I keep finding the bottom of myself and looking up for an outstretched hand. All I seem to find is a mirror.
These are the things I learned this week that I wish I had known 20 years ago:
Hyper-independence Is a Trauma Response
I thought I was building a beautiful life, achieving the American Dream of a degree, a cushy career, and homeownership. Type A, go getter. “Brindi has her shit together.” But I wrote recently about having achieved all of this and I still feel like a stranger in my own life. Why? Because the achievements and independence were formed out of abandonment wounds and the belief that I must earn the oxygen I use up, that I must prove I deserve the space I take up. That I must work, work, work, and never ask for help, never stop, don’t rest too long, because you learn at a certain point after enough people let you down that no one is coming to save you. In abusive, chaotic situations you learn that the good things can be ripped away from you at any moment. You learn your needs don’t matter and they won’t be met anyway, so stop asking. Hide. Avoid. Act as if.
Even when I am burned out.
Even when I really do need help.
Even when I know it would be easier to have an extra hand.
Hyper-independent, high-achieving people tend to carry a lot of shame. Shame for not being enough. Shame for being abused in some way. Shame for needing things. Shame for desiring support. Shame for not being stronger. Shame for having feelings that could be turned against us. At some point, we learned that we could be an annoyance to others. That asking for anything could bring pain. So we stopped asking and just started doing.
Hyper-independence makes for exceptional executives, entrepreneurs, and students. But it creates a lonely life. People have walked away from me because they thought I didn’t need them. I needed them desperately, I just didn’t have the words to say, “I am drowning, help me.”
I thought my needing them would scare them away, so I never spoke up. When someone hurt me, I rationalized their actions and told myself it is better to stay silent.
But hyper-independence masks vulnerability. It erodes intimacy. People think you’re fine without them. People like to be needed. To be called upon. To be asked for opinions. When someone we love reaches out for help, we feel valued by them. Someone who never asks for help, hides their feelings, and avoids having the hard conversations is someone who is not being honest with themselves and the world around them. Always going it alone is a great way to always be alone.
I’m not psychic – I just have insane pattern recognition
As a child in a chaotic household with a parent whose moods were unpredictable and could turn violent or depressive without warning, I learned to scan for threats, mood changes, energy shifts, and safe spaces in every room I walked into. To watch and learn people so I could anticipate their next actions. To tiptoe carefully and always be accommodating, soothing, de-escalating. Shape shift into a person who could not be blamed for causing a problem, because being the cause of a problem brought pain, blame, shame. As a teenager I thought I had clairvoyant abilities. Read the other person for what they value most and display those tendencies so that person doesn’t hurt you, send you away, turn on you. I could guess what was going to happen before it ever did. Sometimes I dreamed about things that later came true. I could tell if a person was a threat or a friend within about 10 minutes of talking to or observing them. This was how I survived childhood, in adolescence the ability to read situations quickly made me a talented writer. It gave me a rich and detailed inner life with a carefully curated outward image. Be the thing that will be most acceptable in this situation and you won’t get hurt.
As an adult, the ability has served me well in professional settings because I can adapt to change quickly – I saw it coming before others did. It is also a curse, because I saw things coming and assume everyone else did, too. But people are often not yet ready for the direction I am heading, they often are confused how I got to an answer, to a conclusion. I worked as a secretary for an accountant, one of my first jobs. I would finish my work quickly. It wasn’t hard. File that year’s tax files in alphabetized folders marked with the customer’s name. Schedule appointments, update the calendar, call customers whose appointments were scheduled the next day to remind them. Clean the office, replace paper in the copy and fax machines (yes, I am old enough to remember when we still used fax machines). That was it. I could accomplish these tasks within about two hours of a four hour shift. My boss accused me of being lazy because I was just “sitting around”. Sometimes no matter what you do, it won’t be enough. If you work too far ahead of people who take longer to accomplish things, they don’t see the achievement, they assume you cut corners.
If you bend over backward too far for someone they will learn to forget what your face looks like and start taking you for granted. People don’t respect you when you always accommodate them. They use you. So that when you do ask for help, or voice a need, they are surprised, and they are unnerved because you were easy all this time and they never had to step up. It can feel like the dynamics shifted suddenly, which is disarming for people who haven’t been watching the patterns as closely as you have. Being a shape-shifting people pleaser has blown up in my face more than once. Either because people don’t respect me because I never commanded respect, or because my ability to think two steps ahead makes them suspicious of my motives and how I got there. It may have been how I survived my childhood, but it makes for a doormat of a woman in adulthood.
I Am Worthy of So Much More Than I Have Required From Others
This has been the hardest one. Knowing you can love someone deeply and they may choose their own comfort and patterns over a future with you. That staying silent, going it alone, never stating clearly who I am and what it costs to be welcomed into my life has created a perfect storm where at 42, I am at the end of a string of failed relationships. I live in a big beautiful house that should house a family of 7, and it is just my son and I. That I have not taken time to heal my wounds and decide what is, and isn’t, required from others to have access to me. And so I have allowed myself to entertain people who only wanted my validation, who only needed something from me.
I am accommodating, I stay calm, I don’t ask for too much, focus on making sure they are happy their needs are met, and they are having a good time. And they use me. Take me for granted. As soon as things get real, or something happens that requires them to put in the same effort, it throws them off. Because I took care of everything. Because I made it too easy for the wrong people to gain access to my time, body, and space. This was how I won safety in childhood, but it has won me a string of relationships with emotionally unavailable people I stuck around for far longer than I should have hoping they would see my worth.
If I do not show that my worth is inherent and move with that knowledge at the base of everything I do, people won’t see it. If I never ask for anything and always accommodate others, they won’t see that I have needs. They’ll carry on thinking only of themselves because I never asked them to think of me.
If you don’t communicate what you need and hold boundaries with people, they learn they can walk all over you, and eventually they will leave. Eventually smoother talkers who can play the game will be promoted over you. Eventually, you’ll wind up exactly in the place you were trying to avoid – abused, neglected, forgotten, overlooked.
Abandoning myself just showed people it was ok to abandon me.
I’m completely burned from overdoing, overextending, overcompensating. And I am alone anyway. I get criticized anyway. I am left for far weaker, much more needy women because I was too busy caretaking to ever define what my time is worth. What I need in return. What kinds of people are worth of my time. I just give it freely to everyone and hope someone sticks around. I trained people to walk away.
“Down here it’s our time! It’s OUR time down here!”
Yes, a Goonies quote. Because it is my time. It’s my time to stop. To say no. To say enough. To say I can’t carry this alone anymore. To say I’m not giving up on people but until they can meet me halfway I am not spending time on them. Call me when you want to pick this up, I’m just not carrying it by myself anymore.
Time to sit in therapy and do the hard work. To look in that mirror and tell myself what I have not believed – that I am worthy of someone’s effort, that I will not ever receive it unless I make it a requirement. That I am allowed to be exhausted and hurt, and to take up space, and be messy and chaotic, intense and passionate, to live fully and honestly and without apology.
I made it to 42. The meaning of life, the universe, and everything. And it’s my turn to be filled up with the love I give to others so freely. If that means walking alone for the foreseeable future, at least I will have the space, time, and freedom to finally define the worth of my soul and establish what it takes from others to have access to it. To command the respect I never learned to gain. To learn what makes ME happy instead of always scanning for what others are going to need to keep them happy.
To remove the “not worth it” sticker on my forehead and paste in on the foreheads of people who abandoned and abused me in the past. I am worth it, I have just been hiding it, placating it, pretending around it, and ultimately abandoning it within myself so I can pour into everyone else.
This chapter is titled, “I have always been worth it and I don’t have to prove it to anyone.”
Leave a Reply