Messages

Hello!
I've been on the forum for a few months reading. Just made a few comments today so decided I should introduce myself. Not sure I'm doing it correctly, we'll see how it posts.

I'm so grateful to find this place. I have become very isolated in the last five years, partly due to the pandemic and life circumstances but also because many of my relationships couldn't sustain the "real me," the me I became through twenty years of therapy. Many of my relationships were built on old patterns of caretaking, people-pleasing, or hiding myself/pretending to be someone to whom my past did not happen: neglect and emotional, physical, sexual abuse. So I've been very much alone with just my nuclear family, of whom I am the caretaker.

I haven't ever really been "out" about my difficult childhood. I built my escape myself, first in my family to go to college, went 500 miles away and never looked back, tried to invent myself from scratch and fit in with "normal" people who didn't have my experiences. It worked for what it worked for, I got out, I have a stable life, many successes and adventures, and did not for the most part recreate my childhood with my current family. I grew, healed, became pretty functional. It also didn't work, because...I was not entirely present in my own life, because I was disowning my past. Just functioning wasn't very satisfying, and then my functioning decreased as I began to have more emotional flashbacks. I hit a wall around age 40 where I could no longer pretend to be someone to whom my childhood had not happened. And no longer wanted to.

So here is the place I'm trying out being myself, all of me, the one to whom all of it happened and the one who got out and lived as if it didn't.

So far I'm finding it liberating and deeply satisfying to just say how it is for me without editing out the context of having been an abused child---a context which makes all the difference for me. More wonderfully, I'm finding it essential to hear how it is for others. I find so much in common with each post, things I never said outside a therapy office, or never dared to take delivery of in my own experience. 

Thanks everyone for being here.

Welcome samereflection1001!

I did have experience with DBT. What I found most helpful was the idea of "defusing," that is, having space between me and my emotions. I struggled with emotional flashbacks and DBT gave me tools to interrupt the emotion and shift my state.

There are other skills for emotional regulation, distress tolerance, mindfulness, and communication that were useful and helped me function better socially, at work, etc. The focus on DBT is on learning, practicing and applying the skills both in a group and individually, that's the "behavioral" part of DBT.

DBT strives to balance acceptance and change, validation and challenge, that's the "dialectical" part of DBT. When that balance is there, it's useful. One critique I have is that when the balance isn't there, it can feel like "talking yourself out of your feelings," rather than allowing yourself to feel what you feel.

Overall it was very helpful because coping tools are kind of a prerequisite for the other therapies that I wanted to do, EMDR, IFS, insight-oriented. Without coping tools these therapies can be destabilizing. So I'm glad I did it, in preparation for the healing work that came next.

I haven't posted or replied before so not sure how this will show up. But I related to your post number 8. I appreciate you sharing it here.

Nightmares are the worst.

I was thinking how I have been trying to "update" myself. Not so much to change myself, but to update, to become fully present in the present as I presently really am. To realize my actual age, and also to show up as that age in the world in a way that's recognizable. I have a youthful spirit or energy, people often remark. I was often passed over at work as seeming "too young," and not taken seriously. Sometimes I feel younger than I am, I feel immature compared to others.  Other times I feel very old, like my life is already set and done and I'm exhausted. I guess it's not the years, it's the mileage. I'm 50.

I too have become very isolated, for me it's been in the last five years, and going out and about to make connections feels scary, hopeless, and also interesting. So I keep going. Each day I've been going into a shop and chatting with the owner or worker. I find the more I do this, the more present I feel, and the more "updating" is happening. Sometimes through nightmares where it's like I have to check back and update myself about the past and take delivery of it again with more perspective of my age, sometimes through noticing small progress where I feel I'm taking delivery of the tools and opportunities I now have to connect in ways that feel safe enough.