Messages

Hi Lorien

welcome. Good people in here. Your experiences sound horrible, but you can rest assured that your reactions to it are normal for all that. It's a strange thing, but happiness and a fresh start is, in itself, a trigger, and a big one. Again, perfectly normal, you are starting on a journey and apprehension is totally natural given your past unhappiness. The flashbacks and anxiety are just your brain doing its thing to settle down the past so it is manageable and your old self can return. Don't feel you are in anyway degraded by that as a person or partner, the past is bound to have created issues in you as it would in any sane person. Psychotics and narcs can turn over confidence in yourself in a thousand ways and that china shop in your mind, now that the bull has been ejected, has to be tidied up. What feels so painful and so frightening, and, given the hope and love you feel now, in the way, cannot be overcome any other way and it is great that you are addressing it. Many of us in this community end up wiser than we have ever been because these experiences are a university of the mind, not one we sought, but an education nonetheless. I am beyond happy that you have found a kind and decent guy and have the family to embrace. Be as patient with them as they will be with you and be as honest as you can, there is no shame, no need to hide your scars, feeling understood often means we can talk about the causes less. All the same, share on here, share with your therapist and do your best to understand the thing. You are clearly a very bright and love person and you deserve this new life. x

having said that, a crash this afternoon. I suspect it was because I pounced on the energy and overdid it tho. Lesson learned. Thinking of it as an enforced power nap. Let's see if it returns to form tomorrow. I'm up against the weekend, whch I hate, so we will see.

right now I'd be 80% certain it's an uplift down to Vitamin D

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00048670802345516

I just spent the entire evening recording music, quite like my old self... something is happening... as usual tho there are mixed signals in me and outside. Dunno. So far, like I say, I'm convinced.

well I would say the energy is there now, tho my head is still like a wiped hard drive. Definitely more positive too. So far, I'm a believer.

Hi Barbiedoll

I think your feelings are absolutely understandable and more to the point, are typical of how these experiences can leave people feeling. Take comfort from the fact that what feels so personal and unique at times are very much the natural response that many of us in here have felt to destructive experiences. You have had your confidence battered, your sense of up-down, left-right, right-wrong has been overturned and trying to live with that in your life has left you shaken and unable to anchor yourself in the real world. Abuse does that. But it's not you, you are behind that, waiting. Be good to yourself and recognise that you were the solid sensible person holding on while this cyclone was happening, you had the humanity and integrity to feel what was happening and take it with you.

The criticism in your head, that is not you, that was placed there. It speaks the voice of others. You are no more to blame for the late arrival of a bus than I am. But constant criticsm during childhood development does that, it means that every simple task is a job interview, a police interrogation or a confession, when all it is is you, performing a function in the world. That's what abuse does, it takes our eyes off the road, makes us crash and then blames us for that crash. It distracts us from even the simplest of things and leaves us afraid, imparing our ability to get on with life and settle into routines and happiness. It makes our choices skewed, opens us up to further abuse.

But it's not you hun, it never was. You have nothing to be sorry for, no apologies to give, no price to pay. You are not on this earth to carry the shame of others. If there is shame, it belongs elsewhere, and deep down you know that. Bad stuff happened to you, deplorable stuff. But it is not who you are, it just fell in the road before you. I have faith in you, we all do, feel loved and encouraged because you deserve to be, you have raised your kids through a storm and you deserve unreserved praise for that.

You deserve better, you deserve yourself. It is coming. x

Hi LadyFinn

all sounds pretty familiar I'm afraid, that attack when you needed support, I cannot tell you how many times that happened.

But it's them and not you, remember that. You are normal, they are not, and that's why you were so deeply hurt, you expected normal parenting and normal relationships, as you should have, as we all should.

One thing I find helps is to write down the conclusions you come to after one of these down episodes and keep it there for when you feel yourself sliding, once or twice I have headed off major panic attacks like that. Remember, your emotions are perfectly understandable, they are a symbol of your experience, an experience you should not have had but a record of your humanity nonetheless. You can't make the past improve, but you can choose to rise above it, something you have already shown you can do. Falling back from time to time is a reality of such a past, and we have to expect it, like dust rising in a car when you hit a bump in the road. But living despite all this pain is a challenge worth taking, bigger and more inpressive than any marathon or academic quaification. It is defiance, plain and simple.

ok, some more updates... I would say there IS a pick up, even that fast. But it's a mixed picture because my mood is all over the place, and I'm still on the juice, not heavy, least not for a brit. Too early to see if it's definite but I'd say it's encouraging so far.

day 2.. ok, but patches where I have to crash. Am going for power naps. I had too much wine last night.. DOH!

So much churning going on at the moment, but it's very different. There's a definite switch in my perception underway but it's maddeningly hard to pinpoint, but I'll have a go.

Firstly, I think I am finally realising that there are a whole suite of behaviour patterns that I am only now attributing to my brother. This means that the damage is deeper and this also means I have to accept that damage and see myself as "damaged". I don't mean that in a negative sense, more in a simple recognition that I am fitting the criteria of post-trauma behaviour fully, something I've been fighting with I think. This is probably because, I guess, because I wasn't physically or sexually abused. I've had a bit of trouble reconciling this. My abuse was sustained psychological abuse, enabled by my mother and unchallenged by his wife, friends or extended family.

I have a friend who had severe sexual and physical abuse and I spoke to her last night, almost apologising for this difference, but she was adamant that in her experience, it's the psychological that is worst. I'm in no position to judge this, but there is no arguing with how well I fit the symptoms. My counselling is nearing some deep buried stuff and I'm feeling it. I'm now remembering that the house was so tense with my brother and father's battles that I have no memory of anything much else. It must have swamped everything at the time and I am starting to be aware that I was sitting in the shadows, watching, feeling unable to react, dissociating for all I was worth. When my brother wasn't attacking dad, who'd had two heart attacks and was very sick by this time, he was laying into mum, or bullying me. He dominated the home. Dad was a broken man. He once said to me, "please, be who you want to be, but never, ever be like your brother." Poor dad.

Then dad dies and there is nothing to stop this grotesque cuckoo taking over mum's life. Mum, recently widowed, and with all the spine of a sea cucumber, was never going to resist. Armed with a child, he was able to blackmail her into silence. But that wasn't the whole story, she was also a class A narcissist herself, but in a simple, theatrical sense. She saw herself as holy, special and pious, seeing my brother as her noble cross to bear, a handy way to mask her cowardice or fear towards him. Her response was to attack me, becoming endlessly manipulative in her perpetual drive to force me to support his parasitism without complaint. When I resisted, I would be guilt tripped. There was a ghastly symbiosis, something between Stockholm syndrome and deep fear.

I am also increasingly in agreement with my counsellor that he is psychotic. He had empathy, but he did it anyway. He knew what hurt people, he spends time gathering data for it, he is sensitive to it. This is a man that is in a relationship with his ex wife's lover's ex wife... (yup) for the purposes of revenge. That's how far he is capable of focusing on hurt.  In the course of today, he will be thinking of ways to get at me.. that's not paranoia, I can assure you it is the case. I have seen him doing it over others and I have no doubt that right now, I am an itch he would love to scratch. I know that I am being monitored, distant relatives have been trying to link with me on Facebook, something that is only likely to be happening because he is out there propagandising against me to make himself look better. The narrative will be something like, 'Poor James, he's so messed up, I'm so worried, but he won't talk to me, maybe you.... '

The realisation for me now is that this sustained madness has damaged me, I'm injured. There was an unhappiness in me when I was young, a melancholy that should not have been there, a depression that at the time, I thought was just who I was. Of course it wasn't, there was all this misery going on and this incessant erosion of my confidence. And it went on, it didn't stop. He didn't grow out of it, in fact he got worse and worse. As his dreadful approach to life yielding its inevitable failures, he became more bitter, looking for blame in those nearest to him and then exacting cruelty and spite in revenge for crimes they had never committed. He is a failed dictator, possessing an alarming range of behavioural similarities to Hitler. The banal cruelty, the savage tendancy to seek disproportionate reprisals for imagined slights, and unfathomable belief that they have been chosen for greatness despite all the evidence to the contrary. The Hitler parody videos on youtube are a very, very close match, that exploding blamestorming and need for retribution in the face of self-imposed failure, the people around them quaking in fear at the sheer level of stress being unleashed. That is MY brother.

It shaped my future relationships, making me a sitting duck for narcissistic friendships. I ended up as the sidekick to some truly ghastly people who I tried to please as they belittled me still further. The pattern was set. And I was sombre, intense, my relationships were cloaked in this issue in a hundred ways, the threat of his bizarre interventions a constant nagging anxiety. And the attacks came in, they still come in, tho the channels are mostly blocked now and his online bullying has been seen clearly on facebook by friends who once bought his dark charm only too readily. My partners had to deal with my fear, tho I never really got anywhere near dealing with it properly and the deppression came and went, the dissociation lingered, both wrecking my intimacy and abilty to just enjoy life. I have no doubts this contributed hugely to my ex's alcohol collapse, something which I feel very bad about suddenly. The stress in the last years must have been unreal, especially as she was fighting her own demons regarding her own mother's cruelty.

These people are dreadful, they are everywhere. This week is really clarifying my desire to write something about it in depth. Black comedy, that's what I do best, and exposing these people in that belittling light. I feel so much for my friends with abusive histories and for all of you, it has robbed us of the normality we should have had, that everyone should have had.

But it is not fatal.

We owe it to others if not even to ourselves, to reverse the damage and claim a happy life from beneath the wreckage, like poppies growing on a battlefield. The doctor said to me that I will never shake it, the trauma will always be there, it's how I live with it now that matters. And that's it really, looking for ways to turn the experience from * into manure. In Normandy there is a battlefield where the German army was finally trapped and obliterated in 1944. They had one last road available to escape and I walked this and I was struck by how amazing the orchids were in the ditches beside the roads. Turns out that the bones and blood of the horses, caught up in this grim finale were bulldozed into the verges and that there is so much of them still in the soil that the flowers thrive.

The abuse and the neglect caused by my brother have created talents in me, ironically. I used humor to pacify him, I leant on art for distraction, my sensitivity has led me to be empathic and to see hurt in others and now that I am a writer, I can see that this experience shaped that. It's something I see in a lot of the writing on this forum, definite skill and subtlety in the use of language. We can't change the past, we can't make it better, but we can be the orchids in the ditches, the poppies on the battlefield, defying the pain and loss to bring beauty back.

so far... well I got work done, then nose dived at 6.30. Still, my mood is better.

Good stuff Contessa, I was thinking about what you'd said when I was at the doc's so thanks for that.

Let's see

Oh and I looked on my paperwork... PTSD. He wrote it down, bless him. That blew a few gaslights out there and then.

Hi

just watched this vid on youtube.

Two warnings. 1, She's very vocally Christian from time to time and that may not sit well with some of you if there has been abuse through religious channels. 2. I at least found it horribly accurate for my experiences, whilst not the abuse that is mentioned, it is clear after watching this very experienced woman that whatever the reasons, I was definitely very badly traumatised by my brother's attacks and my mother's failure to back up either myself or my father, right to the end.
This lecture is so concise and accurate in describing the resulting effects for me, and most likely the rest of you, that I feel it is worth watching even with the above reservations. If nothing else, it is a perfect description of C-PTSD to have other people watch so they understand you and your struggles. I defy anyone to watch this and then turn round and write it off. Choose a good time to watch it tho, it could go either way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otxAuHG9hKo

ok, that's a good control, I'll avoid the B vits other than my usual multi vits. My amount is 1000 units, 25 ug (that whacky greek symbol for the u!)