doormat, victim and other epithets
When I first named and started actively exploring my submissiveness, I worried a lot about being a doormat. My journal from that time is riddled with the question: “Am I being a doormat? What’s the difference?” Vanilla folks seems to confuse submissiveness with being a doormat, so I guess it is not surprising that this is where my questioning started.
I don’t worry about being a doormat these days, although there are times when I wonder if I’m expressing my needs well enough.
I learned pretty early on to squelch my needs. Expressing needs turned into being needy which equated to being a problem. I got lots of praise for being a “good girl,” so suppressing my needs became second nature.
Conventional wisdom says, “Take charge of your own life and don’t be a victim!” and “Don’t blame others; make different choices!” But the hard part about behaviors learned as a child is that stuff was really done to you. The choices and abilities to “defend” yourself were limited. And now – as an adult – it is easy to get confused.
When we hear stories of abuse of children, we don’t question that they are victims. Blame is clear and easy to place on the adult who hurt the child. But what happens when those victims grow up? Why do the behaviors a child learned to protect themselves become dysfunction, co-dependence or any other word we can come up with to disparage our now adult behavior? I guess the theory is that if we make it “bad” then we will be more compelled to change it.
I find it very hard to accept responsibility for my behavior and habits that I do out of self-protection. The irony of these habits is that they are ultimately self-destructive. Sometimes it feels like I’m in an old-fashioned fun house where I’m dealing with a distortion at every turn.
Sometimes my submissiveness doesn’t make this easier to sort out. I’m less confused than I was 14 years ago, but I’m still struggling to sort out my instinct to serve and submit from my habit to please at the expense of myself.
April 21, 2010 at 11:48 pm
[...] In a recent post, I wrote how I’m still struggling to sort out my instinct to serve and submit from my habit to please at the expense of myself. [...]