I am still susceptible to narratives that offer to provide the "one right way to live." For instance, orthorexia. If you just eat these foods you will be perfectly healthy and your life will be great and it will solve all your problems! Which means you should eat only a few bites of the homemade strawberry ice cream your friend made, and give up bread. Following our rules will fix your pain or keep things from going wrong in the future.
It will not.
There are things that reasonable people do to avoid the likelihood of suffering, but in the end we all have to accept the lack of control we have over what happens to us.
And it seems so natural to me to stay in all types of relationships where I am doing all the work to make the thing go, and my needs are secondary. When you have been neglected as a kid, it feels normal for you not to matter. Old friends who never calls you back, a parent who never calls or answers the phone?
I always feel that this is my fault. Maybe this time they will respond with affection. The message I learned was that I wasn't worthy of love, I didn't deserve people's time. That's a hard one to get rid of.
It is not my fault.
I have real friends who don't treat me like that, and I don't need to suffer through that again and again.
These poison messages have continued to cost me relationships and career progress and made me live with a devastated view of myself. I'm still trying to leave them behind.
This is a really, really good point. Thanks for posting this.
ReplyDeleteFundamentalism both inoculated us against "one right way" narratives AND conditioned us to accept them. Even after I left the fundie group I grew up in, I clung to other religious and nonreligious systems in hopes they would do for me what fundamentalism had promised and failed. But with each such system it becomes easier and easier to spot the bullshit. Which is nice.