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Thank you for sharing this, Slashy.
I've experienced very similar stuff to what you describe.

Oh,I forgot to mention just sleeping when you get the chance whenever you feel you need to.

Obviously that's not possible if you have children or work commitments, but I was suggested this by a therapist once. She said that she had a client who worked freelance so was able to work very flexible hours and letting go of the traditional "you have to sleep at certain times and wake at certain times" thing was the only way her client could get good enough, long enough, consistent sleep.

A lot of CPTSD sufferers find it easier to sleep during daylight and have a very active mind during the hours of darkness. That's always been the case for me, and before I had children, just sleeping during the day and working at night helped me keep my brain from melting due to exhaustion from lack of sleep.

Hey Laurrr,
I struggle with insomnia too and have done all my life. I'm so sorry to hear about the abuse you suffered. That's not fair.

I'm always looking for helpful suggestions too.

Someone suggested listening to audiobooks at bed time. So long as I'm careful to choose something that's not triggering, they have been very helpful so far. I've had a lot of sleepless nights regardless, however, when audiobooks help, I can manage to sleep a few hours and actually get back to sleep if I wake. Choosing stories that are very exciting and suspenseful aren't a good idea, as I found myself staying awake to find out what happened!

Someone else recommended Mirtazipine, which helped me immensely when I was younger. Last time I tried it it helped immensely with calming my mind, with sleep too. The downside was that it caused my digestive system to become very bloated and uncomfortable. Basically, it flared up my IBS really badly. I was so disappointed when the side effects didn't even out after persisting for a few months. I had to stop taking it and I'm currently prescribed an antihistamine combined with melatonin. Without the side effects, Mirtazipine would have been a game changer.

Other sleep aid stuff I do:

I have an essential oil burner with a tea light. The light helps because it's dark enough to sleep but not dark enough to feel scared of what might be in the dark. I use lavender oil and frankincense oil or occasionally damask rose oil. Rose oil is very comforting to me.

I sleep with a hot water bottle for comfort too. Even in the summer. I have no idea why this helps, but without it I can't sleep.

I have to sleep downstairs because I have chronic pain that makes stairs difficult, but the other reason is because it's easier to flee if I don't have to jump out of an upstairs window if my psychopath ex finds me.

I used to read a bedtime prayer out loud (to do with my culture of origin) but I've forgotten to do that for a while. It really, really helped in the past but obviously faith based stuff doesn't help everyone.

I hope you are able to find something that works for you

Hey Edna,
"I'm a recovering oversharer" really hit a nerve with me: me too. I look back at some of the things I told people who later used those things against me very cruelly and I wonder too: where's the middle ground?
I guess it's not so much the sharing, but the trust I had in the wrong people that was the problem. Sometimes I'm not sure if I've been too harsh, cutting people out of my life who have hurt me, then I remember, there are good people in the world who would never have abused my trust like that, and at the time, I needed a friend to share those things I told them with. I used to believe in the idea that a problem shared is going to make it easier to solve, and I still do believe that. I'm just more careful who I share my problems with. That's why I like this space. I'm much happier in my own company than in the company of people who don't have my best interests at heart.

Hey Blueberry, I've not read through the whole thread here, but I just wanted to say me too re. exercise being triggering. Actually, until I read your post I hadn't even realised that the word itself is triggering too and I like how you use the word movement instead. I find it impossible to stick to goals I set myself. I installed a fitness app and actually forgot I'd installed it. I've still not tried it. It's just sitting in my phone laughing at me! Thanks for bringing this subject up. My mother was hypercritical of my body, my weight, my fat distribution, my unfitness. She was constantly telling me that I needed to do exercise because I (according to her) was fat and lazy. My parents also used to take me with them on very physically challenging outings eg) hillwalking and cycling from a very young age, expecting me to keep up when I simply wasn't capable. I think that put me off for life. It was music rather than sports that my mother made me compete at. Ugh. I was pushed so hard and of course, never good enough. I'm working on learning to enjoy playing music without caring if I make a mistake or play a note out of tune and constantly criticising myself!


I've also experienced chronic pain from adolescence onwards, which definitely doesn't help.

Wishing you the best of luck with the orthopaedic doctor. I hope it goes well and that you are able to find ways to significantly improve and reduce your pain.

Thanks Storyworld,
I've recently downloaded a library app and since I've been listening to audiobooks instead of podcasts. I definitely agree with the uplifting idea. I realised a lot of stuff I'd usually read is murder mystery sort of stuff! Not a great plan!

Thank you so much for sharing your beautiful song, Getting There.
I really, really needed to cry. I've been unable to sleep for the whole of last night and all of today because I've been in emotional turmoil about my daughter, who was also a daddy's girl and who bravely locked her daddy (my psychopath violent, alcoholic ex husband) in the garden for just long enough that we could escape with her little brother.
She was just 8 or 9 years old. I can't even remember and it's been a rollercoaster since.

He hurt us all so much and the absolute horrors of the reality of it all has done so much damage.

Now my daughter is an adult. He identifies as my son. He's a beautiful person underneath all that pain and anger.

And I've had to make some tough decisions this year after he violently assaulted me whilst shouting the exact words his daddy shouted at us all, when he was a daddy's girl, desperate to please him and not to abandon her... which was a regular threat to manipulate us all into submission.

I'm sorry, I came here to try to write a poem and instead I saw your song.

Thank you. I don't know what it was like from your perspective, but you helped me understand my lost son/daughter who needs to learn to love little her.

Ooh, I've found the potting shed! I kinda wish my shed had an extension so I actually had space for potting plants in it!

Okay, so I'm trying my best to get everything going properly and in the correct order with the help of a wonderful book my dad bought me many years ago. It plans out all the garden tasks, plants, even wildlife, week by week. But I only do spring, summer and autumn because during winter I hibernate.

So far has been a challenge, a struggle and a triumph.

Baby leeks- half of them planted out, the rest waiting patiently for my body to heal sufficiently from the digging to brave planting more. The soil was so compacted it was excruciating, but worth it.

Onion sets was easier. Just a bit of weeding and in they went. They're sprouting nicely now. Procrastination was the obstacle there (as always... avoidance... chronic, crippling avoidance)...

Broccoli that I grew last summer for my son is sprouting regularly and reminding me how much I miss him. Forget me nots he planted have spread to remind me to be terrified for his wellbeing. I worry about him every day and it seems poignant that those were the flowers he chose.

It hurts.

Omar Khayyam roses in bud, planted last season on the graves of our elderly cats. I miss them so much. The damasks are going to be as beautiful as the cats were, just different (and far, far, far more scratchy).

Life cycles...

I love the garden.

I mourn being physically able
to dig, plant and weed all day, every day. It was my distraction during years of abuse and it's been my therapy since recovery started.

My most exciting seeds I'm trying this year are passionflower. Do they actually represent suffering?

Beans next week. I must try to remember.

Hey Skyward and welcome to OOTS.
I'm so sorry you're in this horrible situation with your mother. It's so hard,it really is.


I cut contact with my mother irretrievably by moving home a few years ago. The fact that she kept her address secret from me helps ease the guilt a little. I feel safe now from her hatemail and weird "gifts". I very much empathize with the moral dilemma - I still feel guilty for "abandoning" my elderly mother, but I have to protect myself and my children. Their memories of her (I cut contact when they were in junior school) were of her hostile, manipulative, highly divisive behaviour. She played the golden child/scapegoat game with my kids and they called her out. It didn't go well. I received an absolutely disgusting letter from her in response to a text I sent asking her nicely to treat my kids with equal kindness. Pages and pages of put downs.

I'm glad I made the decision to not tell her my address. I also feel tremendously guilty. But she's been lying to me for years, so I'm trying to be compassionate to myself.

I know 100% that she will have been telling her entire extended family how nasty I am to have abandoned her, using her age as an extra sting. She poisoned her family against me years prior to me moving anyway.

I miss the nice part of her. I miss who she was when she wasn't being cruel, rude, abusive, hostile and to be honest, the nice parts were often pure manipulation.

I feel awful. I miss the mum I never had, but I don't miss my mother.

Maybe I turned her into a monster in my head to protect myself,but if I talk about my experiences of her, I realise she was never a mum. Just a very lost, mentally ill individual stuck in a role she never wanted and couldn't cope with.

I thought thanking her for raising me in spite of not wanting me would break the ice and allow us to have at least an adult relationship, cards on the table,but no- it just led to denial, DARVO and aggression.

My mother would use poor old me tactics too, abusing my empathy.

Have you watched the British sitcom, Friday Night Dinner? There's a character in it called "Horrible Grandma"- me and my kids thoroughly enjoyed watching that and started calling my mother "Horrible Grandma", which helped. Comedy is my favourite coping mechanism!

It sounds like going low contact and setting some boundaries like Kizzy mentioned is a good starting place. I think my situation is quite extreme and even then, the guilt hurts and I thought I'd feel better for not having her in my life,but actually, I just feel sad, hopeless... because all I ever wanted was a mum who loved me. She doesn't.

Thank you for posting about this. Yes, I've been away from the abusive situation for a long time and I have a ridiculously overactive startle response and get into a panic that floods me with panic hormones (is that corisol?) when something just slightly worrying happens. For example, my cats were a little longer than usual coming in for their dinner tonight and usually they come running in- today I couldn't find them anywhere and my entire body went into panic mode. Of course, they came meandering back so casually about 15 minutes later after I called...
I think I maybe should ask my GP if he can test for cortisol levels. He usually doesn't seem to offer anything, I'm not very good at describing what I mean because I panic and get my words muddled up. I'm expecting to be disappointed/refused/told there's nothing he can do... underfunding isn't helping the NHS.

My mother knew I was being s/a as a child and took the side of the paedophile. She then went on to try to convince me my dad s/a'd me.

Just letting you know you're not alone.

It is!
We humans need to be able to talk about things openly without being verbally and even physically attacked in the process.
Especially difficult to understand is that his abusive behaviour and meltdowns have absolutely nothing to do with him being trans: they're to do with him being emotionally disregulated. Yet he refused over and over again to get professional help for his severe emotional disregulation.
He knows I've been supportive. He does know this.

It's never been that I have a problem with him being trans, (though like any other parent, I very much want him to be sure he's making the right decision. Not sure if he's giving himself the space to find out). It's that I have a problem with his obnoxious and often abusive behaviour that's gone way beyond the "normal" teen rages that many teens go through. In fact it's been getting increasingly bad the older he gets.

Let's just say it's really, really hard for him to cope with gender dysphoria: that doesn't give him an excuse or even a reason to attack me and behave like he has been. He wouldn't even join the forum for people on the waiting list for the gender clinic his GP gave him; he also refused to engage with any of the specialist support that the private therapist who diagnosed his dysphoria recommended. He said he goes on Reddit. In my experience, Reddit is a cesspool of trolls. The more he looks at all this stuff on the internet, the more aggressive he became towards me.

It's horrible feeling a sense of relief that he's not here. And also feeling terrified that he's not mentally stable and pretty much alone in the world because he's pushed his supportive family away and made it impossible for him to live here any more. I just want him to be okay.

I also want him to get some good, regular, long term professional care for his mental health.

I completely accept that if he's *genuinely* going to have a happier life by medically transitioning, that's his life, his choice, and I'll always be his mum. I don't accept that he's taken all the steps required to be of a sound enough mind to know whether the path he's taking is going to make him happier. I really don't. I'm unable to talk to him about this and haven't mentioned it for years because I was made aware that this topic was a rage trigger. That's pretty narcissistic. I lived with the psychopath ex husband long enough to recognise a pattern of blowing up at anything I said he disagreed with in order to control me. I walked on eggshells for most of my marriage. I recognise narcissistic control techniques and I have boundaries.

What I can't accept is being treated badly. What I also wish is that he'd accept some help to talk this gender incongruence thing through in depth. Because it's been feeling to me for quite some time that he's scared that if he gets regular therapy, that they'll somehow talk him out of being trans. Which doesn't make sense at all. Because if he really is, how can someone talk him out of it? And why would he be scared to be talked out of it anyway? It's not like he's a biological male wanting to transition to female whose voice has deepened and who's developed a big, chunky, masculine face and body. It really is different for female to males- they can get the same results long term if they leave it til their 40s and beyond, whereas a person who was born male isn't going to be able to. So why the desperate, obsessive rush?

I don't talk to him about this stuff any more because I'm guaranteed to have my head bitten off.

The obsessiveness of it and the complete refusal to have any calm, open discussion about it is a red flag to me. The absolute rage that happens if I even slightly disagree about something eg) whether or not Elon Musk is a horrible individual, is a red flag to me.

I guess as a parent, I can't be right, no matter what I do or say.

If I'm thoroughly supportive, I'm wrong because I trigger him by calling out his abusive behaviour eg) if he shouts abuse at me or throws things/breaks things and I say "your behaviour is abusive", I get told I'm being abusive by using the word abusive to describe his behaviour. I even go to the lengths of explaining that it's not that I believe he's deliberately trying to hurt me, but that he needs to understand that certain behaviours are abusive, and that he needs help to learn healthy coping strategies and help to regulate his emotions. It's not like I'm even arguing with him about anything: I just say I don't feel able to talk about that if I feel like the conversation is going round in circles. It's okay to not understand someone completely. He desperately wants/needs me to understand every little weird thing about him and when I can't understand, he becomes completely enraged. If I set boundaries and limits eg) no, I'm not having that conversation because I don't understand it and I'm not going to be able to understand it, he gets so furious. It's not my fault if I genuinely don't understand something!

Ugh.

It feels like in the world there's no middle ground in this gender thing. It's either extreme gender ideology that strives to fit everyone into a specialised box, and forces people to conform to their ideology, otherwise they're evil, or on the other hand, people who want everyone to have very strict traditional gender roles where females are all soft and feminine and men are quite macho.

I'm somewhere in the middle - just being me and minding my own business. I just want to be treated in a reasonable, respectful manner and I don't want my son (or anyone else) trying to make me tiptoe around him in case some word I say offends him.

The other thing is that he's got it into his head that if he doesn't get hormones and surgery, the only option is to commit suicide.

I told him that he should get therapy to cope with the waiting list. That was seen as transphobic.

Seriously, whoever has been writing these textbooks that make people think not having therapy to cope with waiting for hormones is transphobic should be struck off whatever register that allows them to put their sick academic drivel out there in the public domain and in educational institutions, because it's severely damaging young people.

Reading about your daughter's behaviour and the abusive treatment she's exhibited whilst blaming you for her behaviour sounds exactly the same as what's been happening here.

I did the same with regards asking him to go to therapy to get some help with his extreme anger issues and his extreme anxiety around learning to interact healthily with people in the outside world. He refused, over and over again and kept explaining and explaining why the problem was me and how I triggered him.

Unless he figures out for himself that his behaviour here was completely unreasonable and abusive, unless he figures out that he's the one who needs to learn to deal with his expectations on others to behave how he wants them to...he won't change. He seems to think he can treat everyone like dirt, but they have to treat him like a precious, fragile little doll. No.

Thanks Chart. Nothing at all you wrote is offensive. It's your experience. You know, that's one of the things that's been causing tension here: all the "education" from my son on what offended him, what his "triggers" were, and how I needed to adapt my language, behaviour and personality in order for him not to fly off the handle.

I kept telling him that it's unreasonable for him to attempt to manipulate the world around him to adapt to his mental illness (he's been telling me he has CPTSD around the perceived "transphobia" he apparently experienced.) Whereas, if he actually does indeed have CPTSD, the triggers aren't genuine: they're invented from watching YouTube and reading trans Reddit and so forth. He's been reacting to other people's traumas. I've witnessed it developing and it's complete madness. If I don't "validate" his "triggers" and behave unnaturally around him, he explodes into a rage. Yes, it's very narcissistic. Because his actual trauma was from living with the psychopath ex husband, his birth father, who was severely abusive. My son has adapted his experience to incorporate transphobia, which would be understandable if he treated me and the members of our household with dignity, care and respect. Instead, he's shouting and raging that we're disrespectful simply for setting boundaries with him. No, no and no. I am not going to act out a fantasy where I'm walking on broken glass just so I don't set him off. I never know what will set off his rages, because his "triggers" keep changing and increasing. I told him actually, it's a good idea to get some psychological help from a therapist to cope with your triggers. This was seen in itself to be offensive. I told him that the world won't change to adapt to his triggers. He's going to have to learn to live in the world. Apparently, that's offensive. Every person who "misgenders" him becomes basically an evil person. He refuses to have the concept that it's normal for people to need time to get used to calling him "he" when he doesn't pass as a male.

If he read this, I expect he'd never speak to me again. As it is, he hasn't spoken to me apart from once since he assaulted me. It's been several weeks. And I still haven't had a proper apology or any understanding of how deeply his behaviour has affected me or any of us here.

Apart from that, he was trying to explain to me that I'm trans. Even telling me I should have surgery (a double mastectomy). Seriously, he would laugh sarcastically at me when I said I'm not trans, I don't want surgery or hormones. I'm just me and I'm okay with me.

He hates "grifters for the right" ie) trans people who speak out against the extreme gender theory. Eg) Buck Angel. I can't remember any of the other names, but I listened to Buck Angel and he seems perfectly reasonable to me.