Messages

Hi Beth,

Welcome to the forum  I hope you find what you're looking for here.

Sending you support,
dolly

Hey beauty,

Welcome to the forum  I hope you find what you need here.

Sending you support,
dolly

Hi Pete,

I'm sorry that your relationship ended that way. I have definitely been in that situation before, and it did bring up a lot of self blame too. It's really, really hard because on the one hand self blame is a coping mechanism that I had to learn as a child, and on the other there are things that I didn't handle "perfectly," and was a messy human. So, for me, it's hard when a therapist says don't blame yourself because I know I brought my own stuff into a relationship. On the other hand, I also took responsibility for that and was intent on working through it, which isn't always the case for the other person. At the end, it does take two to make it work.

Welcome to the forum, I hope you find what you need here.
dolly

Hi GcM,

I'm sorry to read all that you're going through and finding yourself in that situation with your partner. I hope you can find what you need here. A lot of us have grown up with NPD family members.

One thing that might be helpful if you do find yourself splitting from your partner and the concern that she will use the kids against you, or put them in the middle, is that you have the experience to draw from when it happened to you as a child, and would likely be a strong role model of "what to do" in that situation for your children. Though it may be difficult for you, and bring up all sorts of past trauma, but it is past stuff and you are not that person anymore, even if it feels like it. It sounds like you have great strength and resiliency to come out of everything and be as self aware as you are about what's going on.

Sending you support,
dolly

That's great Bach    I hope you're able to talk to, befriend, and have compassion for those parts.

I'm really happy for you that you stuck with exploring something that seemed fuzzy, or untrue. Like Blueberry said these sound like big realizations.

Sending you support,
dolly

Hi Dalloway,

I just wanted to send support for these profound realizations that you're having 

dolly

Hi Bach,

I just wanted to say that I don't think you should stop banging on about that incident. I think it's very hard to find those moments of validation when you experience covert NPD abuse. I had the same and went back and forth (and still do) for years with it. It completely messes with your emotions and your mind. I hope you're able to use that incident to find some space from your m for yourself, and to recognize that that's yours.

Sending you support,
dolly

Hi NK,

Underneath all the questioning, it seems like you have made big steps in recognizing what is happening, congrats! 

I don't know how to define dissociation for myself, like a veil I've been living under and you don't know is there? I guess there are times when that veil pops up and I kind of go, huh, and then I it pops down again, and I truck along doing the things I need to do. It popped up this week after I recognized with t, or spoke to t about, how dealing with someone's unpredictability (who had been out drinking and then came to play severely hung over, and I felt familiar with that frame of mind that they were in), and how I had been in that position growing up. I felt tense talking about it, but the "feelings" weren't there (and here they are now as I remember what it was like to deal with m when she was in that post-party state). I just knew, or could recognize that I was uncomfortable.

I don't know if it's because t has been giving more space to my internal world and validation through NARM, but I feel/think over the last year, I have been able to give more space to recognizing those feelings as they come up. I don't have to "solve" them, and they are not a problem to go away, it's something that I am now "allowed" to have where before, I was never "allowed" that. I feel like intellectually, I had also heard and "knew" this, but something about the process has  changed. For me, perhaps it's like the Jay Reid video where he describes having to remove your awareness of yourself and put in place something else, and these veil lift moments I think are perhaps the Self coming back. Maybe ask teenage NK what she could do whatever she wanted, what would she do? Maybe this bolshy-ness is coming up because that's what you need (IMO and not in a self-destructive way)? When I feel like I'm acting with more life force, standing up to people in tennis etc, t doesn't reprimand my behaviour even though I think I'm doing something bad or wrong (because people are upset with me), but instead, I'm doing something for myself.

Sending you support 
dolly

Hi Hope,

Have just finished reading your journal and that's great you were able to stay with the part that felt fear.

I hope things went ok at your inlaws after what happened before. Did you manage to speak to her about it? Maybe the headache is a way of the body telling you something is coming up.

Sending you support 

Congrats asdis, I hope the allergy appointment goes well. It sucks to be in a position of reacting to foods, but you're taking care of yourself by listening to your body, which is a big step.

I think we need some more guidance from doctors to really figure this out though. We've attempted low-histamine diets before, but we're unable to maintain both ED recovery and the diet on our own.

If the appointment with the alllergist doesn't turn up anything, you might want to go back to the sub and see if others had another course of action with docs. From what I've read so far, a lot of these symptoms don't function as normal allergies ie with a distinct IgE reaction, but hoping that you get it sorted and come to a more stable place. I just wanted to say as it can sometimes be disheartening with docs to be having reactions that they're not able to explain, and then are told directly, or made to feel indirectly, that it's all in your head.

Sending you support,
dolly

Hey asdis,

I get you and I'm sorry you're in so much pain eating. I can also see how growing up with a lifetime of food sensitivities that no one could really explain, and living in a family that probably didn't address those needs, could lead to disordered eating. It's a lot to process.

I've been discussing elsewhere on the forum my own history of allergies and health issues. Like you, my FOO was not receptive to what was happening internally for me and was often pressured to eat things because they were "healthy" and if I didn't, I was a picky eater. As a kid, I also tended to go for junk food because perhaps for some strange reason, I didn't react to that. I don't know.

Anyways, I've had MCAS symptoms off and on over the years, which flared up when dealing with mold, and have likely been present since childhood. I started realizing recently that I have been reacting to high histamine foods (tomatoes, peanuts, shellfish, wine, cheese etc) and went on a low histamine diet. So, now when I eat them, I will fall asleep shortly after. I also think there's something else going on ie salicytes, or oxalates, and think soy lechitins are an issue. I've also been gluten free for about 12 years. What I found with gluten is I think it takes a long time for the inflammation to go down. When I stopped eating it for a month, I noticed I had joint pain after and it would make my brain feel fuzzy.

Right now, I've started trialling different meds and am hoping it helps manage the issue. It's been so long since I have actually listened to my body in that way without feeling like there is something wrong with me, or not abandoning myself, that I think it's taking some time to figure out what's going on. There's also a very good MCAS forum on reddit if you think that all this sounds familiar.

Sending you support,
dolly

Yes, there's specific list in the link I sent about what medications create an issue with histamine. It's a interesting cross reference to see if there's any on the list.

Hey Kizzie,

I know this is an old thread, but would be curious if some of those reactions to medications would/can be the result of excess histamine in the body?

https://www.histaminintoleranz.ch/en/therapy_medicaments.html#incompatible

Hi NK,

I agree that there are sometimes things which come up in our lives that reveal, or break, the illusion of control that I have to function with in my life. Or, what I have always grown up with, managed, that has given me a sense of safety in the face of the unpredictability of my family, as you pinpointed. It's true that like you said, I had no idea they were there, or what they even were until it happened. For me, the big one is/was driving. I've broken it down over the years and have gotten better on my 0-60 anger over the carelessness of other drivers. It took me a while to work out though that the anger, and big emotional reactions, were a result of feeling like my life was somehow threatened by the negligence of others. Something which, writing this out, I can see was a situation I often had to deal with FOO. My m going out at night to the bar and leaving me home as six/seven year old while I was "asleep" was something I had to deal with. Waking up in the middle of the night while she was out was also something I had to deal with, and if anything happened during that time, that was up to me too.

So, I think for me, driving was the one thing where I couldn't avoid being put in potentially harmful situations (and at the mercy of other people) where it brought up all those feelings from before, and the resulting anger at being put in that situation in the first place. Like your t said, I think it has been helpful to bring these feelings up and acknowledge them. Well, maybe not just feel the feelings (as I think in the past I have got lost in that and not really known what to do with them or what the next step was), but to just be more aware of my internal world and when I was noticing shifts in what was happening if that makes sense. Like just saying, oh that's a different reaction what is that? This is where I think NARM has been so helpful for me. I am also realizing lately that there are things happening "under the surface" that I am not really conscious of that is taking work to bring out into the light. So, yeah CPTSD does suck, but it also gets better bit by bit sometimes.

I hope you are finding some space to process all this 
dolly

Hey storyworld,

To me, therapy and seeing someone else as safe can be tricky. I think I was a couple years into therapy with my last t when I shared that I felt like she didn't like me, which she countered, and that provoked a shift between us. I think we go in with parts/perceptions etc that we're not even aware of. This was EMDR therapy and not parts work, however.

I also ended therapy with that t after seven years because I felt like I wasn't able to open up any more with the way things were going. I had read about NARM and the concept of fostering agency (finding Self for me with preverbal and likely generational trauma has been tricky), and I felt like this was the next step. I feel like I've made a lot of progress in the last year around my emotional reactions to things.

I tell myself, come next session, I'm going to do better, and develop a plan to do so

When I first read your post, I wondered if there were parts active in sense that you feel like you have to fix yourself (ie there's something wrong with you; you're not normal etc), which is a part, and then there's likely a part that then opposes this, which seems justifiable. I've found that sometimes it helps to recognize opposing parts, and this then opens up a space around them. It might be worth exploring this with your t as well.

I've also just learned about parts which can appear Self like and are dominant, meaning that they like to run the show a lot of the time, and given that they were probably around for me from being a young child, it's hard to recognize them as something other than Self. I'm also learning that inner critics can work like this as well.

Congratulations on your self awareness around this and I hope it brings you to the next step in therapy.

Sending you support,
dolly