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My mother's death is not necessarily imminent.  She's 81 and though she has physical manifestations of her own trauma, she doesn't have any serious medical issues and I could see on Thanksgiving that there's still a poisonous robustness to her.  She could live for years yet.

Sometimes when I think about my mother, a part of me wishes that she would just die already.  That's not even a spiteful wish on my part, just a desire to get something inevitable over with.  I don't feel guilty that part of me feels that way, and I have absolutely no fear that I will regret not trying to reconcile with her before her death.  As far as I'm concerned, I put that all that to rest when I went through my strange bout last year of wanting to have a relationship with her and then figuring out what a terrible idea that was.  So I'm not even sure what the ambivalence is.  I just know that I'm having increasingly frequent urges towards hoping for her death that I can't quite square with my fundamental humanity. 

I don't know if this has anything to do with C-PTSD or not, but I've been hoarding like crazy lately.  Mostly food and cannabis, but I've also been buying lots of things lately.  On Monday after my therapy session, I took a farcical trip to Target and careened around in there for a while because there's a mini-waffle maker that I've been thinking about buying for a while, and for some reason I thought I HAD to have some mini-waffles right away, and of course, to make mini-waffles you need a mini-waffle maker!  Except that by the time I managed to struggle out of there and go home I was so tired and confused and disorientated that I put the mini-waffle maker my room (along with the pretty shirts and the underarm deodorant that I also bought even though I've got plenty of both), and I haven't even looked at it since, much less used it.  I've also been shopping online and ordering things I see ads for on social media that look like a good idea, regardless of whether I actually need them or not.  Mostly not completely crazy or useless things, but things I don't need and shouldn't be spending money on.  Packages keeping showing up and I don't remember ordering them until I open them.  I haven't gotten anything yet that I totally don't remember ordering, but I'm kind of afraid that might be next.  It's really distressing!  Does anyone have any thoughts or insights about this?

I've been doing really well not binge eating and not chasing interpersonal drama for my retraumatising compulsions, but I need to stop pretending that I haven't been smoking too much cannabis.  For many years, cannabis was a big Substitute Problem for me.  A big source of toxic shame, and also a driver of another Substitute Problem, my eating disorder.  Using cannabis was something that I did furtively and compulsively for many, many years, like the 13-year-old I was when I started with it.  It never had any particularly reliable helpful effect on me, just a variety of things with which it helped amazingly well at times and worse than not at all at others, carried the drawbacks of fire, smoke and appetite stimulation, and was also always a problem for a million reasons having to do with it being socially frowned upon by so many people and, oh, yeah, ILLEGAL.  But every pharmaceutical I ever tried had terrible side effects and little to no benefit, and marijuana was a comfortable old thing for a long, long time for me to believe I'd be a better person without.  Then medical marijuana became available in my state, and despite my reluctance to "give in to being an addict" and stop "trying to quit", I got a card last year.  At first, it worked really well for me.  Being able to choose specific strains to address specific needs instead of the "pay your money and take your chances" model I operated under for my entire adult life was just amazing, as was not having to get into weird situations and fork over cash for whatever the friend of the friend of the friend had and then use it by throwing it at everything and seeing what stuck.
I was able to use cannabis constructively for several months.  Lately, though, I have reverted.  It's been at least a week now since I started noticing I was becoming undisciplined with my use of marijuana, telling myself I was still okay "because it's not like it used to be" and intending to "smoke less tomorrow."  Today I realised that I am smoking whenever I feel like it without really thinking about it, accelerating, and not only that, I have been smoking the wrong kinds in the wrong amounts at the wrong times, and it has been slamming my body with triggers.  Leave it to me to take something good like medical marijuana and turn it into another tool for my own destruction.

Okay, now that I've admitted it in public, can I please just stop?

Borrowing this idea from Blueberry, I want to use this journal as a place to plan and recognise myself for my practical daily-life efforts, separate from the place where I need to thrash out all my mental turmoil.

Well look at me! I finally found a title for this journal that didn't make me feel exposed and panicky! 

It's the little things.

I have been on very minimal contact with my mother for the past four years, seeing her only once a year at a holiday dinner hosted by my brother, answering her occasional email invitation to visit her with a polite but firm refusal, and not initiating any contact whatsoever myself.  I am no spring chicken and my mother is getting very old now.  At this past holiday dinner, I found myself feeling sentimental towards her and wishing once again to have some kind of mother-daughter relationship with her.  This is a self-destructive urge of which I am a long-term veteran, but somehow I had the idea that this time I could be in control of it, and that it could benefit my therapy, so I made a vague overture earlier this year.  Her response was suitably cautious and respectful, and for a minute, I actually thought I could do it, but then I thought about it more carefully, and the idea of spending time with her was terrifying. 

I spoke about it at length with my trusted people, and determined that even the thought of a phone call panicked me.  Still, though, the desire for some kind of interaction has not gone away.  In addition to that, my sense of fairness and my understanding that a lot of what's wrong with my mother has similar root causes to what's wrong with me compels me to feel uncomfortable with the idea of doing something to her that she so often did to me both literally and metaphorically -- offering something, but then either snatching it away when I reached for it, or giving me something different and expecting me to be grateful to get anything at all.  So I've written this letter in hopes of...Whatever it is that I'm hoping for.  I'm not even sure.  I would love to get some feedback, so any comments would be appreciated.

Dear Mom,

I've been wanting to write you this letter for a long time, and have been thinking at great length about how to most compassionately say what I want to say.  The first thing I want to say is that I was sincere when I made an overture towards increased interaction with you, and it brings me no pleasure at all to have come to a non-negotiable conclusion that, while I am open to corresponding with you, I will not be able to visit you.  I have recently been reading a lot about something called Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and it has explained a great deal to me about why I react the way I do to many situations, including spending time with you.  I miss spending time with you, but I have realised over the past many years that it inevitably leads to my doing self-destructive things that result in my being ill for anywhere from days to weeks afterward.  I thought for many years that the fact that I could visit you and we could walk and talk, go swimming, eat dinner, and part with warm feelings towards each other meant that our relationship was good, but I have come to the sad realisation that being with you is not safe for me, and my ability to enjoy your company does not correspond to my being able to deal healthily with thoughts and feelings beyond my control that arise in my subconscious in response to hearing your voice and being in your physical presence.  I feel horrible saying this, but even the most enjoyable day at the beach sets off things in me that cause me to hurt myself in ways that I don't even notice until the damage is done.  I am, of course, working on this in therapy, because my desire to improve myself, to be happier, more productive, and have better relationships, is unceasing.  Now that I understand so much more about the root causes of my mental and physical ill health, I feel hopeful that I will achieve new progress.  Hopefully, some time in the not-too-distant future, I will be able to visit with you, but for now, I really cannot.

I wish it was different.  I hope you understand that this is not about punishing you or holding the past against you in any way.  I really would like to be able to have some kind of relationship with you that won't be damaging to me, so if you want to write back, please do.

Hi, everyone.  I just found out about Complex PTSD as a result of reading I did following a highly traumatic event earlier this month.  I've been doing intensive psychotherapy for 20 years and it all came together.  I don't know where to start with trying to find support and a community.