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All of this is super helpful. Thank you!

So -- I decided to build the icr its very own, and very separate, room. The icr loves to feel important, and having, at last, his own room -- wow, it makes him special, and not some pesky irritant. Remember, we're talking visualization and imagination here.

In addition to his own room, I fitted it up like a home theatre, complete with films of my old life, the one he loved to denigrate and make me feel bad about. So key to the theatre are all those old films, plus scrapbooks and items like my old journals which were filled with the downside of cptsd -- anger, shame, self-depredation, deep depression, even touching on years when I teetered on the edge of staying alive when all felt so hopeless. Of course the icr loved every minute, but with the new room all his own, wow -- he loves it.

Woodsgnome, that is fantastic. I like that a lot. I think that sort of imaginative work is precisely what I need to do to make sense of the tangle in my mind.

I haven't yet got to the stage of feeding her narrative with figurative films and scrapbooks, but that sounds rather fun, in a perverse sort of way.

 
I NarcKiddo--that attitude is super similar to the way I dealt with my OCD--egg on the absurdity of it almost. It helps.

When the inner critic is a voice from my past, reason doesn't work. You can't reason with narcissist even if they are just a blip burrowed into your brain. I find it easier just to distance myself from that voice, as I would have from that person who the voice originally belonged to. It's not me, it's them. I recognise that voice as their voice, and it will never be honoured. I do find myself arguing with them a lot, but doing that is triggering. It's more harmful than helpful to engage with the unwelcome intruder.

Bermuda--That is a very helpful way of thinking about it. Learning to distinguish between the legitimate inner voice that is helpful with our current lives and the interloper from the past. In the same way I have chosen to ignore my abuser by going NC with her, I can choose the same thing with the ICr

the idea of ICr being part of my abuser who needs to be eradicated is no longer supported in the trauma T community. At least in the German one, which is where I am. According to my inpatient T last year and this year. The brain is very complicated, the psyche is very complicated. Hope this helps some way, gcj.

Blueberry,

Yes, after speaking with my T at length about dealing with the ICr, she also thinks the eradicating the ICr is unhelpful, impossible, and likely to be triggering. We are working on ignoring the ICr for now (I LOVE Woodsgnome's idea of creating a special space in my mind for the ICr) while I continue doing EMDR on specific episodes of CSA.

I texted her back to ask what she wanted to talk about. She replied that she wanted to know exactly why I went NC with Mom because if she doesn't have that info she can't be in the same room with me. She then said if I can't give her that info she will pursue a relationship with my wife and kids without me. So, um, NO. Nope nope nope nope. Not happening. I don't trust her at all and see this as a fishing expedition to feed info back to M with the typical ultimatum. I have been clear for the last four years that I would not be discussing my relationship with M with her--it is none of her business. I also think my F is a bit clouded by a desire to see his kids reconcile. I get that from his perspective, but he spent a long time enabling M by pressuring the rest of us to reconcile with her and it seems old habits are hard to break.

[feels]

Hi all--

I have been NC with uBPm for almost four years. And it has been FANTASTIC! I am continually working on myself and dealing with my C-PTSD and am excited about the journey. Shortly after I went NC, my F filed for divorce (this was not coordinated, but it was very welcome). I have a really good relationship with F. For most of my life, F enabled uBPm. Once M moved out, he and I had several heart-to-hearts and have done a lot of work. He has apologized for not being there to protect me from M and has sought to make amends. He is on his own journey of healing. He has also been my biggest champion as I continue on my healing journey.

My sister, however, took a different approach. She utterly condemned me and F for abandoning M. M eventually bought a house in Sis's neighborhood (I wish them much joy together!  ). Anyhow, after multiple years of on-again, off-again chats with me, Sis finally decided about 14 months ago that I was too toxic for her and her family and basically went no contact with me. This made me quite sad. Apart from this whole kerfluffle with M, I really like her. And I like my kids to be able to spend time with their cousins.

Well, today, out of the blue, she texted me to ask if we could talk. According to my F (who she is still cordial with b/c she wants her kids to know their grandpa), she has told him that she has grown sick of dealing with M and had the epiphany that M has systematically taken over all of Sis's attention. Again, this is secondhand, but apparently Sis told M that Sis is not responsible for the fact that M's relationship with me and F fell apart. F says he thinks Sis (who previously dismissed my account of the emotional and physical abuse I suffered at the hands of M) genuinely wants to hear why I went NC. However, what Sis doesn't know is that my M also sexually abused me.

Anyhow, I am torn about what to do. I love my sister and her kids and want them in my life and I want to be in their's. But I also don't trust her after some of the nasty things she has told me and the way she has dismissed me when jumping to M's defense. She has never reached out before to ask to actually talk (it has always been her acting as a proxy for M to heap more abuse on me--usually in the form of texts so she can show them to M to prove her loyalty (I suspect)). This feels different to me, but I don't know.

What do y'all think?

I want to echo DD. I am by no means recovered, but the community here is one of the best supports I know of.

Like you, I have a undiagnosed BPD family member. Unfortunately, she (my mother) was my abuser. I get the BPD thing. It can be hard. Lots more on that if you are interested.

If you want more info on C-PTSD, I can think of no better resource than Pete Walker's Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A Guide and Map for Recovering from Childhood Trauma. I bought a hard copy as a reference and listened to the audio book. That book helped me know myself so much better and helped me not feel so alone.

Hang in there. Proud of you for working on getting the help you need. We are here to support you. If safe, here is a 

Hey everyone,

My psychiatrist has me on Prazozin to help me sleep through the night (I often wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning in a rush of adrenaline; sometimes I remember the nightmares). It has worked SUPER well. I sleep through the night now and I am having fewer nightmares. Last night I forgot to take my prazozin and was wide awake at 1:30 unable to return to sleep. I have been sitting bolt upright in a chair in my living room for the past several hours dissociating to YouTube videos trying to relax. This seems worse than before I got on the Prazozin. I will talk about it with my psychiatrist at my next appointment, but wondered for now about other people's experiences (whether with Prazozin or not). 

Thanks to all of you!

NarcKiddo--sorry for any confusion. The stuff with my mother was me flashbacking to when I was a kid. I wrote it how it felt--like the past coming into the present in a confusing and painful way. Thankfully, I have not had contact with her for a few weeks shy of four years.

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!