Messages

   NK! These crazy people like your M, crazy-making too. I hope it's helped you to vent some on here. Your M really makes it all about her. 

  Joining you but just to enjoy the sun and the warmth and the greenery. No planting work today.

I'm sorry your FOO is putting you through this. Mine hasn't always been too good with NC and VLC, but they at least don't 'play games' and manipulate when it comes to deaths in the extended family.

my mom refused to do on the grounds that you should't hear about family death over text.

Oh man, what a load of baloney.

Honestly just want to melt into a depressed puddle in my bed, make a nest of blankets and find comfort snacks but instead I have 2 separate role-playing groups waiting for me to spend my day pretending to fight monsters. And that's probably more productive then cuddling up and marinating in all the levels of feeling and the little waves of tears and grief that keep hitting me

May I suggest that probably both are productive? Maybe after the role-playing, you can curl up in your nest of blankets with some comfort (snacks? hot water bottle? calming music? stuffie? pet if you have one... or all of the above).

Although you were not so fond of your uncle, still - my condolences.

On swearing - most swears will be turned into * automatically by the system. The reason being: swearing can be very triggering for some people with cptsd, especially for those who are/were subjected to verbal violence including swears. So, the recommendation here on OOTS is to use a symbol mash like !&/?#  and/or use emojis like   or there's even a nice explosive one. Please don't use a symbol mash combined with letters because that's just as triggering, the eye automatically fills in the missing letters. Personally, I like using emojis, I find them quite satisfying  

1) Lovely warm sunny autumn day

2) I finally cut the grass for what I hope is the last time before winter.

3) The garden looks much better and I feel a sense of achievement and purpose.

The thing is, Papa Coco - you DO help others.

Very true!

Exactly!

Off the top of my head and in the space of 35 seconds I've come up with 4 different ways among 3 distinct groups of people and undoubtedly there is more.

You are allowed to take a break from that and put on your own oxygen mask!
  

I'm sorry this happened to you. It sounds awful. Not to mention abusive.

But I am always afraid someone is going to tell me I'm being dramatic and making it something it wasn't.

Since your father told you that you were being dramatic, it's not surprising that you fear that happening now. I've been on this forum a long time and I can't remember any member telling another not to be dramatic or anything along those lines! This is a very supportive forum in fact. I imagine most of us have had our symptoms or reactions minimised so often by abusers and enablers that we don't do it to each other.

In the past the CSA done to me was sometimes queried by therapists or even negated, but the definition of CSA is broadening. If you feel it was 'ick', it was. If you feel it wasn't right, then it wasn't. Trust your feelings, especially the visceral ones.

It is quite common for many of us to wonder whether the abuse or neglect done to us was 'bad enough'. It was. Otherwise I or you or anybody wouldn't be here on the forum with cptsd. But you're welcome to keep writing it out on the forum as long as you need to in order to get the poison out of your system. Or in order to get validation from other members, if you need that.

I'm sorry you've experienced this with both parents. Maybe the tickling as a stand alone issue would sound "dramatic" to someone who doesn't know the full story or understand abuse and control but rest assured I agree that the "tickling" was an excuse to continue assaulting you under the cover of being "playful." Im sorry that you experienced it all..being called untrue and degrading names, being subjected to middle of the night sexual abuse by a parent, for the continued touching and control thru tickling, and that your mom did not come to your rescue as she should have. You have a right to feel hurt and angry about all of it.

I second Armee.

It's good you feel safe enough on this forum to start writing these things.

Or you could use the search function, though I don't know how good that is or isn't on this forum software as I very rarely use it for this purpose. I guess it would have too many results unless you happen to remember a more unusual word.

I find the search function here works quite well.

In the Search Parameters, you can enter the message age (anywhere from 1 - 9999 days iirc) which will certainly reduce the number of results.

EMS? Healing Porch? 

A few nights ago, I had a very real seeming dream. I was hunched down in a kind of aircraft that was the shape of an elevator tho bigger, and I was alone. I have a general fear of flying, tho I did work thru panic a good few years ago and did manage to fly again, but still I'm frightened when in the air. I quite often have bad dreams like this. So I was cowering in this dusky, dark 'aircraft', feeling shudderings and able to see landscape down below thru cracks etc, while the 'aircraft' rose steadily upwards. Suddenly I had the impulse to lie down flat on the floor of this 'aircraft' instead of cowering. The dream disappeared immediately - the fear went, the shuddering stopped and I was lying completely stretched out. I'm not sure if I really woke up, but I did realise at some point that I was in my own bed.

I remember now how my now-retired trauma T worked with me quite a lot on posture - not to change it so much as to notice it. Notice how it feels when I cower or fall into myself or hunch my shoulders forward or lie in the fetal position. And then notice how it feels to open my body up, with my arms and legs moving out of the fetal position or out of a cowering position.

Welcome to the forum Blaithe

I'm discovering more and more how difficult it is for me to maintain friendships, although there was a good few years in my healing journey when I seemed to be doing quite well. I thought I had lots of good friends. But I'm really pulling back atm and I'm not phoning my friends, I'm not even leaving the house.

I get dissociated especially when they delay a reply.

I'm sorry. I dissociate for lots of reasons and know how sudden and debilitating it can be. I very often delay with replies - months sometimes, or even years. It may of course look like rejection and abandonment, but actually the reasons are different e.g. it often takes me a long time to figure out what I really feel. So this could be the case with other people who don't reply to you. It may not have so much to do with you personally as you believe. I don't mean to minimise what you're experiencing - please tell me if it comes across that way.

I have a history of NO romantic relationships because I dissociate and/or my body goes numb at the thought. I'm in my 50's. In comparison, 3 months is long and I think it gives you some experience, which is generally helpful in some way.

Wanting to heal is a good start. I wish you healing step by step and hope you find this forum as supportive as I have over the years.

DF, I read too. I second NK but I can't write it all out, I'm sorry.   

I'm so with you on the over-use of "trauma" and "trigger" by those without ptsd or cptsd.

   Bach!
I so resonate with all that boiler stuff plus worries about different heat source in with a pet and responsibility and lying awake half the night...

Just our particular version of cptsd I believe.

Further upthread you mentioned that if you liked yourself better, you would take care of yourself better. Well  yesterday I didn't think I was taking good care of myself at all and saying how hard it is for me atm. A few fellow bearers of cptsd said to me: It is CPTSD that makes it so incredibly difficult and exhausting!
So I'm passing on that gem to you now.

I have noticed recently that some of the dissociative walls I had have possibly dissolved and the consequence of that is that I 'feel' things more, and sometimes that's not a nice feeling - but I'm leaning into that - and exploring how those feelings are.

My initial reaction here is        Yay for you Hope! Dissolving dissociative walls - wow! I'm sorry you're feeling more tho. I'm not big into feeling non-nice things either... But you're leaning into that and exploring and I suppose getting better at sitting with those feelings? 

I can't even imagine anything ever actually "curing" single PTSD in 5 hours but I don't think anyone really "gets over" trauma, rather learns to live healthily in spite of it? The idea of a "cure" seems completely alien to me. Maybe that's just realistic

I think single ptsd is a different beast altogether (from cptsd)! Especially if it really is single ptsd that occurs when you're a fully formed (mid-20's and older) and fairly well-adjusted adult, who is involved in a bad car accident for instance, especially if you get appropriate care / have the appropriate resiliences in place (which most of us with cptsd have to learn or otherwise acquire over years). It seems they possibly are actually cured?? I have read that those soldiers who come back from war with ptsd and who have more trouble recovering than other soldiers with ptsd were often traumatised in childhood, mostly unbeknownst to them so probably also cptsd. Anyway, it's not quite all cut-and-dried. Depends on a lot of factors. Same with anxiety. If you have a single instance of anxiety going back to a single occurrence of something, apparently you might be cured within a small number of sessions, I have been told it happens. But if you have a General Anxiety Disorder which in itself imho is probably part of cptsd - in my case certainly - 5-10 sessions aren't going to cure the actual anxiety, it'll just attach itself to some other object or activity. Everything is so mixed up like the biggest mess of string and yarn in the back of the drawer that you can imagine.

I once had a quick trial session of EMDR when I was inpatient and I did find it fascinating the way I could almost feel things in my brain re-configuring and being slotted in different places for the next idk 12-24 hours. I'd never felt anything like that before and I do have a lot of therapy experience including lots of non-talk therapy under my belt. It didn't feel bad in any way either, no unhappy memories, no triggers during the re-slotting. But I can't say it reduced the anxiety about the object/activity I had with me in that moment. Presumably it healed something I was not consciously aware of, to some degree. 

... I don't think anyone really "gets over" trauma, rather learns to live healthily in spite of it? The idea of a "cure" seems completely alien to me. Maybe that's just realistic

Probably realistic for cptsd, unfortunately. Tho there are / have been members on here over the years who have achieved far more than I have towards living healthily and somewhat normally (having a job they can live off, having a suppportive and loving partner, continuing to grow, managing not to be totally triggered by FOO...)

Hope something in here might be useful for you, otherwise please ignore.

So I was wondering, is my extreme emotional reaction to that very minor thing autism, or is it CPTSD, or are the NYT puzzle people just mean spirited? (or all three?)

I don't know much about autism, I don't think I have anything like that. What strikes me about your post is "very minor thing". Often what triggers me with my cptsd is what is seemingly a minor thing. I have discovered it is often just the tip of the iceberg, in other words there's a whole lot of other stuff going on underneath and possibly not just in me, sometimes in the other person too (things not spoken, things just assumed e.g.).

This minor seeming thing can be an old childhood hurt that I had to put away and put up with, never acknowledged by FOO, me never forgiven by FOO tho possibly I wasn't even at fault, they were instead. On the surface and rationally that may look minor, but it's not. I can't remember off-hand if you work with inner children or an inner child, but if you do, acknowledging this kind of thing with them can be quite healing. Not 100% I have found, but it reduces the triggering because the child you were is finally heard and acknowledged.

If that doesn't resonate at all, then that's fine.