Messages

Thank you to all who have responded so kindly with validation of what I expressed in the original post. It's wonderful to me how, having taken the plunge of writing down these thoughts and sending them out into the world, I manage to clarify things for myself, feel less alone as others validate my experiences, gain some distance from the issue and somehow settle more calmly into my being as I receive acknowledgement from other members of this community. How valuable is this!

Also, Kizzie and other moderators, the work you do to keep this space safe is invaluable. Contrast this community with the wider internet community and the difference is stark. Thank you so much for making it safe for us to speak up.

Woodsgnome, reading of your dreadful suffering in the dark, I remembered something I had pushed away. I developed asthma so badly as a very small child that I was hospitalised and I remember the isolation, loneliness and endlessness of being in hospital. Strangely, I don't remember difficulty in breathing although that was what had sent me to hospital. Sent home finally, I was given a device hung around my neck on elastic, with a big pink rubber bulb and a glass container full of fluid, and I had to squirt the fluid into my nose when I couldn't breathe. Because of this device, and worst of all, I was kept home from school for an entire year and so lived alone all the time, in frightening isolation with my angry and terrifying mother, receiving education by correspondence school and listening to the radio. 

And yes Kizzie, I certainly needed to be small and contained to survive in that environment. And silent. And watchful. Something I'm maybe just now learning to shed somewhat as I relax into being alive and feeling entitled to breathe.

One important good thing came from all this. At the end of the year my mother received the report from the correspondence school on my progress and I remember her amazement as she told me they said I'd done really well and that she had expected me to do poorly. This was the first time I had ever received any acknowledgement from the world outside my family and I have never forgotten this small triumph over my mother's miserable expectations for her daughter.

[Sorrow]

Many years ago I wrote this poem about sorrow; about how I carried my sadness around with me.

Looking back, I feel I've carried this burden in front of my body all my life and certain events can stop me in my tracks as I come up against other peoples' expectations of how I can or should behave.

I feel it most when people ask me to participate in 'group fun', just fooling around, acting the fool, relaxing into playing group games. When faced with these expectations, I feel myself stop, I feel my body 'freeze-up', I feel my face fall involuntarily into a mask of sorrow, my cheeks lengthen, my mouth sags and I feel exquisitely vulnerable. It's a horrible, lonely feeling that is impossible to explain in the moment.

I've never learnt how to 'play' with other people. I've not learnt how to 'have fun'. Life has been too hard, too isolated, too urgent, too sad. Thoughts of death have been too present. I've not known normal family life or normal social life. And I just can't do it.

I sang for years with a very professional choir, where the very formality and seriousness of the choir protected me from this kind of expectation. It was a truly wonderful experience. However, I lost it when I moved to live in another part of my country. And now I've recently withdrawn from trying to sing with a local community choir in my new location because these expectations of group participation in fooling around and doing skits were just too much for me; which, of course, has only increased my sorrow.

It's yet another way that complex trauma limits my experience of life.

Sorrow

Spongy, black,
and surprisingly easy to hold,
is this ball of sorrow
I clasp in front of me.

Frighteningly, it seems to me
that it grows
daily,
and I wonder that
people approaching me
don't bump into it,
stumble,
and exclaim at my burden.

bluepalm

I wanted to thank everyone who responded to my original post yet again and from the bottom of my heart.

I feel that my articulation of this issue, your responses, and working with my therapist on this issue have all contributed to my making significant changes in my mind, and in my body, as to how I view the future. It's like I've taken a confident leap to allow myself to have a future.

Bix, you said: 

This term "foreshortened" future is interesting.  Also your quote hit me like a ton of bricks.

I came to this board because I have a constant sense that I'm about to die shortly.  I wonder if this fits the definition.

One thing that has changed in me is that I no longer look around my home, at my kitchen bench, at my bedroom, each time I leave the house (for however short a time), wondering whether it is clean and tidy enough for someone to come in to sort out my belongings because I will die while I am out (for however short a time) and away from home. The ridiculous nature of this behaviour has somehow become obvious to me (because I do not in fact live in a war zone). And I'm grateful that I've somehow shed that behaviour quite abruptly, like taking off a coat, in recent weeks.

Indeed, my sense that the future will not come has left me to such an extent that I have in the past month extended the lease of my home for two years (which involves assuming that I will live for at least another two years) and, even more amazingly, next Monday I am bringing a puppy home to live with me and my older dog companion - an eight week old puppy who may have a life span of 18 years. I can now envision my life continuing, with this little puppy, out far into the future!

I feel this is all a hugely important advance into relaxing into my life. And the permanence of these changes (new lease, new puppy) makes me feel confident that this is not an issue that will come back to plague me again.

Thank you again to all those in this community whose words have contributed to my feeling this way. 
bluepalm 

 

Agree BluePalm and I also think it's one reason survivors turn to drugs/alcohol, not just to numb ourselves  but to turn down the volume on hypervigilance and be able to relax and drift as you put it.

Yes, I can understand your observation Kizzie - it makes sense to me. But it also makes me sad, because I've always been too afraid of people, too aware of my vulnerability, too untrusting of others not to take advantage of me, to ever allow myself to numb myself, relax and drift through using drugs/alcohol.  I've felt scarily vulnerable even being asleep in the presence of other people. When I think of being an infant or small child, helplessly sleeping in the presence of my parents, my chest erupts in flutters of fear, even now as I write this.  As a child, I would have to ritually check under the bed, open the wardrobe and check inside and carefully survey my bedroom before allowing myself to get into bed and close my eyes, fearing always that danger was lurking somewhere in that room. Although I lived in a quiet suburb of a quiet city in a country at peace, I had no sense of safety in the world. It was utterly exhausting.

Thank you for drawing that good article to our attention Kizzie. I heartily agree with the statements: " The traumatized brain is anything but lazy. In fact, it is over-worked, over-stimulated, over-active, and over-stressed." Yes, hypervigilance is exhausting.

And I would take it one step further: hypervigilance captures and steals our lives. The energy and focus involved in living on 'high alert' are all-consuming. In my experience, hypervigilance casts a terrible shadow over life, so that life narrows to a silent, bleak, survival trek over rocky terrain where the slightest mis-step may spell disaster.

Under these circumstances, there is no energy left to enjoy the movement or the view, allow yourself to drift, imagine or create. Instead life is reduced to a silent, grim endurance trek.  The threat posed by abusers swells to fill the sky and the tension of waiting for danger to express itself becomes the primary focus of life and is accompanied by an endless, relentless bleakness that consumes precious time that can never be recovered.



 

In the past few weeks, as I've recovered my equilibrium after a rough patch, I have realised something strange and I wonder if others have experienced this too.

As part of slowing down and being kinder to myself, I've found myself at times just stopping moving and sitting down to quietly breathe. Nothing else. Just breathing. And it has felt strangely new to me to do this - despite the fact that for some years now, from therapy and reading, I've understood the power of breathing and meditation to calm and centre myself. The strange part is that I now feel 'entitled to breathe' in a way I've not felt before. I feel it's my breath I'm breathing, it feels warm and calm and it fills me up and it's mine.

This is a new thought and a new feeling and it's made me realise that for most of my life I've not felt fully entitled to breathe. At some fundamental level, I have felt  estranged from the right to breathe.

As a very young child, I knew from the way my parents treated me that I had no right to be alive. I knew that, as a girl, it was a mistake that I was alive. I felt guilty for being alive, for taking up space on this earth. The way I thought about it then was that 'I am breathing air that a boy should be breathing'.

In addition to this early sense of guilt about breathing, in my childhood home I was constantly on 'high alert', basically holding my breath waiting for anger or punishment to fall on me. I repeated that pattern with the man who became my husband - silent, observant, barely daring to breathe, apologising for my existence, which seemed to cause him so much anger.

It amazes me to look back and realise that, at a fundamental level in my being, and for over 70 years of my life. I've not really felt entitled to breathe.

I feel tonight grateful that my involvement with this OOTS community has helped me understand that I was injured by those closest to me; that my sense that I had no right to be alive, no right to be breathing air, that I was stealing air that a boy should be breathing, was the result of an injury done to me, not something inherent in me.

It feels a relief to have had this realisation. I wonder if others have also experienced this fundamental sense of guilt about being alive and breathing air.
bluepalm

Three Roses and Tee, I know I'm one of those who has 'gone quiet', even though I did say I have come back to this forum. Because I feel this forum is a wonderful resource for people trying to understand the effects of complex trauma, I thought I'd try to explain why I've been quiet.

While I do have thoughts on peoples' recent postings and the urge to respond and to welcome people, and also I know there are issues I'd like to raise for consideration, I am so grateful to have reached a feeling of emotional stability in this last little while, after falling into dreadful feelings of despair yet again, I'm afraid that if I engage here I will lose that stability.

I've been doing a lot of good work recently, in therapy and just generally in understanding and strengthening my internal boundaries with people close to me who abuse my trust. All of that feels important and I'm proud of the distance I've travelled in quite a short while. I just know from long experience that I can slide backwards easily enough and so I have to guard my advances carefully.

The thing about being affected by trauma from infancy, as I feel I am, is that the effort to retain a degree of stability and hope never ceases. I never stop being aware of my vulnerabilities, never stop being aware of protecting what advances I make. It takes an enormous amount of energy, moment by moment in life. I've long wondered what I could have done with my life if I'd been free to relax into being alive and just live. Instead, my right to be alive, to have needs, to speak, to move, has been in constant question - the central concern of my days. I doubt that those who have not experienced this can comprehend how overwhelming it is.

Perhaps writing this will help. Writing, and the clarity it brings to my thoughts, is always hugely helpful. It's the best way I've found to defend myself against internal disorder, doubts and fears. It brings calm and a sense of gaining more control. So, I hope this is a way to start engaging again.
bluepalm

Welcome Chuck. I hope you experience the support and validation that I have done with this kind and understanding community.

What you say here resonates strongly with me:

To be honest my first thought when I got my diagnosis was relief because I honestly couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. At least I discovered that my ailment is treatable and to be honest, I'm looking forward to this. Once I thought about and researched my diagnosis a bit, I realized that this condition had been affecting my life since childhood, and through remembering, I could see the symptoms of this throughout my entire life, which in turn made it much harder to function and yet because it began so long ago, I thought these feelings and symptoms were normal, or rather just the way I developed emotionally.

For most of my life I felt I must be 'neurotic' and I blamed myself for being depressed and anxious. I sometimes feel that the process of healing involves understanding, deeply in my mind, body and soul, and bit by bit, that the thoughts and symptoms I experienced for so long and thought were 'normal, albeit neurotic', or just the way I developed emotionally, were in fact the results of injuries to my mind, body and soul that I experienced at the hands of other humans. This understanding, as I gain it bit by bit, gives me relief.   

I feel for you and the pain you have experienced and I hope you find some comfort in being part of this community.
bluepalm

Thank you to all for your warm supportive comments when I stepped back from this forum some weeks ago. I was becoming overwhelmed and needed to retreat.

During these past weeks, through quietness and with the help of my therapist, I've managed to gain what feels like a more robust connection with what happened to me; robust in the sense that I feel I can at once understand the enormity of damage done that has  reverberated through my life for over 70 years and yet also feel confident that I can (at least for the moment) hold that understanding at sufficient distance to keep it from overwhelming me. I am now holding onto the knowledge that I've actually survived in better shape than I would ever have hoped would be possible (if I'd ever had the capacity to hope for some future outcome).

I feel very strongly that this forum is a wonderful force for good and I hope to start contributing again. Thank you again for your comments when I left for a while. They helped me feel 'real' at a time when I was losing myself.
Bluepalm

I'm recording this here in case it's of help to others. I've been so grateful for the support I've experienced on this forum but, for reasons I can't quite understand, something seems to have triggered me and I've lost the sense that this OOTS is a place of refuge for me at the moment. So I'm going to leave for a while. I can't imagine this matters to anyone (I state that as a fact - how my mind works to devalue myself!) but I see other people explain their absences so, given I've been posting poems in particular, I felt it may be both courteous and useful to record this.

Maybe it's because I feel I've been too open and I'm now too exposed. Maybe it was reading a couple of posts (having nothing to do with me at all) filled with anger. (I find I cannot read Out of the Fog at all because there is so much open anger there.)

Maybe it's because I feel I engaged with people too closely and now I don't know if they are real people or not. I've not posted anything on the internet before posting on this forum and my trust in other people is very low. This is in no way a criticism of those who've responded to me. I've been very grateful for the support and validation I've received and I'm puzzled right now as to why I've lost my trust.

This may be useful for others to hear. There may be others who struggle as I am at present with trusting any response from the world. I find people generally to be very menacing, very frightening. Just as I'm afraid to turn on the TV because I don't know what violence or anger or misery I'll be exposed to if I do.

In any event, I can feel I'm struggling to hold onto myself at the moment and feel I need to retreat to the natural world, to my books and my music, and avoid people, even people in the virtual world.

Please understand this is in my mind, due to my personal struggles right now, not a criticism of OOTS, which I continue to think is a hugely valuable resource, which I have recommended to my GP and my therapist and others similarly placed.

I hope I will return when I regain some equilibrium.
bluepalm

Yipeee thank you for your warm response. I have ordered Winnicott's 'Playing and Reality' that you recommend. Given drawing and painting are now so central to keeping me reasonably stable, I'm interested in exploring more about what creating my art means to me. To answer your question, I draw in pencil, charcoal and pastel on paper, paint in watercolours on paper and paint in oils on board and canvas. I'm grateful that I have enough skill that the results are satisfying to me and once created, help me to feel alive and comforted. I look at the art work and feel I have made something valuable, something from inside me has come into being and will exist into the future. I think this is a powerful way for me to defy all the contempt and attempts to erase me, to make me invisible, to which I've been subject for so long.

To give you an idea of the pressure placed on me to deny me any way to express myself, many years ago I asked my then husband why he stopped me, with his anger, from playing the piano. He replied that he didn't like me doing anything he couldn't do and he didn't like me doing anything he could do. The absurdity of this is comical but the impact on my life for many years was not at all funny. He was denying me any way of expressing myself, of feeling alive. So I'm grateful I now have the freedom to create my art works.

Regret, I'm so pleased that this topic has been helpful for you. It's certainly been invaluable for me to be able to share my concerns and receive understanding, validating responses.

Thanks for your response Yipeee. I've found my primary urge is to paint human faces, portraits, both of myself and others. Which, in a way, I find strange because I often have difficulty recognising faces, putting names to faces when I meet people. Realising where I know a face from.

I've wondered whether this strong urge to draw and paint faces comes from my having experienced an absence of my mother's face (and my father's face)  to 'hold onto' when I was first born. I'm now drawn to bringing faces into my vision through my pencil and brush.

My mother said that when she held me out to my father to hold when he visited her in hospital after my birth, he turned his back and walked away and at that moment she 'knew she had failed him'. My mother also said she would leave me alone all day while she went out shopping and would forget she even had a baby and be surprised when she came home in the evening and I was still there in the cot. Or she would put me in the pram in the garden for hours and I'd lie there or sit there, still and silent.

Currently I'm painting myself as a baby and toddler in an attempt to allow me to feel I was really alive then, that I was three dimensional flesh and blood, a normal pretty baby born into this world, through no fault of my own, with normal needs.

Being in the natural world, feeling the earth under my feet, holding onto tree trunks, has been a primary comfort for me all my life and I also paint landscapes and gardens. I have no interest in painting the built, industrial world or in painting fantastical scenes. I need to feel grounded in what I make.

Yipeee thank you for your thoughts. I've also found, unfortunately only in very recent years, that drawing and painting, working with art materials, is an effective way to focus my attention on the present and cease ruminating. It also helps me in my struggle to sense a future (albeit a fairly short term future) because, while working on a painting, I have a vision of what I want to create and it gives me something to think about and to work towards. It helps me sense my life as a journey which should continue. (I first wrote 'will continue' and realised that felt wrong to me; it felt uncomfortably strong.) And once a drawing or painting that satisfies me has come into being, I have something that is part of 'me' that I can see as lasting into the future. I didn't know this would happen, but drawing and painting is helping to bring me a sense of the future even as it anchors me in the present. Art has become a central source of healing for me. 

Hullo Bach, and a warm welcome. I'm a relatively new member and have found this OOTS forum community to be a true place of refuge. I'm happy for you that you've found this kind community and encourage you to explore. Sharing our lived experience of cptsd in the way this forum allows has been invaluable for me.
bluepalm