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Dealing with feelings of injustice and unfairness

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sisoon ( Moderator #31240) posted at 2:52 PM on Wednesday, July 5th, 2023

My dancing makes the inflatable tube man look like a ballet dancer.

That's probably a joke, but there's probably some truth in it, so ....

Fuck that. Dancing is fun for some of us. If you think it'll be fun and you want to do it, do it. You owe it to yourself to do it. I learned too late that very few dancers pay any attention to mediocre dancers. They may stop dancing themselves to look at a couple that's really good, but it's much more fun to dance than to stare at couples who don't move well.

Dancing is obviously a trigger for me. smile

There's a larger point here, though. Healing requires authenticity - being true to yourself. I'm pretty well convinced a BS needs to please themself rather than worry about how they look to others. I urge all BSes to adopt that attitude.

fBH (me) - on d-day: 66, Married 43, together 45, same sex apDDay - 12/22/2010Recover'd and R'edYou don't have to like your boundaries. You just have to set and enforce them.

posts: 31151   ·   registered: Feb. 18th, 2011   ·   location: Illinois
id 8798208
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Lurkingsoul12 ( member #82382) posted at 3:26 PM on Wednesday, July 5th, 2023

Fuck that. Dancing is fun for some of us. If you think it'll be fun and you want to do it, do it.

This. You do it because it's fun. That's self-love. When you worry about how other people will perceive you, then it's similar to people pleasing. As long as you are not putting other people in a difficult/harm situation, you do what looks fun for you.

posts: 459   ·   registered: Nov. 12th, 2022
id 8798216
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 oldmewasmurdered (original poster member #79473) posted at 6:28 PM on Wednesday, July 5th, 2023

Yes Sisoon it was a joke. I later recognize it was part of my inner critic knocking myself down a peg so that I wouldn't try new things.

So follow up to that problem then. I have spent so long in my people pleasing mindset that when I ask myself "so what do I want?" The answer is "I don't know". When I wanted something when I was little it was counter-productive and unsafe. I would be punished because I wasn't doing what I was "supposed" to do. Eventually I learned to push down my own wants and desires so as to not rock the boat. Now that I want to be genuine and "do what I want", I don't know what that is. Is it just a matter of trying whatever I can get my hands on and see if I like it? I've had mixed results just trying stuff. This applies in career and relationships as well. I feel like I excel at doing "what I must do", but have little clue when it comes to "what I want to do". So I just drift. And I want to stop drifting and start living. Any suggestions or ideas? Tyvm smile

posts: 119   ·   registered: Oct. 12th, 2021   ·   location: Canada
id 8798256
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sisoon ( Moderator #31240) posted at 7:24 PM on Wednesday, July 5th, 2023

Sure. You are not alone. You're in great company. I'm sure you can figure out how I know about that. smile

A couple of thoughts...:

1) You can start listening to your internal conversations - you DO have wants that get thrown aside. If you train yourself to hear your self-talk, you'll hear the wants before they get thrown aside..

2) Start with anything. Evaluate your response. If you like it, do more. If you don't, put that on your 'probably won't do this again' list. An example: get yourself out to hear live music or a play or an exhibit in a museum. Figure out what you liked and disliked and increase the stuff in your life you like while decreasing the stuff you don't. Shit always happens, but changing the proportions change your life.

3) Be kind to yourself. You WILL make mistakes. You'll fall back into people pleasing. That's no reason to beat yourself up - instead, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start in again to be authentic.

Also, when you DO find things you like, accept that it will take you time to learn the ropes, and give yourself all the time you want to take. You can go to a concert and sit next to a top critic. The critic knows a lot about what you're hearing; you don't. The differences between you simply don't matter. The critic does the critic. You do you. There's room for all of us here on earth, at least so far.

*****

There's a paradox here: if you're a people pleaser, you doom yourself to a life o displeasing yourself and, probably, others, too. Being authentic and asking for what one wants increases the likelihood of pleasing oneself and others, too

I hated my W's attempts to figure out what I wanted. She was wrong so damned often!

I think human beings are much happier when they're authentic. My W pleases me when she asks me what I want and asks for what she wants. Sometimes our wants conflict; most of the time they don't. When the 2 of us are aware of our wants, even if they conflict, we can usually find something that pleases us both - but we can do that only when we're up front about our desires.

*****

I used to be very self-conscious about dancing because I've almost always been overweight, and I never knew many steps. My 1st real date with W2b was a dance, and she had a hard time getting me onto the dance floor. The way she danced with me told me at a gut level that I'd get what I wanted if I became more authentic. So dancing means a lot to me.

It took me years to realize that the way to minimize the possibility of being picked out for lousy dancing by spectators was to get into the middle of the dancers, so the ones outside obscured the view of those inside. smile

[This message edited by SI Staff at 7:58 PM, Wednesday, July 5th]

fBH (me) - on d-day: 66, Married 43, together 45, same sex apDDay - 12/22/2010Recover'd and R'edYou don't have to like your boundaries. You just have to set and enforce them.

posts: 31151   ·   registered: Feb. 18th, 2011   ·   location: Illinois
id 8798269
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crazyblindsided ( member #35215) posted at 7:48 PM on Wednesday, July 5th, 2023

Feelings of unfairness from betrayal just feel so much more raw and the emotional punch hits harder, so it's harder to stop the victim mindset spiral from happening.

This is so true and so hard to explain to those who do not have this previous groundwork of being victimized since a young age. It colors every betrayal and every injustice.

I'm currently going through D and my xWS is trying to fight me on everything and then some so these old feelings of injustice and being a victim have returned and are causing me great distress right now to where it is disrupting my life and mental health.

fBS/fWS(me):52 Mad-hattered after DD (2008)
XWS:55 Serial Cheater, Diagnosed NPD
DD(22) DS(19)
XWS cheated the entire M spanning 19 years
Discovered D-Days 2006,2008,2012, False R 2014
Separated 9/2019; Divorced 8/2024

posts: 9076   ·   registered: Apr. 2nd, 2012   ·   location: California
id 8798270
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Divod62 ( new member #70853) posted at 10:48 PM on Wednesday, July 5th, 2023

Recently I'm having lots of trouble with anger, especially the feeling of being unjustly done. Like I've been a genuinely good person all my life, and my reward is a shit sandwich and lifelong therapy. Yay me. I don't even care if my ex-WF is happy or miserable, I'm just so angry that I was made miserable.

Logically I know I need to accept the current situation, grieve the past and focus on building my new life. But I don't feel it. I feel like the victim of such injustice. It's not fair I have to take most of my free time to try to understand trauma to just survive.

Anyone has luck with this? Any help is appreciated. Ty in advance.

I don't know if this will help you, but I can share how I was able to make forward progress with less anger and pain from the injustice of it all.

It seems your anger is rooted in how your life compares to the people around you, and it's an ongoing challenge for you. Two things happened in my world that made me change my perspective.

A week ago today my dear friends' daughter passed away after battling a devastating super-rare cancer for the last couple of years. They used to be our neighbor and she was my DD's close childhood friend. I know it's been said that the pain a BS experiences is often worse than the death of a loved one, but I can tell you first hand that losing your only child so young is far worse.

When I first moved to the city I now call my home to pursue my dreams, the brother of my first girlfriend (I'll call him K) who was living here at the time picked me up from the airport and helped me settle in. Fast forward 36 years later, I've been working in my "dream" industry all this time and have been mildly successful so I thought, and K contacts me recently though a mutual friend. He's had an interesting life doing odd jobs, living abroad for a decade, never married, but when he asked me what I did for a living I learned that he was here all those years ago to pursue a career in the same industry but it never worked out for him. I was flabbergasted! He said I was "living the dream". Now realistically I know I'm just a big fish in a small pond (I own a small business), but it struck me that maybe he's right, I am living the dream and I have much to be thankful for.

So my advice for you is to look for your silver lining, realize your life could be MUCH worse. You have time and health on your side, focus on the positive and stop measuring yourself against others.

Me BS, Her WS, DDay Dec 2018They hooked up abroad about once or twice a year for almost a decade. EA and PA. Reconciling.

posts: 31   ·   registered: Jun. 24th, 2019
id 8798308
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