Vlog CLXXXI

With regard to the anger stage, it was very, very difficult for me to recover from that because for many years I had been following a subconscious script, actually taught to me by my father, that I had to act like a servile puppy trying to get accepted by the dog pack.  He had enforced to me that I needed to be very humble and accept nothing good about myself until I could finally be accepted.  His instructions to me came in this manner because he suffered from deep shame, himself, because of having lost the war for his country.  He considered that only complete debasement and servility would open the way to us being able to live any kind of life in another country. 
So I followed this script, trying to earn my acceptance by having all the right attitudes and basically making my own needs and values so unimportant that I had no idea of what they even were.  
Instead of being accepted, and gaining social legitimacy (which my father considered us to have lost after we lost the war), I was set up to fail and treated like a scapegoat for all sorts of things that had gone wrong in the organisation I worked for even before I had begun working there.
When I saw what had happened despite the grinding sacrifice I had continued to make (and had been making up until that time for 13 years) I felt white hot rage.  I was totally shocked and humiliated.   I'd had these 13 years of tension building up in me during which time I had denied my own needs and interests without even being aware that I was doing that.  Instead of winning according to my subliminal strategy, I had lost my health and my dignity and my energy for life.
Obviously I wasn't going to find a therapist to help me with this when I could barely undertand the depth of the problem yet myself.  I had to patch up my own wounds and change my strategy.