Messages

I hate to say this but dramamama your husband sounds like he's one of us. These are typical narcissistic and ocd traits

Reading your post made me think of my ex partner who, no matter how I tried to share my problems with her, wanted to blame our relationship problems on me, as I was in therapy so must have been the mad one. It takes two to make a bad relationship, although I don't want to sound like I am victim blaming.

You could have a kind of co-dependent relationship where he acts out a naughty child while and you act out a stern critical parent. You both are together because on some level you both get something from that. We are inherently attracted to people who subconsciously remind us of our parents. Firestone and Catlett's Fear of intimacy is a great read.

Sorry to hear of your loss jdog.

facebook is not all that bad, it takes a bit to sort it out so you are not visible to your students or anybody else that you doing don't want to have on your social network. I use it to stay in touch with people who I wouldn't send emails to. It's often nice to see how people are doing without having to go to a lot of trouble.

However, I have used it for other means, such asto tellmy employer that I am tied of waiting for my salary, and "the network" makes sure your boss gets the message. Lol.

A family member used one of my posts to cause trouble with my mother, which was also intended, so face book has is uses lol, I also use it for getting non mainstream news and easy access to groups that share my interests.

It comes down to what one wants from it.

Wow parents! Going NC has happened off and on but I haven't been closer than LC in the past 20 years.

One needs to protect oneself from the hurt that comes from being among people who have caused so much difficulty in our lives. For me it would be nice to have some recognition of the pain caused, that will never happen, the step of realising that their ways of thinking and parenting is aggressive and abusive has never been reached. I had flashback at their house a few years back when my father started being aggressive towards my nieces, getting angry resulted in my being asked to leave.

The whole thing I find is cyclical and runs in 7 year cycles, going from getting along OK to strained relations to a blow out and typically being ejected from the house with nowhere to go. I learned that if I visit I must have transport and I visit on my own terms. If I become in any way dependent on their hospitality the nature of the visit changes and I hear "you only come here for something to eat / you want something from us.

Not sure if anyone else feels like a stranger paying a visit to acquaintences you've only meet once or twice. That's how it feels when I go to my folks.

They still try to make me feel terrible, never appreciate the thousands of miles I have traveled and hours spent on top of the cost of flight tickets, rental cars and hotels. For instance during my last visit my father felt compelled to let me know that I was dis-inherited. Which I felt was a clear attempt to kick off a fight.

So as they are my family I will help if they need it, I know that a part of me does it for approval that will never come.


At the same time, while I find it hard to accept their lack of remorse and ability to make amends, I also can't blame them, they have themselves endured pretty much what they put me through, and are operating on their own level, as toxic as it is. I am the lucky one being able bring up my kids in the hope that they won't be as screwed up as I am.

So if you can live with everything as it has always been then have limited contact, I would not recommend trying to have a "normal relationship" unless they have seen the error of their ways and sought help

Forgive them for they know not what they do but look after yourself

Yes I am also asking partners if they are angry about something. I notice as well that because one thinks that one is annoying it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

The hardest thing is working relationships, after about a year I trend to run out of energy, then it seams just a short while before I get a letter from the HR dept. I also seem to attract drama, life can never be straight forward.

I figured out that I always feel responsible for everything that goes wrong. I guess after 17 years of being a kid being blamed for every thing that went wrong for my mother its not surprising.

."My boss once said to me, "You always look so guilty about something."" - the story of my life. Lol

If one feels responsible and wears a guilty look it soon becomes easy to pass the blame onto the scape goat. It's hard growing up and nobody trust you, of course it takes years before you can understand why. It's great to know that I am not alone here. It's tiring having to always work against that  though. Difficult to have any self confidence.

I stopped watching horror movies when I was about 14, I didn't realise until recently why that might have been.

I didn't watch any mainstream TV for a few years and once when visiting my parents who always watch TV, I was shocked and sickened at the level of violence on UK TV, it was death and murder non stop from 6-12 midnight. I realised how we can become so indoctrinated and desensitised to violence and war.

Pete Walker points out four states of hyper arousal fawn being the fourth. Fawn means to roll over, give in and do what you're told.

Many of the hyper arousal states are those linked to our childhood, feeling threatened in some way, say when somebody criticises your work, it sends you into a flashback to a time when a critical parent tries to make you feel worthless. As an adult,  instead of being able to sit and discuss the criticism in a healthy way, a person with cptsd will become overly defensive (fight), walk away (flight), go into a state of panic (freeze), or just fawn and agree with all the criticism to try to buy favour from the critic. I also believe that passive aggression can also take place, although the person might be outwardly fawning they might also be very angry and then perhaps refuse to do another task by "forgetting" about it.

Absolutely true, doesn't Pete Walker tell us that the average in terms of dysfunctional families is around 70% healthy. Mental health is like physical health only a few percent are ultra fit, the rest of us sit on a sliding scale between the ultra-runners and iron men and the chroniucally I'll and bed ridden. Normal probably means never does any exercise, carries around 30% body fat and gets out of breadth after a brisk walk up a short hill. Normal is pretty unfit and there's a fair risk of heart disease, diabetes and stroke.

What I meant was should I be feeling this? Is it what a mentally healthy person  normally feels?

Great post. I feel this too like a great sense of loss. I read ekhart tolle he calls it shared pain of societies so I considered that everybody felt it. One of the strange things about cptsd, depression and childhood trauma is that its always hard to tell what is normal and what isn't. Before one can fix it one needs to discover it, then figure out what it is.

Thanks again everyone.

Kayfly I know that it takes great strength to completely divorce your self from your family, respect! I have done this a few times in the past, the first time was delayed when a friend lost both parents advised me against it. It did happen though and I didn't speak to anybody for 8 years,  only when my sister married and then when her husband tragically died did I go back and support them. However, they - my parents, will never change or acknowledge their mistakes, that does irritate me. One would think that they might be full of remorse, but I know that they are as much victims and survivors as I am, they live in a world of righteousness and denial.My mother seems to go in 7 year cycles, '87, '94, 2001, 2009 I went back so miussed the 2007 eruption but in 2014 she blew a hysterical gasket again just like old faithful :-D I am just lucky enough to be aware that I have been unable to fulfill my life potential and that I struggle to do what middle class people see as normal things, I don't want another generation of damaged people. 

Sorry for the typos. I am using a tablet with autocorrect. Lol

Hi Astronaut,
Sorry to hear of your troubles sounds a lot like you have been through a pretty terrible time. It must be very tough going through this, I have friends who tell similar stories.
I can't help noticing how much you focus on your partners problems and how little on your own. I remember spending half of my £100 an hour therapy sessions telling my therapist how bad my ex has been an not taking the opportunity to fix myself. My ex agreed to go into therapy and to my shock was discharged within a month with no problems. What I want to say is that a few therapists that I have read suggest that we look for partners that remind us of our parents, we can therefore subconsciously set out in a bad direction out of choice, the second thing is that often we stay in dysfunctional relationships because on some level we get something out of them. The book "fear of intimacy by "ROBERT W. FIRESTONE AND JOYCE CATLETTtalks about these bonding patterns. The second great book is" why we love" by Helen Fisher that explains love and relationships in terms of neurochemistry. * hath no fury like a woman scorned due to her brain pumping out a ton of neuro chemicals designed by nature to make her aggressive to protect her children, in modern times these mechanisms are used in other ways and women are often seen as crazy heartless bitches. Fisher also backs up the parent attraction theory by suggesting that we are programmed to fall in live with people who are like out parents because on a basic level we survived childhood and therefor are the best model we have. As soon as we have sec or brains pump out dopamine, seratonin and oxytocin and for half a dozen years we live in a brain drug fueled purple haze. We are thereby able to tolerate or partners obvious faults because when we are with them we produce more chemicals and when we are not we go into child Turkey and our chest hurts like * (we miss them). Society is pretty deaf and blind to science and we often judge peoples behaviour rather than the circumstances behind it. I am not defending your wife of course, although in a way I am, as many of us are not aware of how we are behaving and what affect it has on people around us. Emotional intelligence is pretty low on most peoples agenda. We live in a world of pain and most of us act out the inner pain that we harbour, not because we want to but because we have little choice. I am not sure that this is helping you much but the books are excellent.
I do hope that having had to experience all this as a small child that your daughter has not suffered, I would imagine that it has not been easy for her either. While we often think of kids as strong and stoic I Bernice the opposite is true, kids are deeply affected.
Best wishes
Steamy

Thanks for all the warm wishes and words of support.

The task seems so daunting and its frustrating and I have often found  when you think you have reached the end you just uncover more stuff about yourself.

Hi all, 
I am not sure where to begin. I have just in the past few weeks realised that I have cptsd, I was in therapy about 6 years ago, my therapist at the time was a great guy, told me I had PTSD but at the time I considered it to be like PTSD from the military, I served 12 years without much in the way of trauma, but was shot and wounded in Cambodia in 2003, so saw my therapy as a cumulation of traumatic incidents particularly from aggressive and psychologically abuse parents. I come from a long line of war veterans who all seemed to have survived world wars but functioned relatively poorly when they were demobbed, I firmly believe that we pass on PTSD to our kids as a way of cleansing ourselves. After about 18 months I discharged myself from therapy feeling that I had come as far as I could go at that time.

In the half dozen years since, I have had as many jobs. I work in a very small profession  in the physical rehabilitation sector where everybody knows you or of you, I have resorted to working in other countries so rarely see my family. I have been fired a few times but things have never really worked out since I left the military in 1996. I have come to the point where I my work is so intermittent that I am considering bankruptcy, I have almost lost hope out having a normal life where we can afford a car and accumulate some savings.

I have a 2 year old son and realised that I have been projecting my own inner hurt child onto him. Things came to a head when my partner decided to leave him for a week with grandparents. He was fine but all my abandonment issues came out in a massive flashback. I accused her of being neglectful. Luckily I at least could understand what had happened and was able to explain myself to her.

In the past my partners have been less tolerant and really could not understand why I was the way I am.

It is so frustrating to feel so impaired and not be able to tell anybody about why I do certain things, while society is just getting to grips with people with physical disability we are still a lifetime away from giving the same respect to people with metal illness. All the gurus tell us to abandon negative people, negative people are also suffering, so abandonment is like leaving your brother with no legs to walk home. From robin skinner and john cleeses fabulous book, "life and how to survive it", mental health is like physical health: 2% of the population are supremely fit and healthy, 2% are pathologically ill and the rest of us sit somewhere on a gradient between the two points. Forgive us for we know not what we do.

Ironically I bought Pete walker's book back in June, i also did some online cognitive courses, i an not sure why, perhaps my inner self was telling me to get moving again.

Yesterday I had a disastrous job interview where I self sabotaged my chances of having a great job where I would be able to spend more time at home. I noticed the change in atmosphere in the room and  afterwards felt awful, with thoughts of having had enough of struggling when everybody else is doing so well, usual thoughts about if life is really worth all the effort. but it was not until I woke up this morning that I realised what I did and what I could have said. I am now filled with self recrimination and guilt although a small inner voice is telling me that I did my best within my capacity and all is not lost.

At the age of 48 I am still trying to reinvent myself, to find a place to work that is supportive and nurturing, I feel like I need to be rescued, apparently its one of the symptoms of cptsd. I remember as a small kid praying to a deaf and blind God for help that never materialised.  I can't help but think that surely at my stage of life I should be the nurturer. Yesterday I concluded that all of my nurturing must come from within, that's a big task.

I am looking forward to participating in the group but am a little concerned that it might simply be a forum where everybody says something like "well if you think you had it bad, my story is worse,"

Love and best wishes to all