Fear of Healing

[Autodidact]

Has anyone else experienced a...fear of getting better? Like everything good in your life is balanced on your current mechanisms and if you heal you'll lose the things you love the most?

It also bears mentioning that I'm at the beginning of my healing journey but also in a wonderful relationship with a safe, stable, securely attached person and they've been an incredible support to me. Can people share if they've been able to heal in the setting of a long term relationship? He's also been through his own CPTSD journey and is very aware of the processes going on with me. Honestly, I don't think I would have made it this far without him.

Thanks!
Auto

[woodsgnome]

Greetings, Autodidact  -- love your name choice, and its reference to our self-learning capabilities.

While on the surface fearing to heal can seem counterintuitive, it makes sense in some ways. For instance, we're so conditioned by our deep hurts, it's hard to ever fathom healing in the first place. Then, when it seems like it could happen, it's like a familiar trait we'd gotten used to was yanked out, leaving a gap. Talk about starting over! In that sense, it's like any change -- mighty scary at times.

Then, too, it might feel too good to be true, and of course that same conditioning of how bad we are becomes tricky to navigate -- is this the real me? Do I deserve this? Sounds so simple, and the main desire of actually reaching what seemed so unreal and yet those reactions can also enter into the mising gap in consciousness. It can actually seem risky to enter the new territory.

Maybe, though, the fears are covering up the real hope -- yet the risk and anxiety pops up as a caution, causing one to be careful for what so long had been regarded as an impossible leap. Perhaps it is, and it could be radically different than anything one had ever expected well-being to feel like.

Rambling here, eh? I think, in the end, it speaks mostly to a willingness to be surprised that things can also take a turn for the good. At last there's daylight. It still takes discernment, though -- but still, a realization sets in that it might be real, even if radically different from what we'd envisioned. Scary, sure; but so worth the journey.

I'm still cautious, as it can also seem repetitive -- hopes up, back, neutral; hoping the taste of freedom wasn't just a fantasy. But for such good changes -- again, worth knowing that the storms may indeed have begun clearing enough to sense a new direction; beckoning us on towards deserved, even amazing, discoveries -- not really recovery, but far better than one's hopes had ever allowed, even in the most fantastic dreams.

[Papa Coco]

Hi Auto

For someone who is just beginning the healing journey, I think you're asking all the right questions. Leveraging the experience of the other members of the forum is also a great way to get some momentum on your new journey.

You've asked two big questions that actually have complicated, long answers. I'm already guilty of writing too long of posts, so I'm going to make two posts, one for each question, and I'm going to try to not write too much.


----

To your question: Has anyone else experienced...a fear of getting better?

Answer: Absolutely. And the reasons for that are many and complex due to the fact that I am the culmination of the equation: My genetics + My unhealthy childhood rearing  + My vast volumes of life's experiences = Who I am today.

Who am I? I'm a guy who is healing from lifelong sadness, doormat behaviors, and a laundry list of other self-protective behaviors. My early life decisions to internalize my pain, rather than turn it against the next victim and continue the cycle of abuse is a decision I'm still happy with today. I'd rather be a nail than a hammer. Nails are good. They hold houses together. Hammers are aggressive and violent. I don't want to be a hammer. I may not be enjoying myself much by being put in my place by the hammers of the world, but...it's who I am now and who I've always been. My ego has established itself as who I am RIGHT now. Good, bad, beautiful and ugly. It's who I am whether I like it or not. Everything I do is from this place of trauma and trauma responses. It's who I am. People love me for who I am: a peaceful, compassionate Fawn Type (as described in Pete Walker's book, Complex-PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving).

And now I'm threatening my ego by trying to change who I am? NOT so fast, says the ego.

Fundamentally changing my ego's sense of self is a hurdle I'm not good at clearing as I run the track of healing. I'm like the guy who wants to skydive but is afraid of heights. I WANT to get better, but I'm scared of losing myself in the process.

I'm still connected to my sad little boy. He lives inside me, still feeling lost and alone. As a result, he causes a lot of my CPTSD behaviors. I love him. If I get better, will he die?

Also, the quirks and problems I have today: Sadness, loneliness, isolation, dissociation, being a doormat, being a nail rather than a hammer, and more, are good, functioning protections that I built out of my smart little brain as a small child when my permanent personality was forming from scratch. ALL those defenses, as uncomfortable as they are, worked. I'm still alive. They were put in place by my brain to keep me safe—and they've done so. The very idea of giving those safeties up is terrifying.

Lastly:  And this is a big one for me: My childhood traumatized me so badly that I couldn't even talk about it until I'd been in therapy for a few years. The things that damaged my hippocampus gland and gave me PTSD are things that traumatized me fast and hard. Now I'm on a slow, easy journey to reverse that damage, and if I do it too fast, I'm terrified that I'll just retraumatize myself. It's like....it takes one second to destroy a car's door by hitting it with another car. (a trauma to the car).  If a body mechanic tried to pull the dent out as fast as it went in, he'd pull the door right off its hinges and cause worse damage.

We pull the dents out slowly. Evenly. Carefully. I believe that, for me, healing from emotional trauma works the same way. My fear of healing too quickly is a good fear right now. It keeps me from going too fast. I have been uncovering memories of sexual abuse for years. The abuse took minutes. The healing takes decades. My brain is giving me a gift by leaking the information out slowly, and giving me a healthy fear to keep me from demanding my therapist put me into a trance and DRAG the memories out of me so I can be done with it. If the trauma caused THIS much damage when it happened, how much more damage will it cause if I go through it again today? My brain keeps me from pulling too hard by giving me a healthy fear of healing too fast and retraumatizing myself all over again.

Summary statement: I've spent my life hating bullies. My ego thinks that if I stop being a victim, I'll become a bully. So, here I am. I want to heal, but I'm too afraid to.

To keep my posts as short as I am able to, I'll start a new post with my response to your second question: Can people share if they've been able to heal in the setting of a long term relationship?

[Papa Coco]

Hi Auto,

This post is dedicated to my response to your question: Can people share if they've been able to heal in the setting of a long term relationship?

I think this is a great question because I also believe that CPTSD is very, very hard on some relationships. Why do some survive while others don't? Well...I can't speak for other relationships, but I am happy to share how my long-term relationship has thrived despite my plethora of irrational fears.


---


I'm in a long-term relationship with the love of my life. My wife, Gramma Coco, and I will celebrate our 40th anniversary next April. We married when she was 19 and I was 22.

We'd only known each other for 4 weeks on the day we married, so we really didn't know each other well, and SURPRISE! My trauma disorders really flared up fast in our first decade of marriage. It was the 80s. Any help I sought failed. Most therapists were bad back then. Nobody understood Trauma, and the term PTSD hadn't even been coined yet. So my young bride and I were alone with my trauma disorders. This was very hard on both of us. It did put a bit of stress on our relationship.

But she stuck by me. We approached MY problems as a team. We endured those first confusing years because my wife is just the perfect partner for me. She loved me so much, that she became determined to learn what she could about my history with sexual abuse and religious abuse.  When I was 29 and she was 26, she answered an ad to volunteer as a Sexual Assault Victim's Advocate through our county's Sexual Assault Victim's Advocacy Center. This is a critical reason why our relationship helps me: where another spouse may have thrown up her arms and said, "I didn't sign up for this!" She, instead, answered the ad because she wanted to learn more about ME through immersion with other victims. Not long after, I took the 8-week training and joined up alongside her.  For a few years, she and I handled the 24-hour Crisis Hotline together, answered calls to go to hospitals, police stations and courtrooms to advocate for victims of rape, or any other Sexual Assault.

Those years where we, together, stayed immersed in the world of SA victims really drew us together by helping us both learn more about the lives of people like me, who were victims of rape and sexual assault. I credit our work as a team on that project for being what it took in the 1980s to learn how to understand the pains of what I'd been through.

She is light on the Autism Spectrum, which has made her into a stable person who is the same person every day. She's 100% honest, even when it hurts. Her intelligence is a bit higher than most peoples', but her social skills are a bit challenged. Not much, just enough to notice. She counts on me to keep our social life alive, and I count on her to love me, even when I go to bed and stay there for a week. When she was working with clients at the SAVAC, she was amazing. Unwavering. She remembered everything that had been taught to her in the training. Her clients were lucky to have been able to snag her, and many of them stayed friends with us for years after we left the program. What she learned through them, has given her intel on how to handle me.

That supportiveness, plus her belief that I'm "worth the effort" has made her into the perfect partner to be with as I struggle for days, weeks, months, years, and decades, with my irrational trauma responses to everything in life.

I know she doesn't really understand what it feels like to be me, but she respects it and stands behind anything I do to try and heal. I spend THOUSANDs of dollars a year on Ketamine treatments, talk therapy, and my own quirks of overprotecting her, my kids, myself and everything we own. I've been attacked by so many different people that I spend thousands on cameras, alarms, locks, and all sorts of tricks to keep my family and our possessions safe from thieves and catastrophic events. She may not agree with everything I do, but she knows how hard I'm trying to become a better person and she loves me for it.

Also, between her and I, we have more problems than just my CPTSD. Coco struggles with life threatening disorders that require her to diligently manage her health every second of every day. I take as good care of her as she does me. I attend all her doctor appointments; I research with her on emerging treatments for her Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and Renaud's. She's fragile physically and I'm fragile emotionally. We balance each other out, and we mutually support each other. EVEN THOUGH neither of us fully understands the other, we fully respect each other's struggles.

Finally: I respect her fears over my problems. I've made 4 suicide attempts from age 19 to 50. How scary is that for my wife and children and grandchildren? I may be traumatized but I'm not selfish. I OWE my family to do everything I can to keep myself from self-harm. I tell them this openly. I know that if I don't keep pursuing healing that I won't survive. And I can't do that to them. So, as a courtesy to them, I intentionally take care of myself. That kind of sentiment goes a LONG way in a relationship.  I'm the one who brought trauma disorders into this family, and I'm as responsible as they are to keep me safe from those disorders.  A lot of what I do to protect myself is really to protect them. And they know it. We've fostered a family that supports one another. That's what I believe is keeping us together through this exhausting journey through a life of being afraid of everything that moves.

So that's my sharing of how my long-term relationship has been instrumental in my healing. (Without Coco I probably would be dead today). Also, this is how our relationship itself survives and thrives while we live with my C-PTSD.

I hope this was helpful in any small way.

[jamesG.1]

Yes... well for me yes.

Moving on means letting go, but letting go leaves huge unfinished business. Part of me wants justice so badly it keeps me rooted in the past and the people who put me here keep on wounding me.

There will be no public reckoning. Justice will not be seen to be, and I have to heal invisibly from the community I want to sitness my journey. I learn this again and again but it fails to go deep enough.

Closure ends TV dramas, but it rarely happens in reality.

[Autodidact]

Thank you all for taking the time to read and your sweet answers! I can't tell you enough how much this community has already been a wonderful resource and a great place for feeling a sense of community. I'm currently slogging through the mess and fallout but at least it seems like there are lights along the way to tell me others have been here, and that I'm on a path that heads in some approximation of the right direction.

<3
Auto

[Autodidact]

Hi Auto,

This post is dedicated to my response to your question: Can people share if they've been able to heal in the setting of a long term relationship?

I think this is a great question because I also believe that CPTSD is very, very hard on some relationships. Why do some survive while others don't? Well...I can't speak for other relationships, but I am happy to share how my long-term relationship has thrived despite my plethora of irrational fears.


---


I'm in a long-term relationship with the love of my life. My wife, Gramma Coco, and I will celebrate our 40th anniversary next April. We married when she was 19 and I was 22.

We'd only known each other for 4 weeks on the day we married, so we really didn't know each other well, and SURPRISE! My trauma disorders really flared up fast in our first decade of marriage. It was the 80s. Any help I sought failed. Most therapists were bad back then. Nobody understood Trauma, and the term PTSD hadn't even been coined yet. So my young bride and I were alone with my trauma disorders. This was very hard on both of us. It did put a bit of stress on our relationship.

But she stuck by me. We approached MY problems as a team. We endured those first confusing years because my wife is just the perfect partner for me. She loved me so much, that she became determined to learn what she could about my history with sexual abuse and religious abuse.  When I was 29 and she was 26, she answered an ad to volunteer as a Sexual Assault Victim's Advocate through our county's Sexual Assault Victim's Advocacy Center. This is a critical reason why our relationship helps me: where another spouse may have thrown up her arms and said, "I didn't sign up for this!" She, instead, answered the ad because she wanted to learn more about ME through immersion with other victims. Not long after, I took the 8-week training and joined up alongside her.  For a few years, she and I handled the 24-hour Crisis Hotline together, answered calls to go to hospitals, police stations and courtrooms to advocate for victims of rape, or any other Sexual Assault.

Those years where we, together, stayed immersed in the world of SA victims really drew us together by helping us both learn more about the lives of people like me, who were victims of rape and sexual assault. I credit our work as a team on that project for being what it took in the 1980s to learn how to understand the pains of what I'd been through.

She is light on the Autism Spectrum, which has made her into a stable person who is the same person every day. She's 100% honest, even when it hurts. Her intelligence is a bit higher than most peoples', but her social skills are a bit challenged. Not much, just enough to notice. She counts on me to keep our social life alive, and I count on her to love me, even when I go to bed and stay there for a week. When she was working with clients at the SAVAC, she was amazing. Unwavering. She remembered everything that had been taught to her in the training. Her clients were lucky to have been able to snag her, and many of them stayed friends with us for years after we left the program. What she learned through them, has given her intel on how to handle me.

That supportiveness, plus her belief that I'm "worth the effort" has made her into the perfect partner to be with as I struggle for days, weeks, months, years, and decades, with my irrational trauma responses to everything in life.

I know she doesn't really understand what it feels like to be me, but she respects it and stands behind anything I do to try and heal. I spend THOUSANDs of dollars a year on Ketamine treatments, talk therapy, and my own quirks of overprotecting her, my kids, myself and everything we own. I've been attacked by so many different people that I spend thousands on cameras, alarms, locks, and all sorts of tricks to keep my family and our possessions safe from thieves and catastrophic events. She may not agree with everything I do, but she knows how hard I'm trying to become a better person and she loves me for it.

Also, between her and I, we have more problems than just my CPTSD. Coco struggles with life threatening disorders that require her to diligently manage her health every second of every day. I take as good care of her as she does me. I attend all her doctor appointments; I research with her on emerging treatments for her Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and Renaud's. She's fragile physically and I'm fragile emotionally. We balance each other out, and we mutually support each other. EVEN THOUGH neither of us fully understands the other, we fully respect each other's struggles.

Finally: I respect her fears over my problems. I've made 4 suicide attempts from age 19 to 50. How scary is that for my wife and children and grandchildren? I may be traumatized but I'm not selfish. I OWE my family to do everything I can to keep myself from self-harm. I tell them this openly. I know that if I don't keep pursuing healing that I won't survive. And I can't do that to them. So, as a courtesy to them, I intentionally take care of myself. That kind of sentiment goes a LONG way in a relationship.  I'm the one who brought trauma disorders into this family, and I'm as responsible as they are to keep me safe from those disorders.  A lot of what I do to protect myself is really to protect them. And they know it. We've fostered a family that supports one another. That's what I believe is keeping us together through this exhausting journey through a life of being afraid of everything that moves.

So that's my sharing of how my long-term relationship has been instrumental in my healing. (Without Coco I probably would be dead today). Also, this is how our relationship itself survives and thrives while we live with my C-PTSD.

I hope this was helpful in any small way.

Coco! Thank you so much for your considerate, thoughtful answers - you have no idea how much this helped me. The relationship you describe sounds wonderful, and I'm so glad that you have your wife. She truly sounds like a lifesaver. Like your marriage, my relationship has been kind of instrumental in figuring out a lot of what's going on with me. We both come from rough backgrounds full of similar authority figures who left both of us with pretty profound CPTSD - he actually had his breakthrough before meeting me. It resulted in the end of his previous marriage, but also was a very unexpected process and pretty harrowing for him. Alternatively, I grew up with two therapists for parents...which gave me a lot of context for things that might be happening to me...but who used therapeutic concepts to abuse me. I was their designated patient, the problem to solve (by any means necessary).

Through our relationship I've gotten more and more comfortable sitting in...discomfort with intimacy, communicating when I feared that communication would mean that he would see my discomfort as disconnection and leave me, and gaining an understanding of what might be landmarks on my path to recovery rather than horrible internal hurdles that will never be overcome.

I'm going through a pretty tough recovery right now. We're poly and while this current long term partner is wonderful, the person I just came out of a relationship with (consensual non-monogamywise) mapped a *lot* like my uNPD father and had a brutal lovebombing/devaluation/discard process. My partner has been amazing at holding me through the tears and the realizations and the panic attacks, and being a rock for me - but also assuring me that I'm not a burden, that he is here because he chooses to be here, and he wants to walk through this with me because I'm worth it.

I'm just trying to do my part to not self sabotage, not pull away, not fall into fearful avoidant patterns and isolate.

Because ultimately, this is the human I want. He's amazing. I'm so lucky to have him, and I would be devastated if my trauma were a reason I couldn't have this amazing thing.

That's all to say - thank you, yes. I know exactly what you mean, and 'is this good for me' helped tremendously as a litmus for what I asked.

(PS: Funnily enough, I actually call my partner 'Papa' so even your handle made me smile (I know, with an uNPD dad I try not to squint at that particular piece of Freudian...is it subtext if it's just 'text'? - but thankfully he's lovely).

<3
Auto

[Blueberry]

Can people share if they've been able to heal in the setting of a long term relationship? He's also been through his own CPTSD journey and is very aware of the processes going on with me. Honestly, I don't think I would have made it this far without him.

I'll start here, it's easier. The answer is: Yes, of course. There are other mbrs on here posting from a healthy long-term relationship. You'll find many similarities among mbrs on this forum but as I like to say: we don't all need to have all symptoms! One symptom undoubtedly being problems in intimate relationships - this is one of mine but it doesn't need to be yours.

Has anyone else experienced a...fear of getting better?

Yes. But possibly not for the same reasons as you.

Mine has been fear of getting better means fear of having to drop my less than healthy behaviours, e.g. if I was emotionally healthier I wouldn't have an excuse to eat sweet food, though I do know that when I'm feeling more balanced I don't want all that sweet food nor do I want to hang around in bed or do seemingly nothing or any other less than healthy behaviours that I partake in.

[DD]

I recognise the fear of healing. It is as if I fear that if I let go of my pain, who am I anymore. But more and more I am beginning to see that healing is not about that. It is not about forgetting or ignoring my hurts. And healing does not make them go away. Maybe healing, for me, is learning to live with them better. Of accepting that they are there. Of me not punishing myself so much. Or hurting myself to cope. It is accepting myself as someone who has CPTSD and who will never have a healthy childhood or first marriage. I developed as I developed and nothing can change that. I will never have an optimal environment for development. My healing does not take any of this away. However, my healing means I am easier on myself. That I like myself more. That I keep myself away from harmful people.

As for healing in a relationship, I really hope so. I am starting one with someone whom I care deeply for who focuses on my taking better care of myself. And cooking for me. and walking my dog. And making me laugh and takes me out of my head when I forget that I no longer live in the past.

[Kizzie]

Maybe healing, for me, is learning to live with them better. Of accepting that they are there. Of me not punishing myself so much. Or hurting myself to cope. It is accepting myself as someone who has CPTSD and who will never have a healthy childhood or first marriage. I developed as I developed and nothing can change that. I will never have an optimal environment for development. My healing does not take any of this away. However, my healing means I am easier on myself. That I like myself more. That I keep myself away from harmful people.

Well said DD     Your post reiterated for me that coming here is a big step to learning to accept our past, that we have CPTSD we need to manage (like diabetes for example),  and of finding a group of people for ourselves who are not harmful, but are supportive and understanding and with whom we can learn to like ourselves.   

[storyworld]

I can relate to this. I had a similar conversation with my therapist not terribly long ago as I was afraid if I healed, I'd lose my drive, which was birthed out of a need to survive. I think I realize much of my current drive is maladaptive (and obsessive), but it has also gotten me where I am and has informed who I think I am. I think for me, I will need to discover a less compulsively driven person, and come to like and respect that person in order to feel more comfortable with releasing certain other less healthy (but productive!) traits.

[Sprinkles]

Hi Auto, I can't say that I have been or currently afraid to heal. I can relate to being in a healthy relationship and have support on my journey of healing,

It'll be 16 years. It's the only safe and stable relationship I ever had. I think it works because he has symptoms of CPTSD. We understand  and respect each other. No derogatory language or harmful actions toward each other.

I believe healing allows for more joy and happiness to fill the space that the pain and other hurtful emotions were taking up.