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I know this thread is for the development of cptsd in adulthood. Whereas mine obviously developed in childhood.

But it's hit me in a way it hasn't before: My FOO including both parents and my brothers are continuing to abuse me. I was reading about coercive control and that's part of it. It's not over. It's not 'post'. It's ongoing. And they're all part of it. With whatever is going on, somebody is being complicit. Whether everybody's fine with seeing me left out of photo send-arounds of my niece. Or my brothers are fine atm with them knowing what money is to be given to me but me not being privy to that information about them. Or they're fine with me grovelling for information.

No wonder it's taking me so long to heal: you CAN'T heal till you've left the abusive situation. And I haven't. Yet. Though I don't believe I'll really have left it until something happens within me. Either that, or I finally go and explode.

Anyway, this is me finally admitting to myself that I'm continuing to be abused by my FOO, though I'm 52 years old and have long since left home.

And, yes, it IS that bad.

Just yesterday morning I was in trauma therapy. We didn't go especially deep because it was just the second session. But there were more questions than last time and I gave more detail. I did feel a Part - I started getting cold, but after I did some quick re-grounding, I didn't think much more of it. Afterwards during the course of the day, I developed a pain I haven't had for a long time - on my upper sternum, high up my rib cage, just down from my neck. It's really sore and I haven't hit it or bumped into anything and I can't think how I might have pulled a muscle or anything.

***TW   PA ***




Last time I can remember similar pain in a similar place though slightly further left was over 20 years ago during a breast cancer screening. I said I have this funny lump. The gynaecologist felt it. "Ever broken a rib?" she asked. Not that I was aware of. And then an image of B1 drifted through. Which shocked me because I didn't actually have a memory of him hitting me in my upper rib-cage. It wasn't actually a spot where you could have breast cancer but my grasp of anatomy, especially female anatomy, was very bad. I would read about it and/or look at a diagram and just go blank on it. It's a bit better now but not much.



*** End TW ***

The pain today is pretty bad, like when I breathe in. I presume it was triggered yesterday in trauma T. Maybe EFT will help? Or Screen Processing? It would be good to try and help myself instead of suffering.

:lightbulb: today I started a missive to B1 and B2 about some stuff that needs to be discussed - could be that that has exacerbated what pain was already there from yesterday.

For people who don't fit in neat little boxes and everyone who cares about them!

Looking for something else today and came across this place: https://www.complextrauma.org/complex-trauma/complex-trauma-what-is-it-and-how-does-it-affect-people/

Lot of information of the type that we feel and say on here and wish that people, including professionals, would finally understand.

Overcoming Betrayal and Deception starting July 11th.

healing@avaiya.com or check their website.

I got an email from them a couple of hours ago and apparently there are only 3 hours left in which you can get a spot for free. To be taken with a pinch of salt. Worth checking anyway, b/c they'll probably extend.

A few people on here, other than me of course, have mentioned feeling betrayed by parents/FOO so that's why I'm posting. Obviously FOC, current day friends, partners etc. can also all betray us.

I've signed up.

I'll be off the forum for a good number of weeks because I'm going into inpatient treatment tomorrow. I might occasionally read my own Journals especially to find something I noted ages ago, but otherwise I'll be trying to get the most out of the treatment program! 

[It's quite OK for me to be who I am now, with all my difficulties, instead of trying to be some ideal version of who I am. And it's quite OK for me to do things at my pace.]

I've decided to start a new Journal because the possibility of going inpatient has given me an immediate shift in priorities.

First I wondered about entitling this journal 'Getting by' as in 'Barely hanging on' but then decided on the idea which formed itself at the end of T appt. on Thursday: It's quite OK for me to be who I am now, with all my difficulties, instead of trying to be some ideal version of who I am. And it's quite OK for me to do things at my pace.

My T had asked me what Tool I possess which would help me even want to get up in the morning and that bolded sentence came slowly up from the depths. The Tool is allowing myself to slow down enough to feel that I am OK just as I am and just as I do. It's helping already. For instance, today I finally made myself something warm to eat. It was packet soup but for the past idk 10 days I haven't even been capable of making that. Today I was also finally able to sit down and work out the latest Corona regulations and how they apply to me, ie. I need to go back into lockdown until next Wed. when I get my booster shot. The regulations have very recently changed - a week ago lockdown wouldn't have been an issue for me, just for people who haven't had their first or second jabs, but now it is an issue for me. But my brain was a little on strike and I didn't understand. It's pretty important to be able to understand that kind of thing, putting it mildly.

So focussing on accepting myself and knowing that with this self-acceptance I will move forwards in ways I hadn't even planned on.

[finally]

I have noticed some worries of over-long posts. I used to be a moderator on here so speaking from that experience though this is obviously IMO and Kizzie may see it differently and does have final say on it.

There are people who have trouble seeing and reading a whole wall of text. There were moderators in the past for whom that was the case. Also I do remember from my days moderating that it's harder to read long texts as a moderator than as a non-moderator. So the recommendation and call for shorter texts is partially for moderators and partially for other members but also partially for yourself (a generic 'you' is meant here), in case you're wondering why you don't get any or many responses. Well, maybe because your posts are too long for many mbrs. But you might not care about that and it also depends on who is active on the forum at any one time. There may be lots of long-text writers and long-text readers for quite a spell.

On the other hand, for some mbrs it's really good to finally be able to express and write!! what happened, their experiences now, their realisations etc etc. My posts tend to be long too, whether responses to others or my own posts. There are mbrs on here including me who mention things like feeling they have to explain every little thing or they might be misunderstood and know that this 'feeling that I have to' is connected to the trauma.

I and others who apologise for long posts do get reassurance and appreciation from others about the content of their posts, despite the length. Often the length isn't mentioned at all. I think generally it's better to write your experiences on the forum as long as you feel comfortable and safe enough doing that rather than in PMs partially to give everybody the option to read those important thoughts and feelings you are sharing and partially for the protection aspect for you and everybody else that come with posting on the forum according to the Forum Guidelines, which could be unwittingly bypassed on PMs. Your own Journal is a place where you can write as long as you like basically. Now if anybody goes and writes a 10-page post on theirs, be aware that Kizzie might say 'Enough is Enough' at some point

As I wrote above: imo and ime. Kizzie has last say on all this. But I think she's still taking a break except for really important forum stuff.

I hope this is reassuring and useful.

Hi everybody,

I'm on an enforced break because I lost my home and office Internet connection due to gale force winds carrying the cables etc off the front wall of the house. That was over a week ago and I'm still waiting for the phone company to come and re-install everything. atm I'm doing quite well. With no Internet to distract me, I'm getting on with all sorts of stuff.

Today I've come onto a library computer so I can notify a few people / organisations but otherwise I'm waiting for everything to be reconnected. 

To cb,

I know you seemed in a hurry to stop discussing in the summer and just get our friendship going again. The problem is: I feel so hurt at all your criticisms of me. I also feel dumbfounded that you could possibly think it's OK to just go and dump all that stuff on me, saying isn't that what friendship is for, when the going gets tough you can support each other? Well, not if you're doing your level best to support my parents and other FOO mbrs and another friend who is undermining my boundaries. I could just about handle it if you didn't agree with me on setting boundaries. It would be hard for me after all I've said about the massive dysfunction in my FOO, I admit that. It would be hard but I could probably just about manage it. But when you were actually supporting this other friend and trying to make me see it her way, though I never even asked you! I'm just flabbergasted. I don't even have emotions, I'm just blank. But I know if I looked in the emails I wrote to you and the other friend, I know I would start spluttering with rage.

Both of you are coming up with excuses for my FOO, you're trying to make their behaviour look less toxic, trying to show I haven't tried hard enough or something. sj is suggesting that better communication on my part could change the way FOO deals with me. I HAVE GIVEN FOO MORE THAN ENOUGH CHANCES ALREADY!!! I HAVE GIVEN FOO TOO MANY CHANCES!!! YOU and sj HAVE SEEN THE STATE I HAVE RETURNED HOME IN AFTER CONTACT WITH FOO. BUT YOU STILL THINK MY BEHAVIOUR TOWARDS FOO IS GOING OVERBOARD when all I am doing is PROTECTING MYSELF. I HAVE WASTED YEARS, DECADES OF MY LIFE GIVING FOO CHANCES. I have had enough, more than enough. I'm sort-of-sad to let your friendships go, but I'm sad to lose FOO as well, but I have to let people like you and people like FOO mbrs go because staying in any kind of close contact with you is DAMAGING me.

Now I understand after the last contact in person where you were moaning about the trains, that your remarks about the difficulties of sticking to corona regulations were just you moaning, but at the time I really thought you were explaining your reasons for disregarding the regulations. It seems that in all your missives and contact since whenever it started this year that I'm at fault. I did apologise for swearing during that one phone call though I was swearing at the situation rather than at you, but I don't recollect you apologising for anything. I could be wrong, I could go all through those emails and find you did. My impression is that you didn't, that you were trying to prove me wrong in so many instances. I feel sort of the way I did as a teenager in FOO - I'd rather have no talk at the table occasionally than be forced to converse the way FOO did. (I was asked on my birthday what I wanted to talk about since I objected to F and B1 going on about their usual subjects. 'I'd rather have no talk at all' I said.) Or in this case, I'd rather have no close friendships than have people thinking they know more than me about dealing with MY dysfunctional family and trying to steer me the way they want me to go. That is what sj is doing. And you cb are supporting her in that. Even though she's not even a friend of yours. As I said, I could just about manage you saying you don't agree with me about my actions on FOO or I could manage you saying you don't want to hear about any of it. On the contrary, you always used to ask questions and questions and I thought you were being empathetic but you weren't. I didn't always understand your treatment of other people but I let it be, I didn't criticise you for it. Sometimes I patiently waited hoping you might change your mind sometime, especially with things that indirectly affected me too. Whereas in some of all this, you have been criticising me for the way I am interacting with other people and setting limits/boundaries that have no affect on you whatsoever! Which means you are interfering. You are trying to prevent me from growing and changing and sometime or other that was going to cause an explosion - see the phone call where I started swearing. I did apologise for that, but also left a warning: Anybody who thinks it might be a good idea to criticise me for setting somebody else a limit is going to get an earful. I'm not putting up with interference of that sort anymore. I remain flabbergasted! How is that OK? How did you think that could be helpful? But you did. You wanted to make sure I didn't lose the friendship of sj because what would I do without it?? I will manage. But you, in leaning way out, not being grounded and centred in yourself, but looking out for somebody else - me?? sj?? hard to say who - have lost my friendship.

Undoubtedly it was time for me to remove myself from your friendship, I hadn't known all these things you hold against me, but I've learned them this year and it's too late to go back. That's the problem often when my friendships go awry. I've been putting up with the behaviour too long. I haven't said much or even anything before because it's so blinking difficult for me due to childhood trauma. That is something for me to work on, but I still don't see that it gives you an EXCUSE to treat me as you do when I'm giving pretty obvious signals for you to back down, e.g. my voice is loud and I start swearing. I suppose when I'm at a loss for words that's not an obvious signal for you though it is for me.

Yeah, I guess I need to work on communicating limits and boundaries to people I like before things get to the stage they get to. But I still don't see that that gives you an excuse to continue to think you know better than I do what is good for me. I didn't ask you for your opinion or help, you just piled it all on, completely unasked in fact. The problem with sj is: I have communicated limits before but she thinks she knows better than I do and so she didn't observe the limit and went way over my boundary.
___________________

It's sad, like with FOO, but I need to save myself. Same sort of issue applies with FOO and both these no-longer-friends - they think they are emotionally healthier than me possibly because I have an official diagnosis and probably mainly because I don't function as well as an adult of my age would be expected to, but also because I don't lie down and put up with things anymore. In fact sometimes I create a total fuss where they think I should just put up with things e.g. with people like business neighbour. It's true, cb thinks I could have dealt differently with people in my building and not allowed things to escalate, also way back before said business neighbour was here.  This year, creating a total fuss was the only way to keep business neighbour and his plans at bay. Maybe none of it would have happened quite that way if I had managed to exude an air of 'here and no further' from day one in this building but I don't probably thanks to all that trauma in childhood so how I'm dealing with it now is how I'm dealing with it. If sj and cb lived here they could deal with it in their ways, but they don't. They're not even tenants anymore.

Most of the above is kind of stream-of-consciousness, so I'm sorry but almost no paragraph breaks. Don't feel capable of going back and putting any in either.

 I was reading an article about different animal languages and also about how humans round the globe hear what the animals are 'saying' and found this link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP3gzee1cps Animals are just... Idk watching animal videos just does me good. I hope the same for others on here.

If somebody says to you "I was triggered by what you said" but she has never mentioned anything about being traumatised herself despite knowing about me having cptsd, is she misunderstanding what triggers are? Could she being feeling upset or angry or confused or similar and think that's what being triggered is? But actually does not know the finer points of overwhelm etc? Or is this a form of minimising my reactions and problems (for want of a better word)? A sort of jumping on the bandwagon? Or something else entirely?

I'm interested in others' opinion on this. Partially because I might be being overly picky on definitions.




This article https://www.healthline.com/health/triggered reinforces some of what I've been told in the past e.g. that trauma doesn't always lead to triggers, which could be similar to not everybody getting traumatised e.g. not everybody in the same earthquake or car accident will be. The article is not actually primarily about this particular aspect of triggers.  To be fair I maybe ought to look for an article that says the opposite 

I'm posting this picture gallery because I was moved and intrigued by it. A horse shows that his calling is comforting people, not racing or show-jumping or something. His owner allows the horse to follow his calling.

I'll give a slight
                              TW for terminal illness



https://www.theguardian.com/society/gallery/2021/mar/12/doctor-peyo-the-horse-comforting-cancer-patients-in-calais-in-pictures

The horse has great intuition! I had tears in my eyes while reading, but they are good tears.

Here's another video I watched by the therapist Patrick Teahan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs3oVNQvtWQ
Cautionary TW for watching, though not reading.

It shows 3 different role-plays. One is of a daughter telling her M about being in T. The M reacts unsupportive and makes it all about her. The daughter can't defend herself adequately or at all. (This situation or similar is probably pretty familiar to most of us on here, certainly to me)

The second one, M is actually supportive and admits to not being there in her daughter's childhood, apologises etc. I can't remember if it was in a comment on this video or a different one, but Teahan says that's a total unicorn situation - we all want it but it hardly ever happens. It's interesting to see what a healthy parent might look like though!

The third one is something we can work towards if we haven't gone VLC or NC already: M remains dysfunctional but the daughter sets limits, speaks out, ends conversation etc. It's also helping me think about how I react in conflict with people outside FOO like my neighbours, friends, landlord etc.

I wasn't really sure where to post this. Hope this is a good place for it.

 I saw this on OOTF and thought it might be of interest here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PcVXDJQ9Wc&feature=youtu.be
It's an informative video on the 'other' parent who appears good because apparently when we're children we can't possibly survive with two bad parents, we have to believe one is better to the point of overlooking any bad stuff from this parent. I think the video explains it very well. I tried to post on OOTF about my reactions to the video, but I kept deleting my post, so obviously I didn't feel safe enough. 

https://www.thetappingsolution.com/blog/tapping-world-summit-2021/
today 22 Feb 2021 8pm EST and tomorrow. Each day's sessions free for 24 hours.

New Journal

I'm moving forwards. I'm most definitely moving forwards and I no longer feel that I need to pressurise myself into doing therapy homework (or feel bad that I'm not doing it while expecting my own students to do their language homework) or pressurise myself into taking concrete steps. Because I now do those things automatically when the time is right, which isn't always right away.

One concrete way in which I can see that I'm moving forwards is telling myself to breathe and not panic about the fact that one of my adult students is stopping just before Christmas, my traumatised student is not coming at all atm and I don't know when she'll be restarting, another adult student is stopping in February and there are no new inquiries atm. Breathe. This situation comes up again and again. New inquiries will come, they always do. My new increased price is not the problem, so don't worry.

Btw my final post in my previous Journal contains some pretty important points. I may write there again regarding that topic and anybody is welcome to read it and post on it there. 

The Embodiment Conference posted here: https://cptsd.org/forum/index.php?topic=13743.0 is going to be offered in 8 additional languages. Or at least it seems that the presentations of the KeyNote speakers are going to be translated into these languages, but not the whole conference.

So if your English isn't very good or you know other people who'd be interested in this conference or the forum, but English is a barrier, then these links may help.

French  https://theembodimentconference.org/?lang=fr

German  https://theembodimentconference.org/?lang=de

Spanish  https://theembodimentconference.org/?lang=es

Portuguese  https://theembodimentconference.org/?lang=pt

Russian  https://theembodimentconference.org/?lang=ru

Hindi  https://theembodimentconference.org/?lang=hi

Arabic  https://theembodimentconference.org/?lang=ar

Mandarin  https://theembodimentconference.org/?lang=zh

I know I post 'too much', way more than anybody else on the forum, but my impulse atm is to shout this one from the rooftops: my T session today has brought me a big step forward in healing from CSA. I'm sure more direct work is necessary but I'm also sure that the work done today will bring further forward movement without any more direct, specific work before my next T session. My impulse to shout from the rooftops feels almost euphoric. I think that means that some of the burden of shame has lifted. More details in my Journal.

A success today: I didn't force myself to do one more of a specific household job just because it makes sense weather-wise.
The overriding thing is: it didn't make sense either energy-wise or EF-wise! I noticed a sudden drop in my own energy at the thought of going thru with it, especially at having to force myself, so as I write that, I realise it's not a real energy problem because the energy is there for other things. There's some other reason. i could feel into that but I don't have the time to do that rn, especially not because that in itself often exhausts me and I've got quite a bit of paid work to do today.

From this conference topic on shame https://cptsd.org/forum/index.php?topic=13719.msg104605#msg104605 I learnt that toxic shame/being shamed makes you go into freeze and your IQ goes down 20 points while you're stuck there.

I asked my T this morning if that sounds plausible. He says it does, though in some cases it may be more than 20 points (in other cases presumably less).

That explains to me why I felt dumb for most of my teenage years with just a few glimpses when I was able to access my intelligence and realise 'I'm not dumb after all!' I think it became more noticeable to me when I was in high school, so 12 yo onwards.

Anyway, I thought this information might interest others on here.