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Re the book, we have a draft manuscript we're sending out to agents/publishers now. From what we've heard/read it looks to be a long process. The book team are having a meeting this Sunday and I think we're going to talk about a drop dead date. By that I mean if we haven't been picked up by XXXX we will likely move into self-publishing. More to come!

Mmm, publishers, nothing reminds me of an abusive relationship more than a publishing deal! I did 15 plus years in mainstream publishing and I can tell that indie slef publishing is the way... IF and it's a big if, you can get your head around the marketing. Feel free to message me if you need a bit of the indie advice.

Narcicists push hard upwards, usually using shock and awe tactics or criticising other people into the rungs of a ladder. But it never lasts, they go up, they over reach, then they fail, and fail LARGE. At some point they have to prove their value with actual ability, and they rarely have anything to give beyond manipulation, exploitation and lies. Doesn't stop em trying.

Grab your popcorn, put a log on the fire, and wait.

meant to ask Kizzie... did your CPTSD book come out?

Thanks Kizzie. I dunno, I've reached this point where I've shone a torch into every corner, changing the bulb each time I get a new nugget, or diagnosis. It's great to know what's wrong with ME, but blimey... what in the name of all that is reasonable, was wrong with THEM?

How many of us in here are trying to make sense oof what is just plain inexplicable? We want answers, but how can there be answers for some of these utter monster and their flying monkeys? My heart breaks for all of us here, because no one deserves what we've had to endure. Should we carry any of their guilt, shame and corruption, the negligence and the selfishness for them? No, and I refuse to even think about doing that any more. These people have turned a blind eye to every shred of decency and moral code that all of us... ALL of us, are made aware of through religion, art, literature, experience and folklore. We have rules, we have norms, but we have these people who walk amongst us and they do unspeakable things, or allow it to occur in plain view without intervention and tho small in number, they cause MAYHEM.

But we can't do their work for them. We have to prove them wrong by severance, finding the good and broadcasting it and living lives free of thee poison they seem to like.

Walk away. Stay away. Be defiant in defence and open to real love, real beauty and real emotion.

Hi Dolly, Thanks for that. It's well worth looking at. It's not a problem, we're just different, but it does make us horribly easy to manipulate and distort. Therapists, I dunno. I mean I went 10 years with mine and when I told her she said 'Oh I would never have spotted that.' Ohhhhkkkaaaayyyyyyyy. I mean... you have ONE job, etc.

I don't buy the 'I don't want a label' response of many to these things, it's pure logic to me. I had something flipping me out and I needed to work out what it was. I need everything found, fixed and files away so I can get on with my life. If that's a label, then fine. Give me a label. A label is a tool for you, who cares what anyone else thinks about it?

The ambiguity for me is where medication ends and the diagnosis starts, which has had the biggest impact? Also, how much was C-PTSD after all? What my Psychiatrist told me was that trauma responses are much much stronger if you have ADHD. Makes sense. It was a mix.

Not so much a magic bullet for me now, more a shotgun blast of answers. In all honesty tho, I don't think there's much I can't explain now. That's no small thing.

I'm not broadcasting this to people tho. It's just a proper toolkit. We all need that, don't we?

Thanks both.

I've never cut my rope, because I'm not prepared to make anyone's job easier. You can be gaslit by monsters to thinking whatever brand of nonsense they are peddling, but they are the ones to pity, these dreadful behaviours come from fear, cowardice and failure. Pity them, then walk away and let them rot in whatever pond they think is normal. It's not normal.

Narcissists and psychotics are actually very small in number, but their effect is huge. But we have to try and see the good stuff, the good people, and we need to smell the flowers despite them. And we have to just ignore their enablers and apologists too. Heaven knows why those people exist. They do tho. In some ways they are more of a problem, least ways they were for me. I think they will always exist tho, so we'd better brace ourselves and know that we will have to let more than just our abusers go if we are to live our best lives.

I'm hungry for life now. Won't be held back.... nope, nope, nope.

[I did wrong]

Hi all. bit of mind dump here but a LOT has happened and I need to articulate it. Like you do.

ADHD diagnosis came through as expected in July. Aced the test! I'd had plenty of time to anticipate my reactions as I was certain it was coming, so no big flip out, soul searching or regrets. Not entirely accurate, that tho, as the final diagnosis lets the last doubts go away and your are free to process a whole life through the right lens finally.

Meds straight away, concerta, and effects have been remarkable. Trauma thoughts virtually vanished overnight, which at first I thought was solely down to the meds, but which i now suspect is 50% of why it lifted.

The thing is, that the ADHD was the missing component in my C-PTSD story. It was the gift to my protagonists, the instability in me that justified the condescension, bullying and neglect. It gave them fuel to undermine my boundaries and my privacy. And when the trauma moments reached their absolute crescendo, it made me less and less able to control my feelings, and my focus and my self moderation went to pieces, which, of course, made their lousy, petty behaviour even easier. As the trauma hit, my self control went with it, and shame was to follow.

But shame isnt always obvious, is it? The feelings were masked and hidden. Obsessed with the trauma, I put all recovery eggs in one basket, and didn't go near the ADHD at all. Why would I? I had legitimate reasons to assume everything was down to PTSD.

But it didn't stay down, and it naturally made recovery from C_PTSD impossible. I couldn't work out why I could get rid of that last 20% of the shrapnel. I couldn't, because it wasn't shrapnel at all, it was simply how I was wired.

Some things you simply cannot help, it's who you are. I was sensitive, scatty, prone to creative bursts one moment, and cognitive gridlock the next. So what? Is that a crime? Apparently, yes. It's an especially heinous crime, it seems. when you have a mother with a stroke, a business, an alcoholic partner * bent on dying and a narcissistic sibling determined to wipe out everything else around him. With everyone around me dumping their issues on me and leaving me to do the heavy lifting, they stood back to pick holes in a breakdown they were quite happy to create. More stress, more mistakes. To keep control, I had to think harder, push my poor brain to its absolute limits, my masking breaking down under the sandblasting. Every stumbled was highlighted, and broadcasted back at me, exagerating the effect. Victim shaming was the order of the day. ADHD and trauma, my head was at a level of self control that was simply too much, and it waited until my mother died and one wall of my cage was gone and I moved away, and then it broke.

Of course it broke. Self control like that is a dam, you hold back, but it's never going to be forever, the trauma lifts and then the bouncing bomb will finally pop and the flood will come. It's just a matter of time.

10 years later, I have the means to stop it, finally.

I've been hoping for someone or something to forgive me for the things I did wrong. But that's just it. I did NOTHING wrong. I was thrown a thousand babies and I caught way more than was reasonable. For someone with ADHD, I'm amazed I caught any of them. But what I dropped has haunted me, not least because they are the substance of the stick that was used to beat me, occasionally directly, but more often in the cowardly shadows of gossip and online slander. They'd never win a a public head on accusation against me, because it wouldn't work, and a one with two neurons of enquiry would have asked 'yeah, but where were you, then?' Instead, those with the most to answer for chose to mutter their poison in fringe venues. Emails and messaging with distant relatives, over beer in pubs, at my dead partner's wake. Some I caught out, a lot I didn't, and never will, but the damage it did was enough to destroy friendships with people I just couldn't bear justifying and compensating with any longer. Frankly, it was so painful, I let people go who were on my side, simply because I felt I couldn't take the chance.

The smallest slivers of truth, can create the most grotesque and inflated lies. I just felt flawed at a deep, deep level and I couldn't shake it. What I now know was ADHD, was the component that made it unshakable, a gift to these awful, morally lazy people who'd chosen cheap, easy narratives over a complex terrible story, simply for the * of it or to explain away why they didn't come to the aid of my ex partner and a man desperately trying to save her from herself. I can say with 100% certainty, that even a small intervention from these people could have changed EVERYTHING. I asked, repeatedly, and they ignored me. It made zero sense to me. How can you lie on such an industrial scale like that?

But I get it now, I get ME. I can see how I tried to cope with the building crisis with stress lines everywhere I didn't even remotely understand. Even so, I took it on, did my part, even tho others didn't. I get WHY I broke afterwards, I get why I was such a target, why I felt every injustice with the pain of 3 people, I get all of it.

Now I have to just let the monsters and the goblins go altogether. I was hanging on for admonishment from people unworthy of the job. I don't need to feel even linked to these people. I GET that one now. Oh yes. Letting go means exactly that. Go... GO AWAY. Get out of my beautiful mind.

It can be a horrible world, if you let horrible people tell you it is.

IT's actually however beautiful I want it to be.

Thanks NarcKiddo.

There's so much cross over with C-PTSD and neurodivergence, you can never be sure where one ends and another begins, but the treatments need a different approach even tho the symptoms can be near identical. Tough unravelling. Ithink it's a lot like a house fire, the fire always looks like a fire, but it may have been electrical, a box of matches or arson, only the sifting through of the ashes can tell you which, and why.

I'm pretty sure that in my case, it was ADHD fracture lines that the later trauma blew apart, causing C-PTSD. I'd been pretty different to most people around me, which for the most part, wasn't that negative. I was funny, creative and alive and that went down well in my circle. But I was also struggling terribly with organisation, memory, maths, and the sciences. At school I could mask it, but at home I was relentlessly bullied by my brother, every mistake blown up into 80 foot neon letters and broadcast back out into the world. You live this double life, hiding your self in case it brought down this psychological warfare on your head simply for being the person you had no choice in being. I got over it tho, and for 10 years with my ex partner I was safe, happy with someone who I trsuted and who seemed to understand. Then both families went for us. She was equally messed up by hers, and I think both families, especially her abusive mother and sisters, and my Narc brother just couldnt cope with the idea that their written off scapegoats were thriving. We spent so much energy keeping them at bay, I cannot tell you. And it worked, until both mothers became ill. Then we were trapped.

People I've spoken to about this who have been through anything simliar, get it. They know how destructive these things can be, but those who havn't can be breathtakingly blase and glib. Why couldn't you just... that's what I would have done. Yeah, right. Try it. Walk in our shoes and tell us how easy you are gonna find it. It destroyed us. It killed my poor partner. It nearly killed me. Everything we'd built between us unravelled. Our time, energy and peace were just ripped away dealing with the unescapable mess that a dying mother can bring with them. Rrapped in place, we were subjected to wave after wave of game playing, manipulation and abuse. It broke us.

When it started breaking me, I broke along those old fracture lines, ADHD suoercharged my decline, no question. My brain just froze solid, I couldnt think clearly, but I could overthink, and boy did I overthink. My head was like a mass of pistons, thumping away in every direction, trying to keep 8 steps ahead of the next move of people who could outflank me simply by smashing through decent humanity and the milk of human kindness as if they never existed. That's why narcicissim wins, at least at first, they don't play by the rules, they don't think they apply. I just couldnt stop being the Eloi to their Morlocks, I clung to manners, empathy and respect to keep me afloat in a sea of bile and it didn't work. When it did finally stop, I slunk away, put my head down and then the C-PTSD really started. All the conversations, all the 5D chess I'd been playing in my head, rehearsing my responses, pleas to reason and desperate boundary management, it all began replaying to me. 4 or 5 conversations at the same time, rotating and spinning, flashbacking me in to a mess. It took a year for that to stop. I think that's the ADHD component there really, the obsessive repetative rabbitholes, the racing ill focussed thoughts.

Those fracture lines shape so much of what happens later I think. I'd been groomed for my trauma from the nursery.

Bit of a mind dump there, but I get it now. I get the way I went nuts for dopamine while being starved of every happy hormone I should have had. It made me reckless, out of control, a danger to myself. I got of lightly. I lost control of money very badly, something that has taken a long time to settle. I fought like crazy to get out of debt, and did well, too well really, because now I can't get my foot off the accelerator without my partner physically dragging out of the car. I got a very bad scare. I thought I'd had it, not gonna lie.

But you do get through.

You have to find out everything you can take in about what is happening to you scientifically, tough as that can be. You need to know why.

You need also, to hear other stories that show you which tramline you are stuck in, and how some of that is not as unique as it often feels.

You need to accept that no one is coming to put things right. Leave closure to TV dramas, they rarely happen outside in the wild. Closure has to be worked for internally, by you, for you. Narcicistic abuse isnt a crime, the people who did you such harm will not be arrested, they will not be converted and they will not be brought to book. If you don't seek that, you won't die on that hill, waiting. The punishment they have, is to go on being who they are.

You need to balance experience and regret. Learn from what happened, but don't live by it. Learn as much as you need to avoid such people and places again, learn your rights and your freedoms, learn that you can and should walk away if anything like that ever comes to you again. But don't live in fear, bitterness and regret. It's hard, I know, but if you don't try for that, it can't happen. Let those emotions win and the people who hurt you so badly will have you doing all the work for them. Don't let them live in your head.

You need compassion. You need it for yourself. You did what you could, with what you had availible to you. Who is born knowing how to cope with the intolerable? Of course you made mistakes, dropped the ball, failed to defend yoursef or were weak. You are human, these are very human responses and flaws that people under unprecedented abuse will always fall into. If you live in a flustered spinning storm, how can you walk a line that straight? The victim is not a perfect victim, nor should they ever be expected to be. There will be drinking, drug use, recklessness and personal chaos. OF COURSE THERE WILL BE. Excessive pressure leads to unpredictable behaviour. Be nice to yourself and let it go. A counsellor once said to me the line 'Not flipping suprising' NFS. It's a fine mantra. There's nothing to appologise for, you did what you had to do to survive.

You need to find beauty. The world is still full of wonder, love and delight. In spite of the layers of muffling cloying worry you've had, it's still there in nature, in experience and in, believe it or not, people. Just the RIGHT people. Find the things that shine their light through smog and let it wash over you. Get out in the trees, feel the sun on your skin, the sounds of a natural world that is oblivious to ego, pride and jealousy.

Do what you... YOU... need to do, to get well again. You do not need anyone's permission to live. So live.

that's fantastic Kizzie, it's certainly needed.

Hi all, been a while since I've posted in here, so much life going on... wowza.

Mostly good tho, but a lot to reflect on and a lot of lessons learned that might be worth sharing so...

The big thing has been the ADHD awareness. I was completely blindsided on this, it just wasn't on my radar, but once I'd seen my partner's daughter going through diagnosis and seeing her struggles with the people around her it was unignorable really. I wasn't going to pursue it, given that it's a hugely expensive process and the health service is on it's knees dealing with the waves of interest in the subject, but then I was given health insurance wether I wanted it or not by my new corporate overlords and I thought, well, it's now or never.

So I'm at a proper shrink for the first time in all this story and out it all tumbled, the bullying, the condescension and the effect of trying to pull rabbits out of a hat, minus the hat, the rabbits or the magic wand and the trauma period with all it's hideous nuances and shame and it was pretty good. I have a counsellor, but truly, 'there, there, there' can only get you so far. this was proper psyche stuff and for once I felt I was being properly evaluated. I'm sick of having to self-diagnose, sick to the teeth of doing the work I needed someone, anyone, to help me with. It's exhausting and quite often, flawed. You do your best, don't you? But a damaged mind is not te best tool to fix a damaged mind. So yeah, it's been really helpful. But I don't have the results as yet and I've been hung up on the wait. If it's ADHD, I have to adjust in one direction, if it's autism or still ptsd, then each of those also have distinctively different approaches, so I really crave knowing, ya know.

Either way, it's been good to see the reaction to my story from a skilled practitioner.  Yeah... it was a lot. Seeing then only person in your life you trust being driven away from you by your own family, seeing them collapse in on themselves and die, it's not, despite the bad press I've had, NOTHING. It was everything. To survive you have to walk away from everything, impoverish yourself and fix yourself in the worst of gales, battered by narcissistic abuse, neglect from the people you thought were friends or scapegoated by associations who could have done so much to help, but never did.

It did me a lot of harm. You will all understand what I mean. HARM.

But the fracture lines were in place a long time before that storm, cracked in the bedrock of my personality just waiting for old family dynamics to switch back from the past to the future.

I've come to realise that so much of the fabric of my life had been badly chosen by me beyond the family though. I'd been so used to narcissists that I didn't swerve around them, and my 'creative' worklife, with all it's instability and unpredictability made me poor and vulnerable to a world of posers, the desperate and the fickle. That's arts and media for you. At each stage of my life I was marinating the future with past, again and again, using the same worthless flawed ingredients and wondering why my next great recipe always ended up like the slop it was the time before. So much is different now, a different world, different types of people, a new town, new landscapes, it's very different but of course, as the saying goes, here I still am, and it's time to systemically change.

Frustratingly, the trauma is still there, shaping my reactions to my relationship and my management of myself. If I'm tired, especially, the effects are really pronounced with a constant burnout vibe hovering around that can make me irritable, impatient and depressed. And I've been tired a lot. We've moved house, I had way too much work on, and my head has been so busy. If it really ADHD, and we shall soon know, then it's been getting very strong of late. I need new tools for this phase of my life, and I need a rest. Oh man, I need a rest.

The physical work of moving is nothing, good even, but the day job is just not enough to stop my mind freewheeling and it's just exhausting. I need it to stop. You can't really explain this to anyone really, the sheer energy sap of trauma and it's clawing aftermath. I'm like a laptop with the fan going crazy, running a million programmes and understanding little of what is happening.

At any rate, I'm expecting some proper advice this time around. If it's still trauma, then it's off for EMDR again. If it's ADHD, then adjustments and maybe, MAYBE... meds. Let's see. I want this over.

It's been too long.

I feel for you all in here. I feel it in my guts, it's a hideous condition. People don't, can't, won't understand. How can you understand such and invisible attractional effect, but we know.

We know.

Hang in there. Understand it, fight it.

there is nothing wrong with walking away... walk away, be safe, be happy

Yes! I've got a postive log on my phone that I add to. It's so easy to brush over positives and concentrate on negatives, but there are a lot of good things if you keep your eyes open. Writing them down got me through some rough patches, for sure.

So, where are we now then?

Big changes afoot here. All good I think, but naturally, a little more dicey if c-ptsd is in the picture.

Firstly, work going through a transition as we go though a buy-out. It's good, more cash, more security and interesting to boot, but it will perhaps take energy, and if there is one thing I've learned about energy and C-PTSD, it's that you have to manage it, budget for it as if it were money. Two years more, then I retire. That's the plan.

Then there's a house move, quite a long way away to a sleepy town where we can work remotly. Lovely house but a fixer-upper. More energy.

Money is finally under control after a LONG down cycle. Significant.

An old friend finally came up good and started communicating. Seems we both have ADHD. Mixed feelings here as he clearly wants my understanding because he needs it, but... well... where was understanding for me, ya know? It's a tough one to shake, the feeling of weariness where friendship should be. But I'm better just pushing past that and welcoming him back in. If I can.

Then there's my coldness in my relationship, some from me, some from my partner. Both of us want it to drift away but there's a bit of manoeuvring. Clearly there are some seismic life changes incoming which will give us the excuse we need to drop our various foibles. I feel like I'm ready, I just have to cross t's and dot i's and all that. Money a big part of that, huge. I was massively exploited financially in the past, used by the four closest people in my life and it cost me everything. I have nothing to show for a decade and a half of mindboggling effort. It cuts deep. I have to trust again.

For me, it's all about time really, I need time away from work, quiet healing time. I need to think through the last chapters of a long story. It's hard when I'm so swamped with work. I'm also terrible and resting. Surviving c-ptsd and it's attendant financial chaos has been an epic, and I'm terrified of easing my foot off the pedal. But I'm close to safety now. All I want is a good few years with my creativity front and centre. My books are doing really well, but that's on a very small allocation of available time. If I break through in the next couple of years then I feel I've achieved my ambitions. I just wanna write, and paint. It's who I am. I could get very nagry at how my potential has been blunted all these years but that's gonna waste my energy. At 61, there's no point. I need to press on, start living and clean up the last  worries in my head.

in truth, some of it was me. I wasnt myself.

But given that we ourselves have now arrived at a different station on our journey, it is appropriate to find new people that match our new paradigms. The people I know now are better in all honesty, because they appreciate the 'me' with all the life experiences and realism. They are not cynical, broken or bitter, they are good people. Better people.

'It's almost a month since you wrote this post - can I ask how you are doing now? '

Not bad at all, thanks Kizzie. I seem to have these moments every so often, but they are very much about burning off the stubble now. I have them, then the stubble is gone, and I move onwards. Less pain, but sharper when it arrives. I think it's a necessary process so I'm not worried.