Feeling of guilt being on benefits

Hi Tyson,

I am sorry for all that you're going through, good thing you indeed are on benefits… otherwise you would have even more to worry about. But of course, you get to feel what you feel, even if that means guilt over something you feel like you don't deserve. This is what makes you human, you're not a robot.

So yeah, with 'I just hope that I will be able to do what others seem to do so easily….' don't forget we are living in a hard and cold world where it is normal to go with the flow or pretend that life is easy. Everyone's problem is validated and so is yours and you are more than a person on benefits.

Anything you like to share about yourself that is also you: crafts, pets, reading? Hang in there 🌸

Hi @tyson43, @SmellyBin and @Doglover2. 😊

Pretty much across the board, being able to qualify for benefits is very, very difficult, and so if you qualify, it means you're really sick. To me, that's the hardest part of being on benefits - admitting to myself and being validated by the government that I'm unable to work. Maybe that's difficult for you too @tyson43 - admitting that being on benefits symbolises you're unable to work. That's a tough pill to swallow.

The other statement that being on benefits makes is that you are unable to do anything in this society that is worthy of being paid. That's a dreadful realisation. Another tough pill to swallow.

A few years into starting benefits, I was thinking how much better I was doing by not working, and it was because I had more time and energy to put towards my health. From then on, I decided to view my job as taking care of my health, and my benefits as my pay cheque.

So putting those thoughts together... You are too sick to work, so your job is to take care of your health, and your benefits income is your pay cheque.

I hope that helps take the sting out a little when you get your next pay cheque. 😊❤️

I'm sorry you to are struggling with this, @complex_being. You know, I realised that a lot of what I was thinking other people were thinking was actually me projecting my own thoughts onto them. So the work comes in my dealing with my own thoughts. Sure a lot of people think awful thoughts about people on benefits, but I was surprised to learn that I did too. Half the battle has been to deal with my own prejudices.

Maybe that doesn't apply to you or anyone else. I'm just putting it out there as a possibility.

Oh dear! You've misunderstood me as that's not what I said or meant. Do you know what it means to project your thoughts onto other people?

Oh you've caused no trouble at all! Honestly. For sure and for real! 🤗 I thought you didn't understand, and you didn't, which is perfectly okay. Projecting your thoughts on others means you think other people are thinking what you are thinking.

So examples are what I gave above, in my first post:

*I felt horrible about being too sick to work.

*I felt horrible about not being able to do any job that is worthy of a pay cheque.

I didn't need anyone to make me feel bad about not being on disability benefits. But at first I blamed other people for making me feel bad. Since I owned those thoughts, now I am not bothered so much by the few people who have a poor opinion about me being in benefits.

It's the same about being visibly physically disabled now. At first I was mad at people who were unkind or disrespectful. But the more kind and respectful I have become towards myself, the less I'm bothered by the few people who are unkind and disrespectful.

In other words, people can be mirrors of your own thoughts.

I don't know if that makes any sense to anyone, as I've never tried to explain it to anyone. I hope that makes sense.

(That's a lot of I's in this post!!! And I'm too tired to edit. 😁)

✌🏼🥰

I can relate to the last several comments about the relationship between projection of opinions and perception of flaws.

If you worry that you might possess a flaw, it's easy to go into a spiral whereby you end up treating anything as evidence confirming that flaw. I think everyone possess this to some extent but when you factor in the widespread neurodiverse experience of finding uncertainty uncomfortable and resorting to black-and-white conclusions (a negative certainty feels more comfortable than ambiguity) then it gets amplified.

Sometimes it helps to think about yourself in the third person, like you'd think about a friend or loved one:

Often it's difficult to think kindly of yourself even if you habitually think kindly of other people… the quote "treat others as you'd be treated" is often used but sometimes we need to learn it applies to ourselves, too!! I used flawed logic to jump to conclusions about myself that I'd never dream of applying to another person. If I tried to apply the logic to another person it was obvious how outrageous it was, but when applied to myself it seemed perfectly sound - that there was no other explanation than "I'm a bad person"

When you next wonder whether something negative about yourself is true, I'd encourage you to imagine a friend asking you the same thing about themselves and answer in the same way you'd answer to your friend 😊

@complex_being how do you manage the situations where you say people are ignorant about your disability?

@66Mustang do you have the internal fighting I've described in looking at yourself as well as in looking at the world? If you do, do you have any suggestions in how to resolve the fighting? I just can't process my new reality of being physical disabled. So the biggest handicap of my physical disability is being able to mentally process this.

Thank you for sharing the 3rd person thing I think it'll be useful to view myself in 3rd person because some of the things I say about myself I'd never think to say to other people I know because that would be cruel and unlike me

Thanks to this discussion, I've realised it's time to get support set up from friends and family. I don't have it because I have chosen not to share, forany reasons. But by holding everything in, not only are my thoughts and feeling getting distorted, but I'm not resolving the challenges in front of me. I'll never be able to work through the issues here on the forum because we have such limited space to write that it would take forever and a day to get through stuff, and because we don't really know eachother's environment or history enough to go deep.

Up until this week only a few people knew even the bare minimum of what's going on. So this week I've started opening up, beginning with my favourite cousin a couple of days ago and one of my besties tonight, with another bestie lined up tomorrow night. You know, it's gone so well so far that I'm thinking this is long overdue. But rewriting the past is inaccurate even at the best of times. 😊

Anyway, thank everyone for opening up. I hope you're okay with what I shared. ❤️

Don't be hard on yourself for not engaging in confrontations. There's this expectation that a "strong" person will hold their own during confrontation, but when the aggressor is not thinking rationally in the first place there's little benefit. No valid argument and no amount of logic is going to win them over! I agree about setting boundaries, that's very healthy to be able to do. Sometimes, though, that boundary is walking away, not indulging the other person's argumentativeness, and coming back to the conversation when the other person is willing and able to hold a rational, civil conversation.