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One of the most difficult aspects of my recovery has been mapping out the ways I was abused by my BP-mothers emotional blackmail and the subsequent damage on my own being. Both the subtle and explicit.

Susan Forward's book was a great read and she describes the worst form of emotional abuse and blackmail being the threat of suicide. I realized that she said that within the context of her examples; All of which were adults in relationship with other adults. Which means there is a worse form of it and I experienced it.

I was a child when my mother threatened suicide as a means of coercion. Her numerous episodes, abuses, suicide attempts, and hospitalizations all served to galvanize her threats as genuine to me as a child and young adult. Threatening suicide to emotionally blackmail is worse for a child, since it also means real, not just perceived abandonment. The child simply has no defense against it; I had no defense against it. The child simply cannot be safe or loved while forced to carry the death of his mother on his shoulders. Her life was not his birthright. His life was his birthright.

Given her instability and extreme violence during fights with my father or she beat me, I had to believe that she was capable of killing more than just herself. She routinely broke things, slamming doors, cupboards, stomped about, yelling and screaming; sometimes at herself in the mirror. After she first incested me, she threatened in a low and venomous tone "If you tell your father, I will take him away from you!" Why would I ever believe she would stop with just herself?

That ends the grizzly portrait of the seriously ill stranger who was supposed to be my mother. This was the entrapment I suffered daily. The obligation to keep her alive, the fear that she would succeed in suicide, and the guilt that I wouldn't be present to stop it because I was living my own life. Of course, she never killed herself and I still deal with the consequences of my sacrifices and her abuses. I have been no contact with her for 10 years and glad of it.

She still lives and she is a stranger to me now. I realized recently upon reflection that my mother died of suicide long ago, just not all at once.

Dee,

To follow up with papillon's point about body memories and the connection between pain and pleasure; the general recommended treatment related to abuse and trauma with chronic implications is generally exposure therapy. Body memories are tools we can use to uncover the truth about our personal histories when our active memories are blocked or repressed -- which frequently happens with sexual abuse due to it's violence and violation.

Body memories in my experience tend to be extremely accurate. If you can cope with their intensity and follow them with a relaxed focus and intent, they can lead you to what you've lived through that remains unresolved. Your goal in therapy is to work with those memories and feelings to make sure every inch of you survives whatever trauma you endured and can fully rejoin you in the present moment. This process can take significant time and the body memories aren't always clear right away. They can require effort to connect with or draw meaning from and can bring about very old, very primal feelings which can feel unsafe -- which of course makes complete sense because it wasn't safe to feel them then!

For me personally, the revelation that I was incested was not terribly surprising given the level of shame and guilt I held that I couldn't place. What I recalled from my body memories while sexual, wasn't really about sex at all, it was about power, control, and personal vengeance -- a lust for violence and revenge. I believe my abuser was "getting back" at someone who abused them while abusing me. The result is that it makes it very difficult to be touched there by someone who isn't me. While in a relationship, I experienced certain sensations that felt like the specific feelings of the trauma -- I hesitate to share details, but it felt very much like pinching, cutting, or tearing (though I was physically fine, I always checked since in the trauma memory I bled). Hard to enjoy the sensations if all you want is for them to stop! Worse if you're afraid you're bleeding too! A feeling of safety is crucial to enjoyment of anything, but most especially things of a sexual nature.

I definitely recommend body memory recovery done in the presence of a therapist until you're familiar with it. This work can be tough and exceptionally draining, but every inch you fight for is an inch you keep. Sexual abuse by it's very nature can involve heavy amounts of shame and guilt, which can greatly inhibit any recovery process until you can *know* and *feel* that the shame is from your abuser, because they were transferring the same to you while they were incapable of feeling their own shame. If they had appropriate shame, the would never have behaved in that manner! Incest, molestation, and rape all have their own individual problems as well. With these specific types of traumas, corrective experiences are recommended. (how a good healthy person would have behaved instead of the abuser, how you wanted to protect yourself in that moment but couldn't express fully, how someone championing you in that moment of victimization would have looked like, rewriting how you view yourself based on the memories of the trauma and forging meaning from the trauma and reclaiming yourself from it, etc.)

The goal of exposure therapy is to incrementally choose to expose yourself to triggers, situations, feelings, sensations that have overwhelmed you negatively in the past. By doing so, you get acclimated to greater and greater levels of intensity and build a capacity for experiencing more and working through the feelings as you experience them. Having easy outs, plans for how to take care of yourself during, afterwards, and how you actively cope with an uncomfortable experience are all part of the process. Working with your therapist is a good idea to develop plans and experiments towards exposure and reclaiming of your sexuality.

To use an example: If I nearly drowned and never learned how to swim, throwing me into the deep end and seeing if I sink or swim won't help. It'll make me never want to go near a pool or water again! But if I wanted to learn, I would need to go through the process of coping with my own physical reaction to the water, the triggers of what it felt like to nearly drown -- water in my nose, around my eyes, in my ears, and recognize that I'm going to be okay and that it won't kill me. I can stop it any time I want and that the goal of swimming is about reducing the impact of fear in my life -- heck, I might even like swimming! I might even be good at it! But if I never survive the experience of having nearly drowned, that is my body memories of it, I'll avoid water and never know if I might be good at or enjoy swimming.

Sex should be about mutual intimacy and safety. I presume you're female given mention of your ex-husband. Female anatomy especially requires that you feel both safe and relaxed and that you've had enough stimulation -- if you're stressed, tense, and you body isn't ready, of course you're going to experience pain. Add in trauma and sexual abuse, it's completely normal for you to have a physical response like that. Much like the analogy of nearly drowning and learning to swim, you'll likely need to embark on a similar process of recovery for your sexuality. Body memories are a tool to explore your woundedness and traumas. Corrective experiences are for trauma mastery. Exposure therapy is for reclaiming parts of your life stolen by trauma and those who caused it. You are worth your recovery.

*warning, possible triggers, no details*

It took 20 years for me to realize I was injured (I don't call it illness. It was inflicted, not succumbed to)

This is an especially phenomenal insight and one I believe must be practiced daily: I think those like us often confuse the shame and learned helplessness we felt as permission, submission, or a willingness to be injured. It's astoundingly easy to self perpetuate that false belief once it's been planted, especially as a child. The transference and gaslighting done by the abuser is designed to reinforce a belief that we somehow deserved or asked for the abuse, which is patently false. Additionally, succumbing implies a temptation (to be abused) or willingness to not resist (the abuse), which is completely absurd. I do not believe anyone would willingly choose to be hurt when they could instead be loved and accepted. Though, in the absence of love a child(or adult child) might accept abuse as love. Even then, I believe there is always part of us that knows when we're abused and actively cries out against it. That part of us is crucial when undertaking any recovery process.

To add credence to your point of C-PTSD as an injury, I would like to add my insight based on my experience working through having been incested, which I feel might help you: it was done to me and it was not about me. It does not define me. It does not define my worth. The defenses and the behaviors I have exhibited in reaction to it are the natural response to it's violence. The life-damaging consequences and feelings I live with today are evidence of my survival from that abuse. How upset can I really get with evidence that I survived it?

I get that you're mad and ashamed at yourself because you feel you're "not where you're supposed to be" and I sympathize greatly with that. Recovery is filled with all sorts of "not supposed to be's", "should's" and setbacks -- so get comfortable with being uncomfortable until you can accept that they happen. Even though we can become divorced from the environments, circumstances, and people who created our initial injuries, we still have to sort out and deal with it on our own even if it's overwhelming or unfair; that includes old beliefs about ourselves, our feelings, and the world which aren't useful for protecting us anymore or that were imposed by our abusers.

I find treating it as if I were a survivor of a natural disaster helps to orient myself better and focus my energy on my own recovery. After all, you can't really stop or change a traumatic moment from your past any more than you can an earthquake, a tsunami, or a volcano. Are you really willing to go to your grave waiting for a meteor strike to show up in the hopes it will be the parent it never was or that you deserved? You're at where you're at and that's better than okay; you've already survived being a victim of a 'natural' disaster, no reason to blame yourself for it's consequences and the cost it takes to heal from it.

Sorry for the verbose post, I felt pretty strongly about this!

I found this site after a search for "Complex PTSD". It's been a number of years since I've read the list of symptoms and I specifically wanted to refresh the distinction between C-PTSD and PTSD in my mind. I felt compelled to write after reading it. Journaling has been a crucial part of my own recovery process, but there is something to be said about sharing; especially in the later parts of recovery. Specifically gratitude and pride. I am proud of the work I have done and thankful for it, yet I have no outlet with which to express it.

I was impacted when I read of the symptoms of C-PTSD which I once keenly felt daily; grief bubbled up like ripples in a reflecting pond. I remember vividly how murky those waters felt and I've spend the last eight years plumbing those depths and pouring myself through them to cleanse and un-dam them. Once there were tsunamis from the raging storm in my life, huge tremendous crushing waves, engulfing, suffocating, drowning, unending; filling every room in the house I grew up in with feelings that were not my own. I have achieved a great measure of peace and stillness since then and I have attained a depth of self few seem capable of grasping or understanding unless they've been through what we have.

My chronic abuser was my uBPD/uNBP bipolar mother who was worst during my foundational years and my non-BP father was unable to protect himself let alone me. I am twenty-seven years out from when my abuse was the worst as a child. I am twelve years out from when I first began to be crippled by the symptoms of C-PTSD. Ten years since I cut her out of my life. Nine years since those symptoms overtook me and forcefully ejected me from my college experience and eight years from when I started intensive professional therapy and I began my commitment to recovery. I now look forward to the future and creating a life for myself now that that I have a self, capacity, and growth required to care for it.

For me, recovery was inevitable and inexorable once I started it. When I finally made that connection to myself, it guided me to all the nooks and crannies where I hide my pain and grief for so long and insisted I tended to it with fervor and tenacity. The wisdom and serenity gained was worth the pain, effort, and time of recovery. Thanks for reading.