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Recently I saw an artwork referencing abusive relationships that contained these words inscribed in a heart: "I love that you're so open and vulnerable with me. Makes me feel like I'm winning without trying".

This hit home. I have been open and vulnerable with everyone who has abused me in my life.

Looking back I can see how those people took advantage of my openness and vulnerability and exploited these to damage and betray me. And I can see that at the time, or even now for some who are still alive, they may feel they are 'winning', they may feel gladly triumphant in their ability to have 'got away with' damaging my life and not being confronted or held to account for the damage they wrought. 

However, I have come to the conclusion over the years that engaging in vengeance or confrontation or otherwise trying to 'get my own back' against these triumphant abusers would result in my acting against my sense of how I should behave and still retain a sense of myself as being a decent human being.

It actually doesn't hurt me that they feel they 'won', when living as an open or vulnerable person, being kind to people, feels 'right' to me. It feels healthy and decent and gives me a sense of calmness. Feeling I'm behaving as well as I can is more important to my inner sense of peace and dignity than is any knowledge that I've 'got my own back' at those who've harmed me.

But I can remember when, as a young woman with responsibility for two small children, having recently escaped an abusive marriage and with my entire FOO shunning me and opposing my escape, I said to myself 'living well is the best revenge' and it felt so hollow, so tiny, so weak when lined up against my isolation and the damage that had been done to my life. 

I guess what I am saying now is that I'm glad I hung onto that hollow comfort because over the years, as I've held steady on a course of understanding what happened to me and living my life well, not on taking revenge against my abusers, that comfort has grown stronger and my life has become so much richer in every way than my abusers' lives have been. 

And now almost all those abusive relationships have ended, by death or by my putting emotional and physical distance between me and those people over the years. 

I wish I could have told that young woman, enmeshed in her struggles almost 40 years ago, that she would eventually be vindicated in hanging onto her 'hollow' comfort.

And although my every day is still filled with struggles about issues that came from all that trauma, I can say now, with confidence, that 'living well', through focusing on my own values, my own inner work, accepting the slow and uncertain nature of recovery but hanging in there anyway, taking responsibility for my own behaviour first and foremost, despite provocation from abusive others, living a responsible life; all of that really feels to me to be the best revenge.

[Sorrow]

Many years ago I wrote this poem about sorrow; about how I carried my sadness around with me.

Looking back, I feel I've carried this burden in front of my body all my life and certain events can stop me in my tracks as I come up against other peoples' expectations of how I can or should behave.

I feel it most when people ask me to participate in 'group fun', just fooling around, acting the fool, relaxing into playing group games. When faced with these expectations, I feel myself stop, I feel my body 'freeze-up', I feel my face fall involuntarily into a mask of sorrow, my cheeks lengthen, my mouth sags and I feel exquisitely vulnerable. It's a horrible, lonely feeling that is impossible to explain in the moment.

I've never learnt how to 'play' with other people. I've not learnt how to 'have fun'. Life has been too hard, too isolated, too urgent, too sad. Thoughts of death have been too present. I've not known normal family life or normal social life. And I just can't do it.

I sang for years with a very professional choir, where the very formality and seriousness of the choir protected me from this kind of expectation. It was a truly wonderful experience. However, I lost it when I moved to live in another part of my country. And now I've recently withdrawn from trying to sing with a local community choir in my new location because these expectations of group participation in fooling around and doing skits were just too much for me; which, of course, has only increased my sorrow.

It's yet another way that complex trauma limits my experience of life.

Sorrow

Spongy, black,
and surprisingly easy to hold,
is this ball of sorrow
I clasp in front of me.

Frighteningly, it seems to me
that it grows
daily,
and I wonder that
people approaching me
don't bump into it,
stumble,
and exclaim at my burden.

bluepalm

In the past few weeks, as I've recovered my equilibrium after a rough patch, I have realised something strange and I wonder if others have experienced this too.

As part of slowing down and being kinder to myself, I've found myself at times just stopping moving and sitting down to quietly breathe. Nothing else. Just breathing. And it has felt strangely new to me to do this - despite the fact that for some years now, from therapy and reading, I've understood the power of breathing and meditation to calm and centre myself. The strange part is that I now feel 'entitled to breathe' in a way I've not felt before. I feel it's my breath I'm breathing, it feels warm and calm and it fills me up and it's mine.

This is a new thought and a new feeling and it's made me realise that for most of my life I've not felt fully entitled to breathe. At some fundamental level, I have felt  estranged from the right to breathe.

As a very young child, I knew from the way my parents treated me that I had no right to be alive. I knew that, as a girl, it was a mistake that I was alive. I felt guilty for being alive, for taking up space on this earth. The way I thought about it then was that 'I am breathing air that a boy should be breathing'.

In addition to this early sense of guilt about breathing, in my childhood home I was constantly on 'high alert', basically holding my breath waiting for anger or punishment to fall on me. I repeated that pattern with the man who became my husband - silent, observant, barely daring to breathe, apologising for my existence, which seemed to cause him so much anger.

It amazes me to look back and realise that, at a fundamental level in my being, and for over 70 years of my life. I've not really felt entitled to breathe.

I feel tonight grateful that my involvement with this OOTS community has helped me understand that I was injured by those closest to me; that my sense that I had no right to be alive, no right to be breathing air, that I was stealing air that a boy should be breathing, was the result of an injury done to me, not something inherent in me.

It feels a relief to have had this realisation. I wonder if others have also experienced this fundamental sense of guilt about being alive and breathing air.
bluepalm

I'm recording this here in case it's of help to others. I've been so grateful for the support I've experienced on this forum but, for reasons I can't quite understand, something seems to have triggered me and I've lost the sense that this OOTS is a place of refuge for me at the moment. So I'm going to leave for a while. I can't imagine this matters to anyone (I state that as a fact - how my mind works to devalue myself!) but I see other people explain their absences so, given I've been posting poems in particular, I felt it may be both courteous and useful to record this.

Maybe it's because I feel I've been too open and I'm now too exposed. Maybe it was reading a couple of posts (having nothing to do with me at all) filled with anger. (I find I cannot read Out of the Fog at all because there is so much open anger there.)

Maybe it's because I feel I engaged with people too closely and now I don't know if they are real people or not. I've not posted anything on the internet before posting on this forum and my trust in other people is very low. This is in no way a criticism of those who've responded to me. I've been very grateful for the support and validation I've received and I'm puzzled right now as to why I've lost my trust.

This may be useful for others to hear. There may be others who struggle as I am at present with trusting any response from the world. I find people generally to be very menacing, very frightening. Just as I'm afraid to turn on the TV because I don't know what violence or anger or misery I'll be exposed to if I do.

In any event, I can feel I'm struggling to hold onto myself at the moment and feel I need to retreat to the natural world, to my books and my music, and avoid people, even people in the virtual world.

Please understand this is in my mind, due to my personal struggles right now, not a criticism of OOTS, which I continue to think is a hugely valuable resource, which I have recommended to my GP and my therapist and others similarly placed.

I hope I will return when I regain some equilibrium.
bluepalm

[Life seems always to be so violent]

A kind and perceptive response by RiverRabbit to another poem of mine prompted me to remember this poem, which I wrote in my early thirties, when I was acutely aware that I had been, and continued to be, under assault every day of my life and that I needed to escape a toxic marriage if I was to go on living. At that time I had no understanding of trauma or its effects. I only knew I was in a fight for my life with those closest to me who I felt kept pushing me closer and closer to self-destruction. I use 'closest to me' in the sense of physical proximity only. In reality, I was trapped with predators.

Life seems always to be so violent


Life seems always to be so violent.
A continuous battle that surges
from one theatre to another.
Now bombardment, now sniping,
now chaos, now flight.
It is wearying, so wearying.
Even the bones seem ground
about with the dust of battle,
the stench of death
hovering at the edge of the nostrils
always.

[Finding my centre]

I wrote this poem this morning under an impulse to mark a new stage in my healing; a new sense of being grounded and centred.

'Uluru' is a beautiful, large red sandstone rock formation in central Australia that is sacred to the local Indigenous people.

Finding my centre

There has been no Uluru
inside me to ground me.
There has been nothing but
doubt and confusion.

There has been a readiness
always to disparage myself.
A readiness to erase
my existence and achievements.

But now, towards the end of this long journey
I'm daring to sense my centre.
All that doubt and confusion has led
to something solid and beautiful.

(See how my fingers hesitated
to type 'beautiful' - is this too much,
too bold, too outrageous a word
to apply to me?)

I stand on top of my own rock now,
having climbed from that
black hellish nightmare
almost always isolated and alone.


My rock is built on my courage
in the face of an empty universe.

[Admonitions]

I recently discussed with my therapist the danger I've put myself in with men through being silent and compliant until the abuse and exploitation become unbearable, whereupon, with controlled anger, I become wonderfully articulate in my defence and in calmly and carefully ending a relationship.

I explained I have always assumed that my articulateness, my thoughtfulness, my ability to express myself, if displayed earlier with a man, would repel him, would make any relationship impossible. And, I can see now, inevitably, my experience has been of men who are too weak to hear a woman speak out. They are the ones who have preyed on me.  And so I have literally been told, in an angry voice, to 'be silent', not to participate in social conversation, to allow the man I'm with to totally dominate the conversation. When I was a young child, my father told me that 'nothing that comes out of the mouth of a woman is worth a man listening to'. This fear of speaking out to a man, on top of my instinct to freeze in the face of danger, has left me woefully vulnerable.

My therapist is suggesting that I should try expressing myself well from the start and see what happens. She is telling me there are gentlemen who can hear a woman speak. This morning, wondering about the origins of this pattern of behaviour, I not only remembered my experiences and my father's cruel words, I also thought of a poem I wrote some years ago, when the admonitions of my parents, designed to silence me, came to mind. I have no memories of having any articulate, two-way, sustained, conversations about anything with either of my parents, ever. I was a silenced child.

Admonitions

Be quiet

Stop talking

Don't answer back

Don't speak while we're eating

Children are to be seen and not heard!

Be quiet

Sit still child

Go to your room

Stop being so disruptive

How dare you even think such a thing!

Be quiet

Go away

Go to sleep now

Stop asking me that all the time

Don't interrupt me when I'm speaking!

Be quiet

No you can't

Don't disturb me

You're irritating me again

Stop bothering me all the time!


Be quiet

Off you go

Just go away

Stop saying that to me

I don't want to hear you anymore!

And yet I still wonder why I stay silent.


[I was born into captivity]

A new poem, which arose from my painful awareness of how often I've been preyed upon in life. And how I've frozen and failed to defend myself from predators.

I was born into captivity


I was born into captivity,
with wild beasts as my keepers.

They were unable to abide me,
unable to rise to their responsibilities.

Themselves isolated in their cage,
they isolated me further.

No-one came to look through the bars
as they tormented me.

There were no visitors to this
particular zoo of relentless assaults.

And now I cannot abide to see
any bird or other animal trapped in a cage.

Helpless. Unable to move.
Its body bruised and spirit crushed.

Because I know that,
even if it breaks free,
it carries the wounds of its confinement
for ever, inside its beaten body and soul.


And forever it will fly or limp on the outside

of the flock,

of the herd,

easy pickings for predators.

I'm currently trying to understand and, I hope, bring some change to my sense that the future won't come. I mentioned to a trauma therapist some years ago that I am always surprised when a new year comes around. I don't expect the future to happen and so I don't plan or dream for, or anticipate, having a future.  I was surprised when she told me there's a word for that: 'foreshortening'. It was a help to realise that my experience was not mine alone - that the experience has a name.

This has now become an urgent issue for me as I realise the full extent of the loss involved in a lifetime spent without any sense that the future will come. I wish it could be different and I raised it with my therapist this week to try to understand it. I think it comes from being utterly focused on surviving the present - there's no energy left to imagine a future. I'm not worried about something happening to me, it's that I don't feel there's any forward path of movement in my life; there's just 'managing' now. It sounds as if this would be a good thing.That I am living in the moment mindfully. But it doesn't feel good, it feels sometimes as if I'm alone spinning through space, going no-where with no-one. It is frightening. And it has practical consequences in life.

I would be interested to hear from anyone else who has similar issues with the sense of having a foreshortened future.

I've recently discovered an article written by three philosophers which others may also find interesting. It's a discussion of whether the trauma of being tortured can leave someone with a different relationship to time.  The authors acknowledge that they are discussing a situation where a previously non-traumatised person is tortured and that there are people who have never known any period of non-trauma because of childhood experiences, but the discussion also applies to such people.

I found the article really helpful as a way to analyse my problem. It also helped me to understand that the experiences I had in my FOO (and marriage) fit the definition of torture. For example, this extract from the article:

"What makes interpersonal trauma distinctive is the subversion of interpersonal trust that it involves. The other person recognizes one's vulnerability and responds to it not with care but by deliberately inflicting harm. The aim of torture has been described as the complete psychological destruction of a person: "the torturer attempts to destroy a victim's sense of being grounded in a family and society as a human being with dreams, hopes and aspirations for the future" (Istanbul Protocol, 1999, p. 45). It is a "calculated assault on human dignity," more so than an attempt to extract information (Amnesty International, 1986, p. 172)


See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4166378/

Front Psychol. 2014; 5: 1026.
Published online 2014 Sep 17.
What is a "sense of foreshortened future?" A phenomenological study of trauma, trust, and time
Matthew Ratcliffe, Mark Ruddell and Benedict Smith

The most recent post below has struck a nerve in me. The word rage is what did it. Years ago I wrote a poem that expressed the way I sought to turn my turmoil of confusing feelings into something outside me over which I could feel some control. I found that I could gain some relief by putting into the concise form of a poem my feelings of anger and emptiness, my unmet needs and unfulfilled longings.  The poem I wrote to describe this process of writing a poem has stayed with me to help me through countless times when I sought human connection and failed to find it and I had to retreat to holding myself together once more.

I have recently read a wonderful book by Gregory Orr called 'Poetry as Survival' which I thoroughly recommend to anyone wanting to explore the process of writing poetry in order to survive. I found it a thoughtful, comforting and inspiring book. And now I'm reading his book called 'A Primer for Poets & Readers of Poetry'. I dearly wish I had found Gregory Orr and his writing much earlier in life.

This is what I wrote all those years ago:

Out of rage
my words are wrought
to bind my pain
   in parcels
and hurl it into the void,
and hearing no echoing splash
yet have the courage
   to know
it was real, I am.

A poem Deep Blue wrote really resonated and inspired me to write my own poem. I've had a lifetime of smiling to cover the pain and to placate people and to shield me from attack.  Her poem led me to think of another reason why, now, for myself, in gratitude, and not for other people, I can smile...

I smile
because I've survived them.
I've outlived them.
I've outgrown them.
I smile because
I'm still here.

I'm still here
and still learning,
and now slowly healing,
despite their best efforts
to suffocate my soul.

I've endured all
that pain,
that emptiness,
that malicious destruction,
and yet I can still smile.

I'm so very grateful
I've survived,
I'm here,
I'm alive,
and I can still smile.

In a thread below about the answer always being no I read a statement by DecimalRocket which has excited me all morning.

"To many others, the hardest thing is to get out of their "comfort zone", and growing means toughening. But to us with trauma, many of us don't even have a comfort zone to go into, and growing means slowing down. Taking it easier. And resting.

Rest is precious."

It may seem strange but I am only just learning, in my early 70s, that rest is indeed precious and healing. I have driven myself forward all my life - a relentless quest to 'manage' a life that felt fraught, where there was no 'comfort zone', no sense of safety, nowhere to belong, no-one to protect me.  Since my latest crisis, I've been resting - not just withdrawing from people but actively 'taking it easy', drifting through my days, coasting along, shunning commitments, letting go of the feeling that I have to 'manage' the outside world. And it has somehow allowed me to feel, for the first time, how shocking it was that I was so relentlessly traumatised by those around me when I was helpless to protect myself and that I was left so vulnerable.  Respecting my need to rest is allowing me to start feeling the self-compassion I've read about but not fully absorbed before. This is exciting to me. So thank you to DecimalRocket and those who started and commented in that thread. It has helped me a lot.

Hello all, when I first read about complex trauma a few years ago it was an enormous relief to be able to make sense of a lifelong struggle. As a young woman I had sought help for my sadness and despair, but neither my therapists nor I had the understanding or language of complex trauma to help explain what was wrong. So I was left trying to manage to get through life with what felt like a hidden disability, all alone. I'm now in my early 70s and with the help of all that's being written now on trauma I'm trying to listen more carefully to my body and work with it to protect me. As I get older I feel that I'm becoming more, not less, vulnerable to shocks and I'm withdrawing from people even more than I did in the past. A recent episode of acute despair led me to reach out (yet again) for support and I discovered OOTS and decided to become a member in the hope that I will find a safe community of understanding people with whom I can share my experiences, learn and, I hope, feel less alone.