why does it seem i don't want to get better and feel safer in my misery?

I think what I learned along the way is that it wasn’t just one thing that kept me in that mindset.

Change can be difficult. I knew what to be and how to navigate chaos. I had to learn how to be calm in my own skin in order to accept peace.

I had to develop the areas of my life that I had control over. Building those pieces was fulfilling and gave me the chance to enjoy things outside of my misery.

I needed to learn that the world wasn’t going to bite me. And also sometimes it would. I had to learn how to calm my nervous system enough so I wasn’t anxious or reactive. Unless I needed to be.

And I needed to accept that no one was coming to get me unstuck. I really wanted it. I was tired of just finding my own way. I wanted someone to lean on. I found that person when I started to work on myself.

My experience is not yours, but if any of this resonates with you, I see you. It hurts. Getting to the other side takes a ton of work. You made it this far. You have it in you to fight through the doom and gloom. Rooting for you.

I think that when I feel doom and gloom, I realize that those feelings come from a part of me, and that I have other parts with differing views. It's possible that your negative part is trying to protect you from the pain that it sees might result if you were to try some of those solutions to change your life. What if they make things worse instead of better?

pain, dissociation, depression, and hopeless/helplessness are some of the most oddly comforting and addicting feelings in the world. because if it's all you've ever known, the pain of trying to heal feels just as traumatic as the past. that's why rotting in bed all day is preferable to getting up at a reasonable time and bathing and doing chores and being a person. happiness can look like an impossible task from inside of your brain cage. hell, i go to my brain cage every now and again when the world feels so hopeless, because that's what i've always done and i know it works. humans are habitual creatures, so the habit of being a sad sack of shit bc of our pasts is what we know and go back to. i know this might be rambly and all that but i'm just trying to get my thoughts across yknow! anyway

tldr; being a sad sack of shit can feel like the most comforting thing in a world where you have to survive rather than live.

Nobody wants to feel miserable. Not really.

Sometimes people think they deserve misery, but even then they still want to not deserve misery.

And that aside, sometimes a painful situation seems safer than an unknown situation, because what if the unknown situation turns out to be worse?

Consider that maybe the "solutions" offered to are incomplete. Maybe you need additional support to make those solutions happen.

To make an analogy, maybe you need to see the dentist, and there's a dentist right down the street. But you don't just need a dentist; you need someone to hold your hand while you're there, to help you face it.

I don’t know if this is the case for you. But for me I recently realized that there is a part of me that hates me deeply. That part believes and tries to enforce the idea that I deserve to be miserable, that I need to be punished.

My therapist says it’s a way for us to cope as kids because we were entirely dependent on our parents, so they couldn’t be bad, which meant we, ourselves, had to be bad just to survive the abuse we endured.

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I struggle with this a lot too. I think it has something to do with what's called "learned helplessness" and being familiar with that misery and not knowing how to handle things and feel in control even once you're "free"? And not to equate it with just some habit that you can merely change within a few weeks to few months.. but it does remind me of how things like habits in general can take time to remove or form.. except this is really complex and difficult to rewire... Change can be scary even if it's 'for the better'. It's overwhelming and anything that has the potential to cause you any form of stress whether good or bad would seem to be better off avoided due to that fear you mentioned. The fear could be fear of trying and failing even once in any aspect or method you attempt to get better and somehow your mind would reinforce that fear and make it seem like it wasn't even worth trying in the first place. It's really like a struggle with black-and-white thinking or all-or-nothing mindset.

For me, any research into life improvements causes me to Freeze with such force that I can't even stop it.

I've pinned it down to the Fear of Disappointment: "Why expend all that energy and take all those risks if I might not accomplish my goal anyway? And if I don't accomplish my goal, there's a chance I'll wind up penniless and homeless." This thought hits me like a ton of bricks and my brain literally says "No." I even get this problem with online shopping, because if I order a shirt that doesn't fit, how tf do I go about the hassle of returning it? When I look into how, my brain takes over and I give up quickly.

Extremely frustrating, and embarrassing even. But it also serves to keep me in a place where I'm comfortable, even if the state of my life often pushes me to suicidal ideation on a regular basis.