ME: Ok, so now that I recognize what’s going on. (Not trying to be redundant here, but background helps me collect my thoughts). I’m fixing my foundation both in my mind, and now in my life as well. The mission now is to correct every situation that I’ve been letting fester, putting off, neglecting or just generally not fixing that are likely to bite us in the backside later. I think the theme of my next little while is going to be fixing the consequences of spending forty years just letting life happen to me rather than taking any kind of responsibility or control.
For the last few years, that has manifested itself in being in a financial “knot”. Well, mostly financial, but it involves other things. A situation where having one problem prevented us from solving another, and that problem was stopping us from solving the first. For instance, last year we didn’t have the money to pay our monthly bills, so we wanted to refinance the house, but my wife’s credit was too low. Now, refinancing would have given us the money to pay the bills and immediately raise her credit score, but we could only get it done on my credit and got half the money.
I’m verbose enough without telling the story again, but we half solved the problem and are still afloat due to a rather amazing series of windfalls. Added to those problems, we had several large outstanding medical bills, and this stupid thing from our HOA. We have frequently had issues like this hanging out in the background, and I always told myself that I’d get to them when I could, and never did wind up getting to them until they became a major crisis. For instance one of the medical bills lead to my wife’s wages being garnished earlier this year, and it was only through one of those amazing windfalls that we were able to get that taken care of before at least one of us had to declare bankruptcy.
That was a pattern, I just said “eh, it’ll be ok I’ll deal with it later” until it definately was not OK.
I now understand what’s going on, and I think I should get ahead of it. I am going to list every financial sword of Damocles I have out there, and see what I can do. I don’t think that I can take care of it all right now before I’m forced to.
I had an experience while listening to UMS that could be related to what your wife has gone through. A task at work that should have taken me ten minutes to accomplish took me an hour and ten minutes. This happened two times in one day , back to back while listening to the sub. I got distracted and I really to this day don't know where the time went. I felt terrible, so incompetent and confused when it happened. It hasn't happened since.
ME: I’ve been following Findingme’s journal, and something really struck me. Not so much about what happened for him which is bloody awesome. What hit me was my own reaction. Before very recently, I’d have felt happy for him on the surface, but underneath I’d have been jealous and felt dejected because “things like that don’t happen to me”. Both of those things are conspicuously absent. Good things happening to someone else take nothing from me, so there is no reason to be jealous. And something amazing like that happening to someone goes to show that that or something better CAN happen for me, not that it can’t. Who knows, today could be the day.
Oh, and finding me, I always used to say that I can’t win the lottery because I don’t play. Thanks for disproving THAT wisdom saying of mine.
That was very good to hear, Paul, about your internal changes. I associated a hidden jealousy and dejection myself with people being successful, whether it was with women, money, or anything. Now I'm in "that" spot, but worry doesn't plague me. Worrying about that, in my mind, is me making things HARDER for myself. Hmm.... no thanks
Your hope and joy was picked up in your post. Thank you for sharing it
And I LOVE disproven "wisdom"
ME: Im somewhere in loop three tonight, and I got the impression that I needed to bump the volume up a bit. I remember that Shannon said that the higher the volume the more urgency is placed on changing quickly. A while after I did that, I felt that there were some parts that didn’t want to. I and the part that requested the higher volume started screaming at them like a drill sergeant. As in “Execute the ;&;$ program right the &:$$ NOW!!! NO MORE B”$$/)&T!!!”. Apparently the part that wants to execute and get on with improving life is just about sick of the foot dragging on the part of the scared reluctant parts. I agree with it.
Anyway, back to auto psychoanalysis. My fear of failure splits off the same node (remember that metaphor) as my fear of success. These developed in parallel and really made life kind of confusing for me. I was afraid to succeed because it would break the programming from that blueprint I got from my father, and I was afraid to fail for reasons I’ll get into. The only response that was possible was a kind of paralysis. What that translated to in the real world was “don’t try”. Trying could have had one of two results. Either I succeed and break my image of how I’m “supposed to be”, or I fail and pay a pretty horrible price for that. There were no good options there, so I spent a lot of my childhood being pretty passive and not engaging in any activities that could result in success or failure. Everything was a no win scenario in my mind (of course I didn’t really know this). Mostly I read a lot, spent a lot of time in my own head, and frankly tried to hide from everyone. Not an ideal childhood.
Now, why did I fear failure so much? It goes back to my parents again (once again, I’m not blaming them, I kept swallowing the poison pills long after their influence on me waned). First my father. Dad was terrified that I would turn out to be a “failure like he was” and he really didn’t know how to deal with it. He was completely fear based and had no concept of guiding me toward success, he just tried to punish failure and tried to instill fear of failure in me. He also considered every mistake and setback in me and himself as a failure. That meant that I paid the maximum price every mistake or misstep. Now, Dad was not physically abusive, he never once raised a hand to me, but he did scream, swear, call names, and make dire predictions about what my life would look like if I kept being a screw up. He was even harder on himself. Where he never physically assaulted me, he beat the living hell out of himself when he was frustrated. I mean he punched himself in the face hard enough that you heard a thump like in the movies, and rammed his head into walls hard enough to shake the house. And he directed enough of his anger at me that I got I somehow got the idea that his going into this state was my fault wether or not I had anything to do with why he was angry. So I blamed myself when he failed and when I failed. I was never afraid OF my father, I was afraid FOR him. Just like he was afraid for me.
I cared about him deeply, and once again, all this started at the time that I had a natural hero worship of my father. It was natural for me to want to be just like him at that time in my life, and I saw how badly he took his own large scale failures (job loss, and he blamed himself for the divorce) and how that translated to extreme pain/fear/self directed anger at the smallest error after that. I saw how he went off at me for every little error too. To five to ten year old me, this meant one thing. Mistakes (failures) are not acceptable and you should be punished by feeling horrible about yourself for every last one of them. Dad was both leading by example by doing it to himself, and sending me the message directly by doing it to me. Worse yet, his tirades at himself always went from “I failed at that” to “I am such a failure” making a connection in my mind from every mistake to a permanent, irrevocable state of being a failure.
I got a few messages from this. First, no mistake is ok, all mistakes are failures (lie). Second, anything other than perfection on the first try is failure (lie), if you ever fail, you are a failure (you guessed it lie). Dad didn’t mean to do any of this. He had a bad foundation himself, which was dynamited out from under him in a month’s time by the first job loss and the divorce. Then as he saw me start to fail in school he became terrified for me, and I suspect that he also blamed himself (he blamed himself for everything) for me “becoming a failure”. Throughout my growing up, he was trying to steer me away from that by the only means he could figure out. Those being anger, calling me a failure, and at some point telling that a lot of the reason he felt so much stress and was stuck in the cycle he was was because he was so concerned about me.
Oops, I internalized that last one wether he directly stated it or not (I don’t remember, but THERE it is, THATS WHY I felt so much responsibility and guilt for his problems!) I actually convinced myself that he would have been able to be just fine except that I kept screwing up and making him stress out so much. Needless to say, this was a Godzilla sized self lie. It penetrated and set it’s hook deep though. After the divorce, Dad gained a bunch of weight, was very visibly super stressed all the time, and talked about suicide on a daily basis. I lived in daily terror that my Dad was going to die. Now that I’ve written all this I realize that there was more to that. I lived in daily terror that my father was going to die and it would be my fault for failing/being a failure. (He didn’t, he’s still with us and doing a lot better now). It was like the sword of Damocles hanging over my head from age six to about age twenty, though it steadily faded into my subconscious.
It was all a dysfunctional feedback loop. Dad blamed himself for my problems and had a terribly unhealthy reaction, and that lead me to blame myself and have a catastrophically dysfunctional reaction of my own.
My mother wasn’t helpful here either. She never is, but because I chose (rightly in this case) to see her as the bad guy in the divorce, her opinion mattered a lot less than Dad’s did. Teachers school staff and other kids also piled on and maybe made the problem worse, but this was the foundation of it.
So I was telling myself that I couldn’t succeed, but also telling myself that failing was the worst thing in the world. That’s quite a knot I tied myself into.
I have noticed a theme here. A whole lot of the fears and delusions that have caused me problems with living the life I want stem from that one node relating to my relationship with my father. That’s going to be my fear of success, my fear of failure, and my lack of assertiveness/fear of standing up for myself. I might get into that one next.
I think that my social phobias, specifically about women relate more to my mom, and stem from a different node, though they all tie together.
Note to self, I also need to get into fear of neatness and order. I suspect I have a general fear of having my crap together, and that’s a problem.
Whats amazing to Me Paul, it that you're way more noticeably open in sharing your heart and mind experiences in your life,than you were even a year ago. that's not wrong at all, it just shows me ,your incredible progress and healing. LTU5 put chew on a whole nother level,or even perhaps just moved massive amounts of stuff that was in your way,out of your way,as it were. Same Dif'! ever higher. your're knockin' it outta da park,man! NO Bull!!
It is astonishing and very pleasing to see you making this progress, Paul.
(11-07-2019, 07:18 AM)ncbeareatingman Wrote: [ -> ]Whats amazing to Me Paul, it that you're way more noticeably open in sharing your heart and mind experiences in your life,than you were even a year ago. that's not wrong at all, it just shows me ,your incredible progress and healing. LTU5 put chew on a whole nother level,or even perhaps just moved massive amounts of stuff that was in your way,out of your way,as it were. Same Dif'! ever higher. your're knockin' it outta da park,man! NO Bull!!
Thank you, but I’m not sure I deserve the praise. You’d have to know me for many years in the face to face world before I’d share 1/100th of this.
I have given myself permission to be this open because I’m just a screen name, and it would be very difficult to connect me to this. So why not? I assume that what I’m sharing here is helping Shannon, and might be helping people with similar crap going on.
Truth be told, I’m mostly doing this for myself especially during this phase of things. Writing something like this out helps me keep the whole picture solidly in my mind while I puzzle it out. Plus, once I have publicly stated the lies that I’ve been telling myself, even to people who don’t know who I am, it’s a lot harder to take it back and go back to telling them to myself.
ME: I woke up this morning with a slight sub hangover and some interesting stuff going on in my mind. I noticed that some anger was rising, and it was directed at my wife for some stuff that she hadn’t been doing lately. That was stupid, and it was resistance. It was trying to divert my energy from going after my problems and clearing the way to execute the program to being angry at external things. Dee need. Then I got a couple spaces in the “flow” (hard to describe, but I’m now feeling my mind as a three dimensional space with energy flowing around in it) that were trying to resist directly. As soon as I felt that, I heard another voice in my mind. It was the one that was drill sergeant voice that was yelling at the resistance with me last night. This is closer to the real me. A hard charging, no nonesense go getting alpha male who goes after what he wants and gets it. I haven’t felt like I was HIM in a long time if ever.
He (I) said, “Ok, they’re poking their heads up because they can’t hide anymore! Let’s get em. Time to ROCK AND ROLL”. With this came palpable feeling of driving energy. I’d say it felt like a strong wind at my back, but it was more like a freight train, or a tank. The tide has turned. At least at the level I’m operating on right now.
ME: My subconscious has told me to blast it with eight loops again tonight and tomorrow so that’s what I’m doing.
It’s kind of odd. I haven’t thought much about my financial goals since this internal stuff started happening in a major way. Since I sensed that mountain range of fear on the horizon, the important thing has been getting through it, which is what I’m doing now. All resources seem to be dedicated to finishing the FRM process. I know they’re on the horizon, but the horizon isn’t visible right now. I have a feeling that I’m almost through this though.
There was another fear tendril coming off of that node that represents the bad parts of the relationship with my father. At least I THINK that’s where it started. Actually, I think this one has more than one source. Picture tendrils coming off of multiple nodes and kind of entwining together to form a bigger, nastier tendril.
This one resulted in a couple of not so fun things. First off, I have had difficulty standing up for myself. Especially against people I care about, but in general as well. This really played havoc on my life. It manifested as shyness that was almost pathological, an almost complete lack of assertiveness, social phobia, and fear of confrontation. Most of this was a lot more pronounced when I was younger, and I’ve managed to push through and improve on a lot of it externally. But it’s still there, or it was until recently and it has made my social and professional relationships more difficult. I was afraid to ask for what I wanted, speak up when I was being mistreated, and from about sixth grade through the end of high school , I even allowed myself to be verbally and physically abused. The odd thing there is that violence really didn’t scare me, I started studying the martial arts as a kid and was quite good at it. I just couldn’t cross the threshold even when I should have and was more than capable.
This one started with my Dad again. Remember that I loved my dad, but he was a raving ragaholic who was in a constant state of panic over the direction of both his and my life. And I mean a constant state of panic. Yeah, I didn’t realize this fully, but for a while there, his fight/flight/freeze system was kicked in almost all the time and for nothing. The reason being that after losing three jobs (and a big part of his self concept that was tied up in them) and the divorce. He was expecting another life destroying disaster to strike at any second. This lead him to spend years bouncing from rage to suicidal depression. Now, he thought he’d done everything right (Private School, college, military, MBA, low level executive at a major corporation) and still wound up being knocked as low as he could imagine being knocked. I can imagine what he thought when he saw me, who he desperately wanted to do better than him doing “everything wrong” as I started out in life.
The only solution he knew of was to be very hard on me and try to as he put it “control me to success” while only ever seeing me every other weekend and over the summer. I call it treating me like crap and screaming at me more than he talked to me. Experts would probably call it severe psychological abuse. Remember also that I blamed myself for his condition and held myself responsible for making everything turn out OK for him, and I was terrified that he was going to keel over dead or kill himself and it would be my fault. I felt a lot of guilt here even though A. It never happened, and B. I’m not the one who should be feeling guilty.
This caused me a conundrum. I was being attacked constantly. Being attacked makes me angry. The more it happens, and the more of a point the person attacking or criticizing me has, the angrier it makes me (actually that might be another issue I have to look into), However I was afraid of hurting the person who was attacking me, so I couldn’t fight back. The only option was to sit and take it, but I really had nothing to do with the resulting anger as a kid, so it got stuffed inside and I had to keep tight control over it. Throughout the years, I had to build a stronger and stronger wall around the ball of more and more highly compressed anger. Think of an auric shield, but built inside and around an anti matter bomb of white hot rage and you have the idea. At first it took an incredible act of will to stuff the anger down when it tried to rise up. I feel it in my lower chest and upper abdomen, and it tries to get up to my head and I stop it at around the mouth level by grinding my teeth. (That’s where that came from!) Not only could I not fight back, but I couldn’t stop visiting because it would have the same effect.
To make matters worse, I was a kid subjected to adult levels of stress and the containment field leaked. It showed itself as nervous tics, tightening of muscles, shaking, weird facial twitches and a weird habit that I’ve gotten into before, but I’ll explain again. I used to pound a stick on the ground, or pretty much any object on any surface. It kind of let me focus on my fantasy world, and I suppose provided some release of the anger energy. Unfortunately it came with weird movements, spontaneous vocalizations and generally made me look like a head case to anyone around me. Yeah, I got picked on a lot. Starting on the first day of school. It went downhill from there. At first I fought back, in fact I did until, I’m not sure when, The staff of the podunk school I went to didn’t know what to make of me, and frankly most of them weren’t very good at their jobs. They blamed me for getting picked on, and most of the time I got in trouble for whatever incident happened.
My mother wasn’t helpful here either. Whoever I had conflict with, she took their side. I was always wrong about everything, and she would always make sure I knew it. She was an alcoholic for the first part of my schooling which was bad, and a dry drunk (as opposed to a recovering alcoholic) during the rest, which was worse. She has issues with men and I think she was pissed at me from the beginning for coming out with external plumbing.
The additional trouble at school and home lead me to have to suppress my reactions at school like I did with my dad. It was a kind of gradual process, but the finishing touches came at the end of eighth grade. For reasons that I explain above, they put me in a school for the “behaviorally handicapped”. Now this is a euphemism for dumping ground for really bad kids. I was the only one there without a juvenile record, and I was just there for bad grades.
I wasn’t in this Hellhole very long, but it made an impression. It was a closely monitored but uncontrolled environment. By that I mean staff was watching your every move, but had no effective way of controlling the kids that didn’t care about getting out of there, and there were some kids in there who were genuinely scary.
The only way out was to be perfect. All the time. For at least a year. In a war zone where the other people were trying to make you fail. I did it though. It required me to stuff down everything, not just anger and robotically go through my day.
I think that that’s the point where not letting any strong emotion or passion rise to the surface really became a strong unconscious reflex. That’s where I just stopped engaging when mistreated. I had to suppress myself so totally that I developed some really strong inhibitions that were really hard to break.
That ebbed a bit and faded into the back of my mind as time went by, but ever since then, I’ve always felt very awkward asserting myself, asking for anything, or reacting to hostility. (The exception to this is when I have official authority).
The reflex to shove down the anger, fear, and all other negative emotions has harmed me in a lot of ways. Not the least of which is I have had difficulty using conscious manifestation techniques. They require me to access a strong passionate emotional state, which I have a hard time doing on command because they seem to fowl on the same reflexive block that I instinctively use to stop the negative stuff from rising from that ball.
Ok, this explains the rage fantasies that rise up unbidden too. I don’t know if understanding will stop them, but it’s good to know the reason.
Also, the behavior school episode explains my fear of criticism, at least part of it. Whenever I am criticized, I get angry (internally, I repress all that remember) way beyond what you’d expect. For instance, my boss called earlier, and I didn’t answer the phone correctly. He mentioned it, and I felt a surge of anger. It’s really no big deal, and I like the guy, so no real threat whatsoever. I feel the anger because I feel threatened by any suggestion that I’m not perfect especially in the work environment. That’s because I spent that time in that place where any imperfection could lead to me spending another year in that hellhole. I’d internalized that and kept it as a part of my worldview all these years.
ME: After another eight loops I woke up this morning with no sub hangover at all, and a very clear and peaceful mind. The sense of connection with my subconscious isn’t as clear, but with a little probing it’s still there. I think the best way to describe it is that it’s more integrated now, part of my normal now.
I think that I didn’t wake up with a sub hangover because FRM and I have finished clearing out that major node from which the major fears that were getting in the way of executing UMS. As I understand it, it’s the battle with the resistance that causes the tiredness, and if that suddenly stops happening, it means that whatever part of you was pushing back has stopped. Now, while I don’t feel much going on, that probably means that my mind has turned to getting it done in the physical world and everything should be on board.
I have a feeling that I should run some loops tonight to speed up the process and consolidate my gains internally, but I don’t think eight is necessary.
Do 8 anyway if that's what your subconscious directed you to do.
(11-08-2019, 04:54 PM)Shannon Wrote: [ -> ]Do 8 anyway if that's what your subconscious directed you to do.
Great minds think alike. I was just thinking that this might be a clever last ditch resistance tactic, so I started at the appropriate time to finish my eight.
ME: Tonight during my first loop, and before a little bit I went into a spontaneous anger fantasy state. The first few times I pushed it back down and let it dissipate like I started to be able to do on LTU. But it was persistent. My thoughts kept circling back to an issue and throwing me into that state with the tooth grinding anger. The last time I was actually able to catch the process, slow it down, and see what is really happening.
Here’s what it was. I was thinking about that lawsuit that the HOA filed on us (the first solution I thought of for that problem failed). I started playing scenarios in my head, and came up with my wife laying into me for something to do with the problem. I then reacted in my head by being very verbally and physically domineering in a way that I would never actually be to my wife. Mild adrenaline surge, grinding teeth ensue.
What actually happened there was that my thoughts touched on a subject that scares me and makes me feel powerless. That lawsuit could cause us real problems and I don’t have a solution yet. (Operative word yet) This time I noticed that I felt fear before the anger. I then thought up a scenario where I could turn the anger to fear, give it a target, and make myself (or some very ugly part of myself) feel powerful rather than powerless by dominating the target. Man, I’ve been doing this all my life, and never thought to look at what I was really doing.
Ok, I guess that I wasn’t as done with this as I thought I was because this whole incident brought up a number of things.
First, I’ve touched on this before, but it needs a further look. This problem and many, probably most of the problems I have in life come from me ignoring issues until they become huge crises that I can no longer ignore, or until it’s too late to do anything about them and I face major consequences for not doing what I should have been all along. I have ostrich syndrome, and I’ve plagued myself with it all my life.
The first sign of this was how I treated my grades in school. At the beginning of a semester, I would shirk the first couple of homework assignments figuring that it didn’t matter and I could make up for it later. Ok, this was the result of the “don’t try” thing I described earlier I think. After I’d done this for a while, I’d realize that there was a problem and things that I should be doing about it, but by that point I would be so afraid that I had gotten myself into a position that I couldn’t fix that I wouldn’t even get the facts on it to see how bad it really was. Even just starting to do my homework (I realized exactly none of what I’m describing at the time) it was enough of an acknowledgment that there was a problem that it scared me and I shied away from it. This pattern repeated itself in college but it was even worse. I would not go to a few classes, and not keep track of what I was supposed to do for a little while, and I had a very strong aversion to going back, and an even stronger one to asking the professor if they’d work with me. I told myself that I was too embarrassed and didn’t want to be judged, and that may have been true to an extent. That was covering a deeper fear though. The fear that I had already dug myself into a hole that I couldn’t get out of.
In truth, that fear usually struck me before it was actually true, and I could well have salvaged most of these situations if I had done some fairly easy things when I first got the big gelding feeling that I’d been neglecting them a little too long, but I told myself a series of two lies. First was “eh, it’s ok, I can let it go a little longer,” which prevented me from having to face it, and the second was “it’s too late now,”. While often times that was technically true, it was a lie in that it put it out of my hands and made it an inevitable thing that had pretty much already happened, and I could put out of my mind.
The same thing happened with this lawsuit. I knew that things in the yard needed to be fixed, but I was neglectful about fixing them. I knew that the &:$$ HOA was sending me letters, but I didn’t read them. I ignored it for as long as I could hoping it would go away but knowing that it wouldn’t.
Hell, I didn’t take a real look at all of the problems I’m describing here for the same reason. I figured that I might be more messed up than I wanted to admit, and there might not be anything I can do about it. That’s bull flop of course, I’m doing a hell of a lot better between the ears than a lot of people I know
That leads me to the other thing I got from that incident. The fear that put me into a state where I fantasied about abusing my wife was of not being able to do anything to solve a bad problem. The consequences of this going as bad as it possibly could are fairly bad, but not that bad, and they weren’t what was causing that sharp immediate fear. Also, the reaction says something. My mind immediately did what it needed to to make me feel powerful. That’s what all of those rage fantasies do, and some of them are pretty horrible. They’re all a reaction to fear of powerlessness.
That’s it. That’s the bottom of this node. Everything that I’ve been going digging through springs from a fear of being powerless. Perhaps better to say a fear of feeling powerless or that I am afraid that I am powerless since this transcends any particular situation where I might or might not be powerless.
Why does the situation with my dad so connect to a deeper fear of powerlessness, and why did it allow it to rise to the surface and create that knot of fears that branched off in so many directions? Because watching my father, who I did and do love deeply suffer, and waiting for him to Kill himself put me in a situation where I would do ANYTHING to change what I saw happening, and I could do absolutely posifrikinglutely NOTHING but wait for the axe to fall. This was extremely traumatic moment to moment and it lasted for years. I took responsibility for the situation which made it worse. That’s because I told myself that I HAD TO make the situation better and it was all my fault if I didn’t. Of course I couldn’t make it better I was a &:$$ 5-15 year old. This lead to the lie from which all of the other fears and lies I’ve been prattling on about spring. I am powerless. I extrapolated a sense of powerlessness In all situations off of that one situation because of when it happened, how long it lasted, and the gigantic emotional impact it had on me.
That one branched off to possibly every fear that I have that isn’t a primal self preservation instinct.
Oh yeah, that unhealthy blueprint I got from Dad, that included feeling powerless. Maybe that caused me to internalize it more.
The fear of feeling the powerlessness that I’ve been telling myself is my condition lead to:
- That fear of failure. Trying and failing proves me to be powerless.
-Fear of success. If I succeed, I break out of my blueprint, I face an unknown situation and that might leave me without power.
- Fear of responsibility. If I take on anything important, I won’t be able to handle it because I’m powerless. There will be major consequences for me and others if it’s anything important. This lead to a kind of general fear of getting my crap together. If I’m not too squared away, no one will expect me to take on too much responsibility.- My aversion to keeping my environment neat comes from this.
- Fear of being dominated, which causes me to fear people who could dominate me in any way. Since the base lie was that I was powerless, that included just about everyone. I managed to put a very hard shell over this one when I was a CO, but it was still present underneath and manifested itself outside of the work environment.
-A general habit of letting life happen to me rather than trying to make things happen. I thought myself powerless so why would I bother.
- All of the stuff that happened with my love life. I didn’t feel that I had the power to attract a woman, then when I did, and she left, it brought up my feelings of powerlessness through several layers of self lies.
- a lot more.
My life is definitely not where it could be because I accepted the statement “I am powerless” since I was a child
AND IT WAS A M@(-; :”&$)ing LIE. No one in my shoes would have had one lick of power to change that situation. It says nothing about the amount of power I have now.
Ok, I think that’s as far down as this one goes. I could be wrong, and I’m not sure that the fears are removed, but at least I know what was causing them in a way that makes sense now.
Sorry for the eye strain folks.