Too many angry thoughts and regrets

Unusual Beliefs
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I woke up in good spirits, happier than yesterday. I relaxed to music as a way to pass a bit of time. I ate enough and the food was healthy. The voices weren’t being overly abusive. I even had one that said I was amazing…

But I kept ruminating about people who mistreated long ago. Usually, I can catch myself and stop it before I get too mad, but this crept up on me, and I’m totally angry now. Maybe I let my guard drop too much, because things were going so well.

In my past, I let people off too easily, instead of defending myself. My problem: I was a big doormat. I had the chance to study martial arts in grade school but the idea repulsed me, so I turned it down.

In junior high, I remember another teen girl spraying hair-spray into my eyes just to prove I never stand up for myself. Does anyone know how much that hurts? It’s bleeping painful! I should have -----. I’m so angry, so I’m adding a fill-in-the-blank and leave it up to your imaginations about what I should have done to her. :smile:

I wish I had been far nastier, but I had the idea that I was always supposed to be the ‘bigger’ person and ‘Good girls don’t act aggressive or fight.’ I don’t even know where I got this idea about being good. I like to blame society a lot. Anyway, somehow I believed that violence and verbal abuse were something disgusting people did. It was a very black and white way to think. Part of me is still repulsed by these people and possibly being like them. But not defending myself eroded my self-esteem.

Does regretting NOT being a nasty person make me a nasty person? I wish assertiveness training had been available long, long ago. It’s a better way to handle problems than being passive-aggressive, or aggressive. In hindsight, I think self-defense for women should be mandatory in grade school, through to high school. I wish there were more female action heroes in TV and Movies when I was growing up.

So…I’m full of regrets. I’ve tried all kinds of coping techniques this morning and nothing works. I’m seeing red. :pensive: Oddly, as I get to the end of typing this post, I feel I can breathe a bit easier.

P.S. Sorry for another wall of text.

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I feel for you. I was bullied and beat up even though I was a kind person. And I’m a guy!

I also think women should do martial arts.

I never get angry. It has made me depressed and full of anxiety. The anxiety has made me socially weird and awkward.

I tried to get angry for many years but couldn’t. It just made me hurt those who didn’t impose a threat and I was very mean towards my family.

I don’t know. All I can say try not to ruminate on the past. What’s done is done.

Look forward and try to forget what they did to you.

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Thanks for the advice.

I think a bit of anger, expressed in the form of assertiveness, is a good way to handle situations. You’re right, it’s not good to indulge in anger to the point where I’m taking it out on everyone. That’s definitely sinking to bully level. But the ruminating just crept up on me today. Grrrr! :smile:

I read that depression is anger turned inwards. I struggle with depression sometimes…

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There is nothing wrong with having boundaries and being assertive.

I think that thinking too much on the past makes one even more depressed.

Yes, anger turned inwards makes you depressed. I used to hate myself and it ultimately made me do stupid things that left me psychotic.

Do you have a therapist?

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I’ve got a really good therapist. I won’t talk with her until the new year though. I’ll try and go for a walk soon. It’s supposed to warm up a bit. :slight_smile: The wind is brutal. :smiley:

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Our society sucks, kids are not taught anything useful and thrown into jail-for-kids (public schooling).
So decent kids must endure the social rings of abusive delinquents.
Public schooling / Mental Facilities, seem very similar in my perspective. Different levels of freedom to move around or find other options, and that is the main difference.
I believe society does this to keep kids off the streets during the normal working hours. They have a point to do so, but it does destroy any reinvestment value in society by doing this to people in their more malleable youth.

It really hurts when I realize almost all of my negative experiences in my school days before the diagnosis were created by a combination of compulsive force/ignorance on my part. And then it was a downhill slide after the psychosis.

You have to promote yourself, be aware, and control your own life with initiative to get anywhere in this world.
Hyper successful people say no to almost everything, and they project what they want onto others, rather than letting other people waste their time by taking control of the steering wheel.

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Perhaps talk to her on having boundaries and being assertive?

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I’ve got books on assertiveness and boundaries. I’m much, much better these days with that stuff. I let my guard down and got sucked into ruminating about the past. Darn past! :smile:

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Haha! It happens to all of us.

It sounds to me that you are ready to kick ass!

:wink:

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School can be a toxic environment. It’s overly competitive with not much emphasis on how to be supportive and encourage the best in other people. I wish the stuff about win/win was discussed in grade school (in the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People).

As an adult, I found some workplaces toxic too, especially because I wasn’t as good at socializing and my memory was terrible. I became a target. It’s hard to figure out what changes need to be made with society.

Sorry to hear you faced a downhill slide after psychosis. That’s rough.

I’ve done a lot of self-help book reading. Saying no is important, for sure. :slight_smile: Thanks for commenting.

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I would recommend ‘the 4 agreements’ by Don Migual Ruiz, it was a great book on philosophy and changing your mentality internally.

Being stoic and maintaining positive means in your own life is all you can do. At least that is what I would like to live my life under such a mentality.

I had 2 previous jobs that really made me miserable, they were not hard work (but dirty, physical and often disgusting), but were structured with toxic people in a way that made me uncomfortable to say the least. But I acknowledge overall that if I could not keep my mind together and do my job, than I should not be there.

Bad experiences are tough, but they made me learn to see the writing on the wall and know what to look out for in the future.

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I used to have The Four Agreements, but read it once, forgot everything in it, and then gave it away. Maybe I should re-buy it. :sweat_smile:

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I had similar problems. People used to break in all the time. I had no confidence and could barely talk to people. Then made bad career decisions. I would have been much better off, taking something easier in college.

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I really understand how painfull and hurtful your past experience must have been. More than 75% of us Schizophrenics have been bullied in our childhood or youth. I to was traumatized in my youth by bullies just like you.I really hope that the perpetrators will get punished by there own carma.

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Sorry for the info block, but once I hit the keyboard I get carried away.

In 5th grade, there was a held back by 2-3 years teenage A$%^#%@ (probably should be in 9th grade, high school) use me as a target. I remember as we would do our practice runs to a fence and back for PE, he went out of his way to slam me into the ground on his run back. If I could go travel back in time, there would be one less person in the world…

When I graduated elementary school I was in such a negative almost psychotic/traumatized state, I actually remember looking back after my graduation day and being so sarcastically ‘glad’ I was finally getting away from that school. I was practically homicidal as a 10 year old. And things did not get much better afterwards, although they did slowly in middle/high until my psychotic episode at 15. Fun life.

When I am not fully sedated from this disease and can look back clearly on my past, I can see it is no wonder that I cannot trust people or feel angry about the past. And when I am sedated: I blame myself and am gaslighted by my parent’s expectations/bullying nature + am tortured within my own mind by my own consciousness for what I have seen and endured, both from myself and the world.
I can thank God that I am not enough of a coward to act on the viscous thoughts/ideas my mind comes up with from my horrific experience, even when I am sedated to the point I cannot know myself or remember much.

“I really hope that the perpetrators will get punished by there own carma (Karma).”
They will not be, they get away with what they do because the system rewards them for it. The games of power and influence do not follow ethical grounds. It is human nature to follow in crowds and subvert others, it is a survival strategy. The good thing is that the system does not have to be like this, in fact it is being unnaturally kept like this by those who benefit from this system, and it can change to a more natural form that is beneficial to groups of people that support each other, rather than subvert/bully.

People naturally form small communities to support their members and defend themselves, but our current society that drives acceptance of ‘diversity’ is meant to keep people divided and unable to care/defend themselves in naturally formed groups/communities. Humanity cannot and will not accept this, and people will walk away from the division and form naturally segregated groups for their own benefit. The unfortunate caveat is that these groups are often at each other’s throats, vying for resources, but that is the way it has always been. Think harmonious villages versus anarchic mad-max cities.

It is parasites versus benevolent co-existence in biology. Parasites thrive in expanding mono-cultures, which humanity is in the position of right now. Common weaknesses in a large group of organisms is what parasites strive after.

Like all organisms, the waves of predators/prey go in sync with each other until they reach a sustainable plane of existence. My theory is that the parasites in the world will act as a wave function that will get smaller and smaller over time until it is eliminated, and only benevolent co-existence thrives in nature. That will happen long after humanity perishes, but it is nice to theorize that things will get better over time in evolutionary standards. If you want to call that Karma.

Individuals who lie and act to rob others, will not get away with it psychologically (although they will try otherwise) and will end up destroying themselves internally, or externally by trying to hold onto power/control to the very end. People who desire control are weak, and they will perish inevitably. Humanity cannot survive without other humans. You might call that Karma as well.

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Thanks for taking the time to write a well-thought out detailed reply. I try to be a free-thinker and read books on critical thinking. I never liked “follow-the-herd” mentalities either and hope the karma will catch up to some people. I also hope that I’m forgiven for anything I did wrong to others. As a wise writer once said on twitter, “We’re all the c$%# in someone else’s story.”

Yes, this is a great idea. There’s a lot more being done nowadays to help children than there was when I was growing up. There’s an event called “Bell Let’s Talk Day” to raise money for mental health supports.

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It is a more useful way to visualize the world, and gives a better narration of how we interact, from childhood into adulthood (as a form of domestication.) And what we can do about it from the author’s view (the four agreements.)

It doesn’t help me if I cannot control my own mind, just like most philosophy, but it is good for you if you can however.

I have all three books of his 4-agreement series, and have only read the four agreements and the beginning of the second one. My ideas of self-agency are based on his book, among other stoic like works.
I think it is crucial to recognize what happens in the human mind through society’s influence, so I appreciated his books, from what I read.

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Maybe I’ll repurchase his books. I think his son wrote a book too. :thinking:

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I’ve had a similar episode in highschool where a girl tried to prove a point by slapping me for no reason. She was soon thereafter lifted by her neck(not really, I lifted her mostly with my other arm but a hand was on her neck for dramatic purposes) and gently kept against the blackboard for a couple seconds to reflect on her actions. I was very careful not to hurt her, which I didn’t, but she was totally panicking while screaming I was crazy, to which I calmly told her that she should learn not to slap crazy people for no reason and let her go. It wasn’t helpful, people started to see me as a threat as she used her popularity to campaign against me.

There are downsides to standing up for yourself, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows, people don’t take well to being told they are doing something wrong. It doesn’t matter how well you go about it, standing up for yourself is only as useful as your social standing, if you have a low social standing standing up for yourself has a good chance to backfire regardless of how reasonable and calm you are. Ever since I became psychotic I have had a much harder time standing up for myself, I even lost a bit of money because of it, it’s a tough position to be in but it’s not a necessarily worse position, it just feels worse.

We have generally very poor social standings as schizophrenics and not exactly the best impulse control, both vastly increase the stuff that can go wrong when you go about defending yourself as well as making ourselves quite vulnerable to both smearing and riling tactics. If someone is evil enough to do something that requires our intervention we might go about standing up for ourselves only to have them tell a lie about what happened and completely thwart our credibility, easily causing us a mental breakdown for our troubles, which in turn validates them even further. Media portrays standing up for yourself in a way that is not representative of what standing up for yourself in an actual power imbalance looks like. It’s dangerous on many different levels and can easily escalate despite your best efforts, often in unforeseeable ways.

Don’t grow too enamored with assertiveness, it’s not the assertiveness that works in itself, despite what people more delusional than me would have you believe assertiveness works because those who practice it have the social standing to pull it off, it’s by no means something you can copy expecting similar results with people who know you. Women might have slightly better results than men in social settings when standing up for themselves properly but it’s equally if not more dangerous for them to do so where nobody is looking. Assertiveness is all the rage because it’s meant to help you overcome your insecurities and society keeps in check what can go wrong in many cases but those feelings are not there to impede you but to protect you. Those feelings aren’t your body betraying you, your body is working perfectly fine in order to protect you from everything that can go wrong and standing up for yourself puts a whole lot of trust in society tying up the avenues of the person you are standing up to to make matters worse.

I am not saying don’t stand up for yourself, just don’t judge yourself if you don’t and don’t idealize assertiveness as a solution to your issues, it might solve some just to create new ones. Do what you feel is best and accept the fact that no course of action is devoid of downsides nor of upsides. There isn’t an objectively proper way to handle someone taking advantage of you or targeting you. There’s just a costs vs benefits analysis and a risk assessment, then you do what you deem best for you. I am a tall big man, I don’t have to fear others giving me a beatdown for the most part but I am easily perceived as a danger and this can be used against me quite easily. What works for me and what works for a girl are two completely different things. You can provoke violence from others and they have to suppress themselves or you gain a benefit from it in how people will look at the situation, while if I do the same it easily backfires into all sorts of narratives against me simply because at a glance they could start that fight but I could always end it.

Don’t let the world sell you on the lie that there is a proper way to handle yourself. There isn’t any such a thing. All you can do is learn to live with the consequences. The path not taken often looks more appealing but generally that’s because you don’t like yourself, not because you’d actually necessarily prefer the outcomes of acting differently. If you decide to stand up for yourself in the future good luck and power to you. If you decide to just live with the inconveniences look deep at your choices and accept yourself for what they are: an attempt at making the best of a bad hand and not a reflection of weakness on your part.

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Today is a new day. I am doing my best not to wreck it by bringing yesterday’s problems into it.