Messages

Thank you for understanding, and for the useful suggestions, NarcKiddo.
I'm glad it's not just me who can't cope with video game sound effects! I thought it was just me. Not that I'm glad anyone else suffers them...
I'm useless at playing video games. I used to play them with my kids when they were younger but I never did get any good at them. Most of the games these days seem to be single player, which makes it boring. I used to really enjoy Lego games with my kids. They always beat the bosses though. I didn't stand a chance!

I think another reason I'm scared to ask is because I hate being criticised because all I ever experienced was criticism before and my partner experienced a lot of criticism previously too, so I'm quite desperate not to make him feel bad equally as I am desperate not to be criticised myself. But I also have to acknowledge that I'm not scared of my partner so I don't think he'd mind me asking in the slightest. I just close the living room door and put on music sometimes but the feeling of helplessness is still there. Also I refuse to let him do things for me even if I find them difficult sometimes because I was treated like a slave by my ex and I have a massive problem with feeling like someone is doing something for me. Oh dear, it's really silly because I actually love doing things for people who do things for me too ie) there's a good balance. I've never had that balance before and now I have it, I don't know what to do with it...

I'm not sure where to put this.

This happens a lot.

Please note I am NOT having a grumble about my partner here. I'm trying to figure out how to ask for help.

For example, the other day I said to my partner "would you eat x?" And he said sure why not. He was playing an online game. I didn't say "Shall we cook x together?". I know 100% he would have come cooked with me. But I didn't.

So I started preparing the vegetables etc.

The sound effects from the online games he plays drive me crazy. The living room door opens into the kitchen.

I know exactly why I get triggered by the sounds from the TV. It's because my psychopath ex husband used to command me to cook clean etc from his "throne" on the sofa. The TV was always on, watching something he chose. I was never allowed to choose the programme. Ever. He never cooked, cleaned or tidied. (Except when people came over. He'd put on a big display of cooking and washing up and people would say what a wonderful husband he was 🤮) He never cooked for the children either. Ever. I was his slave. So I get horrible flashbacks when I'm trying to cook here and now which are worse if the TV is on next to the kitchen. That's not my partner's fault and maybe I'm torturing myself by even considering cooking when he's playing online games or watching TV. I have a choice now.

I'm not sure what my problem is: I know I can just ask him to come cook with me.

So I was getting really stressed out cooking. I am trying to reclaim the kitchen after years of domestic abuse and servitude with my ex. It was years ago now. It bothers me immensely that my brain and body can't enjoy cooking. I used to love cooking before that marriage ruined it for me.

So I was almost crying with frustration. My body was shaking and hurting so much with tension. I have fibromyalgia and chronic pain. I am DETERMINED to conquer my cooking trauma, so that's one of the reasons I don't ask for help, because I'm proud and stubborn and determined that I "don't need help" when actually I do and if I was living on my own it's highly likely I would just snack on junk food and get even more unhealthy. Some days I don't even realise I haven't eaten. My partner reminds me and offers to cook me food and more often than not I say no, I don't want to eat. It's very unusual for me to even know I'm hungry until I get dizzy.


The other day when I was trying to cook I was getting more and more distressed and I just wanted my partner to come into the kitchen and cook with me.
All I have to do is ask. I can't ask. That's not his fault.

He did eventually. He finished cooking what I'd prepared and it was fine.

I don't know why I want him to read my mind.

I guess it's little me crying and crying in my childhood bedroom as a toddler and no-one came.

I guess it's baby me being put in the garden in the snow so my mother could get some sleep, a break from the stiff tantrumous baby who never slept and never stopped crying.

I guess it's wife and mother me completely bewildered as to how my helpful fiancé turned into a slave master after I married him.

I don't even know what I want from posting this.

I just wish I could live in the present and that the past didn't make now so impossible.

My partner is loving and caring and reasonable and kind.

I've spent my whole life looking after other people - my mentally ill mother who didn't want me, my mentally unstable psychopath ex husband who didn't want me except for a sex object toy and a slave, my children, my eldest of whom couldn't cope with growing up and who has cut me out of her life...

...Now I STILL have this "I want to take care of people" thing inbuilt.

Trying to learn to take care of me or to allow my partner to take care of me is almost impossible.
 

Thank you Chart. That's very useful. Mine is very much a work in progress so nothing to add yet!
I'm secretly glad your first link is in French because I love languages and it gives me a reason to practice my French whilst doing something else important!

It's kind of weird that I started talking (completely inappropriately and annoyingly to most people) and whilst my silence scared people off as a child, my verbal diarrhoea scared people off as an adult. I still just randomly rant away to myself. It doesn't matter if anyone listens. Okay, sometimes it does.
I wish my daughter would go for an autism assessment and just accept the help she needs.
It really upsets me that she's desperate not to be autistic, because there's nothing wrong with being autistic and I think it would help her learn to be okay in the world if she had a better explanation than just (self diagnosed) CPTSD. I'm sure CPTSD is not the only thing.
Anyway there's another change of subject!

I need to learn not to procrastinate because I'm wasting my life.

I should write the book in my head.

It's about a teenage girl with a crazy weird family who goes out taking drugs and drinking and ends up pregnant working in a pole dancing club and her mother reacting in a "oh well done, you're so clever" way when the whole time she's being sex trafficked and abused. I want to show the weird dynamic between the daughter who's crying out for help and the mother who's trying to see the positives in everything where there really are none. Kind of the opposite of my mother in an extreme way, but with the same results.

You captured exactly the thing that puts me off, Dalloway-
I want there to be a "happy ending"- that "I am okay now" but it's ongoing and it's never complete.
You know, Maya Angelou's autobiographies were the first books I read that I really identified with. I thought, oh my goodness, this woman is amazing - she went through all that nightmare and came out the other end a famous author - but of course, her story was still ongoing... four volumes were just part of her life, what she chose to share. But I feel a bit like a nobody who does nothing and fears everything.

I just watched a very short documentary on Netflix about an autistic girl, "Makayla's Voice A Letter to the World"

And I just cried all the way through it. Because she's got a loving family around her and when I was silent/non verbal/mute, nobody helped me. They just said I was naughty and needed to stop daydreaming and stop staring into space and "pull my socks up" ffs what is wrong with those people? I'm glad our world is more understanding of autism these days. I'm pretty sure I'm autistic and nobody ever noticed or cared.
Maybe that's what my book should be about.
"Nobody ever noticed".

I wasn't non verbal with my parents or selected friends, just with most people, but because I *could talk* that was seen as me just being stubborn and rude. They couldn't have been more wrong. Also I couldn't communicate feelings. Only by having tantrums. Again, bad behaviour. I don't have tantrums any more. Not since I escaped evil ex husband.

It was called Wayward - the series!
I think one of the ways in which I "spiral" is that my brain randomly changes the subject when I don't want it to. It blocks out what I'm trying to remember and just goes into random places I don't want it to go. It's very very very difficult to stay, or even to be, "present".

Thank you everyone for your explanations. Okay so it is basically what I supposed it might be! So yes, I do.
Since I watched a Netflix series about running away from a cult I've wanted to write "thank you for your feedback" and it always makes me laugh (sorry, can't remember the name of the series, it was US/Canadian).

I feel silly asking this question, but when someone tells me they're "spiralling", or saying "when I spiral", what does that mean?
I don't know what it means. Is it having a panic attack, or is it an ef or is it intrusive thoughts one can't control or is it a combination of many things? I hear the term a lot and I can't figure out if I "spiral" because I don't understand what it means.  People use this term a lot so I feel like I need to know what it means! Thank you!

Thank you for reminding me! My son called himself stupid the other day and I said to him, hey, you're not allowed to call yourself stupid because you're not stupid and he said well in that case, you're not allowed to call yourself stupid either, because you're not stupid. Bless him - I need these reminders! 

Thank you everyone for your thoughtful replies.
I'm emotionally exhausted right now and was planning to reply to everyone but my brain seems to be telling me I need to do that another day! So thank you all, you are all very much appreciated 

Thank you so much for your insight, Kizzie. Yes, you're right. It does come from a place of not understanding, doesn't it? I wonder why the person who stormed off the zoom call registered in the first place, if they didn't put the work in to first understand the research.
I think some of the people who write horrible things are aware that they've been complicit in abuse or have directly abused someone, so they're either defensive or just being their abusive selves. What they write says more about them than it does about us. Thanks so much Kizzie, it's part of my recovery to become resilient and the ability to decide not to even read horrible comments for example is important. I used to spend a lot of time doom scrolling and reporting abusive comments and whilst that's maybe helpful in a tiny way, it wasn't helpful to me to be reading all that stuff.

Even well meaning people say things like "it happened a long time ago, why don't you get over it? It was the abuser's fault then but now it's your fault now for not taking control of your own life".

It's very frustrating for me to be stuck, desperately waiting to be able to do stuff but putting it off because I'm scared, or because I'm permanently exhausted. I don't want trauma to ruin my life going forward- because I survived, I'm physically safe now. I want to be strong now and it's so frustrating that I can't magically feel strong and alert and energetic (quite the opposite actually).

Maybe I'll start compiling stuff I've already written and go from there. I have all the time in the world to procrastinate. Which is something I desperately need to learn to overcome.

I've been thinking about this a lot. I've started and stopped multiple times writing my life story focusing on the abuse and I never manage to get far with it because?

I don't know if writing it down is helpful or self harm.

My initial idea was that if I write it all down in one place, I'll be able to "file it away" and forget about it, but obviously that's not happened. I'm haunted by the horrible memories and flashbacks in the same way whether I write about it or not.

Another idea I had was that writing it down could help others, for example, survivors of domestic violence who ended up in a relationship with an abuser because they were abused in their childhoods. I thought, somehow knowing that happens to a lot of people, could help them understand that it's not their fault they ended up with an abusive partner.

I didn't even understand I was being abused as a child - I just knew I wasn't okay and I thought there was something wrong with me.

I read a lot of autobiographies of survivors when I was stuck in my marriage to a psychopath and I remember always comparing the experiences of the writers with my life, sometimes putting myself down and thinking "I don't have it that bad, at least he didn't set fire to me" for example, which was bad for me. Other times I would think oh my goodness that's abusive, how could I not have seen it coming?" Or "If she escaped, so can I". So overall it was a helpful thing to read other people's accounts, but sometimes I worry that wanting to write about it means I'm fixated on the abuse that happened to me and obsessed with it. But that's ridiculous - I'm actually desperate to forget it ever happened. Then I realise how much I learned about avoiding certain behaviours and people, because if I forgot it happened, I could be in a very dangerous situation again and welcome people who abused me into my life and get abused again, or not understand when someone is grooming me to abuse me. So my CPTSD does serve a purpose (to protect me) but it's overprotecting me and I'm so confused...

I wrote a few chapters of my life story on multiple occasions. So many bits and bobs, nothing properly organised.

I'm also feeling like "why would anyone want to read that? It's so depressing".

I wrote some memories from my young adulthood on a forum for survivors of sexual abuse/rape and one of the moderators heavily edited it without telling me beforehand and then wrote to me basically telling me it was "glorifying drug addiction" and I was absolutely devastated. She didn't even keep a copy to send me privately. I felt violated. It was so painful writing that. It was so painful experiencing that to be able to write about it.

The attitude that survivor memoirs are some kind of "trauma porn" is really creepy. That scares me from writing my memoirs publicly/publishing them too. Because there probably are disgusting people who get off on reading about survivors traumatic experiences so that puts me off. I've already been humiliated once by an insensitive moderator. Imagine if I published my memoirs and got a horrible load of abuse from nasty critics. I remember reading a memoir of a woman who survived horrendous domestic violence and in the reviews on Amazon loads of people wrote nasty things about "I didn't like the way she stayed when it was obvious he was going to keep abusing her, frustrating to read her being beaten up for years and not leaving". I hate how ignorant people can be. Why read a memoir by a survivor of horrific dv if they're just going to blame her for the abuse because she didn't leave sooner?

Anyway I should talk about this with my therapist. I don't know whether I should write it or not. Maybe I should just write the novel I have in my head to try to focus on something else.

Hey Desert Flower,
I identify a lot with your experience.
The way you describe it as though it's "not happening to me" is how I feel too.
I have a lot of shame around not being able to work currently. I've realised it's mostly the voices of my mother, her family members - causing that shame. Their shame is that they didn't help me. They didn't save me when I was a vulnerable child being abused. All of them blamed me for being abused and my mother played victim that she couldn't cope with her daughter who "had gone off the rails" and she "didn't understand why" which was a lie to cover up her culpability.
It's okay to take a break. You need a break. We wouldn't expect someone with a noticeable illness to force themselves to work when they were ill or be forced to do so. I'm still full of shame though, feel like a complete failure but actually asking for help is a massive step. It's terrifying and you did it.

It's so difficult when our children are the same ages as we were when we were abused. I actually think it's a beautiful thing that you went out to rescue little you from being abused, and that in doing so you asked for help for her too.

It'll be okay. I wish there was a magical quick process though.
 

I'm going mad! I did reply 🙄

  Hey Desert Flower, I'm sorry I'm late replying too.
I don't understand mothers who treat us like school pupils. The complete lack of emotional availability is so frightening. I'm sorry sorry you experienced that too. I think because we weren't allowed to cry we're still scared to.
I'm also scared that if I allow myself to cry I won't ever be able to stop.