Dalloway´s Recovery Journal

[SenseOrgan]

I'm sorry you're struggling with this. I recently got hit with something similar after a very long time. It's okay to be "unreasonable" [at least in your own mind]. It's a healthy response to what happened. Part of the grieving process of the child you were, and the person you are today. It's a bitter pill to see the consequences of such a start, in so many aspects of life still. The freedom from this kind of bitterness is a byproduct of feeling all the hurt. I've had a very good taste of that for many years. I hope you have too. It seems to be a non-linear process. Sending you a big hug 

[Dalloway]

Thank you, SenseOrgan, for the big hug, it was very much needed and is very much appreciated. And I think you´re right in that it´s all a byproduct of better understanding my past and its connection to my present. It hurts and it can make me feel really helpless sometimes, but I´m glad that I´m not alone and people can relate. And in the times of more peace and clarity in my mind, I come to appreciate all the things I´ve learned and that I´m moving forward to feel better. It´s still hard when I think about it, but now I feel better about myself and my story. Maybe eventually I´ll learn how to accept and own it with all the stuff, good and bad.

[Desert Flower]

Hi Dalloway, I just wanted to say I'm sorry you're struggling too. Even if you posted this a while ago. I think it's a very natural feeling to have this rage about missed chances or what have you, that's why in my therapy 'the angry child' is one of the archetypes we worked with. What I mean to say is, you're certainly not alone with this. I think you are doing great recognising what's going on inside you. And I hope you can vent it in a non-harmful way.
 

[Dalloway]

Thank you, Desert Flower. It´s very frustrating to feel those things I wrote about above and now it´s turning against me in a form of a very negative and very critical inner voice. It sucks so much to have these feelings or should I say beliefs about myself and my worth. There are many things that were actively harming me in the past and doing that passively to this day because of their power over me and it´s very hard to untangle from them. I try not to abandon myself and side with that inner critic in mocking me, but it´s very hard.

[Dalloway]

I find it more and more difficult to concentrate on my personal growth and healing journey in a world that´s falling apart. Everything loses its meaning. It´s hard to find essence in everyday actions. I look around and see the objects surrounding me and creating my personal space, the proofs that I´m here right now, that I haven´t ceased to exist yet. And yet, my heart and soul is aching and this pain is the only thing that assures me that I´m still alive. The absurdity of existing in parallel with the death of thousands is what makes me question my very own existence. Everything feels out of context, in a vacuum, and the context itself is decomposing slowly, too. Where do I stand in this turmoil with my trauma and my deep knowledge of personal loss and suffering? How can I continue to live in a world that has stopped being the place I want to live in a long time ago? Where is my place in all this? Everything loses its meaning. Words don´t describe the pain sufficiently anymore. I can´t be free from suffering. Nobody is free until everyone is free. How can I heal my own wounds amidst the destruction? Where does "personal" end? In my soul, all starts to blend.

[SenseOrgan]

Your compassion is beautiful Dalloway. It's brave to keep your heart open in the face of such horror. Bad things flow out of closing it. The very things you refer to are a result of this. It's hard to realize our influence is limited, to put it mildly. It seems absurd to work on personal healing in a world falling apart, doesn't it? Still, I think it's the most powerful and constructive thing we can do when dealing with CPTSD. Every action ripples out from there. It also determines to what degree we can be effective in the world. It has to have priority if we're not in direct danger ourselves, I think.

We can't know how far we'll get, but I think we owe it to ourselves to give it our all. And also to the world (without being grandiose) because none of us is an island. There are things we can influence and things we can't influence. It helps a great deal to focus on the former, however small it may seem. It matters. Without downplaying any of the horrific things going on, we truly can't know where we are even one day from now. Regardless of how things develop, there's intrinsic value in acts of kindness and compassion, no matter how seemingly insignificant. Towards yourself and others.

There are great examples of people not succumbing to cynicism and hopelessness and remaining their dignity in the hardest of circumstances. They showed and show us that it's possible to do what's right even if all the odds are against us. Big and small. The circumstances we find ourselves in sometimes makes us tap into almost super human abilities we weren't aware of. It's not necessarily about getting the outcome we want. More about what we value, even more than ourselves. I recently saw a clip of a Jezidi man singing about the massacre on his people. He was honoring them by keeping the story alive of what had happened. There was an immense dignity in it, even though it changed nothing about the horror. It touched me deeply. He was unbroken.

Much love 

ps
If you want to hear the Jezidi man sing, you still can for a week or so, if you have VPN which you can set to The Netherlands. The fragment starts at 2 hours 48 minutes into the show. https://npo.nl/start/serie/vpro-zomergasten/seizoen-37/vpro-zomergasten_15/afspelen

[Dalloway]

Thank you, SenseOrgan, I really appreciate your kindness in these hard times. Yes, I very much agree with you and this is what keeps me going, even if it sometimes seems so meaningless, that through my personal healing and gaining of wisdom I can make changes in the broader world, too. I try not to forget that in my life I need to be in the first place, especially when it comes to healing the traumas, but this is what motivates me the most, the power of wisdom and healing that I can share with those who need it. Everything I do pretty much points into one direction: to make this world (inner and outer) a better place. My personal journey may be about me in the first place, but I like to think that it also benefits other people because, as you put it, we are not an island. My plan of becoming a social worker, which I wrote about, is also part of this bigger picture.

And it´s already changing me as a person in a positive way. I used to be in my head 24/7 and very much isolated from the outside world. All I cared about was my mental and emotional state, which is of course not a bad thing, only that it cut me off from the context I exist in. But with everything that´s happening, I am changing, too. I would have never thought that I have so much integrity and bravery in me that I´m experiencing nowadays. And you know what? My CPTSD, my personal healing journey and experiences of abuse and oppression (even systemic one, since I´m part of a minority ethnic group in a country where we don´t have equal rights with the dominant group), it all helps when it comes to understanding the issues of the world today. Everything I´ve been and am going through gives me extra understanding and compassion. I used to think about my negative experiences and ACEs as something that shouldn´t have happened (I still do in a sense that it was horrible and would never want it to happen to anyone), but it´s also starting to change and now I can value my experiences as something that helps me be more compassionate and helps me build something better for me and for others.

It can feel hopeless sometimes, especially with all the helplessness I´m experiencing, but it makes me want to integrate the pain into something bigger more.

[Dalloway]

Does the feeling of abandonment ever get better? There are multiple occasions a day when I feel the good old feeling of being left alone. Someone didn´t reply to my message? You are alone. Someone couldn´t find the time to dedicate to me or my needs? You are alone. You felt something good and now it´s gone? That´s because you are utterly, eternally, endlessly alone. It´s lurking in the darkness of my mind, waiting for the right time, and the right time comes almost every time a minor inconvenience happens (minor inconvenience = a huge disaster to a CPTSD folk). At that very moment I´m drawn back to the past, to the childhood I never really left mentally and emotionally. Painful emptiness and stone cold vacuum fills my body and the space around me. I´m experiencing anxiety and deep sorrow. I´ve never been loved and I´ll never be - this is the message it´s carrying. No matter how many people tell me the opposite, my childhood´s got it right. My mother´s got it right.

Gabor Maté, my hero and number one role model talks about this a lot. He himself was abandoned as a baby by his mother, who gave him to a stranger on the street to save his life that was threatened every day in nazi Hungary as a Jew. Despite being reunited with his mother after six weeks and living after in a loving and safe environment, he says he never fully recovered from this trauma of early abandonment. He was a baby who then got the chance to live a meaningful life with people he loves and he himself became someone who saved the lives of thousands of people as a doctor and a humanist. And yet, he never fully recovered. This deep are the childhood wounds.

So I´m sitting here thinking: Will I ever recover? Can someone fill the aching void that was supposed to be filled with unconditional love? If someone experiencing a short term abandonment can´t fully recover, can I, dealing with abandonment my whole childhood, get better? I´ve spent my whole life being absolutely sure that I´m all alone. I remember sitting on a bench in the park, waiting for the school bus, listening to the sound of the birds and distant chatters, and feeling that I´m alone in a world that forgot about me. There are people but I can´t reach them and neither can they. Abandonment became my second nature, my loyal companion. Things may change in the future, but the childhood scars are stronger than any bond in the world.

No matter what I do, this is embedded in my mind and soul. I can´t tear it out and throw it away. That´s just not how it works. I was a child who never once heard ´I love you´, who never once felt that she´s important and that it would be sad if she didn´t exist. Instead, she was abused and neglected, again and again, being used as a tool that had to be useful, otherwise it wouldn´t be needed anymore. I learned that I´m not precious and that love doesn´t come unconditionally. I´m worthy of stuff only if I can provide something in return. I have to be smart, kind, quiet and easy to manage. But love, unfortunately, didn´t follow and it took me almost thirty years to understand that it was never about me. But knowing something rationally and being able to act upon it, are two very different things. And my body and my soul remember everything. They feel the pain of the newborn that was emotionally left alone, they remember the tears of desperation of the ten year old writing a letter to her mother, asking why she never loved her. I remember everything. The question is: can I remember and heal at the same time?

[NarcKiddo]

Oh, Dalloway. That resonates. Especially the last paragraph.

 

[Desert Flower]

Yes, me too Dalloway.

And I'm sorry you're feeling this way. You are a loveble and lovely person! 

[Papa Coco]

Dalloway,

Your post touches my heart deeply today. Loneliness has always been my lifelong sorrow also. Being utterly alone in an overcrowded world.

I agree with you that I also know that this isn't my fault. The loneliness has a mind of its own and it stays with me no matter how intellectually I "understand" it as a symptom of trauma. But, like you say, my heart still feels lonely even though my head says there's a reason for it.

If it helps, your entire post made it deep into my heart today. I feel the pain of loneliness for you as well as I do for myself.

I've been on a rampage to learn as much as I can lately about trauma and healing. I've been reading book after book about it. Some of the modern psychologists that we all trust, like Richard Schwartz, and Thomas Hubl are homing in on the loneliness of trauma more than ever. In Attuned, Hubl says It isn't the abuse that traumatized us as children, it was having to endure the abuse alone that traumatized us.

Loneliness is the greatest pain I know. And your post really said it well and really touched my heart this morning. The letter you wrote to your mom at age 10 really hit me hard. I am touched by your sincerity and your desire to connect with other people. When I was a young boy, my mom did say "I love you" a lot, but she didn't behave like it. I was treated more like a chore or a problem she had to deal with. I would occasionally ask her, "Why do you love me?" She would casually respond, "Because I'm your mother. I have to love you."  That answer never made me feel very loved, but it does help me to connect my own drama with yours so that I can empathize and share this moment with you, even if it's over the internet.

One of the conundrums I deal with is I don't like the loneliness, and yet I intentionally isolate myself. I don't feel safe around other people. I feel safe alone. Nobody to criticize me or make me give up my life for theirs. The dichotomy is stressful. I feel alone so I isolate. I want friends, but I get nervous around them. So I bike alone. I kayak alone. I walk alone. I sleep alone. I want love but I don't feel safe unless I'm alone.

I'm following a lot of the current authors who are beginning to turn their attention on our connections to each other. Lack of connection caused our CPTSD. Like it or not, the loneliness became a defining attribute of our lives. So their new tack, as trauma psychologists, is to encourage me to love myself, and love my loneliness, and accept it as one of the things that made me who I am. They believe that as I learn to stop fighting against the loneliness, it will finally begin to heal. Accepting it as something we didn't want, but we got it anyway, gives us permission to start to let it go. I'm in the first week of practicing what they're teaching. I suspect that if I can keep it up, my own dark loneliness will start to ease up a bit. They say that what we resist persists. I resist loneliness so it persists. If I can accept it as a part of me, I can stop resisting it, and it will, in theory, dissipate.



This is the magic of this OOTS forum. We can be alone together. It still hurts, but knowing I'm feeling as alone as you are makes me feel not so alone with the loneliness. That statement probably only makes sense to us CPTSD folks.