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I've been NC with my FOO for about six years now. In so many ways it has been the most freeing thing I have ever done for myself. In other ways it feels like a wound that will never close. My FOO is huge and I've always existed within the context of my many family members. Now, being a family unto myself leaves me feeling deeply deeply alone. I have chosen family and I love them and often they are enough, but they do not fill the wound.

Anyway, I am plagued by nightmares about my parents. Often in my nightmares I am being chased by them. Sometimes in my nightmares one of my parents commits suicide and I discover it and believe I am the cause. Sometimes it's just nightmares of flashbacks of abuse, or frightening memories. But then last night I had a nightmare where I was a teenager again, and my mom was being her usual verbally abusive self. But in the dream I start berating her, so much so that she is stunned into silence and begins to cry. In the dream it's coming out of my mouth like a flood and I just continue to verbally eviscerate her just to see her pain. Dream-me gets a deep satisfaction and a feeling like I am better than her and like I have won. I woke up feeling horrible, guilty, disgusting. It left me feeling like... like the only way I know how to seize my own power is through taking on the role of abuser and seeking my revenge. It left me with a lot to think about, but mostly it left me with a lot of pain and guilt and self-hatred.

My therapist talks to me a lot about techniques to reduce my nightmares - but I can't help but feeling like my dreams are trying to tell me something about myself or clue me into something I need to do or reflect on. Do others experience these types of dreams? Do you find them insightful, or are they just a symptom that needs managing? Are they useful at all?

I am the child
of a miserable man waiting to die
and an angry woman so desperate to live that
life just slipped through trembling hands,
I am the self-centered daughter
of eclipsing emotional black holes
born through starving,
I am chaos. I am a hungry void,
there is no end to what I am missing.

I don't need anything
or anyone, just this familiar state of wanting,
this inertia forever waiting
for life to start in spite of me,
what kind of child gets kidnapped,
just like that?
What kind of kidnapped child
gets returned?
I am unwanted baggage,
too old now to claim.

I am my own,
and most days I rebuke this gag gift,
don't you know?
You cannot nurture a life force
that was never there,
you cannot reach inside yourself
and find something never given,
not everyone is born
with all the tools inside of them.

This is the story I tell myself.
This is the legacy I lead,
but somewhere inside me
still lives a seed.

When I was a kid in the thick of my traumatization, I missed a lot of school due to "sickness." I would be sick to my stomach, often to the point of puking, and would feel so certain that I was going to die that I felt my only option was to hide under the covers in my bed and try to fall back asleep. I know now that the sickness I was suffering from was psychosomatic - brought on by the complete emotional overwhelm I was experiencing in my home circumstances. I had always been at the top of my class in school (I was thrilled to soak in any positive attention from teachers) so my mom let me stay home with this sickness whenever I wanted - which ended up being two or three times per week for YEARS until I finally graduated high school. I would only be able to bring myself to go to school if I felt that there would be significant consequences - like missing an important test that would affect my grade significantly. It's as if I was waiting for the last possible second to break out of my mental paralysis, fueled by fear that overhwelmed the toxic shame and anxiety that kept me from living my life - fear that finally helped me to move my body.

It's an exhausting cycle and it continues to this day. The stomach upset has gotten better, but I still lay in bed waiting for death to strike me when I can't seem to move my body and get to work. When I have deadlines, I am only able to start my work when I feel that any second more of waiting will spell certain doom. I know people call this "procrastination" but I think it really is just my toxic shame and crippling anxiety. I look back and I wish my mom had made me go to school - taught me how to face the anxieties in my life instead of isolating endlessly to avoid them. Or even more, I wish someone had recognized how much I was suffering, how badly I needed guidance in learning how to regulate my emotions and manage my stress.

Does anyone else experience this? How do you work with it? How do you get yourself out of bed? How do you break the cycle?

Phoebes and Blueberry,

Thank you for your messages. I'm not thinking about death anymore but still in a deep fog of depression and hopelessness. I've been thinking about something my therapist said to me. She said, "Sometimes, feeling like you want to quit your job just means that you need a vacation." I think that might apply here too - I don't really want to die, I just need to find a way to make life a little easier to bear. Maybe by reducing my stressors or increasing my support. But my job is a big part of my stress and I have so many other factors in my life relying on that employment. It's going to take a big burst of functioning and energy to get me through making any career changes if that's what I need to do. But I'm taking it one day, one hour, one minute at a time.

Phoebes, I relate to that toxic shame feeling so much. I get it when I first wake up in the morning. Sometimes I can push through it and start my day, and other times I just lay there in my shame all day. It's been going on as long as I can remember, when I used to miss 2+ days of school per week because I had a "stomach ache" that was really just shame and overwhelm from the trauma in my life. It brings me so much hope to know that you've been able to learn to work with those feelings. In all this time I've not been able to learn how to deal with it any better than when I was 8 years old.

Blueberry, being gentler with myself is so hard for me too. I think I get caught up a lot in feeling like I "should" be more stable already or I "should" have done this healing work a long time ago or I "should" be able to emotionally handle things that other people my age handle with ease. I really appreciate your signature: should is never good for me, either. We are here now and we are doing the work and our healing is taking exactly as long as it needs to and that's okay. Baby steps it is!

Deep Blue,

Thanks so much for your response. I can relate to so much of what you said. I work with adults serving long terms in prison for violent crimes they committed as teens. Nearly every single person I work with had an extremely traumatic childhood as well as untreated PTSD. I do a lot of trauma interviewing with both my clients and their family members, and I find myself struggling to stay grounded sometimes because the content is so triggering that my mind begins to disassociate. I begin to feel hopeless at the endless cycle of violence, abused children becoming abusive adults. Sometimes it's very cathartic, though, to help someone begin their healing process and to help a family unpack all of those skeletons in the closet.

I think you're right that I need to find the balance. Often I feel like I'm on a teeter-totter - either feeling really great about the healing work that I'm doing, or deeply depressed and intense flashbacks. I want to be "strong enough" to do this kind of work long term, because it feels important to me. But I don't know. Maybe it's too much until I've reckoned with all my own skeletons. I have a lot to think about. Thank you for listening and sharing those thoughts with me.

I have been teetering on the edge for a while. Tiny things set me off into spirals of self-hatred, like forgetting to put out the trash bin or failing to return a phone call. Today in therapy I started sobbing because I confessed to my therapist I told a work client I would call them back in 20 minutes TWO DAYS AGO. I told her about how it brought up every single deadline I've blown, ever single phone call I haven't answered, every single friendship I've failed to nurture because I was too busy trying to get out of bed. I told her how it made me want to give up. And then I started telling her how angry I am at myself for crying in therapy over a phone call and how it's so cliche and how I'm so sick of myself. My T pointed out that I'm being so hard on myself I'm not even giving myself permission to make space for my feelings in therapy.

On the drive home from my appointment all I could think about was how much I wanted to kill myself. The funny thing is that I really don't want to die. I really want to live long enough to get better and to experience all the joys of life more fully than I've ever been able to. And I realized it isn't me that wants to kill me, it's the little critic in my head who is always telling me how worthless I am, what a failure I am, what a waste of energy.

I came home and took a long nap, even though I'd only been awake for three hours and I was supposed to go to work after my appointment. Now I'm awake again and feeling hungover almost, drained and exhausted but more emotionally stable. I'm trying not to give up. I feel like there's a war going on inside of me. I don't allow myself any gentleness, any vulnerability, any safety because this voice inside my head says I'm not worth it. I hope I can figure out how to win this fight.

Does anyone else on this board have a highly stressful job with a lot of secondary trauma working with other trauma survivors? I do and I've really found myself struggling lately with this career path. I feel so driven to do this kind of work and make this kind of difference in people's lives - but sometimes I wonder why I don't just allow myself a job that makes me happy without piling on all the other stuff and reopening my old wounds? Why don't I just let myself heal without trying to help a bunch of other people at the same time? When I've worked clock-in-clock-out type jobs I just feel useless and pointless and like my life has no meaning. Is it better to feel useful and meaningful but also exhausted, re-traumatized, constantly stressed? I really love my job, but my world has become so so small to accommodate the extra emotional work that sometimes I feel like I'm choosing between having this job and having a life outside of it. I would love to hear how others have approached this.

Does anyone else get really disturbing intrusive thoughts about danger when they're stressed/overwhelmed? I think it's related to the hypervigilance I experience, but basically what happens is that I have these periods of days or weeks during triggering/stressful times in my life where my brain frantically communicates with me about every possible danger under the sun. If I'm outside or near a window in my house or office I think "Someone could shoot me in the head right now." Whenever I drive through intersections I brace myself for impact of a car accident even with no threat in sight, or when driving around curves I see images of myself continuing straight into the ditch. If I'm ironing or boiling water or chopping things with a knife I think of all the million ways I could trip or slip and seriously injure myself. When people walk near me I expect them to attack, when I'm in a crowd I expect there to be a catastrophe. I am able to remind myself when I have these thoughts that "right here right now I'm safe" but my brain can't seem to stop thinking "what if? what if?". Less disturbing but still concerning, in social situations I sometimes get those same intrusive thoughts except it's more like "What if you just slapped/kissed this person right now?"

I talked with a close friend about the thoughts recently and she had a sort of fear reaction like I'm going to harm her or something, which was kind of hurtful. It's not like voices telling me things or telling me to do things or even me having desires to do certain things, it's just my brain worrying about all the million wild things that could happen at any given time. I don't know. Anyone else know about this?

I spent the day yesterday with a close friend of mine, for the first time in quite a while. We got to reflecting on the history of our friendship and our lives over the past decade and I realized - my world has gotten really really small. As I've gotten older I've picked up more and more triggers, and I can't seem to lessen their effects. I've experienced a few additional major traumatic events in the past few years (major car accident, close family death, terrifying home invasion while I was home), and also have a highly stressful job that comes with a great deal of secondary trauma (social work field). I'm in therapy now with the correct diagnoses (finally) and digging through all this old and new stuff leaves me feeling so raw all the time. In the name of safety and self-care, my interactions with others outside of work the past couple years are at an all-time low because of how exhausted and fragile I feel. There are so many places I don't go or things I don't do because of the memories they are tied to. I barely see my close friends and I haven't dated in years. I used to think I was on an uphill climb to ultimate healing, but I look around me and my world is smaller than ever. I want things to change but don't feel that I have the capacity unless I want to be tearful and numb all the time from the emotional overwhelm. I'm not sure how to proceed. I guess I have some decisions to make.

Thank you both for your thoughtful responses. This really helped me to think about these concepts in a different way that feels truer for me. I have found during my healing process that I often have a lot of defensiveness come up whenever I perceive something as criticizing my parents (even though I don't even have contact any more because of the abuse) and I think that was clouding my thoughts when processing my conversations with my therapist. You're right that, even if there are good reasons for why things were the way they were,  I still wasn't getting what I needed to thrive. Thank you for helping me over this bump in the road!

I talk openly about my trauma/healing work all the time. Even when it was happening, I would tell "funny" stories about the chaos in my childhood to the other kids at school (it kept people from bullying me and turned my experiences into social currency, something useful). Pretty much all my friends and some of my coworkers know my "story" or at least the highlights. I write openly about aspects my trauma/healing on social media when I'm feeling triggered, because I feel like it helps me bring it into the light and not be ashamed. I write poems about it, essays. I go to trauma groups (or on this forum) and speak about it with others.

Honestly I'm sick of hearing myself. Sometimes when I'm talking or writing about my trauma, it feels like a faucet I can't figure out how to shut off. I get mad at myself for being so self absorbed that it's all I think about. I get mad at myself for giving everyone the "TMI" version of everything, of being unable to edit myself for my context. I get mad at myself for how eager I am to talk in cry in therapy -- I feel pathetic that no one ever has to draw it out of me, I just spill it everywhere all the time. I have a deathly fear of being a narcissist, like my mother. I see so much of her in me. I have a deathly fear that everyone in my life is sick of hearing me, sick of my self pity and my sad stories. But I also can't let go of telling it. If I don't talk about it, it eats me up inside. How do I let go and shut up? I just want to learn to shut the faucet off and not feel any pain.

Just commenting to say I, too, am extremely triggered over this situation. As someone who was kidnapped as a young child and not reunited with my mother for several months, I am having horrible flashbacks and am grieving on behalf of all these children and the uphill battle of healing work they will need to do to recover from this if/when it is all over. Sending love to them, and to others on this board who are feeling the same pain I feel over this. I am glad to say that I see many of my friends, coworkers, and community members stepping up to make noise about this issue, as it's hard for me to overcome those feelings of powerlessness and DO something right now. I look forward to assisting with those efforts once I've had a moment to process my triggers and build myself back up a bit. For now, I'm avoiding the headlines until my mind is in a slightly better place.

This has been knocking around in my brain for a while. My therapist and I talk a lot about building healthy boundaries, what is or isn't my "responsibility" in inter-personal relationships, and what sort of things my parents were involving me in as a child that "shouldn't have been my job." For the most part I find it to be a great relief and very validating to know that I am able to draw that line for myself and that I shouldn't have to suffer so endlessly at the hands of those closest to me - and that the things that happened when I was a kid were not supposed to be that way. But I feel like I also keep hitting roadblocks in giving myself permission to view my life through the lens of those boundaries because.... who decided what they are?

In an ideal world, they make sense. My parents shouldn't have been counting on me (their child) to meet their basic needs and those needs of my siblings and myself. But I feel like all these rules about boundaries take people totally out of context. For example, my family was very poor. I have ten siblings and my parents were making barely above minimum wage. Adding to that, my parents are also survivors of extreme trauma themselves who were never able to access help due to their financial circumstances and other burdens. Considering all that, it makes perfect sense that they couldn't meet our family's needs on their own and that they leaned on me (the oldest child) for help. I have a hard time looking back on my childhood and saying "They should have done X instead" because the circumstances of our lives were so inescapable. I feel like there are so many circumstances that prevent people from thriving on their own - like I think about communities of people who are oppressed in one way or another and how (by necessity) their social relationships and boundaries look different from the ones we talk about in therapy. Is the concept of "healthy boundaries" culturally bound? Socio-economically bound? Does anybody know what I mean?

I have always felt like an outsider in my own life - probably because I began disassociating and engaging in escapism from a very early age. My own story has never felt like the central story. The central story was the book I was reading, or my damaged parents, or the character on TV I was over-identifying with that week. I used to sob when I was done with a book or a movie because there I was, back in my horrible and chaotic life again.

In adulthood, I've found stability. Cut off my family, found my chosen family, threw myself into therapy and finding a career. I'm having major dissasociative breakdowns less and less frequently (though the PTSD and depression are ever-present). Two weeks ago I closed on my first home. I am the first person in my family to ever own a home and I never thought I would make it to this milestone. I thought I would feel.... relieved? proud? accomplished? safe? Instead, I feel a mix of emptiness and fear. I've gotten to a point where I've learned how to secure and maintain a "normal" existence and all I can think is FOR WHAT? I know that's an awful and ungrateful way to feel. It's just that I still feel like an outsider in my own life. I still feel more engaged with people in books or on TV than with myself. I still feel emotionally lightyears away from the "chosen family" people in my life. I wake up every day and go to work and come home and call the electrician or argue with the cable company or shoot the * about the weather in the elevator and it all feels so empty and pointless? What is the point??? I'm not even sure I'm really alive unless I pinch myself? And then there's the fear - this feeling like everything I'm building is just a tower I've locked myself inside of. I feel trapped and alone, like I've always felt. I don't know where to go from here.

One of the hallmark features of my C-PTSD is that sometimes when I'm triggered or lonely or exhausted I fall into these deep depressive disassociative episodes. The world (and my own identity) will start to feel not real, like a dream or like I'm underwater, and the basic framework and obligations in my life start to feel flimsy and trivial for days or weeks. It makes it really hard to do things like fight for a parking spot downtown for work for example, because it's hard for me to remember why it matters or what I used to care about. It makes it hard to cook good meals for myself, or meet deadlines, or be a good friend, or show up to appointments. This used to happen about once every six months, and I would always be blissfully unaware until my life was in shambles around me. Then I would wrestle with my guilt and my shame until my survival instincts would kick in and I would right the ship that is my life.

Over time, I've tried to learn the signs that I'm about to slide down into the abyss. I know that if I give into wanting to stay home from work one day, it will be even harder to go in the next day. I know that if I don't eat a single home cooked meal in several days my self-esteem and feelings of wellness will plummet. I'm not saying I've figured out how to stop these problems at the source - it's hard to listen to and take good care of myself all the time. But the more I try to pay attention during the rough spots, the less appealing it will be to give in next time (I hope).

Today did not go as I hoped or planned, and I struggle not to feel guilt, shame, worthlessness over the way I wasted this day and let myself down. But at least I'm paying attention to the lesson. It's not all good days, but I'm getting better all the time.