How to find your passion?

[iwillrise]

I have posted here yesterday but it didn't get much views, so I am rephrasing my question in hopes of getting more people that can relate.

I am a 19 year-old who have been through abuse his entire life. My psychological situation is really bad; I am depressed, dissociated, and apathetic. However, I am determined and I want to achieve my goals.

The problem is, when you grow up in such environment, you don't really know who you are, you feel ashamed from anything that you do. As a result, you never really find what you like, you never find what you believe in.

I am in search for my truth and my beliefs because I know that in order to succeed in life, you have to have a drive, and that drive comes from you doing what you love consistently.

Has anyone been here? If so, how did you find your passion despite all of the toxic shame and depression?

[Associate of Daniel]

Hi, iwillrise.

I'm sorry you haven't yet received a response to your previous post.

The subject might receive more attention on the Working On Us board.

Either way, your topic is weighty and many posters may need some time to process and format their responses.

I'm sorry for the difficult years you have endured.

At the risk of sounding condescending (and I certainly don't mean to be) you are in a fortunate situation.
You are still very young and have many years ahead of you to heal and improve your situation.

You also strike me as being wise beyond your years - you recognise your situation and the need to improve it - and you are taking steps to do so.

I find that admirable. Not many 19 year olds have that foresight.  I encourage you to keep fighting for your future.

The question is, how?  And I unfortunately don't really have much more of an answer than you have already come up with:  to follow your interests.

I will say though, in your case, you should perhaps take part in what interests you while working on your depression, dissassotiation and apathy.

I highly recommend attending counselling to help you with this.

Following your interests (Music? Sport? Etc.)  even just on the side after work, will be of great benefit to you.

I wish you all the best. And do, please, keep us posted on your progress.

AOD

[iwillrise]

Thank you so much @Associate of Daniel. I really appreciate your kind words and your encouragement.

[SeaGlass]

I agree with everything that AOD posted. My son luckily has found his passion in music. See my post above commenting on your first post.

I do not know if you are in school or not, but oftentimes a counselor there can help with career counseling, often helping to point you in the right direction with personality tests and/or questionnaires that can help you narrow your interests. There are even free online ones too. I love the Meyers Briggs Personality Assessment.

Even if you are not enrolled in school, often community colleges have great resources for people trying to find their path. Maybe sit down and talk to a counselor if there is Community College near you. Taking a course and/or joining a club there can help you find what your passion is.

[Janeite V]

iwillrise I really feel you when you say your "psyche was ruined" because of all the abuse you endured. Perhaps you can't believe it now, but we humans are very adaptable creatures and you are no exception. You learned to adapt to an abusive situation, and I fully believe you can adapt elsewhere just as powerfully.

I don't know what your current situation is or whether or not you are still in a very dysfunctional and abusive environment, but if you are, I am sure you will be utterly amazed at yourself and how strong and motivated you are once you get into a better environment and you realise that all of these protections and coping mechanisms you've had to carefully adapt are no longer necessary without all of that weighing you down!

As to your question: in a more theoretical sense, one thing I wish I learned much earlier was to focus on what I wanted, not on what I was afraid of becoming. If you are excessively focused on not turning out like those who abused you, or passively accepted your abuse, that can massively backfire, because your focus is still on them.

For example, much of my own family was too narcissistic to work hard, because they thought they were "too intelligent to have to study." My assumption was that if I did the opposite and worked hard, I would avoid turning out like them. It didn't work no matter how hard I tried because I still hadn't gotten out of their mindset and didn't have a real goal besides not being like them.

It's hard, I know, because you no doubt were discouraged from having your own goals and you may not even truly accept the concept of having your own desires if you are heavily conditioned to dim your own light for your abuser. It's okay not to know right now what you want, but even just the act of searching for what you want and what makes you satisfied with your life will be so liberating for you.

A more practical thing to find your passion is to read a lot of books. Eventually you will find something that you want to study further and can't put down. It will also help you powerfully develop your visualisation and your concentration; vital traits that are needed to understand and reach your own goals.

[athene1399]

It took me a while to figure out what I wanted. I wanted to take time off before going to university because I didn't know what I wanted to do. Or more like what I wanted to do M didn't approve of and she wanted me to choose something else. But she also didn't approve of me taking time off to find myself so I went for what interested me at the time and it got me no where.

At any rate, what has helped me to find myself was doing a lot of trauma work and healing. Eventually the depression started to fade and I didn't feel trapped by it. But it took a lot of time (maybe becasue I never went to a T but used a lot of self-reflection coupled with reading about the effects of childhood trauma). And I spent a lot of time being angry. but i think we were never allowed to be angry as children while the trauma was happening so that anger has to get out at some point. For me anyway.

Once I was spending a lot of time healing and working on me, I started taking personality tests that recommend what professions are a good fit for you based on how you answer questions. I took a handful of them and they all came out with similar results. So I went back to school. The more I learned about the profession I chose, the more passionate I became. And I am in my late thirties and just figuring this stuff out now.

But in regards to hobbies, I have always known what hobbies I was passionate about. They were the hobbies that helped me through the trauma: writing and music.

And with the self shame, I started to work on being good enough for me and no one else. Now I don't care what my FOO thinks about me. It's about if I am doing what is important to me. It's unfortunate that they are happy with me doing things that make me happy, but whatever. I just don't overshare my wants with them anymore because i know more often than not they will not be supportive. So I guess part of it is learning who is accepting of you and sharing your dreams with them instead of toxic people.

[Fulcrum29SMT]

The thing is that you don't know, from birth, what could be your passion. If you're coming out of an abusive family/relationship and are pretty much and find the idea of passions and of having fun foreign, it's hard, but not impossible to try and find something that will bring pleasure in your life.
If you managed to break the circle of toxicity that controlled your life, that's already a victory. Maslow's pyramid of needs is a good way to explain what will happen next:

-Survival needs are covered. You've got food and a place to sleep in with a roof and four walls.

-Mental comfort needs are covered. You're no longer harassed by an abusive family/partner, and hopefully, you can get a decent job and not fear bankruptcy or debt anymore.

-There comes the next step. Pleasure. Once the serious difficulties are gone, you may want to try and have some fun in your life. But since you were struggling with the previous steps of the pyramid before, you never had the luxury to think about it. But let's come back to the topic: pleasant things can be a relationship, hobbies, friends, collective activities. One (or several!) of these could give you a passion in life.
What I'd recommend, at this level, would be to experiment different potentially fun activities. Playing music, doing volley-ball, going to quest games, playing tabletop games, decorating your house, fishing... It could be anything, and your best bet would be thus to try everything you can access until you find a thing you like. Or several.
If you're not interested in such hobbies, you could find a cause you find important - mental health awareness, ecology... Once again, anything - and join a group in your region that defends that cause. By supporting them, you could both meet potential friends and find a way to fulfill yourself. And that's how we go to the last step!
And we shouldn't forget relationships, too. Meeting that one right person could make your life brighter, and just talking with them, doing simple stuff or going out in town with them will be the best fun you've had in years.

-Fulfillment. This is the level at which you're proud of yourself and of what you're doing. If you started playing music, you gave a concert. If you're an activist, you took part in a big demonstration, and a law was passed. If you're fishing, you went on a memorable trip you'll remember all your life and caught all sorts of fish you had never seen before. If you're into home decoration, you now live in a house where you like everything, and are regularly complimented on how tasteful it all looks. If you went on to be passionate about your romantic partner, you made them happy, gave both of you a life you both enjoy, and maybe even had a child together.

As of right now, you've covered the first step, and have either covered or are taking care of the second one. It's time to think about the third, and to find out what matters to you, what you like and don't in life, so that you can discover what you're really passionate about, and thus, what will be your way to achieve fulfillment.

[Hepatica]

Hello iwillrise,

Such a great question. How to find your passion? I love it because it is exactly what we deserve having grown up in toxicity and abuse. We deserve joy and we deserve passion.

Firstly I am very sorry that you grew up with abuse and you are feeling the effects of it. You are not alone. We are all here sharing how similar things have affected us and certainly a childhood of abuse leaves one depressed and often dissociated, which makes it hard to connect to joy and passion.

I am reading My Grandmother's Hands currently and it's all about healing trauma. Trauma sits in the body and to heal from it we need to learn to connect to our body. I believe that when we begin to heal the body wounds - meaning the physiological effects of a childhood of abuse - we also receive the gift of being once again becoming connected to play, joy, laughter and passion.

Abuse shuts us down and makes us fearful. It is hard to get into beginners mind. I really suggest you find a therapist who does body work and is trauma informed to work on healing the woundings from childhood. I really believe that as you do this, you will begin to connect to passion and joy.

I always tell my son (who is 18) to notice or be mindful of when he feels joy. He told me that he got up early one day while camping and watched the sunrise over the lake and he felt joy. I said to him, remember that. You felt joy. Maybe from there he finds his passion in nature, and maybe he even finds a job that works in nature and he gets the gift of working with his passion? This is just an example.

You can find clues to your passion every time you feel pure joy. Healing the depression and dissociated parts of yourself will be good, with the help of someone who supports you, and all the other parts of you will also come back.

Personally I find mindfulness meditation mixed with self-compassion a great tool for healing body trauma and to begin to notice joy and passion.

Remember how resilient we are. Surround yourself with good people, people who model passion and joy and keep toxic people at a great distance.

ETA: This process is not a quick fix. This is life work. Don't become discouraged if you don't entirely heal next week, or even next year. This kind of healing work is circular, like a spiral, you will come around to it again and again, often spurred by a cycle of depression, which will be old trauma that needs to be released. We don't heal all at once. And that's ok. Healing can be one of your passions.

In your healing work, you may find the key. You can become a light for others as well as yourself.

[Angelacl]

There are so many good tips here! It is hard for me to know what my passion is for sure as I have tried a lot like dancing, writting and so on.. I think I love art. But I am not passionate about it.. I am passionate about nature for sure!

[JollyJazz]

Hi Iwillrise,

I hope you are doing well today.

Lots of good ideas here from the other posters.

I think it's great that you are starting out on a journey of healing. Personally I set aside some time each week to read self help books and I do some counselling. There are lots of good resources in the tool box section. It's amazing what we can heal from. I found working through the exercises in 'Children of the self absorbed' very useful. Books like these are fantastic resources that can really help. Depending on your financial situation, therapy/counselling really helps. If you can't afford yet, don't despair, because you can get a lot of healing from books like these from the library.

As for finding what you are interested in, this can be a fun process! You could try having little 'tastes' of different activities, you could try signing up for different activities and seeing how you like them. You could try going to the library and just browsing for anything that picks up your interest. Experimenting a bit with different kinds of activities and interests is a good place to start.

Don't worry if other people from your family would do things differently, this is about you, and what you like 😊

I remember trying to figure out the same question as you when I was 19 and feeling a bit overwhelmed. Another thing I found helps is rounding down what you don't like!

Having a physical outlet, some kind of exercise or sports that you like is as good for the mind as the body as well, if you are feeling down.

Anyway, best wishes, and I'm sure that you'll find something that you enjoy, and remember that you can also change careers if it's not quite right, most people do.

Good luck! 😊

[1footouttadefog]

I was in your place twice.

First was when I married at about 19 and was entering a twilight zone that had alot of abuse.  I re emerged later, decades later realizing  I had been  surrounded by abusive people and trying to make things better by doing more andbmore ajd sacrifising myselfbanfbmy goals and dreams.

I exited tumhe ride slowly and realized I know longer knew who I was.  I could not hang out with 19 year olds and was not in synch with most in my age group either.  I had to find myself then find my tribe so to speak.

I went on discovery missions.  I ate new foods in places I had never been.  I wejt to small towns and looked in galleries, and used book stores.  I visited home shows, agricultural fairs, I went to flea markets and antique markets, etc etc. 

I went to bookstores and drank coffee drinks and looked at magazines and books for hours at a time. 

I walked in malls and strip malls.

I was looking at things, not to buy but to buy tuem, but to see how I felt about them.  To figure out what I like to eat, what  perfumes testers smell nice to me and on me, what clothes looked appealing on people in these places and that I might try on.  What people shopped what places, who talked about what.

I discovered many things about myself, Identified hobbies to start and what business venture I want for my next chapter. 

I identified that being a landlord works with my dyi nature and that I want to habe a small organic greens growing operation in the winter amd shoulder seasons and to take heat of summers off to travel akd hike/back pack.

I hope you find your self also.