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uh, suddenly my small reply I don't remember writing pops up. My brain isn't making sense today. That's the 3rd time that's happened. I don't know what's happening.

Thank you for your reply Bert, I only just saw it.

I've been thinking a lot about little me. I have so much to process there. So much.

Thank you for your kind words. Thank you all of you. I very very much appreciate your kindness and understanding.

Thank you Armee. I thought I had replied. I keep doing that, thinking I've replied. I caught myself several times, just holding my phone staring at the apps menu page innanely ..."staring into space" as my school teachers used to write on my reports. I think I must have been thinking about your post whilst randomly staring at app icons. I have to laugh: it's my best medicine.

Gardening really helps me too. And walks outside. I have fibromyalgia which is a bas£@&* and I haven't done anywhere near as much gardening as I would have liked but just getting out there helps. I feel so lucky to have a reasonable sized garden where I can grow things.

I hadn't realised the head banging thing could be flashbacks. Sh*£. Yeah it's like I'm trying to knock the bad memories out of my head a lot of the time so it probably is. Thank you for that explanation.

It's a balancing act I am yet to master: obsessing over my mother and her vile behaviour has got completely out of control. I read about "compartmentalizing" but haven't a clue how to achieve putting her bulls#-£ into a box. I have vague memories of a therapist trying to help me with that and me being very angry that I couldn't...that was possibly in rehab. I was "the angriest client they'd ever had". Now my anger is a festering malignant monster buried so deep I can't even feel it but I'm very scared of it. I don't know when it could emerge or what it's capable of. It did something horrible once, really horrible and yet I don't have shame about that: I have nothing. I feel shame about things that the abusers should be ashamed of, not me and logically I know I shouldn't have that shame but inside it's still very present.

Thanks Armee. I hadn't thought of the head hitting being flashbacks. That actually makes sense when I was concrete head hitting, I thought I was trying to make myself wake up with the other (open palm both sides of head or more often rubbing my head really hard all over because it feels like it's going to explode with the pressure... maybe there is no pressure...??))

Armee I exactly know that feeling of passing out trying to say the trauma stuff and not remembering what or why it matters.

I often question myself "what's wrong with you? It's nothing! So what: just get over it and stop moaning there's nothing wrong with you".

It's so confusing.

Today I feel like my head is...I can't explain... it's kind of buzzing. It's like it's muffled and buzzing and horrible.

How do I tell the intrusive stuff to slow down? I'm overwhelmed by it and it's making my life that should be safe and happy now so difficult because it won't let me experience here and now properly...

It's always there. I sometimes hit myself of my head (not too hard any more, not these days) to try to wake myself up because I feel like I'm not real or dreaming...

I used to hit my head against concrete when I was younger.

My rapist violent abusive ex hit me so many times in the head I think I must have brain damage. I wish I hadn't hit my own head so hard...I think I actually fractured my skull once. When he was threatening to "smash" my "face in" I said "Look, you don't have to I can beat myself up perfectly well all by myself." I had multiple egg sized bumps all over my head one time from what he did and I called the police and they wouldn't even look or touch. They let me down so many times. If I hadn't been abused as a child I would never have fallen into his trap. He was evil.

Thank you so much Armee. I must have been typing at the same time as you!

Thank you Bert and Blue Sky.

Bert, what you say makes so much sense. I hated myself so much for freezing, for not being able to talk (I became selectively mute) for not fighting back. I hated myself for "allowing" so much more abuse to happen for so many years. It's easy for me to say to others "it wasn't your fault" and to offer empathy and logically I know it wasn't my fault and that I'm not stupid or feeble or pathetic but I don't think I really believe it, not properly.

My partner is kind and compassionate and I'm not used to being treated kindly and it's wonderful. I often wonder if they are a figment of my imagination. I sometimes panic if for example we are out and I am waiting outside a shop with my dog, I think my partner doesn't exist. Sounds stupid but it's a very real fear.

I also have a lot of self deprecation, like I did nothing good or productive with my life...I barely stood a chance but hey ho I "should try harder" (ingrained from childhood I guess).

Lots of work to do on me.

I actually feel like I'm overburdening my partner with my CPTSD (my worry, they've never said so) but it's good to have this place to talk to fellow survivors. So thank you.

So anyway many years later I am safe but my life has been so negatively impacted in so many ways I feel physically sick thinking about how disgustingly I was treated.

And because I don't feel real it's really hard to feel anything.

I think I was sold by paedophile 1 to some creepy men when I was a teenager. I kept getting approached and I can't talk about it but I think it was a paedophile ring. My childhood friend was having the same happen. We were young and naive and didn't understand what was happening. She was being sexually abused by several men and all of them knew paedophile 1.

When I reported this to the police years later nothing came of it. I was made out to be a liar and her statement was basically ignored.

We were child victims of a paedophile ring and we didn't even know it.

I've blocked so much out but horrible memories are recently seeping through the blocks I thought my brain had made.

I was abused by a paedo from age approximately 5-15. Last night I realised that he was the first person to touch me in private places. I don't know why that didn't occur to me before. That just really upset me last night.

We were playing Cards Against Humanity yesterday and I got a card about losing your virginity. The rest of the game sort of went by on autopilot. It shouldn't have been a paedophile raping me. (different paedophile).

Then I realised that there's a connection between paedophile 1 and some things I completely buried due to feeling so much shame and dirtiness. I can't talk about it. I can't speak it. I think I'm going to have to talk about it with my therapist when I finally get allocated one. When that will be I have no idea.

Then there are my university years. Waking up in bed with a stranger after a drunken night. I don't consider that SA and I have no idea if I slept with this person in the sex way but it was definitely connected with having been sexually abused previously as I had no concept of being able to say no. I don't remember how he ended up in my bed or how I got there either. There's other stuff I feel absolutely mortified by like the rape when my drink was spiked and fighting off two men, screaming and a woman coming into the room. The drugs they'd given me must have been wearing off but I'd already been raped.

The rapist who abused me for 10 years knew the rapists who drugged my drink. I can't talk about that much either but suffice it to say there was a ring of them and there will be more victims, as I prefer to say, survivors.

I hate so much that my mother abused me teaching me that sex was dirty so that sex was a punishable offence: so that when I was abused as a child she made it my fault.

She called me every name under the sun. She made me the guilty one.

If I hadn't been sexually abused and had had a mother who was kind and supportive, none of the CSA or SA would have happened. I honestly think the initial paedophile chose me because he knew there was something very wrong with my home life. He also worked with my mother so he probably groomed her too.

I feel sick.

I don't want to feel ashamed.

I talked a little with my partner last night about the SA but I started dissociating really badly so I had to stop and to be honest I want to forget, not talk about it.

But how do I stop the intrusive thoughts? I wish I knew.

I just thought of something else: I pretended to be doing better than I was to my therapist because I thought I SHOULD be doing better. I was in some ways but not in others. I got stuck in everyone wants a happy ending land so I wrote my own happy ending but then I couldn't live up to it. I tried: I really really tried. But I couldn't do it. I think it's important professionals are aware a lot of us do that: pretend to be okay when we're not because it's expected of us. It's expected of a lot of us to pretend to be okay from birth. We learn to shut up because our crying gets us punished.

It sounds so lovely pretending to be on the train to your grandma's house! I think I will buy my son a white noise machine as he likes the sound of his fan which makes it very cold in the winter (I didn't understand why he needed it until I read about white noise). Plus the white noise machine takes up less space! I can't cope with fan noise as it's one of my triggers. I love the sound of the ocean but it sounds weird in headphones so I just listen to hours long podcasts which distracts me from intrusive thoughts which are my sleep's worst enemy. Plus I can figure out how long I lay awake for by rewinding and noting the timestamp from the last thing I remember hearing which is reassuring sometimes but when I get to the end of a 4 hour one and am still wide awake it sucks! With nothing I lay awake with horrible horrible thoughts. Even the podcasts can't block it out sometimes, but they do help.

The stupid part is that I can sleep much easier during the day. So if I don't fall asleep til 6 or 7 even several very noisy alarms don't wake me up because my brain knows it's daylight therefore it feels safe to sleep. Which is incredibly frustrating. Not being able to fall asleep OR wake up is a double whammy of bad sleep patterns.

Oops- my reply never posted. I must have forgotten to press send.

My partner tells me I seem to wake up at night and start getting hyper alert when everyone else is getting sleepy... which is spot on.

It seems to be a habit my brain has set in concrete though.

When I was tiny I was left alone and out of the way because my crying kept my mother awake. When I was bigger I used to have terrible nightmares and night terrors so I got into the habit of talking to myself or reading under the covers with a torch. There were late night noises that kept me awake too, often my parents arguing.

When I was in my DV marriage he used to wake me up through the night on purpose. I'm not going to go into details but yeah that made me very, very hypervigilant at night and I think that's the main thing that made it impossible to develop a healthy sleep pattern.

I wake often during the night. Always have.

I have figured out I need to develop a bed time ritual. I am working on that.

https://www.sleepfoundation.org/mental-health/ptsd-and-sleep

I thought I'd share this here because I'm done with not finding a solution for my insomnia. It seems a bit pointless for me to keep reading all these articles and nothing I try helps. For example, drinking was the only way I could sleep for years. It's a miracle I stopped drinking, but here they're obviously sensibly advising against drinking as a way to block out nightmares (never worked for me, but it did cause sleep... and hangovers... and alcoholism...)
Hmmm.
So I'm now wondering, will I ever ever have a normal sleep pattern or might I as well give up and just accept sleep doesn't work for me when I want it to? No: that doesn't work either...I need to get a regular sleeping pattern. I so badly need to.

Just ruminating really.

They advise things like "screens keep you awake" well so does my brain and that is way more powerful than a screen. In fact on my better sleep successes, reading books on my kindle was my only way to get to sleep. Now it's listening to podcasts on low enough volume to hear what they're saying but only just so I have to focus my brain on their words carefully and that can help- I emphasize can help but isn't guaranteed - to help stop intrusive thoughts...a bit.

Thanks Blue Sky,
I have a feeling my blood pressure is already too low so probably not a possibility, but I will look into this. Though since I no longer smoke maybe blood circulation isn't awful any more so that might have been the problem I had with beta blockers which gave me sleep paralysis and blackouts which was scary!