I suspect I have CPTSD. Maybe I’m just butthurt and taking things too seriously.

[Blueberry]

If your parents seem to be open to making amends that's wonderful DR.  My only suggestion FWIW is to not slip into minimizing how they behaved toward you in the past, to deny younger you endured trauma/abuse  Telling ourselves we were/are being too sensitive, overly dramatic, etc., can be barriers to recovery and healing. 

My parents made some amends, especially financial, and they have even made a few minor changes themselves but the emotional abuse and the dysfunctional family system has remained in place. Also my siblings admit to some of the dysfunction and one even apologised for his part in the misery of my childhood. All this lulled me into a false sense of "my family isn't so bad after all". Unfortunately they are "so bad".  They're still in the mindset that I'm causing the family problems and they are not taking responsibility for their own decisions and actions. Plus everybody is protecting my mother, who was chief abuser.

In order to have contact in the past few years (I've more or less cut all contact again now) I shut down my Inner Children, who were saying that sibling is mean, sibling hurts us etc. Since sibling had apologised, I thought that that was enough. It wasn't. Also my mother has never apologised for anything. The family take on that is: "she can't, no wonder, look how her parents were" which is enabling hogwash. I went along with this hogwash too though.

I haven't read all your post yet, but it's not because it's "boring". Never fear that! I write long posts and reflect a lot. There is nothing wrong with that! Probably the world would be a better place if more people could do self-reflection.

[aaltimeter]

I've experienced the same thing with meditation, yoga and related practices: shaking, emotional release, sometimes feeling like crying or yelling out in rage.  That happened for years and continued escalating before I ever found out about CPTSD and the concept of emotional flashbacks. 

Now that I have, there seems to be lots of work to do to uncover how often I'm dissociated... like I too can get into jhanas and, if I stick with it long enough, come away from them with a feeling of bodily and emotional wholeness that can last at least for a bit into my day... yet it's always been a mystery to me why I have such a hard time staying anything like as present in my social interactions as I can when I'm by myself and putting just a modicum of effort into it.  Seems I'm often back in some charged memory. 

I keep being reminded of the scene at the end of Twin Peaks season 3.  Without spoiling it for anybody: there always seems to be more work to do.

[DecimalRocket]

I've experienced the same thing with meditation, yoga and related practices: shaking, emotional release, sometimes feeling like crying or yelling out in rage.  That happened for years and continued escalating before I ever found out about CPTSD and the concept of emotional flashbacks. 

Now that I have, there seems to be lots of work to do to uncover how often I'm dissociated... like I too can get into jhanas and, if I stick with it long enough, come away from them with a feeling of bodily and emotional wholeness that can last at least for a bit into my day... yet it's always been a mystery to me why I have such a hard time staying anything like as present in my social interactions as I can when I'm by myself and putting just a modicum of effort into it.  Seems I'm often back in some charged memory. 

I keep being reminded of the scene at the end of Twin Peaks season 3.  Without spoiling it for anybody: there always seems to be more work to do.

Yeah. Always seems like neverending work. Each time I think I'm finished — there's more.

Posting here has been giving me flashbacks over and over. But I think I had enough rest today for it to be time to push myself back here again. At least, just for a little more.

I'm still traumatized. . . but I think jhanas have still healed me in some significant way. It's often  whenever I experience grief from flashbacks or experience any distress, there's a feeling of happiness in the background. It's not the superficial type of happiness — the pleasurable feeling you get. It's the type of happiness that sticks with you when you're sad, angry, afraid or anything negative.

It feels like  being physically sick. Exhausted. Aching from your entire body. Throwing up. Constantly sneezing. Coughing violently so much that your throat feels like it's being ripped apart. But you rest in a high quality cushion with just the most amazing scent and under the coxy covers of warm blankets. It carries my pain somehow.

I don't know if I'll ever heal to be happy in my life. Seems like it'll take years. But it seems it'd be a lot easier to be entirely satisfied with life — the feeling that it's enough whether things are good or bad intenally and externally.

I'm not fully there yet but the feeling is well on its way to surrounding my entire life. Sometimes I wonder if even if I'm clearly more emotionally distressed and more easily physically exhausted than people my age — I wonder if I'm actually more satisfied with life than anyone I've ever met.

Heh.

Maybe I'm just crazy, but after a good long cry witn tears and snot, being traumatized isn't that bad. It's possible life would make me change my mind somehow but right now and here, I think I have eveyrhing I need in my life.

Oh well. Guess only time will answer.

I have to leave now. Don't want those flashbacks to go crazy, you know. I've been freaking out the entire time I was typing this.

Well, see ya around.




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