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Thank you everyone for taking the time to write something nice to me and for validating my experience.
I find it very challenging these days to navigate between pleasant and unpleasant emotions. It´s like a roller coaster ride with my eyes covered, so I can´t see what´s coming next - the up or the down. Lately I´ve been involved in different activities with different groups of people that filled me with a lot of energy. For the first time in my life I experienced real human connections and presence in the company of other people. It gave me the impression that I truly exist, that I´m not just an abstract something without borders and contours. This experience was out of this world and left me wanting for more. The more real I start to feel, the more I need to be connected to the reality. I realized that I´ve always had this need, I was born as an expectation for it. So when I started to experience it, it was as if a valve had been opened and now I yearn for more. I know that there´s huge amount of love that I´m capable of giving and receiving and that it´s always been my natural need.

I know that little me is still crying and crying and crying in a small bedroom in a separate wing of a big old house with three doors closed between me and my parents' room, and no matter how much I cry, nobody comes.

Saluki, I´m so sorry for what little you had to go through. I can relate to the quoted part so much that I can even picture your being in emotional pain because that was my experience, too. I wrote about this similar experience in my recovery journal, writing a letter to my mother when I was 10 and feeling so deeply alone in the process...
The pain of being abandoned, unloved, forgotten by my mother is a wound I will carry with myself forever. I just wanted you to know that I hear you and that you deserved to be loved and cared for.

I know that first wound was probably the most painful. Being abandoned by the world, being alone. As I´m uncovering more and more from my past and all my traumas, I feel more grief and also more pain. When healing is present, there´s always some amount of pain. There´s a part of me that thinks it´s in pieces. This broken self is longing to be whole, looking at the world from the perspective of it´s own brokenness. That´s why everything it sees is distorted and twisted. As children who don´t fully have a sense of time, this self also thinks that everything is infinite - the pain, the suffering, the sorrow. This part is stuck in the past, in and endlessly repeating scene from a horror movie.

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Today I had a very profound experience. It was something out of the blue, but it made me very joyous. As if the universe knew that I needed something to keep going. I was lying on the bed, just woke up from a nap, half-asleep, when suddenly my heart filled with immense love. I felt it to my core and it was radiating from inside my body. I started to think of all the people in the world, all the lives on Earth, how far they might be from me in the physical world, and yet how close they are to me, because we are connected. I realized that our lives our interconnected, no matter who we are or what we do. At that moment, the whole world could fit in my heart. And everything I went through and all the things I´m experiencing now and will be in the future, is a part of me, and not just me, but the wider universe. I´m not an island, I´m not alone, I´m part of something lot bigger than my mind can comprehend. It goes through space and time, it started before me and will be here long after I´m gone. I´m not religious, but at that very moment I felt something higher and thought to myself: if there´s some kind of God, it´s nothing but love. I felt so close to nature, I felt that it accepted me, that I could return and be united with it if I wanted to. And the best thing about this experience was that all the love I felt, was radiating from me, from my chest, my whole body, in fact. And that´s when I realized that it´s been inside me all the time, all the love I have in me, it never went away, it was there all along, waiting. And that means that I was never really broken, there is a place inside me that was whole the whole time. That part was never dead and I´m not dead either. I am capable of love, giving and receiving it.

Does the feeling of abandonment ever get better? There are multiple occasions a day when I feel the good old feeling of being left alone. Someone didn´t reply to my message? You are alone. Someone couldn´t find the time to dedicate to me or my needs? You are alone. You felt something good and now it´s gone? That´s because you are utterly, eternally, endlessly alone. It´s lurking in the darkness of my mind, waiting for the right time, and the right time comes almost every time a minor inconvenience happens (minor inconvenience = a huge disaster to a CPTSD folk). At that very moment I´m drawn back to the past, to the childhood I never really left mentally and emotionally. Painful emptiness and stone cold vacuum fills my body and the space around me. I´m experiencing anxiety and deep sorrow. I´ve never been loved and I´ll never be - this is the message it´s carrying. No matter how many people tell me the opposite, my childhood´s got it right. My mother´s got it right.

Gabor Maté, my hero and number one role model talks about this a lot. He himself was abandoned as a baby by his mother, who gave him to a stranger on the street to save his life that was threatened every day in nazi Hungary as a Jew. Despite being reunited with his mother after six weeks and living after in a loving and safe environment, he says he never fully recovered from this trauma of early abandonment. He was a baby who then got the chance to live a meaningful life with people he loves and he himself became someone who saved the lives of thousands of people as a doctor and a humanist. And yet, he never fully recovered. This deep are the childhood wounds.

So I´m sitting here thinking: Will I ever recover? Can someone fill the aching void that was supposed to be filled with unconditional love? If someone experiencing a short term abandonment can´t fully recover, can I, dealing with abandonment my whole childhood, get better? I´ve spent my whole life being absolutely sure that I´m all alone. I remember sitting on a bench in the park, waiting for the school bus, listening to the sound of the birds and distant chatters, and feeling that I´m alone in a world that forgot about me. There are people but I can´t reach them and neither can they. Abandonment became my second nature, my loyal companion. Things may change in the future, but the childhood scars are stronger than any bond in the world.

No matter what I do, this is embedded in my mind and soul. I can´t tear it out and throw it away. That´s just not how it works. I was a child who never once heard ´I love you´, who never once felt that she´s important and that it would be sad if she didn´t exist. Instead, she was abused and neglected, again and again, being used as a tool that had to be useful, otherwise it wouldn´t be needed anymore. I learned that I´m not precious and that love doesn´t come unconditionally. I´m worthy of stuff only if I can provide something in return. I have to be smart, kind, quiet and easy to manage. But love, unfortunately, didn´t follow and it took me almost thirty years to understand that it was never about me. But knowing something rationally and being able to act upon it, are two very different things. And my body and my soul remember everything. They feel the pain of the newborn that was emotionally left alone, they remember the tears of desperation of the ten year old writing a letter to her mother, asking why she never loved her. I remember everything. The question is: can I remember and heal at the same time?

Thank you, SenseOrgan, I really appreciate your kindness in these hard times. Yes, I very much agree with you and this is what keeps me going, even if it sometimes seems so meaningless, that through my personal healing and gaining of wisdom I can make changes in the broader world, too. I try not to forget that in my life I need to be in the first place, especially when it comes to healing the traumas, but this is what motivates me the most, the power of wisdom and healing that I can share with those who need it. Everything I do pretty much points into one direction: to make this world (inner and outer) a better place. My personal journey may be about me in the first place, but I like to think that it also benefits other people because, as you put it, we are not an island. My plan of becoming a social worker, which I wrote about, is also part of this bigger picture.

And it´s already changing me as a person in a positive way. I used to be in my head 24/7 and very much isolated from the outside world. All I cared about was my mental and emotional state, which is of course not a bad thing, only that it cut me off from the context I exist in. But with everything that´s happening, I am changing, too. I would have never thought that I have so much integrity and bravery in me that I´m experiencing nowadays. And you know what? My CPTSD, my personal healing journey and experiences of abuse and oppression (even systemic one, since I´m part of a minority ethnic group in a country where we don´t have equal rights with the dominant group), it all helps when it comes to understanding the issues of the world today. Everything I´ve been and am going through gives me extra understanding and compassion. I used to think about my negative experiences and ACEs as something that shouldn´t have happened (I still do in a sense that it was horrible and would never want it to happen to anyone), but it´s also starting to change and now I can value my experiences as something that helps me be more compassionate and helps me build something better for me and for others.

It can feel hopeless sometimes, especially with all the helplessness I´m experiencing, but it makes me want to integrate the pain into something bigger more.

I find it more and more difficult to concentrate on my personal growth and healing journey in a world that´s falling apart. Everything loses its meaning. It´s hard to find essence in everyday actions. I look around and see the objects surrounding me and creating my personal space, the proofs that I´m here right now, that I haven´t ceased to exist yet. And yet, my heart and soul is aching and this pain is the only thing that assures me that I´m still alive. The absurdity of existing in parallel with the death of thousands is what makes me question my very own existence. Everything feels out of context, in a vacuum, and the context itself is decomposing slowly, too. Where do I stand in this turmoil with my trauma and my deep knowledge of personal loss and suffering? How can I continue to live in a world that has stopped being the place I want to live in a long time ago? Where is my place in all this? Everything loses its meaning. Words don´t describe the pain sufficiently anymore. I can´t be free from suffering. Nobody is free until everyone is free. How can I heal my own wounds amidst the destruction? Where does "personal" end? In my soul, all starts to blend.

 

Thank you, NarcKiddo, for introducing this technique. I like it very much and it immediately reminded me of some people at work with whom I have this exact problem that they are behaving in a certain way and saying the same certain things all the time that I find extremely triggering. I find myself triggered even just imagining that they are going to approach me with the same stuff again every time I see them. I always get caught up in endless thoughts like "why are they like this, why are they doing this to me/saying mean stuff to me etc" and it makes me feel very sad and depressed even. I´ll definitely try this next time.

This post and the comments themselves gave me good vibes, just remembering that despite the bad stuff there are some happy moments, too. My happy memories most often operate on a sensory level, so they always pop up when I hear or feel or sometimes smell something that reminds me of that happy memory and then the pleasant feelings flood me and my whole being for a while and it´s heartwarming. It´s nice to be reminded of the good in life sometimes. 

Welcome to the forum, SomewhereThatsGreen. Here, I think, you can "shout it out loud", meaning that we can share our experiences, ask for advice or just vent or try to write our stories in our journals. I found it very helpful and I think there are many good and understanding people here who really care. Hope you find here what you´re looking for. 

Welcome, Yaya. I´m sorry for everything that happened to you and that you feel like an outsider, as you put it. I´ve always felt that way myself, still do many times. I know it´s the result of emotional neglect and disconnecting from myself as a coping mechanism, but it´s still hard to accept. I hope you can find here what you´re looking for. 

Silveris, I remember reading your post in March and thinking that something similar is happening to me, but I couldn´t really articulate it back then. But now that I had very recently experiences of this kind, I am starting to be aware of this in my life, too. For me, it always comes out of the blue, usually when experiencing something pleasant or neutral, suddenly a wave of profound sadness washes over me and I try to explain it to myself somehow but I can never really come close to deciphering it. And I realized that it might be connected to what you wrote about being disconnected from your emotions, that I can´t translate my somatic experiences into feelings or words. I´ve been living all my life disconnected from my emotions because it was safer this way and also because I was emotionally neglected, so I coudn´t develop these skills and it also meant being disconnected from my authentic self. So I find this concept very interesting and I can relate to it very much.

Thank you, Desert Flower. It´s very frustrating to feel those things I wrote about above and now it´s turning against me in a form of a very negative and very critical inner voice. It sucks so much to have these feelings or should I say beliefs about myself and my worth. There are many things that were actively harming me in the past and doing that passively to this day because of their power over me and it´s very hard to untangle from them. I try not to abandon myself and side with that inner critic in mocking me, but it´s very hard.

I wanted to ask, how do you guys manage the negative self-talk when it appears and is very strongly present? I am at this moment coping with this difficult situation: something (inner critic?) inside me keeps telling me that I'm pathetic because of the way I live vs the way I should be living by now as an adult. It also reminds me very often that I'm not enough and also my efforts are not enough. It's very hard to accept because it has a very negative effect on my mood and mental state. I tried to talk to myself and explain why is it happening to me and why do I feel the way I do but nothing seems to really work. Any advice or thing that anyone personally found to be useful would be very much appreciated. Thank you 

Hi BlueMoon, I just wanted to say that I hear you and you are not alone. I know that feeling of hopelessness when you try very hard and try again and again but nothing seems to change, so I wonder why trying and failing constantly when there´s no change to the better. It´s very frustrating and sad to believe that nothing I do has an impact on my life. Unfortunately, I don´t have a recipe how to solve this issue, it´s a though one for me, too. But I wanted to say that I absolutely hear you. Take care.