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[Emotional abuse is like brain washing]

What? ALL of it sounds bad! Not just "oh dearie me" bad or "tsk tsk" bad. It's "Swedish arthouse movie" bad. It's the kind of bad people write biographies about (those "I survived a cult" kind of books). It's BAD bad. You're not surprisingly broken: given the hand you were dealt, you're surprisingly strong.

People normalize and rationalize the sh*t out of their abusive behaviour. There's always a good reason, isn't there? The crassest, most mind-blowingly stupid examples of abuse get treated like - "oh, I was having a bad day", "if you hadn't (done this thing or said that other thing or used that tone of voice), then I wouldn't have..." BLA BLA BLA BLA BLA. Nonsense! And we bought it and internalized it and believed in it because we were kids and didn't have a choice.

Emotional abuse is like brain washing in that it systematically wears away at the victim's [...] trust in their own perceptions [...].

(http://www.counselingcenter.illinois.edu/self-help-brochures/relationship-problems/emotional-abuse/)

IMO, being parentalized alone qualifies as a marker of a sh*tty childhood. And you had so much other crap to deal with on top of that. You had a youth I wouldn't wish upon my worst enemy, and you're still standing, still able to work towards your own recovery, still able to find a voice for what had happened. That's big.

Interesting article. Thanks for the link. I had noticed that life gets considerably easier if I avoid fatty foods, sugar, and simple carbs (white flour, white rice), if I exercize, and if I eat lots of meat and/or veg.  But I had no idea about the inflammatory response thing.

I found some links on sources of zinc, selenium, and omega 3 fatty acids. I don't know who owns that particular website, but the information is well presented and easy to understand (I don't have much of a head for numbers, and most other sites were full of spreadsheets).

Zinc: http://bembu.com/foods-high-in-zinc
Selenium: http://bembu.com/selenium-rich-foods
Omega 3: http://bembu.com/omega-3-foods

There's several other things where a deficiency makes you tired and less able to concentrate, like iron and folic acid.

First of all, you have my fullest empathy. I've had stories like that happening - just one thing after the other. Bleargh. And kudos to you that you still handled your dd's accident with such poise.

Here's a barrage of advice, then. Most of it will turn out to be unhelpful - you decide.

Freeze might be combated by Flight or Fight? What do you think? It would make sense (I think). Would you say that your fitness classes are an example of Flight? Are they a symptom or a cure? I'm asking because for some reason, I sometimes get out of milder EFs by rearranging furniture. Or by therapeutic baking. Or by researching the topic. Any activity that seems even remotely connected to fixing the problem. (And exercize does help get rid of stress hormones, so maybe you're on to something here.)

Fight works still better. Not really, actually fighting, of course, just getting properly indignant and angry and shocked at past events.

If part of your trauma was that your trouble was overlooked, or minimized, or trivialized, or maybe you were even punished or rejected for having problems at all - then maybe you need to be validated and heard? Now, that's easy to say, I know. It's a bit of a ticklish subject, going spelunking in my problems without freefalling into EFs. But here's some things that worked for me.

---Writing a dialogue with my inner team. I sit down, relax, and go into freewriting mode. Then I write a dialogue - like a script. What works well is asking a question. Usually, an answer wells up within me. I often get a sense of where it's from, i.e. what inner part is speaking. Then I react to that answer, maybe ask a new question, and things go on from there, just like in an actual dialogue. If there's no reply, I'll just write that down as three dots, and maybe either ask another question, or stay silent and wait. (So half the sheet might be filled with a line of dots, then another line of dots, then another...). After all, if I talked to a real actual person who was hurting and in trouble, I might just have to sit there and wait for them to collect their thoughts too, or maybe just be gentle and respectful of their silence. The ground rules are, everyone talks with some basic respect, and emotional abuse isn't acceptable. So if my inner critic starts abusing me, he gets told off. If he gives me valuable information or if he validates me, I'll thank him and express my appreciation. ------ This has turned my life around. But maybe that's just me.

---Writing to myself about my old trauma. Like a note or a letter you leave for a good friend who's hurting. For me, that's usually along the lines of: YES it was bad, NO it wasn't just you imagining things, NO ONE listens to their kid talk about being bullied and basically goes 'tough sh*t, you're on your own', who even DOES that, this is NOT NORMAL BEHAVIOUR, etc.

---Freewriting. Unburdening myself to someone who knows how to do active listening. Journaling about how I feel. Doing a version of CBT.

Lastly, giving myself permission to be affected by this. This is like a bout of the flu, you get to be slowed down and you get to take care of yourself, and no one has a right to make you feel like you're being weak. This is because usually, NOT ONLY do I have EFs, I also feel guilty as all * for having them. Sometimes I wouldn't be surprised if one of the things that trigger EFs are EFs.

Hang in there.

I have also been reading Pete walkers book and I finally found out what that thing was that used to happen to me if my mother beat me for too long. I thought I just made myself go limp and fall asleep kind of and it stopped the pain, but he calls it the "collapse response".

Oh my words. I don't even know what to say. I want a time machine so I can get you out of there. I want to get everyone out.

Kizzie - "range from subtle to horrific"? Oh thank goodness, that explains a lot.

Do you tackle your different flashbacks in different ways? That's on my to-do list - to explore what precisely I'd need during panicky vs foggy flashbacks. With the panicky ones, I need safety, reassurance, maybe the chance to anger or grieve my way through the bad memories. With the foggy flashbacks, I need... what? Hm. Must think about this. Hah, maybe I need a Richter scale for EFs. An early warning system.

Butterfly, I've asked myself that same thing for years. Those things always happened around EFs though. During bad times, even my food intolerance* gets worse, which is just weird.

(*If I eat foods that contain histamine liberators, it's like something's hitting my off switch. Histamine is a stress hormone. Maybe EFs produce so many stress hormones that the little extra contained in food tips me over the edge, I don't know.)

Thanks for this. This looks interesting.

That sounds incredibly painful. That someone would steal your things and then blame you for wanting to protect what's yours is jaw-dropping. How many of your rights has your mother waltzed all over?

It's a shame that your mother's actions ruined painting for you (at least for now).

I don't socialize either. I'm hoping to do it again one day, but for now, it's just too energy-consuming. Even just meeting acquaintances on the street is stressful. I'm always paralyzed with fear because I was usually abused especially if I seemed unhappy or dour.

It seems the numbness and lack of joy or even hope is pretty common for C/PTSD folks. It makes sense. The way my T explained it to me is that I lived the first half of my life with the emotional volume at 15 on a scale of 10...so learning to "hear" emotions at normal level is hard.  And all of those "loud" experiences naturally take center stage, even well after the fact, and overshadow the "quieter" normal stuff. 

Ah ha. That's an excellent point. Thank you for sharing it.

And of course, any quieter normal (even pleasant) stuff was always just the quiet before yet another storm. I remember now.  Any good times were always ruined by the knowledge: this won't last, it's just a flash in the pan. Maybe that makes it difficult to let myself really feel the normal, pleasant quietness now.

I hope you all have the wind at your backs, at least a little.

Thanks. That course helped me loads. I think I was a reasonably okay soother before it, but I often felt weirdly uncomfortable soothing my kids' day-to-day troubles. I used to be brushed off so often, I just had no clear idea what to do. It was all so unfamiliar.

And from what my mother did, I had a vague idea stuck in my head that "soothing" means "doing some quick and impatient action, and then the crying or complaining or weeping goes away". It was like "soothing" was goal-oriented: my kid presents a problem I have to fix, and I have to swoop in and do some quick, efficient fixing-it things before swooping back out again. So when my kids just settled in for a good cry, or if they came back again and again with the same story of what had happened to them, a part of me felt: "crap, I didn't to a good job the first time". And then of course I felt unsettled because I thought I didn't go about things the right way. I still comforted my kids for as long as they needed it, of course, but I felt like I was maybe doing it wrong. After all, they were still upset.

So this course helped me loads. It let me approach this like any other new skill I'm learning. And its main assumption was that we don't have to "fix" literally each and every problem the kid has, we mainly need to establish and maintain this sense of connectedness, and to give a level of care that empowers the child.

Oh wow, you were really fast or maybe I was really slow. I spent so much time editing my post that it's now too late to read the self-medicating thread and download the worksheets. So my apologies if I wrote something that's already been said before. I'll look into this tomorrow.

This is from a parenting course:

In a difficult experience, a child needs a sense of connection, a sense of control, and a sense of meaning. So ways of soothing a child could be:

CONNECTION

Being physically present in the situation with her - sitting by her side, having her sit on one's lap, putting one's arms around her, cuddling, stroking her hair if she likes that, holding her and rocking her gently. Being physically present at all, not walking away. Letting your kid hear your voice (soothing noises) so you're not simply just sittting there in silence (some kids might find that too distanced).

Being emotionally present. Active listening. Assuring her that I'm there and that I won't leave her alone in this, we're in this together. (Even if she's the one fixing it, she'll be like the boxer heading for another bout, and I'll be in her corner with a towel and the water and all those things.) Showing one's concern in one's facial expression (NOT grimly determined to get this over and done with ASAP, but more along the lines of "oh dear, yes, I can see that you skinned your knee really badly this time"). Open, relaxed, welcoming posture, not closed-off or stiff, not fidgeting with impatience. When my kids were very little, I used to first hold them until the worst of their initial shock (at skinned knees and such) was over, and then I used to softly sing a certain song. Then I'd stop and hold them some more.
Another way of establishing connectedness might be through acts of service: making a cup of coacoa, offering her a "comfort cookie", fixing physical injuries, asking if she's cold, offering to read her a story. A lot of kids are comforted if something is done - if there's some kind of action that says "yes, I'm taking care of you". (A lot of adults are, too.)

CONTROL

The woman who held the course didn't offer examples here, so these are my own.
Active listening is a good tool to help others work through their own issues. Just letting them tell the story helps them gain a first little sense of control. I got this from PTSD texts. Several of them said that PTSD memories are traumatic precisely because they still stick in your gullet and aren't yet organized into a coherent narrative. So telling a story is already a form of control.
If my kids fell and skinned their knees, I'd first do the connection bit outlined above, then I'd ask: "Where does it hurt the most?" That's another way they automatically assume control: they switch from passive suffering to active scrutinizing. They'd often sit up straight, calm down, and become visibly focussed and controlled, so I'm assuming it worked. Some of my own milder flashbacks can be fended off that way, by investigating what it is really like: how would I describe this if this were a story I'm writing?
A third thing I did was point out what they'd done to protect themselves. So if a kid had stumbled, I'd maybe say: "It's good that you were able to catch some of your fall by really quickly taking hold of that bannister." They'd often pause, looking at the bannister, then again I could almost watch them regaining a sense of poise and control, and we'd spend the next five minutes talking shop about bannisters and how to hold on to them, and they'd tell me how they moved their hand real fast etc etc.
Or rituals. Little compensations. Anything that's an active step you can take together with the kid, a step that's about healing and recovery and ressource work. If the kid had a difficult time, you might do something especially nice. Again, it doesn't have to be much, it just has to be something the kid enjoys. Maybe ordering take-out dinner from a place she likes, or having dessert when you usually don't, or taking a step that will fix the problem. My dd had trouble at school a few years ago, and though it's fixed now, she still doesn't really like the place all that much: so when that came up again at the start of the summer holidays, we took all the notebooks that she definitely wouldn't need anymore and burnt them.

MEANING

I didn't like the examples given in our course. Which is why I can't remember them. Sorry. From what I heard and from my own experience, it's best to explore this whole area together with the kid. Kids will often initiate such conversations themselves. Sometimes all they need is for someone to actively listen while they work it out by themselves, using you as a sounding board for their own ideas. They're often appreciative if you share your own experiences ("I was bullied, too" etc) so they feel less alone.
That's one level of meaning one can explore: whatever happens to you - you're never alone with it. There's always others who share your problem, and who'll know exactly what you're going through. And there'll be yet others who'll suffer the same way, and whom you might be able to help.
Then there's religious meanings.
Maybe a part of "meaning" might also be when they ask you how to make sure this doesn't happen again.



(This sounds theoretical. I often try to dissect things into their component parts so I understand them better. Also, I'm from Central Europe. If we have a problem, we soothe ourselves with flowcharts and diagrams and difficult words. I'm only half kidding, believe you me. I only jiiiust stopped myself from using the phrase "paradigm shift".)

I'm hesitant about even posting this, but...

It occurred to me that many here might not have all that many experiences with being soothed as kids. I know my own mother was often too harried and impatient, and quite often, she'd ignore things or tell me to buck up.

However, now in recovery, I'm supposed to "soothe my inner child".

So I thought: there have to be quite a few parents here. Or people who had positive experiences with being soothed, or who've researched the thing. Would it be helpful if we just collected a few ways of soothing people? Or stories of how successful soothing experiences. Soothing strategies. Guidelines. Anecdotes.

I'll add mine in a separate post.

I only found out about EFs a few days ago. So I never thought about my various flashbacks and how to classify them until I wrote that post. It's one reason I'm so glad to be here. Talking to others is a lot more thought-provoking than simply just thinking about things, and it makes one think clearly and combat woolly-mindedness.

So... hm. Let me think about this. Perhaps those flashbacks might be mainly caused by CPTSD, but I seem to get two basic kinds.

Variation one triggers my freeze response. It numbs me and makes me tired and less able to concentrate. I drift into doing all kinds of numbing, escapist things, while also feeling terrible and having toxic thoughts run amok in my head. Up until a few days ago, I didn't even know those were flashbacks. They're hard to spot. It's really like drifting into a fog. It's a slow poison, not a quick shock.

Variation two gets me a feeling that I'm threatened, that I'm under threat of... I don't even know what. No, now I get a clearer idea. A threat of being actively rejected and abused, not just passively ignored and overlooked. I think that's it. That too makes me want to do some of the escapist things I mentioned. But I don't gently drift into doing them: I frantically dive for cover. I feel that I'm acutely in danger of being scapegoated, singled out, othered, and made to feel shameful, the way I felt as a kid when my mother was close to exploding (she had a LOT on her plate and was sometimes very short-tempered from all that).

That kind of flashback is the one I called PTSD flashback in my previous post. I realize though that I'm not a hundred percent sure it is one. It fits the PTSD model well, and I think it's the reason I was (mis?)diagnosed with PTSD by two different therapists.

However, there's never any tangible memory that gets evoked. There isn't anything visual, or anything I re-hear or re-feel. It's all just in the way my body reacts, it's that sense of danger, and it's the moods and thoughts.

There are two possibilities.
1) I have both CPTSD and PTSD flashbacks, like I thought at first.
2) I have two kinds of CPTSD flashbacks (possibly more? - must look into this). What kind I get depends on what kind of past experience gets evoked:
--- a) memories of being neglected and/or memories of "passive" / "gentle" emotional abuse (like withholding, minimizing, trivializing) -----> freeze response, numbing, dissociation, depersonalisation; flashback feels like a fog thickens around me; I avoid people and "risky" situations mostly because I feel too shameful/inept/unacceptable (=inner critic)
--- b) memories of being emotionally abused in an "active", i.e. recognizably aggressive or hostile way, or memories of physical abuse -----> feeling shocked, endangered, like I'm under threat now; feeling like I must dive for cover; highly elevated startle response, I can't stand being crowded and very easily feel claustrophobic, I feel like I need to hide, I avoid people because everyone seems like a potential threat for more abuse (=outer critic), I'm panicky and hypervigilant,...

I'll have to think about this again a few times to see if it holds water, but right now, it seems likely that this is what's happening. After all, each flashback mirrors the way I felt about the specific trauma back then when it happened. (And all these years I thought I didn't remember what my life was like when I was a child. A part of me remembered all along, and tried to tell me about it, but I wouldn't listen.)

Thank you for talking to me about this. I hope I wasn't misleading you.

Thanks for your kind words. I was afraid I'd theorized too much. Phew.

Thanks. Do you know how unfamiliar this is: feeling normal? This has changed my entire life.