Standing Up for Yourself (Part 2)

      Standing up for yourself is like a two-sided coin. One side is knowing how to stop people invading your boundaries. The other side is looking after yourself. This is easier said than done, I'm afraid. We have been conditioned from birth to look after other people and other people's feelings. Conditioned to rather be uncomfortable than bother anybody else. To drop our own stuff to go take care of someone else's. So when I at last drew a line in the sand and managed to keep all the narcs in my life at a reasonable distance I found that I didn't know where to start when it came to my stuff. I had spent my whole life "winging it" (as in: to improvise with little preparation). Spinning plates. Stashing and dashing. Dealing with the urgent rather than the important. Always on the run to catch up with one thing or another. Reacting to things as they came my way rather than deciding in advance what I wanted. And always, always putting myself last. 

     When I was in the process of deciding to put the narcs behind a safety line, I came across this sentence in a self-help book: 

 "If you don't have a plan you'll be a stepping stone for those who do."

    That's exactly how I felt. Like a stepping stone in their plans. The problem was that I didn't know what I wanted. What I wanted had never been an option. It had always been about what other people "needed". Since I was the "good girl" who never got in trouble and was always "ok", it was my "job" to help with my siblings' messes. 

   This sentence haunted me. "I need to have a plan" I'd say to myself, "but what?" "What do I want?" "I don't know". And somehow to even think about what I wanted just felt self-centred  and selfish. That's what all the narcs had been doing all along, right? Except that, in our quest to not be anything close to what they are, we end up shooting ourselves in the foot. Because there is nothing wrong with looking after yourself and your stuff. What the narcs are doing is different: they're not looking after themselves and their stuff, they're getting us to do that for them. Hitching a free ride at our expense. They just trained us to think that way so that we would look after their stuff. Quite a clever ploy, don't you think?