Messages

Starbunny,

Welcome to the forum. I'm very glad you sought it out and that you found it and that you joined. Thank you for writing the introduction. I'm very sorry to hear about your dad's suicide. My little sister passed away in what I believe was most likely a suicide 16 years ago and I have found it to be the most difficult thing I've ever had to live with. So, I empathize, and I know that what you are going through is no small thing to deal with.

It is very hard to leave home, both logistically and emotionally. I hope you feel comfortable to share here whenever you feel the need. the people on this forum are kind, and have collectively lived through almost anything you can possibly bring in. So, please feel free to share whatever you feel you need or want to share. As little or as much. The guidelines are just there to keep us from becoming political or meanspirited or offensive, but those are just the commonsense rules of kindness.

And about memory, I get that too. That same thing has been happening to me lately too. I met someone last week for the first time. Then, yesterday, I remembered that I'd met her already in November of last year and even had conversations with her. It was such a shock to realize that I'd had that odd lapse in recall. But then I remembered those lapses used to happen to me all the time when I was younger and dealing with my narcissistic family.

Be as active as you want to be. Lurking is okay too.

Welcome.

Journal Entry for Sunday, April 21, 2024

Some big changes happening. I hope they stick. Yesterday I had some energy work done. I may have mentioned here that about a month ago I decided that the physical world wasn't working out for me, so I made a radical decision to allow myself to believe in ANYTHING. I say, "If you tell me a spaceship landed in your backyard" I'll believe it. If you tell me you have a Sasquatch living in your basement, I'll believe it. Nothing is off the table anymore. So I called my massage therapist, who I know to be learning all kinds of woo-woo stuff and asked if she wanted to practice on me. She did. Yesterday she did something she called Quantum Alignment. She worked on me for 90 minutes, doing some very light massage on my sore knees, and a bunch of woo-woo work with my chakras. Before last month I'd have just giggled and called it fun playing, but now that I've decided to give it a real chance, HOLY MOLY did it every make some changes in me. It's only been 24 hours since the session, but yesterday, my body felt stronger. My heart was racing during the afternoon, sort of like I'd drank a gallon of Espresso, but I hadn't done anything different at all. The heart racing subsided by bed time and I slept like a baby last night.

Tomorrow I'm going to meet a new therapist who was recommended to me by my current therapist, as someone who can do VERY intense IFS work. She has studied with Robert Falconer, who wrote The Others Within Us and she told me on the phone that our first session(s) will be to work with the part in me who is, what I call, my inner bouncer. I have an inner bouncer who, for my entire life, has tried to keep other people out of my head. Anytime I've ever tried to meditate or be hypnotized, this part pops up and distracts me. He sends me messages like, "This is stupid. Don't fall for it."  Meanwhile, I PAID a hypnotherapist to help me quit smoking or quit eating too much or to help me find my inner peace, and this bouncer keeps throwing them out of my head. I'm intrigued. I'm so glad she said that was where we'll start, so that as we work in later sessions to find more parts, he won't throw her out of my head.

As always, I'll update my journal with stories of whether this worked or not, and how it might change me.

Today, I'm going to drive up to the mountains where my son and his family live to wish one grandson a happy 13th birthday and let the younger grandson show me his new go-cart. I'm as excited to see them all as they are to see me. Today is a good day after a long bout with difficult days.

I'm very hopeful that the energy work my massage therapist did yesterday continues to help me feel the energy of flow in my body.

It sounds crazy, and it looked crazy while she was doing it, but...wow. Something in me has really opened up. I feel more energetic than I've felt in months.

Lakelynn,

I resonate with the orderly who sat by and sobbed as you told you story. I am a huge fan of empathy, as I believe it can be the greatest healing tool known to mankind. When we know someone is touched by our stories, it feels like a hug all the way to the heart.

Thank you for sharing the story here. I'm drawn in by your post. And the trifecta of things that sent you to be hospitalized, the death of your GM, your mother's act of taking her own life, and the housefire...oh my gosh, ANY ONE of those things was a trauma almost too serious to deal with. My little sister took her own life in 2008, and I have never stopped having crying fits over it. Your story is touching my heart, and I just want you to know that.

I am sorry all these things happened, but I'm glad you are open and willing to share them with us.

Know that, as today progresses, from my heart to yours, I'll be thinking about you and this post.

I'm sending you as much caring energy as I can today.

Meanwhileup

Welcome to the forum. I join in with our peers here that an official diagnosis is not required. If you've been reading about C-PTSD and you know that you fit the attributes of it, that's all that matters.

You said that you had a loving childhood, and I just want to comment that I also did, but that love, like yours, was peppered with mental illnesses and narcissism by some family members, religious leaders of my childhood and even friendships that I'd made with people who were not, at all, good for me. Coming from a "loving" childhood that was also fraught with confusion and coercive or mental gaslighting leaves us growing up confused. I used ask "HOW can I have trauma disorders when I came from a loving household?" It took a while for my therapists to help me see that I am not at all an imposter. The neglect and abuse I suffered was hidden under the name of love. The damage done to my self-image was absolutely real. I am not an imposter, and I don't believe you are either.

It's very common in most of us to begin our journey of healing by first having to accept that our own abuse or neglect really was severe enough to drive a lifetime of trauma triggers. Nobody has trauma triggers if they didn't have trauma.

I sometimes like to think of it like this: Two people sitting in a hospital waiting room, both with a broken leg. One person's leg was broken by a serious war or a serious attack, while the other's leg was broken by falling while having fun playing with friends. My question is: Who's leg deserves to be cleaned and casted, and which one deserves pain meds and a 6-week healing period with a pair of crutches? The answer I come up with is, both of them. A broken leg is a broken leg, no matter how it happened.

So it is with our right to be aware that we lived through something, no matter what it was, that has formed a trauma response to life that is just as serious as anyone else's.

For myself, and many others, the more we accept the trauma triggers as something we have the right to talk about, the more we see just how serious our childhood traumas really were.

I'm very glad you found the forum. I'm sorry to read about the dynamics of your young life, and the confusion it causes in you as you learn how to process what it means to have a normal family today. As far as I'm concerned, if we love our spouse and children, and if we are able to show them that we love them, that's about as normal as any family can ever get.

Welcome to the forum!

Little2Nothing,

Nice share. The sun is shining today here. I think I need to follow your lead and go sit on the porch with a cup of coffee and find a moment of peace.

Enjoy your day,
PC.

StartingHealing,

I just want to say hi and that I enjoy the openness and heart in your posts. Good luck with your schooling.

I was touched by your comment that your dad is closer to you now than ever before. I know that feeling. My little sister has visited me several times during my dreams. She reassures me she's happier now than she was, and that her love for me still shines, so I'm very glad to hear that your dad is still with you also.

True love may be hard to find, but once we find it, it never really dies.

Little2Nothing

Thank you for sharing that post on April 13 above.

I thought I had processed my own stories of CSA as deeply as they could be processed, and yet, reading the recent posts by yourself and one or two other OOTS members as of late has begun to strip away another layer of varnish I hadn't really noticed was there.

I've been dealing with the sadness and frustration of CSA for 40 years. I realize now that I had assumed that was as close to the memories as I was ever going to be able to go. And yet, something about the posts being shared this past week by yourself and a few others is giving me permission to dig a bit deeper and to address the hidden, lost horrors of what really happened.

This is a good thing. The fact that my brain is willing to release the core files and actual memories is an unexpected relief. I feel like I've been carrying 300 pounds of baggage that I didn't realize I was carrying, and that maybe, just maybe, that weight might fall off soon, leaving me to feel lighter and nimbler, and more grateful to still be alive today.

Welcome to the forum, Sunspirit!

I like the name you've chosen. Very positive.

Slashy,

I spend a lot of time on Zillow looking for a secluded place too. Coco and I live in the city, not far outside of Seattle, but we build fences and grow trees all around us so as to make our yard as private as possible. We also have a small house out on the coast, where we spend a lot of time listening to the ocean surf and not much else. It's not terribly secluded, but it's in a quiet community where most homes are empty vacation homes, so it's very quiet and, again, we plant trees and build sheds strategically to block views from neighbors. Currently it's illegal to rent homes near us for weekend partiers, but if that changes, I'll demand we sell the house. When I go to the beach, I like to stay for 3 weeks at a time, several times a year. I try to spend 40% of my life there.

Coco won't consider moving out of either home, so my Zillow searches for secluded homes on 10+ acre wooded lots are just me pretending to be in the market. When I get really stressed, I do Zillow searches the way other guys do porn. I call it my real estate porn. I can't have the houses, but I can sit and pretend I can buy them. Sadly, with Coco's love of living in town, there is no acreage in my foreseeable future.

I will, instead live vicariously through you and your GF, hoping you find a fantastic, secluded acreage with a good house on it so you can breathe.  I agree, that when I feel alone, I can breathe better. Nobody judges me when nobody can see me or hear me.

Good luck, and I'm jealous (in a good way).

Slashy,

Sounds like your first therapy appointment was definitely energized.

If your inner critic returns, it's probably because it needs to.

My experience with IFS therapy, also called Parts Therapy, is that in my case, I have a lot of inner critics. The interesting thing is that they are not talking to me to hurt me, they are trying to protect me.

When I want to do something risky, and one of my parts shouts out, "You aren't smart enough to make it work" that critic isn't trying to hurt me, he's trying to stop me from doing something that I was taught as a child would be dangerous. My inner critics call me "too emotional" and "too sensitive" and "You'll fail." Which is what my parents used to say to get me to stop wanting to do things with other kids. My inner critic is trying to stop me before someone humiliates me.

Parts therapy isn't designed to stop the inner critic or send him/her away, it's designed to make us into friends again and to find the right way to help me now that I'm not a helpless child anymore. Our inner critics are frozen in time. They think we're still the age we were when they were created. Once we talk with them and thank them for their service, they sort of discover that we're not helpless anymore, so they change their method of working with us.

My therapist works to join me and my inner critic together and find our love for each other.

So if your inner critic(s) become(s) active again, that's good, because you and your therapist can work with them if they're willing to come out and talk.

Parts Therapy, or IFS therapy, is about merging our voices back together and giving these terrified little critic voices proof that we're all grown up now and we can merge back together as strong and competent adults.

Trauma disorders are a fragmentation of the brain into individual pieces that don't work together. GOOD IFS therapy is all about merging our brain's isolated parts back together, one critic at a time. Like putting a thousand-piece puzzle together, it goes from a thousand pieces to one completed puzzle as we work with it. It's proving to be a powerful type of therapy for a lot of people. 

One thing my therapist, as well as the writers like Richard Schwartz and Robert Falconer, say is that the therapy isn't done by talking about these inner critics, but is done by talking to them. The critics don't hear us when we talk about them, but they respond very quickly when we listen to them, and talk to or with them. Like children, they want us to listen to what they have to say. If your therapist truly understands parts therapy, she will help you listen to them, and they will speak to you, and resolutions really do happen.

I'm truly amazed at how, once I've made contact with a critic, they change to a positive voice very quickly and permanently. The true slowdown for me is that I have a lot of inner critics. The good news is they are all willing to talk when it's their turn in therapy.

After 40+ years of therapy, IFS and Parts therapy are giving me more traction than all the therapies I've tried put together.

Larry,

I'm glad to hear you're feeling the joy of being around other people with like minds.

Hope,

I agree, and I'm glad you feel like it's an oasis of peace here.

 

L2N, Slashy, NK, Armee, Chart,

At 3 am this morning I woke up in dread. I checked the forum to try and find some comfort. I saw your posts. I was overwhelmed by your support. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the supportive comments.

I have a chronically difficult time keeping my self-image above the waterline. I post this same fear from time to time, and always receive support from you all. I always think, "okay, this time it'll stick" but as my post says, I keep going in and out of these moods, sometimes so fast it makes my head spin. I expect that you all understand this next sentence:>> I can remember every bad thing that's ever happened in my life, but remembering good things is like holding water in a kitchen strainer.

I feel like I'm doing and saying good, and then all of a sudden, I feel this revisit to the terror that I'm annoying people. I suppose there's no need to explain, as many of us already know that the giving and then withdrawing of love was used as a weapon for many of us as children. I don't mean to sound needy, but if I'm going to be honest, then in a way, I guess I am a bit needy. The fragility of love from the people I needed in my early life still haunts me today.

Chart's comment "I wish you could see yourself through our eyes" actually made me cry for a moment.

I just watched a Tonight Show interview from Tuesday, April 16, between Stephen Colbert and George Takei, who had been imprisoned at age 5 with his family during WWII just for being Japanese in America after the Pearl Harbor attack. Mr. Takei brought a photo of a beautiful tree root that his father had dug up from the encampment and had turned into a sculpture to celebrate the resiliency of the family during the imprisonment. Mr. Takei's father had told him that survival was not so much about fighting and resisting but was more about finding and appreciating any beauty during adversity.  I didn't quote it perfectly here, but, as I heard this interview, I feel like I learned what Mr. Takei was teaching.

What I focus on is my reality. In this thread, I've been focusing on all the times I was cast aside for talking too much. All the while I could have been focusing on how my friends today are still my friends even though I talk a bit more than most. Survival comes through the latter.

Not everyone survives what most of us have been through. At least two of the boys I went to Catholic school with ended their own lives as they were trying to enter adulthood. Even my own little sister didn't survive the world we were both brought into. But I did. And all who are reading this post did. You all are my tribe. My clan. My people. My cohorts. Your kindness is the beauty that came from the adversity of our youths.

I just want to point out right now, that the love and comradery I feel with the people here, and with all the survivors of the rampant narcissism on earth right now, is the beauty I see. The care we have for each other continually and repeatedly saves me and furthers my own survival.

The people I share healing with are my statue and are the beauty that I cling to. We struggle still, but we have each other's support. And that's what keeps me going.

San,
Your compassionate responses are always comforting to me. Thanks. I accept your hug and return it with interest:   

Journal Entry for Tuesday, April 16, 2024

I've been compelled to spend a lot of time on the forum lately. I always hope I haven't become a problem for people who get tired of seeing my inputs on too many of their posts, and I am always worried about my propensity to write too long of posts. Again, and again, I apologize for talking too much, only to be followed up by more of me talking too much. I can't fix it no matter how hard I try. I'm like an alcoholic promising to quit drinking today, every single day, but rather than alcohol, my addiction is to talking/writing too much. My wife and I share a kind-hearted joke that she tells out of love, which goes; "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The longest distance between two points is to ask my husband for directions."

My conundrum of the day is how I struggle with my own dysregulation. It mimics bi-polar behaviors, or maybe DID behaviors as I have been switching from mood to mood almost like I'm channel surfing with my conscious mind. I occasionally approach my therapist with the comment that I feel like I'm getting worse instead of better, to which he responds with resounding disagreement. He reminds me of what a mess I was when we began working one on one together in 2005. He reminds me of how I would blank out nearly completely during therapy and how my channel surfing was much slower, meaning I would go into anxiety for weeks at a time, and depression for weeks at a time. The fact that my mood swings are rapid now, by the hour, but not as debilitating is a sign that I'm actually gaining control, not losing it. It's just that it takes time to work this stuff out.  I guess it's like when a pendulum has a long arc, it swings slowly but far, far apart. As the balance begins to right itself, the arc shrinks but speeds up. HOPEFULLY, stopping in the center is still in my future.

I look back at my posts and I sometimes feel like someone else wrote some of them. My goal, as of today, is to stop posting when I'm in a fired-up mood. I am triggered by other people's pain. That's always been a problem for me. I guess that after having been raised by people who put their happiness on my shoulders, forced me to grow up feeling like every sad thing that's ever happened to anyone anywhere is my fault for not being smart enough or selfless enough to protect them. All of them. Every human on earth. I can't watch much news because I'm 1) so broken up about the cruelty people do to each other and 2) so terrified that things are only going to get worse and as hard as I try I can't stop it. I can't tell you how much it hurt every time my big, strong, manly father made me feel like all his misery was my fault. Mom did the same thing. "If you hadn't wanted [anything here] we wouldn't have [this problem] now."

They raised me by ignoring me when I had needs or when I was in pain or when I was embarrassing them by being a child who sometimes made mistakes. It was an act of aggression that, I suppose, could be considered passive-aggressive attacks??? Passive aggression is something I don't fully grasp the exact meaning of, but choosing to not look at a child until that child stops being a child seems like it might fit into the term. I don't know if that's why I talk too much now...the need to be heard has never left me. Being ignored feels like being attacked and my anxiety just soars into the stratosphere.

I don't know. I'm tired right now, of trying to diagnose absolutely everything about myself that embarrasses me about who I am or who I've always been.

I just know that today, April 16, is a day when I don't understand why the confusion and chaos in my consciousness won't calm down and let me be the same person from one day to the next.  Sometimes from one hour to the next.

[[TRIGGER WARNING: Childhood Sexual Abuse--body memories without cognitive memories]>>>]

Littel2Nothing,

I really got swept away by your comments that we were just meat to them. [TRIGGER WARNING: Childhood Sexual Abuse--body memories without cognitive memories]>>> As I read it, I felt it. I have very chopped up memories of my abuser. I was seven. He was an adult. My cognitive memories are so chopped up that I really can't place how it was that he got me alone to do what he did, nor do I have any idea how many times it happened. I woke up in the classroom in third grade a few times having no idea where I'd been for the past hour or two. Almost like alien abductions, I experienced complete 1 to2 hour time losses at school on more than one occasion. But what my body remembers is what he smelled like, his body heat, visions of the thick black body hair on his arms, and...as I read your comments, I suddenly remembered feeling a spiritual sense of him having no soul. Like he had absolutely NO compassion for me as a human being. I have always remembered feeling abandoned by God because I somehow recall having prayed so hard for God to make him to stop, but God ignored me and the man...just...wouldn't...stop. It literally felt like he was not human. Like he was a cold-blooded alligator enjoying a meal.

So, I REALLY, truly understand your anger. I feel anger for what you went through, which revives my personal anger that these men are soulless and completely incapable of feeling the pain they are inflicting. Sometimes I feel like I've grown past the anger. Like I've accepted that psychopaths exist with us and they "know not what they do" and that my forgiveness of them has brought me peace. But then, every now and then, I remember how horrific it is to be caught in their snares, and I realize I haven't made peace with it at all.

I think this trigger for me, from your sharing, is a gift that I can use as I explore the way my life goes in and out of acceptance. I've been feeling like I'm DID or Bi-Polar or something. Like...if I've forgiven these people, why am I still traumatized? 

I just read an internet article on the 18 things that identify a person who had a traumatic childhood, and I was able to connect with 17 of them. I shook my head and thought, but my childhood wasn't that bad, so HOW do I have 17 of the 18 traits? (the only one I didn't have was a sense of wanting to lash out aggressively).  I think you've provided a much-needed spark for me to stop hiding again from the horror of being with someone who has no soul. No connection to other human beings.

You shared a deep part of yourself today here which has blessed me with a revival of something I need to address in myself...my own anger and unmitigable frustration at how I was consumed like a meal by someone who had no right to do what he did.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for having the courage or compulsion to share it. Not addressing this anger in myself allows it to fester unnoticed. I really want to work through this for myself as you work through it in your own life.

Thanks for showing me that I'm not alone in this anger and for giving me a sense that the anger is real and its justified and it isn't going away just because I'm feeling calm every now and then. My anger for what was done to you, gives me permission to feel it for what was done to all of us, myself included.