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Thanks I will check it out. And that was the book I was checking out on Amazon too!

I want to clarify though, for others who may offer advice that I'm not at all shy, in fact I worked for 10yrs in a people facing job. My problem is more about connecting with people rather than turning them off very quickly which seems to be more my issue. I have habits which are obvious red flags to others but I'm blind to.

But off to check out that website all the same.

Thanks to both of you.

I started out stream of consciousness style journaling and had no difficulty there. Easily able to express what I felt and yes even the not so nice thoughts about myself and FOO. I hit the wall when I decided to pen fiction though. I wrote probably 10 or so chapters before my inner critic jumped in and told me it was all rubbish and not the right story and had the wrong characters. I suffered a bit of a meltdown over it because it triggered my need for perfection and my inability to give myself a learning curve.

I've taken this week to just let the feelings come, the fear, the anger the whole nine yards and honestly I feel sick like I have a virus I'm so exhausted. I just didn't expect that. But I do have a story plotted out now and I've learned the value of planning in this and am happy to let the project rest for a few more days while I settle again. It's the darndest things which trip us up.

I've realised in my journey that a lack of this is what keeps me isolated and I've decided this is the bridge I need to building a healthy support network around myself. Can anyone suggest good authors for this subject. I feel as if my upbringing left me very shortchanged in that regard.

I'm glad she made it home too. Thanks for the welcome everyone.

This part of the book was an enlightening moment of relief and painful washing of ignorance as I FINALLY understood and had to grieve no one else could give me a name for it. Therapists would just ignore it because it didn't fit; the same way they would ignore the emerging of my inner child. It's like all the pieces were there but it was just ignored. Finally I understand but im not sure which is worse: this or ignorance because this really hurts.

I agree the inner critic is something many therapists miss. Or think it unimportant and unrelated. It helped me so much to see it as the core of the problem and needing to tackle it as the main priority rather than the anxiety symptoms which had been the focus of my therapy to date.

At work, me and some coworkers saw a woman beating an 18 month old, while yelling and swearing at him. We called the police and had her arrested. 

Sorry to hear you're having a hard time. In terms of sleep this worked well for me when I was at my most anxious and not able to sleep.

NatureSpace - it's an app (free) with pure nature recordings. Has both a sleep and a wake timer which is handy.

I found that giving my brain something to listen to while I nodded off affected the quality of my sleep enormously. I'm so trained to it now that I can put it on and be dead to the world in seconds, not minutes. My brain hears the familiar tracks and I'm out. The best thing about it, there are no distracting human voices filling your brain with nonsense while you are at your most easily affected (during theta wave awareness), so you don't dream off things like the news or a TV program etc.

Since I  habituated myself to the sounds of nature the anxiety calmed a lot. The falling rain tracks are my favourites.

You might also want to try lavender milk. Throw a sprig of fresh lavender into a pot of warming milk, strain and drink. Not only is it delicious but very calming and soothing.

For now yes, but it's still unsettling. While I'm not in the grip of fear right now I don't exactly feel secure either. But better than where I was a year ago and even 2yrs ago. 2yrs ago I was fighting everyday to not feel like I was going to die at any moment. A year ago I had intense episodes of fear but they came and went. Today was a milder version of that but still very unpleasant.

I understand. For years I was completely in denial that my childhood had any negative impact at all. Except for this slow building underlying resentment that eventually exploded in my face these past years when I could deny no longer. 

I think it's so hard for people who were emotionally abused and neglected to see it for what it is. There's a strong socialisation current out there that wants to excuse parental failings unless it's very obviously a crime. No-one parents perfectly but there are a lot of abused people are being told they're just full of ungrateful angst because their childhoods weren't perfect. Which is of course gaslighting. 

It's also part of the parental patterning to have you completely confused about your own experience. It's unlikely you were allowed to protest their abuse without consequences. Parents that act like the mafia, silencing witnesses, are extremely good at convincing us that their actions were acceptable.

The other aspect is fear of admission to yourself. I ran into this. When I finally accepted I was traumatised you can't imagine the fear that beset me for days on end. It meant, this one person I had been maintaining a relationship with was my biggest oppressor. I had been in bed with the enemy all along and that made me feel extremely fearful and vulnerable to realise that. So unpleasant.

Actually the use of the word disorder didn't bother me at all. Everyone knows that PTSD is a result of trauma not a result of character. So I was fine with it. I read the entire book in less than 24hrs. Triggering? Yep. But then anything that forces you to admit that actually you have been traumatised and in a fairly major way is always confronting. I was still teetering on the brink of denial about that until I read this book. Then suddenly all the weird little pieces of my life fell into place and I can no longer put my head in the sand and pretend everything is okay. Right there someone has explained the forces at work in my life to a T and linked it to trauma.

The mind tricks us all the time, but the body does not lie. The good things that came out of this book for me were....

- Anger rages are a normal response to trauma
- Self berating didn't mean I was possessed, it's a result of a child's ego in arrested development. I didn't really consider the possession possibility...
- All my physical symptoms of life threatening fear episodes have a cause. They don't just come out of nowhere and my body isn't malfunctioning when it happens.
- Hypervigilance and paranoia didn't mean I was going crazy. It's a symptom.
- Being unable to trust humanity is normal after trauma.
- My intense feelings of anhedonia, fatigue, lethargy and helplessness all had a cause. They weren't just negative thinking I'd slipped into or picked up from other people.
- None of these problems were actually my fault and I'd done extremely well just to live with them to date.
- I now had some idea of what my struggle actually is. Instead of flailing around in the dark wondering why I had all these disconnected symptoms that no mental health professional would actually take seriously or connect to a meaningful diagnosis.

Seriously this book is great.

So in the past three weeks I've been working on creative writing and been working specifically on finding my authentic authors voice. What I didn't bargain on was a massive triggering of EF's that has pretty much written this week off in terms of getting things done. I realised that all this time in my life I've not been using my own voice in life, but my mother's voice and personality. I realised now I have no idea what my own self expression actually looks and sounds like.

To the extent that today I actually felt life threatening primal fear around the idea of finding my own voice. It's strange, one would not think that doing something an innocuous and self-caring as simply taking practical steps to learn to write (it's been my dream) could trigger such deep seated fear. But it's there.

I had one of these flashbacks today, horrible. Literally feeling very unsafe and had to sit with it, work my way towards being comfortable. Very difficult to deal with. You did well to manage it.

Hi,

I'm in my 40's and still living in abject fear of my parent. Today was a hard day with more crying, resentment and feeling unsafe than most days. Frustrating.

I struggle to hold a sense of self. I'm a freeze/flight type, so spent most of my life engaged in busywork to keep my mind off the fear that I felt. I literally clam up and stand still whenever I'm in an intimidating situation and then berate myself afterwards for not standing up for myself. Not knowing what to say in the moment etc.

I was seriously triggered last night when my kitty cat went for a neighbourhood jaunt and didn't return until almost 2am. I ended up on my backsteps crying for her not to abandon me etc.

Just wanting to be free of the ever-present fear that wracks my life and seems to pervade every moment of my being. So hard to sit in the middle of this and soothe myself and tell myself everything is going to be okay.