Papa Coco's Recovery Journal

[SenseOrgan]

You're making sense to me Papa Coco. People who bully attempt to overcompensate for their insecurities by creating a sense of power over others, preferably in the form of terror, which means total power. It impacts those who are more sensitive more, so they are the low hanging fruit. I think perpetrators often perceive sensitivity as weakness. The aspect they despise about themselves and can't stand to be reminded of through others. Perhaps the jealousy is about seeing the actual strength in someone having the courage to be sensitive. If it can be defined/terrorized into a form of weakness, that gives the bully a sense that it can be kept out of awareness by force. It's all false, off course. Nobody has this kind of power.  What is so, isn't impacted by changing the story about it. Only the arrogance of the mind believes so. Narcs are actually extremely insecure behind their mask of grandiosity, which can't be stressed enough.
The battle really is between love and fear. The narc has fallen prey to fear completely. It may seem we have too. But that isn't the case if you're heart is still open. So often things aren't what they seem to be at first sight.

I believe HSP's are at higher risk for (C-)PTSD. As, in general, events impact us more deeply. So starting off life in a toxic environment has a profound impact.

One question, if you don't mind. Is there really anything to forgive for being sensitive?

Much love

[TheBigBlue]

Papa Coco, thank you - truly. What you wrote put words to something I've only recently begun to let myself believe: I wasn't weak growing up. I was perceptive and empathic. And yes ... that made me the easier one to hurt.

Your framing of sensitivity as an inherent trait - even a superpower - really hit home. It mirrors so much of my own story: feeling everything intensely, and then being told that this was the problem, instead of recognizing it as the very thing that helped me notice, adapt, survive.

It's incredibly validating to hear sensitivity described not as a flaw to fix, but as a way of being wired that becomes strength once it isn't living under threat.

Thank you for putting that into words today. It landed exactly where I needed it.

[Papa Coco]

Chart, Thanks for the hug emoji. Those things hold a lot of meaning for me.

Desert Flower, I personally see it as a tragedy that people like you and me who are more sensitive are insulted for it. It's a gift, not a curse. People who can't see that are the cursed. And they pour their own jealousy out on us to make us feel bad about something good.

SenseOrgan,  TO your question about whether I have anything to be forgiven for, I agree with you that rationally, none of us do. But irrationally, thanks to a trauma disorder and conditioning by the jealous adults that put their anger onto us to carry for them, we irrationally believe we can't be forgiven. I hear it a lot in movies, novels, and just plain conversations with peers: the most difficult person there is to forgive is our Selves.  Knowing I don't need to be forgiven doesn't always appease the feeling that I'm unforgivable.

An example from my own life, which I feel pretty sure that others on this forum might have had similar experiences was this story from when I was 7. I was being abused at school. When I was at home, I was caught up in not being good enough for my three adult teen siblings or my parents. One day, I said, "I hate myself." Maybe I was hoping someone would help me through the feeling. Instead, my family roared up and all started yelling at me, "That's a SIN!  God will send you to H--l for that!" Now...think this through: Is that a reaction that makes a child suddenly start loving himself? Not me. It made me even more sure that I was worthless and bad in "god"s eyes. For a child who had been taught that the old man version of god is a real old man who loves and hates whoever he chooses, that's about as bad as anything I could have ever heard. I used to go to sleep at night begging God...BEGGING God to love me, but every day, my church and family would prove he never would. I would go to church and school every single morning with the taste of fear in my mouth and throat. Disgusted at how ugly and stupid and unlovable I was. More proof that I didn't deserve to be forgiven for existing.

That's why I live with a chronic need to find reasons each day why I don't need to be forgiven for having been created in the first place. It's the healing that I manage each day. Any book that proves I'm just a normal person dealing with abuse, is a book that can give me a few days of feeling forgiven until I forget the book and return to my original wiring.

TheBigBlue, I can feel, through your writing, how closely your perceptions and empathy resonate with my experience too. I am glad that my words helped you too. I absolutely feel it is true that we are stronger when we are in step with our healing paths. I am sorry that it happened to both of us, and I'm glad that we are all here on this forum, learning that it wasn't just us. Knowing that we both resonate with the truth, that sensitivity, empathy and kindness are NOT something to be ashamed of, gives me more validation and power to be more okay with being who I am. Who we are.

We're stronger together.

[TheBigBlue]

     

 

[Desert Flower]

 

[sanmagic7]

PC, interesting post about forgiveness.  that religious bit, that we are born sinners and need to be forgiven for simply existing had never rung true for me - i was quite heavily involved in my church for years before i rejected it all.  i'd heard for years about how people felt the presence of 'god' in church, how it brought them such peace of mind,    and the truth is that i never once felt a sense of spirituality from being involved in church, but it hit me like a ton of bricks at my first AA meeting!  that's what i had been missing.  from that time on, my spirituality was of my own invention, and it suits me.  but what a revelation it was!

i had a discussion w/ a pastor's wife once about forgiveness.  she was of the notion that we cannot move on in our healing unless we forgive those who harmed us.  i've heard that sentiment from many others, including therapists.  i told her i didn't agree because even Jesus, on the cross, said 'Father, forgive them for they know not what they do'.  i pointed out to her that he didn't say 'i forgive you for what you've done', but gave that power of forgiveness over to someone/something he deemed had the power to do that. 

once i said it, it cleared up the entire 'forgiveness' burden for me.  i don't have to forgive anyone, least of all myself, cuz there is a 'higher power' who can take on that job.  i've lived much more peacefully inside myself after that.

and one other thing you wrote that caught my eye was the idea that we, ourselves, are the most difficult to forgive.  i'd like to add that i believe we are also the most important ones to forgive, or, as i wrote above, to turn over that urgency to forgive to something beyond ourselves to take care of for us.  as babies, naturally, we had no judgment on ourselves, no matter what we did or didn't do.  it was all the teaching of the unnatural laid upon us that, to my mind, caused our unrest within ourselves.  i hope you can find your way through this to the other side.  i don't see you as needing forgiveness.  you may have made mistakes - we all do - but such harsh judgment just doesn't belong on our shoulders, as far as i can see.  sending love and hugs

[TheBigBlue]

Happy New Year, Papa Coco.
I've been thinking of you and hoping the holidays haven't been too heavy.
Sending a hug if it feels okay.

[Papa Coco]

TheBigBlue, I'm doing pretty good. Thanks for checking in with me. How about you? Are you holding up good now that the Holiday Season is done and put to rest?

---Journal Entry for January 11---

I'm feeling reflective this morning. Taking a quick inventory of how things have been going for the past few years.

January brings, for me, a new beginning as usual. As soon as the Holidays end, the world normalizes again for me. 

Looking back on the 2025 Holiday Season, I'd say it was the most stable Autumn in all my memory. The therapies that I've been participating in have been helping me in ways nothing else ever has. I dabble in a lot of them. I do a little EMDR with my therapist, a little IFS therapy, I participate in a wonderful forum with you all, I read and reread and re-reread a robust list of really good books about trauma, brain science, emotion, meditation, high sensitivity and spirituality. All these little things in concert have made a profound difference in my ability to better regulate my moods and to recover more quickly from EFs.

I pursue healing fervently. My therapist comments often that my relentless pursuit of healing has been working. It's a long, slow road to travel, but it's what I call my Journey of a Thousand Steps, and I recognize that each step is as important as every other if I want to keep finding tomorrow to be better than yesterday.

The world itself is certainly not better than it was. My life has a lot of loss and sorrow in it now that it didn't have when I was younger and more social. It's not the world that's improving; it's my ability to stand tall during its storms.

One of the many little things that help me daily now is that little sign I made and put up on my bedroom wall next to my bed; "The Journey IS the destination".

My lifelong propensity is to always focus only on the end product. I push myself and drive myself crazy trying to finish everything I start. I seldom ever just enjoy the journey. Healing from CPTSD is a lifelong journey that really doesn't have a final finish line. I'm finding a little bit of peace in accepting that as long as I'm moving forward on my journey of a thousand steps, then I'm right where I need to be.

There were times when healing was critical. I barely lived through some of the EFs of my past. 4 times I had to be rescued from myself during the decades from childhood to retirement, but the world is providing support now that is helping me. This forum, and the people I'm meeting on it, are one of the supports that never existed until just this last decade.

Having my friends from the forum is the first time I've felt like I'm not the totally alone with my struggles.

I live by a few new rules now. One of the big ones is written in one of the books I read by a doctor who teaches that it isn't the abuse/neglect that traumatizes most people, it's that we had to endure that abuse/neglect alone that gave us C-PTSD. The cure for being alone is to not be alone anymore. And having the forum to share our emotions with each other is me not being alone anymore with my traumas.

Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to convey is that this forum is one of the best parts of my healing journey. It puts people in my life who share in my loneliness. And, like I said, being with people is the opposite of being alone. And being alone was the hardest part of my life. Being alone in a crowd of people who didn't understand me was the most damaging part of my life.

As a child in the 1960s, when TV was just three channels with no ability to record shows, we kids would excitedly make a huge event of watching a few holiday shows each year. One was a Claymation animation called Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer. When Herby the elf who wanted to be a dentist accidentally floated onto the Island of Misfit Toys, I would yearn to find that island in my own life too. I was a misfit. My family taught me I was fragile and helpless and kind of stupid. My friends were critical of my physical limitations, my church/school was teaching me I was a freak of nature and that even God hated me for being such a worthless loser. When Herby would find himself on an island with all these broken toys who all just wanted to be loved, and had found acceptance in each other, I would spend the rest of my life wanting to sail off and try to find that island for myself. It was a place of acceptance. A place where nobody was competing to be one of the cool kids. Nobody was critical. No narcissists even wanted to be there. The damaged toys all cared for each other without anyone making them feel like misfits anymore. I wanted that so bad.

And when I found this forum a few years ago now, I felt like I'd found that island of traumatized souls--misfits who feel like we just don't fit in with the rest of the world--where I could be accepted and cared about, even though I'm not perfect or even able to compete for acceptance and respect. I don't have to prove myself here. I don't have to pretend I'm tough here. I don't have to try to hide my emotional side here. I can be a man who cries here. I can talk about how kindness means more than toughness here. I can be a man who loves kittens here. I don't have to hide my true self to try and keep from being laughed at and criticized for being "too emotional" here. Nobody here EVER asks, "Why can't you just get over it?"

So, I'm starting 2026 with a big note of gratitude for this forum and for anyone anywhere in the world who is becoming a help to people like us. I'm grateful for those therapists who embrace trauma-informed-healing and who have begun to treat us like we're human beings, rather than misfits with medical insurance.

I see the world changing. For trauma healing, I recognize that the world still needs a lot more help, and that healing methods still need to be made more available to more of us, but many of these things are coming. It's a slow train coming. The helpers that we need are learning now how to help us. So we keep the vigil in motion and keep watching and keep looking for the next step in our Journeys of a Thousand Steps and hopefully trauma informed help will reach more and more of us.

I guess nobody ever promised life on earth would be easy. That's certainly been true for me. I've finally started to accept that I can't change the world and make it safer, but I can work to heal my Self so that I'm better at handling the chaos that is the world.

[Desert Flower]

WOW Papa Coco, that is another truly wonderful post you put out here. I'm so glad you are doing well. And it's making me so happy to hear you are healing, it's very encouraging and I may have needed to hear this.

I would like to sit on your island of misfits (with or without insurance) with you and all of us, if I may.

 

[TheBigBlue]

So, I'm starting 2026 with a big note of gratitude for this forum and for anyone anywhere in the world who is becoming a help to people like us. I'm grateful for those therapists who embrace trauma-informed-healing and who have begun to treat us like we're human beings, rather than misfits with medical insurance.

    

I am grateful to be on this island with you. 💛🧸🏝🤍

[Papa Coco]

TheBigBlue

[Chart]

 

[NarcKiddo]

Yay for the misfits!

 

[sanmagic7]

hey, PC, i agree, we really are stronger together, and this is a new year for embracing that. i'm finding more support than i have in ages, and it's a big help to my feelings of stability.  we'll get thru this, no matter what!  love and hugs

[Papa Coco]

Chart, Narc, San:    Hugs back to all of you.

San,
I agree. We are stronger together. I am in the middle of another episode where my credit card was skimmed somewhere and now I've got a ton of repair work to do to get a new card up and running so I can buy gas and groceries again. This is a Costco Visa, and I shop at Costco as my main source for groceries. So I've spent a couple of hours total this last week on the phone with Costco agents, trying to figure out who stole my card and how can I get up and running again before my auto-payments start failing one after another. (I pay all my utilities and insurances, medical bills, streaming services etc on auto pay, so this inconvenience is pretty annoying). Whenever I talk with someone about this incident, I do so in a cheerful mood. Nearly every person I've had to call or meet with at the stores has thanked me for being cheerful and kind. Whenever someone thanks me for being kind, it throws in my face the reality that most people are not kind. WHy would someone thank me for smiling if everyone was smiling, Right?

Today, I'm actually feeling a lot of warmth in my chest for all the fun conversations I've had with people who are used to being blamed, but who instead, thanked me for giving them a nice connection. The last person I talked with was in Costco store yesterday where I had to jump through all kinds of hoops just to get in the door. Her final words to me were, "Thank you for the smiles."

What this is enlightening for me is; this is a litmus test that is proving to me that I really, truly AM stronger when I connect with people rather than fight with them. To be brutally honest, I'm feeling kind of glad this mess happened to me. FOr me, the benefit of connecting through kindness with several strangers is stronger than the annoyance of the crime that was committed against me. I feel like saying that thing people sometimes say after catastrophic events bring them positive changes. "I wouldn't want to go through this again, but I'm a better person now for having gone through it."

For me, I'm always talking about how I value human connection over anything else in the world. This week has given me a chance to see that it's true. I am so pleased with the connections I made with those who could help me that I'm aaalmost glad it happened. I'm definitely glad that when it happened, I really did find the connection to be stronger than the pain.

San, we really are stronger together. I hold to my belief that the reason we hurt is because we feel alone with our abuse/neglect and we really do find strength in connecting with others who we can connect with. I hold now to my belief that a fear of being abandoned or left out causes most of our grief AND that connecting with others really is what most people really want. We struggle to connect when we can't get the abuse of the past out of our brains. But with today's modern therapies and helpful writers who address CPTSD, we are starting to find ways to deal with past abuse so that we can start to feel less afraid of connecting with others.

Here's something I've recently learned: One of the main reasons I've struggled to forgive the people who've hurt me is because I feel like if I forgive them, then I'm letting down my guard so they can hurt me again. Mom used to force me to be kind to my evil sister, and would make me forgive her so she could hurt me again. So when I think about forgiving bullies today, I fear that if I forgive them, then I'm making myself vulnerable again.  What I do now, (and this is a brand new thing for me), is I meditate and think about all the people I love, then I think about all the people I hate, and I put them together and send them all the same amount of love from my heart. But when I send love to my sister and brother, who both abused me pretty badly and tried to get me to kill myself so they could take my share of an inheritance--which they eventually got anyway, I say to myself, "I love them, but I never want to see them ever again." I'm setting a boundary to protect myself, while allowing myself to forgive them.

I find that when I hate anyone, anywhere, I feel tethered to them. I can't let go of them if I still hate them. I feel darkness in my own body. Poison in my blood. I literally hate feeling hate. The truth, for me, is that they don't know that I'm forgiving them. They don't care. I forgive them so I can let them go and stop letting them exist in my heart and brain rent-free. I feel that poison drain from my body. I'm the only person who knows I've forgiven them. Life is so much brighter for me when I stop hating people who are gone and can't hurt me anymore.

Forgiveness is about myself. I don't judge myself as bad for having been unable to forgive for most of my life. They hurt me and I was using hatred as a way of protecting myself from them. I'm just very glad that right now, I'm feeling less poison in my blood than what nearly killed me in the past.

We really are stronger together, and I really am finding it to be true in practice that connection is a way for me to control my fears and my angers at others.

When I say I live for connection, I now know it's true. I did an inventory recently, looking for what it was that drove me to suicide 4 times from ages 19 to 50, and what I finally was able to discover was that each and every suicide attempt happened while I was feeling abandoned by the people I loved. All four attempts required outside rescue. I was stopped by someone all four times. So when I say "I live for connection" It's a literal statement. Anytime I feel abandoned, I literally lose all desire to live. So no matter what happens in my life, no matter how bad things get, I now know that I can use connection to rise above it.

I love it here on the Island of Misfit Toys. In my novels I wrote "I can endure almost anything in life as long as I have a friend at my side."

I know Love is a trigger word for a lot of us. To me, Love is a synonym for connection. I connect with the lovely souls on this forum, therefore I'm telling the truth when I say I love the people here. I feel connection. That connection is driving my desire to keep healing from CPTSD.

I know too, that CPTSD tends to make us feel different moods at different times. One person on the forum once said that every morning the first thing they do is find out who they're going to be today. So, I'm leaving myself an out if in a few weeks I don't feel as loved as I do today. But, I've noticed that as I improve from my trauma triggers, I have good days and bad, BUT the bad days are no where near as bad as they used to be. The good days last a little longer than they used to.

Today's a good day. I'm loving the feeling of a lack of poison in my blood from past abuse. Who knows how I'll feel the next time someone hurts me? I may have to start all over again on working toward forgiving them.

Forgiveness is NOT easy. It takes time and effort for me. I will steep myself in anger and resentment for a while until I can finally find myself able to put it behind me. No way am I trying to sell forgiveness as an easy thing. And, for me, the abuse is done. My abusers are all gone or passed away, so forgiveness is a bit easier than if they were still abusing me.

NOBODY needs to feel bad for struggling to forgive. It's part of our wiring. We protect ourselves in myriad ways, and forgiveness can feel like vulnerability. And I do NOT like feeling vulnerable.

Putting my focus on the people I feel safe to connect with helps me release my anger at the people who will hurt me if I connect with them. The trick is choosing who to connect with. I used to say, "I don't have to hate alligators to choose not to swim in their swamp. I can stay out of their swamp for safety without having to hate them."

We're stronger together.