procrastination

[Guest guest]

Having begun to see my mother's behavior for what it is, after a long period of

idealizing her and giving credence to her complaints about me has revealed to me

a scary truth that I really don't know how to deal with.

I procrastinate as the only way to keep myself safe. This has pretty much ruined

my life.

It's not an exaggeration. I have realized over the course of the last few months

that there was a period when I was between the ages of 6 to 8 where several

things that I was looking forward to in great anticipation went horribly wrong.

I also changed schools three times in those three years. I seem to have made

some decision at that point that anything I ever feel hope about will go wrong,

and that any decision I make will be the wrong one, by default. Therefore my

entire life I have waited til there isn't an option but one, if that, to act. I

only go to work at night when I absolutely have to (I can go in hours earlier

but don't.) I only get started once I get there when I *have* to, sometimes I go

in but don't clock in and just sit there and watch tv. I wait til the last

minute to do anything so that I am *forced* to take action. To not do so fills

me with this overwhelming anxiety and I know something really bad is going to

happen if I act of my own accord before something HAS to be done. The only

exception to this seems to be my schoolwork, I am in school part time. But other

than that I feel like I have walked through life frozen and terrified to make a

move in any direction or a decision of any kind. Can anyone relate to this? Not

so much the procrastinating but the anxiety that I am just noticing for the

first time in my life, after 4 decades of carrying it, that any act I take of my

own accord is going to cause lightning bolts to rain down from the sky. It's

that feeling of fear that I can't believe I didn't even know was there, 'don't

do that, something bad is going to happen if you make a decision.

I know part of it is when I got angry or argued with anyone (even my brothers

who were younger than me) my mother would say, what if that person had a heart

attack tomorrow, or, what if that person got drafted because we are going to war

tomorrow. It also comes from being blamed about everything because in households

with PD parents, everything under the sun is YOUR FAULT.