Obstacle to happiness

What is your biggest obstacle to happiness?

For me it is the tendency to isolate - difficulty with social skills - an inability to make good sense of it all.

I am suspicious that I might have aspergers.

As a child I did not like being touched - especially soft, gentle touch. (As a child would have nightmares about being touched) My brother and daughter also experienced this difficulty. I cannot look at a person's face when I am talking. I cannot tell when to enter a conversation when I am in a group - I tend to miscalculate and interrupt. I am at a complete loss in a group - have not idea how to stand, what to say, how to interact. Tend to walk with my head down because looking straight ahead is overwhelming in a sensory way. Get overwhelmed easily and need lots of 'down time' by myself to recover.

But I also can be imaginative, playful, quirky and silly. It is very hard to form a friendship but when I do, it is close and long-lasting.

I wonder how much above is my innate temperament and how this influenced my response to trauma...the existence of Ball, The Others, etc.

for me, it's this feeling that i'm stuck. i feel like i never seem to move forward. i know that i do make progress, even if it's small, but it feels like i'm forever peeling back a rug and every time i think i've uncovered everything underneath there's always more and it just keeps getting more and more complicated. i feel rotten and stagnated, so many things still break me, i still can't function well enough, can't work on my novel as often as i'd like, i can't do what i wanna do to be happy, consistently anyway. i try to work around my illnesses as best i can, but it does hinder me, quite a lot right now anyway.

also i relate to a lot of what you said. can't look people in the eye, walk with my head down, need headphones on a lot or i get sensory overload, i interrupt people all the time without meaning to, group / social stuff is a nightmare. i've been told a few times that i should get it checked if i have autism and/or ADHD, but it's difficult. at least here in the UK, it's pretty standard to need proof of how you were as a child. i don't remember my childhood for the most part, at least not enough to know what i was like and how i felt, and i can't involve my family for various reasons, so i've left it to one side for now.

**trigger warning - mentions of abuse + suicide**

i think it's hard to think about happiness as a concept because i never planned for a future. i never thought i'd live long enough to have one. i couldn't wait to leave home and for the abuse to stop, but when i got out i couldn't comprehend the idea of living with all of it. i'd spent so long just getting through it all, telling myself "just wait til you're 18 and you can get out", then i was 18 and out and i realised i'd never thought beyond that. ended up back home after 3 months of leaving lol.

i guess to me it's like, how can i even comprehend the idea of being happy or content when in the past it was always the calm before the storm. "happy" moments always felt too tense, i was always waiting for the moment to end, when were they going to snap, when was i gonna slip up and ruin it all. i still get like that now.

**trigger warning end**

i think happiness is idealised too much. being content feels better to me. i'd like to be content one day, at peace with life and myself. i will be content one day, i'll heal and it'll take time but i will reach a point where it's not such a constant uphill struggle. happy moments won't make me feel tense and on edge. i hope for that anyway.

sorry i rambled, this brought up a lot of stuff for me to think about.

- alice

For me it's not wanting to do the work. I say I will go out , make new friends, try new stuff then I usually convince myself I'm too exhausted. Sometimes I feel lazy then I tell myself it's good to rest. I know what I want but then I just need to make myself so the work.
TCI

It was really nice to read your posts guys, thanks for them.

I relate to the Asbergers notes a lot too, and sometimes I feel I have it pretty strong. Other times we don't... I think a lot of it is tied up with a lack of experience of people, and growing up being quite isolated. A lack of experience, and a mind more inwardly orientated. Its all on a sliding scale anyways, and just words. I guess it doesn't get in our way of happiness, it just knocks our confidence sometimes.

For me, the biggest obstacle to happiness is time. We have 10 co-hosts and quite a few littles, and so we only get 3-4 days a month which is 'ours'. This means our personal projects and hobbies take ages, literally years, to go anywhere. We can't just 'get into something' and have stuff done in a month or two...

Yes, not thinking we would be alive has been a massive challenge. We've had to start to learn how to day dream of the future and have future ideas for ourselves. Again...it takes years...to even get some ideas going!


Yanni - One in the Albion System

We relate to the asbergers issues as well and have also been told we should get tested. However we don't think we have it. The sensory issues we put down to out relationship with the body. We are often very poorly connected to it that when we do become more connected we become overwhelmed with what it's telling us. Like going from a dark room to a brightly lit one and the light being painful. Our senses are often muted. And the social issues we put down to poor socialisation as a child and not learning relevant skills.

I was talking to the T the other week about the poor relationship we have with the body and ended up talking about how we get overwhelmed by food a lot especially the texture. She said that what I was describing was the way infants interact with food and that for them the biggest issue is texture and that they won't try to eat food until they are used to it. And that something might have interrupted that development for me.

Back to the original point because those issues don't bother me all that much. I'm sorry for the people it does because I don't have any useful advice. The biggest obstacle to our happiness is the fact we are always wanting to be hurt, especially since the crisis started. The last T said I'm afraid of being afraid. But that's not it. I'm afraid of the all consuming pain and terror that exists in Nixie mostly but not only. I know that some people enjoy hurting others and I'm afraid I can't tell those people from the others. I'm afraid of what I don't remember. I'm afraid someone intends to hurt us. I'm afraid that even if I do everything right it won't be good enough they will still hurt me. And so I wait and watch looking for the people that will hurt us. And that is our biggest obstacle to happiness.

Our biggest obstacle to happiness is that we are all stuck in this one tiny life, conflicted over everything we do or don't do.
And the resulting, long standing self esteem issues. DID is truly crippling. Let us all pray that my new ad's will work! Because I don't know how long we're still going to keep this up before I end up in the looney bin.