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Twenty years ago, as a kid, I wrote you a letter out of desperation and immense pain. In that letter, which I never gave to you but kept it till this day, I asked you a question and tried to answer it for myself. The question was: why don´t you love me? I kept asking in the letter if I did something wrong and if you were ever going to love me. Now, as an adult, with a long healing journey behind me and an even longer one ahead of me, I´m not asking any of those questions anymore. Not that I gave up, I just simply know the answers to those questions. And that is that it was never about me in the first place. I´ve always been worthy of love, I´ve always been enough, only you couldn´t see it, couldn´t see me. You were and still are unable to see my value as your child or even as a human being. You keep telling me how proud you are of me, but your words don´t match your actions, and even your usual words don´t match those you´re saying when you´re in a good mood.

You know, this is the hardest part not just for me, but for many of my fellow trauma survivors: coming to terms with the fact that my own mother can´t appreciate and love me unconditionally. Of all the people who don´t owe me anything, who are strangers to me, right you, mother, have to be the one that doesn´t see how precious I am? It hurts in the deepest realms of my soul, at the place that I am keeping untouched till the day when you will finally acknowledge my existence. But I have to brace myself for the possibility that this day might never come.

And I´m building a fine, silky net from all the wonderful people I meet, from all the love and warmth I get, from all the strength and resilience I collect from within me. And it gets stronger and stronger, even though it still keeps its fragility. I am learning the things you never taught me: how to be accepting of myself and others, how to receive and give love, how to be vulnerable and fierce at the same time, how to live a meaningful life.

Now I´m writing you this letter that you´ll also never see. But I don´t mind it, you know. I´m starting to be okay with the fact that you´ll never see me the way you should as a mother. And that I don´t have to explain you the basics of how to love your children. It´s not my duty to heal you and to make you see me. I´m on my own healing journey and guess what: it´s awesome and empowering and most importantly, I´m learning that the way you raised me was not okay and that it wasn´t my fault, it wasn´t something I did wrong, it just happened because of your huuge package of unresolved trauma. Seeing the better examples of how you can live your life gives me hope. I wish one day you can experience it, too.

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 

I have my own journal - many of them actually. I've been journaling every day for more than a year now, so I have plenty of journals full of my emotions and thoughts. This is something new for me. An experiment on sharing my thoughts, reflexions and random trains of thought with people on the forum.

The last few weeks passed in sweet ignorance. I kind of ran away from the reality to the magical world of books and stories from different eras. I enjoyed being part of that, even if just as a guest. I always found solace in books, my sweet and loyal companions through the painful years of childhood and adolescence. I especially like 18- and 19th century novels by my very favourite Brontë sisters and Jane Austen. Their era and world is distant enough to think that I'd be happy there, their stories and happy endings with the good ones winning gave me hope and sometimes illusions of what life and people should be like. So when I felt that everything is becoming overwhelming, I turned to books again.
But this weekend, which was very silent and peaceful - ideal for reflecting on life and death - I started to feel that my stories are not fulfilling my needs anymore. And that I need to return to my life and face my real life challenges.

I knew it's going to be hard. Life is hard. It's a never ending story of fighting your demons, finding new paths and mourning your losses along the way. I thought to myself that I must be a fool to leave my fantasy world behind for this kind of suffering. And I knew that some more suffering may come. But in spite of that I also knew that I need to return. I know that life hurts, but I also know that the things that hurt resurfacing, hurt just as much as living my whole life in denial. So I chose pain from knowledge, not the pain of denial and ignorance.

That doesn't mean I won't read any more books or enjoy the stories of my favourites (I ordered four more books actually 😅), but I don't want to use my passion as a validation for throwing my life away. Escapism can be a sweet poison and I know that very well.

I am returning to the topic of unfairness every time I think about me and my sisters and what are our lives like now. I grew up with them, with the same FOO and experienced similar kinds of traumas and difficulties. Now I see them struggling in their lives, being depressed and hopeless most of the time. But they are the best people and sisters I can imagine - they are capable and talented, intelligent and open-minded. The only problem is that they don´t see what I see. The reason I´m writing this topic on this forum is that I know I´m just like them. My T told me today when I was talking about my little sister not seeing herself as I see her, that she thinks the same of me. And I know that the four of us sisters are tied together with this invisible rope made of shame, self-blame and guilt which our M created.

And every time I think about that I feel extremely angry for the unfairness of it. We were born with the same expectations as all the babies, we should have received the healthy amount of care and love and affection, but we haven´t. Our lives were ruined, our chances taken away from us.

I like to celebrate small victories - being able to stay with my feelings, getting out of an EF -, and these small things have to be enough for me because that´s all I am capable of right now. Not because I´m worthless or incapable, but because someone years ago made me believe that I am worthless and incapable. So instead of living a joyful and whole life, I am picking up the small pieces from the ruins of my childhood and try to put them together to create a life worth living.

I know that as an adult, it´s my responsibility now to create a meaningful and happy life for myself and no one can do that for me. I just wanted to highlight how helpless this makes me feel sometimes.

Thanks for reading.

Hello everyone,

I´ve just finished reading a book called Running on empty by Jonice Webb and I wanted to share my experience and maybe start a discussion on a topic that is very important to me and what I struggle the most with.

So the book described emotional neglect in childhood and it´s impact on our behavior later as adults. The topic was not entirely new to me, but it helped me to reinforce the fact that I´m not a weirdo for having odd feelings I can´t explain, I´m not "fatally flawed", as she named it, because everything I feel has a reason. I found myself especially in those parts where she describes that emotionally neglected people often feel empty inside, as if they were just looking at the world and people from the outside, the inability to really feel the emotions, to identify them in themselves and in others.

One of my biggest struggles is finding a clear purpose and a goal in my life that I can follow. I would like to do something, but I don´t know what my calling is and when I look inside for answers, I find nothing but emptiness and silence. That´s why this book resonated with me so much. It opened up a gate that was inside me, that needed to be opened, but didn´t give me clear answers on how to change the things I want to change.

So I wanted to ask you if you have any experience with working with the sense of emptiness. What did you find useful in the process of finding your way out of disconnectedness? Personally, I find it very hard to look for something that isn´t even there, cause the absence of it is the problem in the first place.

Thank you very much for your contribution.

Dalloway

Hello everyone,

not sure how to start this, I´m not really good at asking for help, but I guess what I would like to say is that I could appreciate your support and/or personal insights on this one:

Yesterday I had a really tough therapy session. I´ve been feeling really low lately (the past 2-3 weeks), so I knew something will happen when I get the chance to talk to someone about my problems (the thing is, I wasn´t able to see my T for a month because of the summer vacation, and besides her, I can´t really talk to anyone about these deep things). We went into really hard topics and I talked about things that have never been told before,they weren´t even said out loud by me, ever. So it was very difficult, but liberating at the same time. I even cried - for the first time in my therapy history - and it really meant that those things were huge milestones for me to recognize and acknowledge.

After the session, I started to feel very bad emotionally and mentally, I was in pain the whole day (also physically). Today I woke up a bit numb - the pain is not that raw as it was yesterday, it´s more like aching. And I was thinking of something that I read before: that the hard things and realizations might and will hurt at first, but it will get better eventually. I dont´t know about that, I just feel the pain and don´t see the light, because those things are the most difficult ones in my life and I don´t know how to deal with them yet. It´s like I know that they are present, I named them, but it´s just soo hard cause I feel like a bowl that´s been stirred and all my emotions and pain are whirling in this mess and I don´t know how and when will they settle down and rest.

So my question is I guess, have you ever experienced something like this?

This feeling is stuck with me, well, all my life as far as I can remember. Recovery work, healing and learning, awareness - these are the things my life is centered around, I couldn´t find anything more meaningful if I tried, but this feeling, this unease and burden is stronger then all the healing and learning, at least I feel this way right now. I´ve always been very impatient and gave up immediately after the first problem or challenge appeared, so maybe that´s why I feel hopeless in this case, too. Because the bad things were present in my life more persistently and for a longer time than healing.

This persistent feeling is that I don´t belong anywhere. Especially now, in the summer, when I look out my window or have a walk outside, I can see that everything is calm, bright and beautiful, it feels like everything is in the right place. Everything but me. 

When I think about it, the rational part of my mind knows that it´s not about my worthlessness, but about my trauma. That I was forced to grow up very early, be an adult in a child´s body, without being able to go through all the important steps which the child needs to the healthy development of her individual self. I was thrown in at the deep end and had to swim, but now I don´t feel like I learned how to swim. I learned only how to survive, but that´s not swimming, it´s just instinct. So yeah, I know that I´m confused and can´t find my place in the world because my self is a distorted mass of traumatic events and hard feelings I cannot understand from the child´s perspective even if I´m an adult now - but understanding doesn´t make it go away.

And now, it feels like it is the other way around like it used to be -- I was and adult child, but now I´m a childish adult. Of course I am, it was unhealthy to take on adult responsibilities before the time was right and now   I´m stuck with these two versions of me -- a child that was not allowed to be a child and an adult that didn´t learn properly how to be an adult. 

All my life I´ve been jealous of people who seemed to stand on the ground firmly, certain of the fact that THEY BELONG. I never felt that. And I think this is something that is at least partly responsible for lots of other unpleasant things, for example my lack of self-esteem and self-confidence. How could I have those things when the "self" part is something I never knew - I don´t even know if I have a self (I don´t think about it in a Buddhist sense of selflessness, more in a psychoanalytical way, in which there IS a self - in normal circumstances), because I was never taught that I have one, that I´m an independent person with boundaries and all. And without it, I feel like I´m not able to face the challenges and the uncertainty of the life, which leads me to shy away from life itself. It manifests in inability to take risks and chances and it makes me feel SO DESPERATE. Because I know that I´m smart and capable and eager to do good things for myself and for other people in the world, I just can´t make the first few steps. I´m stuck with this burden and feel like I´m a prisoner of my own mind and traumatic memories. 

  Sorry for the long post, I just wanted to get this off my chest a little. Also, I will be glad if you decide to share your thoughts with me on this. 

Hello people,

it´s been a long time since I posted something here. Life was going on, I started a therapy which is going pretty well and I have really nice moments of self compassion and pride towards the things I have achieved and done for myself and my recovery.

But in the past few weeks I´ve been feeling overwhelmed and anxious. Am I doing it right? I mean - the whole "life" thing. And as I have experienced before, every positive period is followed by this depression-like state, where I start to panic and "ruin" this little joy of small good things. The scheme is always the same - I am happy about myself and then comes the realization: fine, fine, but you know you still struggle very much in general and there are big issues unresolved in your life. And then the magic is gone and it´s the sad, anxious and pessimistic me again.

Today I was experiencing this above mentioned process while sitting in a park and watching happy people with their loved ones and suddenly, tears started to fill my eyes and a thought popped to my mind that was wanted to be said: "Why is this happening to me? I am a nice and worthy human being, I didn´t hurt anyone, I just want to live a normal life but the chance was taken away from me by the way I was raised and the way my mom behaved to me. IT´S SO UNFAIR.

And this last thing, this very deep feeling of unfairness towards me, that I didn´t have the choice, didn´t want to become an adult who struggles this much, and the chance to a more fulfilling life taken away from me, this is so very hard to accept.

I just wanted to ask if you had similar experiences and if yes, how do/did you cope with them.

Thanks is advance 

 

Hi everyone,

I am in a big dilemma about this thing right now and I would really like to hear your opinions/insights about this.

So I just finished reading Pete Walker´s book on CPTSD - From surviving to thriving and there was this concept of the inner critic. He writes that this bunch of negative thoughts and negative self-talk and self-shaming mechanism is not part of ourselves because it´s projected into us by our parents/caregivers/perpetrators. He also writes that sometimes it is useful to shut it abruptly when we recognize that we have an inner critic attack and just say like NO, SHUT UP and stuff.

BUT

I also think for some reason that every and each part of us belongs to us in some way, like in the internal family system theory, that the critical voice was useful at some point in our lives even though it´s unhelpful right now. So I can´t help but to think that if I was you know harsh or aggressive to that critical voice, it would be to some degree as if I was rude and aggressive and violent towards myself via that part that also belongs to me. And I was raised in a household with constant verbal abuse so maybe it would trigger me into a flashback every time I used that technique.

What do you think?

Hello people,
I was thinking of an introduction about myself and the reasons I am here but I guess we are here for very similar reasons. Personally, reaching out from the years long isolation and hopelessness is a huge milestone. For a very long time I thought I am alone with my pain and fear and anxiety but then I started to educate myself on topics like the mind-body connection, childhood trauma and CPTSD and realized that everything I feel and think has a reason and explanation, that I am not flawed or bad but there were so many things that happened to me in the past, in my family history that shaped me this way.
And more importantly I realized that this suffering and fear and shame is unique but also very universal in a way that we humans are all experiencing similar things that affect us and our lives.
I believe that by reaching out we can experience this shared humanity.
I am very glad to be here.