard because I have an immense fear that the issue won't be revisited after cooling off.  (Things were always swept under the rug/never discussed after each fight, so I don't know how to fight in a healthy way.)

6.  I have an extremely difficult time asking for help.  I learned over the 30-something years I've been alive that I could not *EVER* count on my parents to offer help with something.  I learned people--even friends & teachers--couldn't be relied on for help cuz sometimes the teaching just didn't gel with my way of learning, or they had very specific windows of time that never lined up with mine, or always having to find my own way home because my parents were always unwilling to get me & bring me home afterwards.  Even writing this, I'm literally thinking right now: "People have always failed me one way or another, & the only person I've ever been able to always count on is me."
I lived with my dad's uPD mom for 3.5 years.  This is my story:  http://www.outofthefog.net/forum/index.php?topic=59780.0  (TW for abuse descriptions.)

"You are not required to set yourself on fire to keep others warm." - Anonymous

NC with uNM since December 2016.  VLC with uPDF.

artfox

DaisyGirl, your #5 and #6 are exactly what I was gonna say. Figuring out what I need is the first big hurdle, being able to express it is the next one. And it's hard for me to avoid crying or getting angry when I try to express it, even if it's something simple like, "Could you put these dishes in this spot instead of that one when you put them away?"

And I will ride the struggle bus for so long before asking for help. And then, see above, I sometimes get teary and/or angry in the process.

alphaomega

Yes, yes and so much yes !  Thank you for this thread.

I grew up in an alcoholic household.  We used it for everything.  Both parents were alcoholics, my late sister became one.  And I still use alcohol to escape, from myself, whenever I can.

I am determined to break this cycle. 
Dream in Peace W.I. - you are free now...

Poison Ivy

I don't think my own parents have or had personality disorders, but my mom did have some severe mental health issues before and after I was born.  She was hospitalized for postpartum depression after my birth, and my father, somewhat overwhelmed by having three children 4 and younger in his care, temporarily farmed me out to another family who had a baby close in age to me. I didn't know about this until my teen years at the earliest, but throughout my childhood I had what I would call abandonment issues.  I got horribly homesick when traveling, and I didn't like it when my mom was gone from home (which she rarely was). I don't blame my mom or my dad for what happened, nor do I think it was wrong for me to react the way I did.  Life happens.  But later (and continuing to this day), I've become almost too independent. I like to help other people, and in theory I believe I should accept help, but I also feel at some basic level that I can't and shouldn't trust other people to help me.

GettingOOTF

Quote from: GentleSoul on October 05, 2019, 01:25:52 AM
Many!  I have been working on myself to learn what behaviours that I thought were perfectly ok are actually abusive and disrespectful

This! So many things I thought were normal or desired behaviors. My father is very sarcastic. I was too. It took me a long time to realize that this is hurtful and no way to relate to people.

I also have a tendency to think that other people don’t have feelings like getting hurt or feeling insecure. I trace this back to the environment that I grew up in. Nothing I said or did whether loving or mean ever got  positive reaction. My parents were awful to me and my siblings learned to be too. It seemed like I was the only one with feelings.  This has been a hard one to overcome.

I used to be very codependent. I’ve worked hard on that.

I procrastinate a lot, self sabotage and tend to give up on things easily. I think this comes from the “what’s the point, nothing changes” experience of my childhood.

I used to be scared of everything. The most ridiculous things. I’m better now, but it’s still one of my biggest issues.