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We've been having trouble getting our middle child (age 7) to stay in her own bed at night. We recently moved to a much bigger house. But, before that, we were so cramped in a tiny apartment that she regularly slept in bed with my wife and I. We have slowly been transitioning her to her own bed in a room she shares with her younger sister and things have gone ok. But tonight she came back out of her room after being asleep for only 45 minutes. I asked her why she was up and she told me she got out of bed because she woke up. I snapped and told her that she needs to figure out how to roll over and just go back to sleep when she wakes up. And I ordered her to her room. She became dejected and sad and started to head for her room crying when I was assailed by guilt. I quickly apologized for snapping, reassured her that nothing was wrong with her, that we are all learning and change can be hard. That is when my wife walked in the door from work and she went and tucked our girl back into bed. My guilt surged again and I found myself drawn into a flashback.

My body is tense and I am trying not to cry. I am sitting on a couch in the living room while my mother shames me in front of my siblings. She is yelling and cursing and telling me just how terrible I am. And I am like, yeah, I am awful. I just shamed by 7 year-old little girl for having trouble sleeping. What kind of a-hole am I? So my current feelings of guilt merge with my old feelings of shame and I get trapped in my head, terrified that I will traumatize my kid like I was traumatized. This happens with some frequency. I am EXHAUSTED!!!! UGH.

Thanks Kizzie. Much appreciated.

Thanks Kizzie! Framing the trauma response as rational is SUPER helpful. So often it feels like a really stupid, annoying, ridiculous part of me. But it is fundamentally rational. Here is another analogy: we have two very old dogs who have been on death's door for at least a year. The dogs both dislike my children. This is because when they were toddlers they pulled the dogs tails and ears and such. Now that my kids are older and can be responsible with a dog, they don't understand why the dogs don't want to be near them. The dogs are behaving entirely rationally (these people hurt me, so I will avoid them). In my case, being vulnerable with someone resulted in lots of pain and betrayal, so I'm not doing THAT anymore.

Hey all--

I developed OCD in response to the emotional abuse I suffered as a child and the gold standard for treating OCD (Exposure and Response Prevention) worked like a charm. The OCD was a way for me to police my inner thoughts. I know what OCD anxiety feels like--it is characterized primarily by anxiety about absolutely absurd thoughts, things that I know are not even in the realm of possibility. My first victory was to reclaim the sanctity of my mind for myself.

I have been told that I also suffer from GAD and I have had some success treating it with traditional CBT work. But, I often feel like the CBT work doesn't address the swirling turmoil and tsunami of emotion below the surface. Here is an example:

I am a high school teacher at a small, close-knit private school. I often have students in my office sharing about their struggles, especially mental health struggles. They know I am a safe person. I occasionally (in an appropriate way) share bits of my own story that seem relevant to what they are going through. The empathy usually helps encourage them and helps deepen a trusting relationship from which I can encourage them to do what they need to do for themselves. When I open myself up like that, however, I can become consumed with fear that I will be harmed. This usually manifests as dark fantasies of my boss firing me for crossing a "professional" line with my students. I *know* he won't. He and I have actually discussed this aspect of teacher-student relations many times and I am by the book with all of our policies. But that doesn't soften the terror. If anything, it feeds it because I begin to suspect that he is lying to me and is just waiting for the opportunity to fire me when I am least expecting it. It is clear to me that this mirrors the way my M treated me as a kid. She would lie, pretend that it was just against the world, and then use whatever I had allowed myself to share against me when I was least expecting it. I learned to just never be vulnerable with her or anyone. Basically, my defense against toxic intimacy was just to have no intimacy.

I know this isn't OCD because there are no associated compulsions and while my fear is highly unlikely, it isn't absurd on its face. Besides, it doesn't respond to repeated exposures. It just opens the wound all over again, which I know is what a trauma response feels like.

I also don't think it is GAD in the traditional sense because it doesn't seem to respond well to the sorts of logical, thought-replacement, cognitive restructuring of CBT. I mean, the CBT helps enough that I can mostly just ignore the fears and keep going, but it is exhausting. It seems to treat just the surface and just the outward-facing part of me. Here is an analogy: when I cook pasta, it isn't uncommon for the water to threaten to boil over. I simply lift the pot from the stove and it calms down. But, when I set the pot back down, it will boil over again. The CBT work seems like lifting the pot off the fire, but it doesn't do anything about the fire itself.

So, I suspect this is a manifestation of my fear of intimacy, of the danger of opening myself to anyone. I am a flight type, so my immediate impulse is to run away. I start looking for new jobs. I fantasize about quitting altogether and moving to a cabin in the woods. I swear to myself that I will just teach and not have any kind of personal relationships with students. Etc. It is only after a week or two passes and I don't get fired that I calm down. Until the next time.

Anyway, I don't really know what I want. I just wanted to share this and see if anyone can relate.

Thanks!

I am convinced my M has undiagnosed BPD.

I've recently started doing work with my T to address the inner critic and boy has she reared her ugly head. Though I also experienced plenty of CSA and some PA, the EA might be the deepest and most difficult thing to deal with. It wasn't just that she molested me or beat me, but that she explained that she did those things because I was disgusting. And she would then apologize and offer to kill herself if I preferred to not have her as a mother.

I had to massage her feet every night. I had to massage her back every night. I had to pack her lunch for work for her. She was a teacher (God save her students) and I was often tasked to grade their papers. When she was in one of her "get healthy" moods, I was jolted out of bed at 5am to go for a walk with her no matter what else I had going on.

I never did anything correctly even if I did it in exactly the way she instructed me to. There was always a flaw. I never measured up because I was just as useless as my father. I was never clean enough for her and was forced to scrub myself over and over and over and over again. She told me that Jesus was disappointed in me for not loving her well. I was going to go to hel l for dishonoring my mother.

In my adulthood, when she began to suffer from more medical issues, she always seemed to find herself in a crisis when Dad was traveling for business. And, being trapped in the FOG, I would come to her house to take care of her for a couple of days, all of this despite that she lived 4 hours away and I had a job, a wife, and young kids. My wife was gracious to allow me to go, but I should never have been put in a position where I was forced to choose between remaining with my family or giving her the kind of reassurance she felt like she needed. And I don't know if she felt guilt for the way she treated me, but she would often hand out large amounts of money on these occasions. Wanting to believe the best of her, I took the money as an apology of sorts. Of course, as I left, she would make comments about maybe not being alive for my next visit. And I would secretly pray that she would be dead when I came back, that she would screw up the alcohol and opioid combination she was on. And then I would INSTANTLY berate myself for even thinking such a thing.

Anyhow, my internal critic sounds JUST LIKE HER. And in times of stress or during a flashback, her rage-filled or manipulative voice fills my mind. I am worthless. I am crap. I am disgusting. I can't do anything right. I will never amount to anything. I am a horrible son/father/husband/friend/coworker, etc. What will I do without her voice to guide me?

As I have been trying to deal with the inner critic, she has made absolutely clear that she is strong and powerful and will not easily be dislodged. I feel so discouraged and want to give up, to go back to drinking way too much whiskey, to zoning out to reruns of Friends over and over again, to dig a hole and crawl in. But I WON'T! Not because of shame or guilt, but because I have a RIGHT to a life of joy and peace. I didn't start this fight, but by God I am going to finish it.

Anyhow, writing all of this out really helped. I needed to externalize this. Thanks for this community that is always here.

DD,

I am so, so sorry that you have to keep it in. My wife has never recoiled from anything I've told her about my own CSA, but I can only imagine if she had. Actually, she is a critical care nurse, so nothing surprises her (she has seen it all), but sometimes she doesn't react at all--is just impassive--and that can be hard too. I have given very general outlines to two very close friends, but I have avoided details because I don't want to gross them out. My T has heard everything and has been a lifeline for me.

Anyhow, I am proud of the courage you have shown in sharing this here. We will witness your story and hold you up.

Thank you all!

Pete Walker in his book Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving suggests a very combative approach to the inner critic via thought stopping and telling the critic to "shut-up", etc. He views the inner critic as a foreign invader to be fought and vanquished.

However, I have had some success with an IFS (Internal Family Systems) T who wants to integrate the critic and express gratitude for all the ways the critic protected me during my trauma but relieving the critic of this responsibility going forward.

I guess the question comes down to how one thinks about the critic: is the critic part of me and therefore needs to be accepted and integrated or is the critic part of my abuser that has been left with me and I need to excise it?

Any thoughts?

Thanks!

Thanks everyone! I will give all of this some thought.

Kizzie, my wife actually brought up the idea of a dog to sleep with as a comfort and as a built in alarm system and I started sobbing. When I was 11 my mom killed my cat (she ran over the cat one day after church; she claimed it was a tragic accident), the only living creature I trusted. She was always super jealous if I gave anyone other than her affection. Anyway, I spent the next few months BEGGING for a chocolate lab (my grandparents had a lab mix I would take naps with), but instead she bought a chocolate colored lap dog that she systematically trained to only like her.

Anyhow, I may very well get myself a chocolate lab. Thanks for the idea!

We just moved to a new house and it superficially reminds me of the house I grew up in. One issue is that I have a window just behind and to the left of my bed, just like I did growing up. I now find myself staying up until 1 or 2 in the morning in an effort to get tired enough to just fall asleep instantly. I do have nightmares sometimes and wake up in the middle of the night sometimes (though my psych put me on Prazozin which has really helped with the middle of the night wake-ups), but I am scared to lay in the darkness because I sink into a twilight zone of sorts where I keep "jumping" awake, expecting my perp to walk through the door and attack me (or that my perp will break through my window). This wasn't much of a problem until we moved to this house and it is impractical to try to move my bed somewhere else or to move to a different house. It is easier to go to bed if my wife is awake but laying in the bed--I can trust her to keep watch for me, but she usually gets to bed before I do.

Does anyone have advice on dealing with hypervigilance keeping you awake?

Thanks!

I found this book today. It is a dissertation by an Australian researcher with tons of case studies. I have read the first 20 pages or so and the case studies are really helpful for me as a man who was sexually abused as a child by my mother.

First of all, Welcome! So glad you are here!

why don't I just say NO to my mother?

I realized no one ever said no to her.

That's when it hit me - it's a family system. Everyone's upholding the values. These values almost killed me.

Second of all, I COMPLETELY get it. When I got my hands on Walking on Eggshells by Mason and Kreger, I was just flabbergasted at the dysfunction in my FOO system. My mother has undiagnosed Borderline Personality Disorder and I have also found a lot of help and support at the Out of the Fog web site and forum for dealing with those in our lives with PDs. Of course, I have no idea if you suspect your mother of having a Personality Disorder or not, but wanted to leave that link here as  resource.

Third, good luck to you! And I am glad we can help support you!

DD,

Super helpful. Thank you. I go through phases where I am certain and then wonder if I made it all up. My T has always been really good about validating my experience and also telling me that whether or not these specific memories happened in the way I remember, the emotional and somatic memories cannot be denied. I certainly feel a certain way and those feelings are connected to these memories.

I found the article you shared to be fantastic. I have also read The Body Keeps the Score, which discusses some of this. Thanks for the support!

I find it curious that I never forgot the physical and emotional abuse I suffered as a child, but I have only in the last three years recovered memories of sexual abuse. In my career I am an academic (though not in psychology, I have quite a bit of social science training) so I started researching the phenomenon of repressed memories and found that there is a divide in the academic literature between clinicians on the one hand who largely accept some version of repressed memory (probably more like motivated forgetting and/or dissociative amnesia than the repressed memory theory of Freud) and memory researchers on the other hand who discount the whole idea that one could forget something so traumatic.

The first time I remembered my sexual abuse was during an EMDR session on a memory of emotional abuse. That memory morphed into one of SA. So I have to wonder, am I creating false memories? Is there a danger of that? Why would I create false memories? It is not like I enjoy thinking about these things!

The memories certainly seem very real (though I recognize that to some degree I am consolidating similar memories and I often don't have a lot of details), but are they real?

Just need to vent if that's ok--

My wife worked yesterday, so I was home alone with our three girls. I felt the flashback coming on (extreme thirst is always a sign) and started to catch glimmers of the flashback, but I had to push it away until my wife got home. I told her what was going on and then I laid down on the bed and couldn't fight the flash back anymore. It was a new memory. But, like the other memories I've recovered, I wondered how I could have forgotten. I ended up vomiting and sobbing and the release felt good. I then went to bed early (despite my fear of nightmares) and actually slept pretty well, thank God.

*TW--Suicide mention, CSA*

My M forced me to orally stimulate her (using a clinical phrase on purpose). I did so and immediately was so disgusted I ran off and vomited in the hallway. I laid down in my bed and shivered and cried. She came into my room at some point, apologized, and offered to kill herself if I wanted, and FORGAVE me for vomiting in the hallway. She reminded me that I was disgusting and only a mother like her could love a gross boy like me.

What kind of person does that to a kid?!?!?!?! Why am I so baffled even now? Why am I continuously surprised at the monstrosities perpetuated against me???

Not long after this (and this is a memory I have never forgotten), I took a bath with my younger sister and forced her to orally stimulate me and I also orally stimulated her. I threatened her if she ever told anyone. I have often wondered how I knew to do that to her. I guess I know now.

Is there no end to the depth of the corruption in me? Am I doomed to constantly remember these hellish memories? Will I ever be set free?