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Never in life has "weighing your words" or "watch your words" been more a important theme. Never in life have words hurt more. It seems anything I might let out... to anyone... will come back to bite and haunt.

Even in school, when a bully was at me, the pain from that would go away more quickly than the pain of current times, for physical pain does go away again, much of the time.

But emotional pain seems to linger and reverberate.

In times of grief, we're told not to isolate ourselves, while at the same time, people I know don't want to see or hear the reality of my life, they all say, "Gee, are you having a nice day? or the latest..."glad everything is ok."

It.is.not.ok.

So when journaling doesn't work, when your "virtual" support system wants to hear no more, where does one store the words we dare not speak aloud?

There is meditation that I work on and IC, but there are those moments in the darkness late at night or a rainy day with no kids home where the words come to mind and echo against the walls of my mind.

Or when X pulls some stunt and I have a reaction, but I have to stifle it.

Or when the tears and anger come but he will use that against me, stores them like a file cabinet or squirrel for later use. And I'm sure goes to his new home to OW and reams me out.

When he wants to hear nothing negative but what you have to reply cannot be sugar coated and he did something wrong, where to store those words?

To lighten my mood, I'm reminded of a Simpson's episode where Marge finally gets a glass jar and every time Homer swears, he puts a quarter in there...i.e. a swear jar. Maybe there can be a jar for these words that hang in the hemisphere of our brains and have to go unheard.

Thank you for SI and a place to put so many words that we cannot tell anyone else.

Then there are secrets. I live in a world where people who should be closest to me and part of my "support system" actually continue to keep secrets from me. Immediate family members want to know my innermost problems but are keeping secrets with DD around me and I was raised that secrets are bordering on lies and just plain bad.

So why am I one of the only people I know who have trouble keeping secrets, especially from the very people who do it?

And if you were raised this way, where secrets found out got you spanked or grounded, how do you then go against your upbringing and learn to keep them to protect yourself?

[This message edited by Ashland13 at 11:03 AM, October 6th (Sunday)]

I have to learn to keep somet things to myself as well - for me it's not so much for fear of punishment as the whole "external validation" thing.

I'm glad you have us to lean on.

What I have learned is that people want to know the gossip. I also learned that our pain is just that our pain, we live with it 24/7 and people we have been there for just don't care. Mostly this had made me redraw all my relationships. It has made me realize that there are exactly 2 people in my life that actually care about me all the time. That mostly people don't want to hear our pain past the intial stabbing pain. Being the victim of mental pain is unlike the pain of being in physical pain. I was raped years ago. People turned there back on me because they just couldn't understand my mental state or the fact I had to go into a mental health facility four times to get through this. Honestly, that is when I knew who really cared about me. Perhaps it isn't they don't care but don't want the weight of it or understand it.

I honestly believe that if people who are in support of you are in on keeping secrets with your child you should 180 them. If your discussing your ex and his doing it. I think you need to document it as it. I really have no suggestion for you there.