Just needed somewhere to talk...

[helliepig]

Hi I'm new here. Hello to everyone. Hope it's ok to share something. I joined tonight so I had a place to put this.

I've been working with a dissociation/child abuse therapist for years, I'm also in a gestalt group and I've done individual and group therapy before that.
I just mention that because I've worked so hard for years and yet right now things are very difficult.
My cptsd story "in brief" is hostile unloving mother, bullying father, sexually abusive grandmother I was left with as a baby,  horrible dysfunctional family and then some. I don't think I ever felt genuinely loved - or even knew what it was - until I had my son and even now I only feel it vaguely. I was severely dissociative with many many many fragments of me that we are still finding.

Lately I've been working on the real baseline stuff of abandonment, self esteem, the paralysing loneliness and the way "people" trigger me.
Just to say I work in a public facing job and get on with people great there... I can do it, On the face of it you would think I was really together.

But  I just never seem to find anyone for me in private or ever belong anywhere and I have a painful set of irrational but powerful beliefs that make finding myself a community or "family" very confusing and painful. Lately it has started to feel unbearable.

Just tonight I picked up my son from 2 weeks at his dad's - who has just broken up with his second wife and now has got a new girlfriend. Not that I care - other than I was suddenly overwhelmed with my inadequacy that he is so much better than I - even though he is a nasty narcissist and bully - and I felt an icy hopeless aloneness that is like shock.  How does a nasty * like him just walk into another relationship?  How do people just do that? I feel ashamed that I haven't had any relationship in 10 years, that I hide at home rather than go out and that I can't find anywhere to belong.  Going out to meet new people is really really hard for me , I try but it's easy to run away or give up....I feel inadequate that I have never had the family and friend support to do "normal things" and although I try - and have tried very hard for years - it all feels hollow and empty because this stuff deep inside never changes.

My son tonight seems really happy and I can't shake the belief that it's being at his dad's rather than being home has created this and that now  I have to hide from him how dreadfully useless and inadequate and empty and boring and UNABLE I am. I can't see that I have value.

I have friends - but no one  that understands this level of pain or really wants to know about it, in truth.  I never trust that there is anything in me that people really want, and I struggle to feel any connection. I try over and over to remind these parts of myself that this is the traumatised me and not the whole picture but the ferocity of these feelings literally take my breath away  - especially tonight - and show my little efforts, to "meet people" and live normally, almost laughable.  I feel ashamed that people will see how much I , a grown woman, struggle to do the thimgs that to them are so easy.....
I am brave and I have faced unspeakable things in my recovery but this feels too big.... no one able to help me as I can't even tell them. I feel trapped having to pretend to my son when I feel so empty and with the terror that it will turn out to be true that I am not enough and will drive him away. I know that is stupid as I write it but it feels so real.

I'm not sure any of this makes much sense. My therapist says putting things down "in writing" pulls it through the hippocampus and out of traumatic memory but just now I've been losing hope that I can do this. It just feels too big.  I feel very demoralised .

[Kat]

I was reading this saying, Yes!  Me too!  Yes to that, too!  That's how I feel!

I don't have time right now to give much of a reply.  I'll try to come back to it later.  For now I'll just say that I can relate to so much of what you've said.

I have friends.  I can make friends.  I actually connect well with others, but it always feels so superficial because, as you said no one understands the level of pain or really wants to know about it. 

This doesn't make it any easier or fill in any of those lonely places, but my therapist has likened it to soldiers coming home from war.  They've seen and experienced things no one else can imagine and, truthfully, don't really want to try to imagine.  It's too much.  And so these soldiers struggle to assimilate back into "regular" society because they're worlds have been rocked. 

After you've seen and felt such horrors, it's really hard to sit around and talk about The Real Housewives of Atlanta or whatever reality show is most popular at the time.  It's no wonder soldiers seem to get the most help from being in groups therapy with other soldiers.

[Three Roses]

Hello and welcome, helliepig! I'm glad you are here.

I also relate to almost everything you've said. The feeling alone, don't know who to talk to or how to talk about it, feeling inadequate. I'm in gestalt therapy and that's helping with my thoughts, but the emotional flashbacks and triggers are still there.

Here's an idea - what if your son is just happy to be home after a weekend away? Back to you, and familiar territory? Just a thought. This is the kind of stuff that wrecks me, tho - the constant comparisons and doubts. That relentless inner critic.

Anyway, thanks for joining! I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how much we do "get it."

[helliepig]

Thank you, both of you, for replying, and yes it is good how much you get it. It does help to hear it from other people even though I wouldn't wish anyone to feel the same!
The soldiers analogy Kat is a really good one, I hadn't thought of it like that. I guess I do need to find other soldiers... I shall give that some thought. I worry that sometimes contact with other damaged people becomes an exercise in naval gazing but sweeping negative generalisations are what I do to avoid the fear of finding out...

My son did seem to relish being home actually. It was odd to sit with how I feel inside and with the incongruity of him appearing to find something he likes in being home. Daft really- when he was little I had very few doubts and we were uber close, It's easier when they're little and look at you as their whole world. it's as he's got older and I can't be so sure I'm enough and when I get scared others are more important - the constant comparisions and doubts Three Roses, Yes and yes again.

Thank you for making me feel welcome and I'm looking forward to getting you know you all a bit better.