Topics

  My disability pension has been granted for another three years   

[not]

 Ms. R,

I'm really angry . Yesterday you were removing "just" one branch from that tree. Now I see that you are taking over that whole area of the garden! You're like some colonial power - you move in to "uninhabited territory" taking it over for more and more vegetable plot without caring that it's not uninhabited. It's just used differently from the way you see as useful. FYI I sit in that part of the garden in spring and autumn when there is sun only down the bottom of the garden. You have 3/4 of the bottom of the garden along the wall already! You could leave the remaining 1/4 for me (and anybody else in the building who wants). Mark my words, when that turns into your new garden plot, I'll be putting my lawn chair in the middle of it anyway. I don't care anymore about that. Though I will have a bit of trouble putting the guinea pigs' run out so that they get the last of the warm sun too. But I know you think my little furries are a waste of space, that they don't have any right to be in the garden, that your plants are more important. They aren't though. Everybody in the building can use the garden. Before you moved in, we had the concept of shared space and individual space. We didn't always agree but some of us at least talked about it, talked about plans. You don't. You just move in and bulldoze down, take over. 

I have every right to question your plans when you're in the garden! I don't need to be ashamed of that, or feel guilty. Your actions show you either don't know or don't care about other people's rights or space or boundaries. Nor does your mother, and she doesn't even live here. I'm sure she's not listed on the rental lease. But still she comes and moves my stuff or moves your stuff into my space, like potted plants into my personal garden space, claiming it belongs to the other business premises in the building. Years AFTER you persuaded the landlord of the time to ban the people from that very business premise from the garden. It's just so  unfair.   
_______________________________

  Yeah, it's an IC. Well, T tomorrow where I can try and heal the IC so as to be better able to deal in the present with this situation, though we will discuss how to deal too, not just the past.
Now that I've got that out of my system a bit, I can get on with my translation again.

I'm talking unhealthy behaviour when I was growing up, but actually it continues.

People say that when you want to discuss an issue with someone, you should not bring up past behaviour, you should stay in the present. That's what FOO says. The problem is they wouldn't allow you to discuss it at the time either. That didn't just happen to me. enF refused to allow uPDM to discuss issues. He just wouldn't listen so she'd blurt them out whenever, like when he had friends over. But what did he expect? He didn't want to hear it later. He didn't want to hear it ever of course. I suffered more directly under her than him, but he's by no means innocent.

My brothers both discuss issues with their wives and present day issues with enF and uPDM now, or more likely they tell enF and uPDM in no uncertain terms where to get off, but allowing me to discuss anything would count as rocking the boat too much. So they block me.

I wouldn't go as far as to say I feel sorry for uPDM because of the treatment she got at the hands of enF and possibly still gets but I have a bit more understanding for her in general, but not for her treatment of me if that makes sense.

This has all come clear to me since my second yoga stay.

I'm teaching a young American woman the local language of my country. She's a complete beginner and she likes learning with me. There's also only her, not a whole group. I like teaching her too. But for some reason I panic internally and my brain goes on strike about grammatical gender or sometimes even verb endings. Words where I wouldn't think twice in day-to-day usage whether I'm using them correctly - when I'm teaching I have these brain lapses. I'm talking very basic language usage too. I know this stuff! 

I suppose it's connected to all the criticism and making fun of that I experienced at the hands of FOO since that was particularly about my verbal expression and intellectual intelligence.

Thanks FOO, not. A few years ago when thousand of refugees moved to my country, all sorts of institutions were desperate for teachers of the local language. I looked into it but noticed the panic setting in and gave up on the idea. Again, thanks FOO. Not.

This topic has been moved to Therapy.

https://cptsd.org/forum/index.php?topic=11620.0 because the OOTS Board is for questions about the forum in general, not about therapy!

This topic has been moved to Introductory Post.
because new mbr's first post
https://cptsd.org/forum/index.php?topic=11600.0

This topic has been moved to AD - Affective Dysregulation (eg Anger, Numbness, Derealization).
so that it's on the same board as other posts on anger.
https://cptsd.org/forum/index.php?topic=11519.0

Tomorrow I'm going on holiday for 2 weeks and I'll be offline the whole time. It is a yoga retreat and I'm sure it will do me good. Likewise being offline.

I may or may not come back on this evening to post something for myself.

This topic has been moved to Suicide Ideation/Self Harm.
because of concrete mention of self harm.
http://cptsd.org/forum/index.php?topic=11261.0

When I was told by two of my abusers (parents) that "something bad might have happened (to me), but it was time to forgive and forget and get on with life", I made a tremendous effort to forget, but the only possible way was to block out much of my childhood and teenage years, including the good stuff, like my vivid and colourful memories of nature and being out in nature. A lot of memories have come back bit by bit, but not the vivid colourful good stuff. It's as if I've lost the ability to have colourful memories.

For some reason I ended up on this Memory thread today. That reminded me that in the past few days colourful memories and even pleasant smell memories have been coming back It's totally innocuous stuff from outside in the garden. It feels huge to me because those memories have been buried for a few decades.

I commented on some totally different website today, semi political stuff. Somebody took me up on it a good few hours later pointing out my ignorance, though s/he didn't quite word it that way. I realised the person is right. I did make a mistake. And it's OK. I can accept myself with this mistake. I don't feel as if I'm about to be annihilated. This is big.

Dear Mr. Z.,

I feel duped and I'm angry. You came to me saying that you just needed my stamp, now you admit that in your home country that this type of work isn't done well. "Isn't done well" is an understatement. Your countryman did an appalling job, no wonder it was turned down by the authorities here.

If you'd been honest about it from the start, I'd either have said that I need a week for the job or I would have suggested you look for somebody else.

You're in a hurry for the final result? Sorry, but I'm so used to that in this occupation. You're in a rush because you didn't set the work in motion early enough yourself. That's your problem. It's not my job to take up the slack and work over time and/or ignore my other clients' needs to help you out. It's painstaking work, requiring high levels of concentration. I need breaks and I take them, breaks of hours or even a day or two.

 

Also because you said you 'just' needed my stamp, I gave you a cost estimate which is way too low. I did say I might have to charge more, but if you'd been upfront and honest and at least told me there would be quite a lot of correction necessary, I'd have given a higher estimate right away. Now I've had two impatient emails from you, putting the pressure on. In neither of them did you say anything about money. If you want me to work faster, then you'd better signal willingness to pay more!! Not that I won't demand more, but that's hanging over my head too. I'm going to have to re-negotiate. Things hanging over my head make me slow down.

Yours sincerely

At the therapeutic healing weekend the Ts suggested it might help me to repeat a sentence to witnesses: "I deserve to be protected." It felt OK to say it, but didn't move much in me. I said I probably most needed to direct it inwards to my Littles. So that's what the others did. They were standing all round me in a circle and each and every one said to me "You deserve to be protected." I stood there looking at them all, one by one, hearing something quite unbelievable and feeling emotions I never felt before. ?? I deserve to be protected?? Really??!

One of the Ts went on to suggest that the group should show me physical protection in one of two ways, neither of which 'said' anything to me because the whole concept is so novel to me. So the T decided, they would all turn their backs to me and make a defensive circle around me. I could sense the protection. I commented on it too - along the lines of: "this feels totally novel". Some people in the outer circle spoke about how they felt: like they felt as a member of the circle it was easy to protect me.

I realised while standing there how difficult it was for anybody in FOO to protect me because of the lack of unity in FOO. My parents weren't on the same page. Both of them tended to turn to their parents instead of each other in times of need or just in order to slag each other off instead of trying to work on an issue. My grandparents obviously heard negatives about their SIL and DIL and got involved in these disputes too instead of suggesting my parents sorted them out themselves. In all this negative quarelling mess, who was there for a little girl who needed protection from the quarreling mess itself as well as from M and the older B and the weird pronouncements of both GrM?

I realised too, I felt almost viscerally, how things could have been so much different if I'd felt that protection from day one. While the protective circle was around me, I felt warmth and safety. I think I might have been able to develop and flourish more as a child if I'd felt such protection, instead of creeping into myself, making myself as small as possible and often being cold and not moving much.

I know this type of therapy does go a certain way to healing those old wounds, it can give us as adults what was so desperately missing in our childhoods. It's a form of Re-Parenting.

I deliberately put this here and not in my Journal in case it inspires somebody else to write.

For me this is a symptom not a comorbidity. I think I manage fairly well now on the forum. I get a lot out of the forum and I give back by moderating. As for responding to others' posts: it's an activity where I'm practising not doing too much of it. Practising noticing my feelings, energy levels etc etc as my T teaches me to do.

However IRL it's just not easy atm. Sometimes wanting to do something for somebody else can galvanise me into doing something beneficial for myself. So I channel the energy and impulses back to myself and my life. e.g. with the local election a few days ago - all this energy churning around to support the mayor I'd like to win, including the thought I could put up his poster in my office window. Instead I'm improving my own advertising for my window/front of the building. 

So far I've asked a fellow freelancer how I could express better what I wanted to say and have re-formatted my document. I need to print it out and stick my coloured logo on. But I also desperately need to wash my windows and other parts of front of the building which got very dirty due to building site next door. It makes sense to do that before I put up new advertising. I will do it but I feel so exhausted...

Sometimes I help my refugee neighbours, sometimes it's just explaining something e.g. in this country you have to give your landlord written notice 3 months before you move out, but no, you can't hand in your notice on 6th Oct. to move out on 6th January, you have to do it by end September. Something which I and most people in my country take for granted. Sometimes I just sit and listen and nod and say that I understand that it's hard not knowing things we take for granted.

But it is too much for me. I then went and dumped my frustration on a friend. I apologised right away but it just shows me: it's too much for me. It makes me sad. I'd like to be able to help, I'm genuinely a helpful person.

I'd also genuinely like to be able to spend more time with my godson but at the moment I can't without blowing a fuse. It's not his fault. It's not mine either. It's the effects of cptsd. It's my responsibility not to spew the effects all over other people, e.g. my godson, by looking after myself and saying "No". No, I can't even manage a compromise. No, the date my godson's mother is coming to my town and would have brought my godson to me is not a date I can manage. It's the final day of intensive therapy workshop I'm doing. I didn't realise till a few hours later that it would have been difficult for me to say that the following two days I really need for myself as well, had she been coming on either of those days instead. Self-care, self-care, self-care and go slowly and mindfully are the recommendations after these types of workshops. The mother of my godson arranged to cme to my town when she did because it suits her and somebody else. She was just hoping that it would work for me too, without asking me in advance if it would. Presumably the other person can only manage this day. But if they were meeting the next day instead, when I will be home, then I would feel 'guilty' for not compromising and saying that my godson can come by, even though it would be too much for me.

This post is way too long as usual but I am going to leave it here and not move to my Journal because it may help others.

Dear all,

Some of you seem to think I haven't been the last few times because I couldn't get there on my own. There we are at the pesky topic. I hate the way you go on at me for cycling!! And I'm sick of it. That's why I can hardly be bothered to come any more. I never know when you're going to start harping on at all those evil cyclists again and talking down to me like "Blueberry, you don't know. You don't drive." No I don't any more, it's true. And your point?

If you think you're going to change my lifestyle somehow, forget it! I'm a dyed in the wool commuter cyclist, that's not changing. Why do you care even? What's it to you if I cycle almost everywhere? If your goal is to reduce the number of people coming to the meeting, you're certainly doing a good job there.  It certainly puts me off.

I once objected slightly and L.P. said "No, no, that's not what we're doing, we're not criticising you." Well, you certainly harp on about the subject. If I feel criticised, I feel criticised. It's not for you to decide that your behaviour is OK. Because you are not the recipients. I am. Imagine every time C. comes and you harp on about the illogical aspects of vegetarianism? What would you all think about that? What would you think about it C.? Might get annoying after a while or just plain old boring. "Ho hum, Yawn. Please find another topic." It's more annoying though. I can't even defend myself, there are too many of you all at once, not even listening. Just grinding your own axes on the nearest serious cyclist.

Blueberry

I read the description of hypervigilance pinned here and realised that's what I was suffering from when I last spent a significant amount of time with my godson, his siblings and their mum. It's useful for me to have a name for it because that way I see - it's cptsd again. Note: I'm not so hypervigilant about making sure the children don't get hurt, it's about making sure they don't do anything wrong. I know it's not good at all that I react this way, but it is what it is. My godson's mum thinks he sort of understands and doesn't attribute it to himself. Though I don't know. I did apologise to him. But ime apologies are only OK if you actually change your behaviour. I don't believe in my case that merely wanting to change will lead to a change. I think some deeper healing needs to take place.

As I think also Kizzie mentioned, I'm hypervigilant but their are still situations in which I leap sky high when something unexpected happens. Certain noises do that to me. The phone used to, it did when I still lived at home with FOO and it did all my adult life until recently when FOO finally accepted my limit of "I don't want phone calls".

I was lying in bed reading a novella, set in 1830's rural Britain, but written recently. I couldn't keep going reading a children's book, but a much darker adult book, yes.

Maybe it was time for the realisations?? An uneducated but bright farm girl is sent to the manse in the village to help the sickly wife of the vicar. Eventually the vicar starts touching the girl's legs and putting an arm around her. She hates that but allows it to happen. It goes further....

Me too. I've been touched repeatedly over the years since I was about 18, often just a hand on my leg or an arm around me. I freeze and allow it to happen with excuses in my head like "the man just means it in a friendly way" or "it doesn't mean anything". In my case, I'm lucky, it never has gone any further. One time possibly because a young woman my age told me in no uncertain terms to be careful, to avoid a particular man, so I did. Yet I still allow it to happen. I still freeze and scrunch myself up in my clothes, but I don't say anything.

How did I get in this state? Partly it's that "rude" thing I grew up with. Saying "No" was rude, especially saying "No" to an older person. Partly it was probably the indifference at home. What I'm remembering particularly with this novella is: me needing to get a signature from a college professor and just the atmosphere in the room. I was across the table from him so he wasn't even touching me but he was enjoying his power over me, keeping me in there for about an hour. The status difference, power difference and the male exploiting that. When I mentioned it at home, that the prof had held me in there for an hour, enF jocularily remarked "What? He held you on his lap?" As if there's no other way to hold somebody in a room. I think M was in the background, she didn't say anything. I may have said "Noooo." to enF but I didn't try to explain. There wouldn't have been a point.

Affirmative action was new back then. F, M, B1 - they all raged against it. I was actually against it too, I believed a lot of what I heard from FOO all the time. I never would have even imagined getting help at college for myself, like going to the Women's Rights at Student Union. Idk if it was called Women's Rights, but there was certainly somewhere like that. Anyway, I'm sure I could have got the right to speak to another prof with the right to counsel students on the next courses to take. In this case instead I dropped out of the second subject I was majoring in and majored in only one. Because I couldn't deal with the atmosphere in the prof's room. Because I didn't know how to get help. Because "feminism" was a bad word at home (I still lived with FOO) and getting help as a female was wrong somehow.

Had I got in 'real trouble' like this poor unfortunate farm girl, FOO would have asked me how on earth I could have been so dumb as to get pregnant.

M, F, B1 they all claimed back then to be feminists, they probably still do claim that. They missed teaching me to protect and stand up for myself and not allow SA to happen. 

[very triggering]

I followed a link on our sister website OOTF to HG Tudor, a self-proclaimed narc who explains how narcs function. What an eye-opener! F, M, B1, SIL2 are all a bunch of narcs. B2 probably as well. I think just SIL1 is not. This explains so much of my family dynamic.

H G Tudor could be very triggering for some mbrs on here, maybe if you're more aware of how narcissism functions or react more to narcs in the news e.g. 

I suppose this is ICr. on the rampage. I bought a card and small present for one of the couples at the farm who had a baby a couple of days ago. I didn't need to but I wanted to. I asked another farm person today at the market for ideas and she gave me a few, one of which I decided to get. I took a long time to decide in the shop. Even though I know, I know, it's the thought that counts. Also: the proceeds from this shop go to support something this farm couple totally support themselves, so even if they didn't like the present, at least the money wasn't 'wasted' and anyway it's edible. If they don't want it, someone else on the farm will.

But none of those justifications help really. Because ICr. is not interested in that, ICr. absorbed FOO's constant criticism of me in every respect. This is not about: Can I make a good decision? This is about: Blueberry cannot be allowed to believe in herself in case the whole dysfunctional FOO construct comes tumbling down, hurting/destroying other FOO mbrs on the way. As usual it becomes clearer as I write about it. Regularly, I feel almost paralysed in decision-making because of this.

I feel better for having come onto the forum to write about it and to read other posts.

I came on here ready to be angry at FOO, especially at enF but it seems to have all disappeared.

I'm so angry that enF went behind my back to get information about me from friends. He claimed to be worried about me. Why?? I wrote that I was OK. Sure he wants a more detailed answer but I don't owe him one. I'm an adult! I'm not as his beck and call anymore to do what he wants.

I feel like telling him that you don't always get what you want in life.  I certainly don't. FOO including enF has been telling me to put up and shut up for decades. And again and again: where were they (my parents) when I was a child and needed them? Or even at last Horrendous FOO Event? I could have done with help then too. The other sibling refused but FOO mbrs send their "love" via enF. It's nauseating. How can you possibly call that "love"?