I'm so glad I found this place!

[prismgems]

Hi, I'm new here and so happy to have wandered onto this site. I don't even know what to say here or even if I can. But if ever there was a definition of CPTSD, it has my name and picture on it! I joke about writing my autobiography but I would hate to put Stephen King out of business. At the tender age of seven or eight I was trying to figure out how to kill myself to end the pain and this many years later I still think about it once in awhile. My mom, bless her in heaven, was a single mom of two when my brother and I were born in the early fifties. She worked so hard to keep a roof over our heads and food in our tummies. One of my earliest memories, about four years old, was my brother dropping a claw hammer off of a neighbor's roof onto the head of the five or six year old who lived there. Then it got bad. He is sociopathic, sick, and twisted and would gladly let you experience it up close and personal. He is two years older than me and to make a short story long, I married a man who beat, choked, put guns to my head and knives to my throat, and I thought he was an upgrade! At least he would say he was sorry after. I married him at seventeen to make sure I was out of the house when my brother returned from Vietnam...he liked it so much he went back for seconds. See, they gave him the big artillery guns so he could kill whole villages at once instead of having to take the time to kill them individually. So fourteen years of being married to an abuser was not too hard to deal with. Perspective. He was mad because I took a job that paid well enough to pay the bills and feed the three kids so at 2am I heard the slide pull back on the 9mm. I didn't know if he was going to shoot me and the kids then kill himself or just kill me. My brain had had enough and I went non-responsive. Three days later we were divorced. Married again. Sweet, gentle man who was covertly passive aggressive. Seventeen years of that later I was still ahead of the first two men in my life. I kept my two exes as friends...really! They both had been through horrors during childhood and there was that bond and kids to raise also. Then hubby two died of cancer. I held him as he died. Then son number one had a seizure and a heart attack and died two years after hubby two. Two weeks later my mother in law passed. Hubby one (the father of my children) followed our son eleven months later. The last words I told him were "I love you". It doesn't stop there. Several dear friends have died as well as my blessed mother and two weeks later, my father in law. As if that all wasn't enough, just before my son died, my thyroid completely quit, followed by the rest of my endocrine system. So I am now diabetic and my adrenals don't work. I gained a hundred pounds in a few years (never having had a weight problem before). The physical abuse as a child caused the discs in my back to degenerate as are my joints from being damaged by my brother. I have had pulmonary embolisms twice now and I'm pretty much house bound. Not that I have left the house much in ten years, I have become a recluse. I really thought I had dealt with the horrific things my brother did but now I know I am so messed up I have no idea where to start. And...now you know just a fraction of it all. Do I get a prize for the longest introduction ever?

[wednesday]

hello Prism, glad you found this place too! Welcome!

[arpy1]

welcome from me too, prismgems. life sounds so tough for you right now; glad you're here, and i hope you find some help and support among us.