Maybe this only relates to me or people that are as shitty as me, but ive been realizing lately that the reason I've been holding onto and thinking about the abuse my parents gave me and been have all these powerfully intrusive narritives is because they are t really intrusive thoughts.  At least for me how I think of intrusive thoughts. I think that I actively choose to hold onto this narritive to justify my continued shitty actions. 

My parents pretty severely abused me and neglected me. That obviously had a real traceable impact and that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about how now I'm 23, the dust has been settled for a few years now, and I'm still thinking about this shit all the time. And it's not the whole "you couldn't process it then and now your having to process it now" thing, because I've totally gone through that phase. It lasted me a couple years but I'm honestly past that now and have really fully processed those events.

I think some people get to this point and they are pretty good and well on their way to recovery.

But some people don't. They get stuck, and I have been stuck for some time now. Maybe you can relate and this can help you.

I feel like a good portion of my life I had to use justifications just to keep going. I wasn't really taught valuable lessons and had poor examples so I pretty much just did exclusively bad shit.

For me the only people who were compassionate to me were people who recognized that I was a troubled kid in a fucked up situation. The only positive feedback I could get was basically a direct result from getting the sympathy of people outside my situation.

I think this twisted my reward system. Not only outwardly in a social sense, that was pretty obvious. Not so obvious was how much it really twisted my internal reward system. I'm probably not using the best descriptors , but a lot of people don't realize they have an internal reward system that YOU control.

You resist a temptation and you tell yourself "good job" you fail and you beat yourself up for it or let it go. But I resist a temptation and think "you did a good job for someone who was abused as a kid" I fail and I think either " well that's just because I was abused as a kid" or when I was really troubled " wow of course your parents abused you. This is why and it was justified" usually not in these pecific words, but something that is like sneakily to that effect if that makes sense.

I think lately the thing that has been holding me back and making me stuck is that I haven't been honest with myself about the fact that I don't want to let these things go. If I do and then I mess up it's just my fault. But that was already the case, wasn't it?

That was already the case wasn't it?
