Papa Coco's Recovery Journal

[Chart]

 

[sanmagic7]

yes we are, PC, and i'm together with you.  everyone here gives me the strength i need to keep going.  it is a real connection that i've hung onto for over a decade.  so glad i found this place, these people.

i've chosen to hand forgiveness over to some higher power who will take care of it for me.  it does similar for me as you spoke about - lets the poison out.  i've only hated one person, actually felt the hatred, and it was horrid but it also felt natural at the time, organic in a sense that i didn't set out to feel that way, it just came over me.  it's finally left me somehow, but i know it was there for a time and i hope i don't have to feel it again.

i'm glad your day has started out well, you're feeling pretty good.  i hope you have more days like this.  love and hugs

[SenseOrgan]

I'm feeling kind of glad this mess happened to me. FOr me

Yep.    I'm delighting in your post-traumatic joy Papa Coco. This life is horrifically beautiful. 

[Armee]

 

[HannahOne]

PapaCoco so happy for you to hear how you are connecting with other people, even amidst your credit card being skimmed. That connection is the most important thing and you're able to experience it and create it!

[NarcKiddo]

Credit card fraud SUCKS! I'm so sorry you are having to deal with it. 

[TheBigBlue]

 

[Papa Coco]

The support on this forum is, without question, the core of my healing right now. Nobody here shames anybody for struggling to live with what the world calls "normal" behaviors. Nobody ever asks, "Why do you let that bother you so much?" This is a place of healing and safety and that's what's so helpful for me.


That being said, some things have changed since my last post.


The credit card fiasco was a tiny pebble that struck a huge, buried hornets' nest and I'm now being swarmed with 6 decades of angry bees that are making me feel attacked, unsafe and ashamed and alone.

Yesterday was a day of wandering around the house lost. I couldn't find peace. I felt fear all through my body. I was weepy and right on the verge of complete meltdown.  The entire world feels dangerous. I can't protect myself or my family. After a lifetime of feeling chronic anxiety and fear, a hit like this heaps MORE fear on top of already existing fear and has pushed me into a state of debilitating overwhelm. Trauma: The gift that keeps on giving for a lifetime. Phooey!

I keep trying to remind myself of what my therapist would say. He'd say "This feels like a very young part of yourself. Hold your hand over your heart and welcome that young part to you and give him the love and compassion he has been wanting." It helps a bit, but I have a long way to go before it helps completely. Logically, I know that it's my dysregulation of my nervous system, and not that the world is too dangerous to live in. But trauma says, "Nope! The world has never been safe and it's not safe for you, so you NEED to find a safe place to hide!" I did some research on not feeling safe, and read about how since this is the second time this card was stolen in 3 months, my brain is now even more sure I'm never going to be safe. So, I spent the day walking around the house like a zombie trying to figure out how to hide from the world for good. It's important to note that I was raised by people who valued their money more than they valued me, so when my money is stolen, that just brings up all sorts of personal value problems. I was stolen from as a kid too. My family would search my room and throw away my little treasures while I was at school, and Catholic classmates would steal possessions from my desk at school when I was at home. My own elder sister and brother stole my inheritance when Dad died in 2011. I've never felt safe from thieves...MY OWN FAMILY AND THE CHURCH! I've never felt that I am strong enough, or man enough to protect my boundaries, even from my protectors. Money means much less to me than it should. It's not the money; it's the inability to protect myself that rattles my cage. It's knowing that my own family would trample my rights and boundaries anytime they want to. I don't care about the money being stolen, I care that I can't protect myself and my family from thieves AND siblings!

My lack of feeling safe for 6 decades has hit me hard these past 48 hours. Last night I got only a few hours of restless sleep, tormented by nightmares. While trying to fall asleep last night I kept seeing lights flashing through my closed eyelids, as if someone was turning lights on and off in my bedroom, but they weren't. It's more like the wires in my brain are frayed and sparking like a broken electric cord. I woke up at 3 AM from a long, chaotic, frustrating dream that my wife, (Coco) and I were in our home, but all the furniture was gone, and the house was crumbling around us. We were trying to repair walls, windows, doors, but all we had was garbage wood scraps and no tools to work with. An Amazon Prime driver came to the door with a delivery of some little filing cabinet I'd ordered but he never left the porch. Finally we opened the door to find out why he was still here. He said he had been instructed to assemble it for us on the porch before he could leave. We thought he was being nice, but he was angry, "Amazon made me buy this for you and sell it to you for no profit to me" he said. I replied, "That's not right! Stay here!" I went back into the house to find some money to give him as a tip and to thank him for doing it for us. It took me forever. I couldn't find anything. My anxiety was rising and I was getting clumsier and more upset by the minute. I kept dropping everything I picked up. I found a $50 bill but before I could get it to him it tore and crumbled into confetti. I could feel his impatience and hoped he hadn't given up and left. I FINALLY found my wallet and pulled out three $20 bills. When I finally got it to him he was irritated at how long it took me to find the money (that I didn't owe him but I gave it to him anyway). He just yanked it from my hand and stormed off. Even when I gave him a huge tip I was still the bad guy. That was the moment I woke up, my heart pounding. I immediately felt like I am completely unable to support my family and I'm the screwup my parents and school always told me I was. 

It's like a prophecy that they created and I lived. Children can grow up to be what they are told they are going to be. And I was told I'm always going to be a screwup and other people are always going to have to carry my burden because I'm always going to screw it up.  And every time one of my bill collectors contacts me now telling me they'll cancel my services if I don't fix the credit card, I feel that old, ancient prophecy, created by my FOO and church coming to life just as they'd predicted.

So, this is what I mean, the card issue is easily being handled. Nobody's going to throw me in prison for being a week late on bills, but every time someone texts me with a warning, my entire life of shame and incompetence floods all over me.

I've been accused, my whole life, of being a problem for my family to deal with. I was a burden. I was incompetent. I was weak and annoying. Every time they made a mistake it was my fault. My dad's money was more important to him than I was, and he made sure I knew that all the time. Mom did too. My siblings were allowed to want things, get things, even have romances with other people and get married and have children, but somehow, I wasn't allowed to do any of that. In high school I had to date girls in secret so my parents wouldn't freak out. At age 22, when I met Coco, I kept her a secret. One day I told them I was going to get married and they freaked out. (of course they didn't know I was dating anyone, but whose fault was that? What few girls they knew about when I was younger and dating, they pulled all kinds of tricks to break us up. They stole my possessions, my inheritance, and always, ALWAYS destroyed my friendships and love interests. They made it too dangerous for me to even share my wants and desires with them. My family only knew I was dating for one week. When I could sense my mother and my older sister starting to tell me lies about this girl they didn't know, I knew I had to act quick or they'd take her too. To make the long story short, Coco and I dated for 4 weeks, and eloped 28 days after our first date because we knew my family was planning to break us up, so we had to act quick. (That was almost 43 years ago now and we're still married). 

To be honest, the past two or three days, ever since I wrote my last post and all those nice things about how I was handling the theft, have taken a dark turn toward crazy-ville. No matter how good I feel on any given day, I'm wise enough now to always remind myself that today is today. Tomorrow is a mystery. I may feel all better today, but this roller coaster is relentless. RELENTLESS! My EFs are fewer and farther between, but this one came on like a tsunami that nobody saw coming. The only reason I'm not drowning in it, is I've made connections now with others who know that what I'm feeling is real. The trauma. I'm not alone in trauma anymore. I now know that as ugly as it is, it's how I was wired by people who had no idea how to raise a child properly.

A book I'm reading now says that we need to forgive ourselves for the wiring. We aren't as responsible for ourselves as we try to believe we are. At least, I'm not. It described me perfectly when it said I'm like a leaf that's blowing in the wind but thinks I'm dancing of my own free will. That's been a comfort. I absolutely believe in personal responsibility, but I have to stop taking it so far as to think I can muscle through all the terrible things my family and church did to train me for most of my life. I'm behaving as I was trained to behave. I'm taking responsibility for myself by seeking help, admitting my feelings and fears, connecting with the right people, reading the right books...I don't need to behave like nobody's ever hurt me before. I can be responsible without believing I need to be undamaged. I like that old saying that our scars are where the light enters us.

Today, I'm about 8% better than yesterday. I'll take it. I've been learning how to work with my body, giving it some sense of agency so that even in the fear and emotional duress, my body feels comforted by some light breathing exercises, and permission to be unproductive for a few days. The only time I ever feel like I have the right to not be productive is when I have the flu. I need to know that this is worse than the flu and I'm NOT required to do my chores or save the world today. Today is going to be another day of wandering around like a zombie looking for someplace safe to hide, but I'm going to give myself permission to be okay with it. Coco is encouraging it. She knows what I'm going through and she's telling me to just relax and be lazy today.

Okay: My keyboard is smoking. (ha ha) I need to give my computer a rest. Maybe I'll draw a bath and hide in the dark for an hour.

Thanks, from the bottom of my heart for letting me be a part of this community.

[Chart]

A book I'm reading now says that we need to forgive ourselves for the wiring. We aren't as responsible for ourselves as we try to believe we are. At least, I'm not. It described me perfectly when it said I'm like a leaf that's blowing in the wind but thinks I'm dancing of my own free will. That's been a comfort. I absolutely believe in personal responsibility, but I have to stop taking it so far as to think I can muscle through all the terrible things my family and church did to train me for most of my life. I'm behaving as I was trained to behave. I'm taking responsibility for myself by seeking help, admitting my feelings and fears, connecting with the right people, reading the right books...I don't need to behave like nobody's ever hurt me before. I can be responsible without believing I need to be undamaged. I like that old saying that our scars are where the light enters us.

PapaCoco,
I'm so very sorry for your current state. I want to absolutely support and validate what you wrote. It cannot be said enough, cannot be repeated enough: We are not at fault for feeling terrified and triggered at events and situations we know all too well. This pattern was pounded into us when we were in development, construction, neuronal creating, processing and pruning... it is as if during the construction of the house, an evil clown passes every night and switches wires around, changes the plumbing, inverts doors, pulls out insulation, unscrews the drywall, saws through the beams, and tears off parts of the heating system... Day after day, and for years after, we keep finding things that break, don't work, explode suddenly... it just goes on for years. We got sold a lemon... a lemon of a nervous system and limbic brain... Visitors to the house, like our prefrontal cortex see very little, but we know, when the lights go out at night, and things start going wonky, we know, that f*ing clown was one sadistic sob...

I got an email from a narcissist yesterday. They demanded to know what I meant by "X". I read the email and felt the clench in my stomach, the twist in my gut, the shame-jolt through my heart. I reread the email, then reread what I had originally written... I never wrote "X"... For a good fifteen minutes, my brain did a somersault... I "tried" to figure it out...I tried again. I got scared. I felt their anger towards me. I began responding, writing, thinking of a way to explain to them that they got it wrong, that it made no sense, that they'd made a mistake. I began explaining the mistake, searching to express how I could be understood. Then I stopped. I realized I could not do anything. The feeling I felt inside was horrible. This sick person had just jabbed a pen into my wound of 57 years. Bloody heck... I deleted my email... I shut my computer... I walked away... But the feeling of "wrong" and "responsible" and "you're in trouble" stayed right with me... I still feel it now.

That "thing" is punched into my nervous system like a cannonball punches into the side of a ship...

PapaCoco, YOUR family was a forty-gun ship of the line, and they had but one target... But lord almighty, you are one tough son-of-a-gun... You're still afloat! How many broadsides did you take? That beautiful little innocent trusting boy, looking around, wondering... they tried to kill you, but you're still here, standing, weeping perhaps, but tears more justified I have rarely seen. I say, "Go ahead, slink around your house feeling however you want to feel. Hide, cry, rage, suffer... none of that comes from you, even if it's as deep as it goes... it's still not the "real you". The real you is on either side, before the torture began, and now that the torture is long done. That is the real you. And you know this is going to pass faster then in the past, faster than it ever has, because you have done the work, pushed forward, opened to the love. You're firing salvos yourself now, but they are bombs of love that explode like fireworks in that dark night sky. And by their light, we see a thousand other little ships out there alongside you, floating on the soft swell, all your friends who know and love you. We're watching your magic, PapaCoco, it's so beautiful. Thank you, thank you for letting us be part of YOU...

[Blueberry]

  to you PapaCoco. You made it! You married Coco! Your FOO didn't win that one.

[TheBigBlue]

PapaCoco, I'm really glad you're here and that you shared this. I want you to know how much care, thoughtfulness, and heart come through in your words. Even in the middle of something this painful, you're showing so much awareness and compassion toward yourself - that matters more than you probably realize. You're allowing yourself rest, letting Coco support you, and giving your body permission to slow down without shame. That is not giving up, that is learning a new kind of safety. The way you are noticing even small shifts, like being 8% better than yesterday, that's huge when you face tsunami waves.

You matter, PapaCoco, far more than the world ever reflected back to that little boy who had to survive so much. What you went through wasn't fair, and it never should have been yours to carry alone. And yet, here you are, with a 43-year partnership built on love and loyalty, with a depth of kindness and insight that didn't come from nowhere. That says something real about who you are.

You're not alone. It's okay to take this day exactly as it is: to rest, to be unproductive, to hide in the dark for a while, to breathe. We're really glad you're part of this community, and we're holding you with a lot of warmth and care.
 

[sanmagic7]

PC, i was so moved by all you talked about.  i know about things being taken from me when i was young - they were disappeared and i had to make up fairy stories to explain it to myself because not to do so  . . . well, my little mind could not fathom or cope w/ such a reality. 

yeah, using illness as an excuse to be non-productive, as if we need one.  we have all the excuse we ever need, no, not excuse, reason, we have a verifiable reason to take time for ourselves, read, play on the computer, read, watch tv, whatever it is that helps calm and soothe those frayed and fragile nerves.  they were ravished in the worst way, and thank the stars you have been able to now know that.

this isn't on you, never was, never will be.  the people who did this are the ones who deserve the shame, blame, guilt, all the bad gunk we carry ourselves on their behalf.  what you deserve is peace, comfort, love, and caring, all the things you didn't get but have always deserved.  i have no doubt that 8% is a testament to you taking care of you the way you've always needed, and w/o an excuse.  it's just because that's what is best and healthiest for you.  standing by you thru it all.  love and hugs

[Papa Coco]

How can I express the inimitable feeling of safety that comes through you all on this forum? I can't express it, but I can hope that I'm as helpful to you as you are to me, because...wow. This is truly what I've been looking for my whole life. People who will love me no matter what.

I had a powerful experience this morning that I want to archive in my journal here:

At 1 AM, I woke up again this morning, sweating and hyperventilating with heart racing, from a dream that I'm an adult, and my mother was staying with me for some reason. (She'd be 95 years old if she were still alive, but in the dream, she was the same age she was when I was a teenager), and I was who I am now. Coco wasn't home, it was just Mom and I. And I was upstairs and had, for some reason, printed a journal entry and forgotten to take it off the printer. I ran downstairs hoping to grab it before she did, but she was holding it and was ready to confront me. (*NOTE: I once wrote a short fiction story of a romance in my private journal and hid it in my bedroom. The story had some evidence in it that I was not a happy teen. One day I came home from school and she'd searched my room, found it, read it, and confronted me before I could even take my coat off. She was crying and FURIOUS with me and I had to lie my way out of it. This dream brought all that back up). In the dream, all my secrets were out. As I sat down next to her, feeling like "Well this is it. This is where it all comes out" and I started to say, "Well, Mom. I'm sor--" and I woke up. Sweating. Heart racing. Fear and shame were beating me up with a bat from inside my head and chest. In the past, I used to go drink myself back to sleep. Then about the same time I'd quit drinking, my city had just made cannabis legal, so up until last week, I'd have used cannabis to put myself back to sleep.

But not last night.

I want to suffer with it now. The way addicts go through the DTs, I want to shiver and shake and sweat and pound on the walls and cry and laugh hysterically and clear this lifelong feeling of danger once and for all. Or at least find good, healthy, solid ways to deal with it without medications.

Instead of pot, I grabbed the cellphone and went downstairs to the dark living room to watch TV, but instead, I opened up ChatGPT and told it what had happened. (I just downloaded the app two days ago. I'm new to it and am utterly dumbfounded at how helpful it is) I spent the next 2 hours chatting with it, taking its trauma-informed suggestions for how to understand why I'm in this funk now, why I've always been in it, and how to calm down--if possible. (All of my past suicide spirals began with me feeling how I feel now. So when I feel like I'm feeling, I know it's time to react with urgency). The app is mind-bogglingly helpful. I have never had such good, clean therapy. It led me to a suggestion for how to calm my body by using a few tricks to show the body that the danger I'm feeling is not present right now. The app kept telling me not to try and fix the problem, not to feel any shame, but to help the body feel powerful, regulated and safe. It really, really worked. And when any of the suggestions didn't help, or I started panicking again, I told it so, and it showed me how okay that was, and gave me suggestions for to deal with that. It would say things like, "That's understandable. Your body is checking to see if we really are safe, so we just need to show it we are."

During every so many back-and-forths, it would do a sort of a process check and show me where I was at in my panic cycle: For example, after 90 minutes of me following its guidance (Which is very simple; things like "take 2 breaths only. NO MORE. Make sure the outbreath takes twice as long as the inbreath because that's what the body does naturally whenever danger is finished. Sit with feet planted firmly onto the floor, leaning forward, not back, because leaning forward is how people protect themselves, while leaning back is vulnerable. The body needs to feel like it can protect itself for it to calm down--then come back and tell me if it helped), it gave me this update on all we'd talked about so far:

----
From ChatGPT this morning:

You should know this

You just went through:
- Panic
- Dissociation
- Fear rebound
- Regulation
- Parasympathetic Release

That's real nervous system healing, not imagination

It doesn't mean everything is fixed. But it does mean your body is capable of settling when supported.

----

The app learns about me as I work with it. Yesterday I'd told it that I have a life history of feeling unsafe 24x7x365, and that my credit card was stolen twice in three months. It is telling me that my safety is understandably in fear mode. It called what I went through last night a sort of a predictable fear cycle that was ignited by the card theft. It recognized that the card theft was piled on top of the lifelong trauma stress and helped me feel less ashamed of how I'm reacting. It guided me, step by step, very gently and politely, through all the steps of the cycle.

When I first downloaded the app, it said to "ask it a question" but I didn't. I made a statement. The first words I ever typed into it were, "I feel unsafe always and everywhere". It began the therapy with me by asking what was going on. It asked if this was lifelong or after a single incident and when I responded with "both" it became my best therapist ever so far.

I'm not trying to sell this app to anyone, but I'm reporting that I was able to go back to bed at about 4 am and sleep, a bit restlessly, until about 9:30 am. I didn't have to use any medications, but giving my body a chance to feel regulated really helped me calm down. I'm still in an EF, but my body is also feeling a sense that it at least has the ability to calm down when I need it to.

I don't support CBT as a main therapy but doing these physical things to at least calm the body while the brain feels unsafe, helped to at least regulate my nerves enough to get some rest and to make some clear and sober decisions today for how to stave off the bill collectors until I can get my finances cleaned up again.

----

I might one day look back and see that these robberies I've gone through these last few months were some of the most helpful things ever to happen to me, because they are showing me how deep my feeling of being in danger really goes. I've been working from the other end of this for too long. I've been trying to create peace in my life through meditation and prayer, which is very helpful, but in some ways, I'm painting over the rust only to watch it come back into view the next time someone steels a package off my porch, or skims a credit card, or tricks me into making a bad purchase, or accuses me of something I'm innocent of (Which is what my FOO did ad-nauseum. If they were to read what you people say about me, they'd scoff and call you stupid for trusting me). I am still very fond of prayer and meditation (I'm not religious, but I do believe we are all connected, and prayer is how we share some positive energy in the lives of our struggling friends who we are connected with in some sort of an ethereal world that seems to exist alongside our physical lives), but I realize I ALSO have to spend some time now scraping the rust out or the problems will just resurface again.

No matter what I believe; right, wrong or indifferent, I do know that I love the connection I have with you all. Of that I'm absolutely certain.

 

[NarcKiddo]

I'm really glad you were able to find help and regulate enough to get some rest.