Hey everyone!

[CrackedIce]

Glad to be able to join the community here!  Almost 40-year-old male in Canada.  I've been on a therapy journey since January of 2022, which started when my wife pushed me into talking to someone about my inability to handle conflict or confrontation - it had been coming up a lot in our relationship, and I had been feeling disconnected, unable to really enjoy myself around my kids or wife, and mostly just going through the motions.

My therapist had started helping me dig into my past where I had some issues with abuse from my stepfather and neglect from my mother that I had mostly trained myself to ignore ever since I left home, but were clearly affecting me in ways I wasn't acknowledging.  We did some internal family systems work, and I eventually went through a bunch of books, landing on Pete Walker's C-PTSD book which really resonated with me.  As I'm sure you're all aware, one of the recommendations from that book is to find a group therapy/community you can work with.  I had reached out to a few local groups but no one seemed to be meeting regularly (if at all), eventually found the /r/cptsd subreddit, and then found the link to this site from there.

If I were to describe the ways I'm affected and stuff I'm trying to work on, it would include an ever-present fawn response, where I basically give up myself and my needs to ensure that there's nothing wrong for anyone else so that no one can get upset with me.  While this makes me a great employee and a good-enough father and husband, it generally leaves me feeling drained and unfulfilled, and makes it near impossible to engage with my loved ones in a meaningful fashion.  I've got brief moments every now and then where I feel truly present, but they're pretty rare and almost exclusively when I'm so exhausted that I have no choice but to surrender my fawn response.  If/when my fawn response doesn't work and someone (generally my wife) gets upset with me, my fallback is freezing so that I'm basically mute until I can physically escape the conflict (and often for a few hours after that).

My therapist has asked me a few times to identify my needs, and I draw a blank every time.  I've been so used to serving others to avoid conflict and tending to my own minimalistic needs that it's near impossible for me to conceptualize that it's healthy for people to need things from other people.

Anyways, I'm grateful to have a chance to join the group here.  I've been lurking a bit waiting for my account to be verified, and I really like the concept of a recovery journal (as well as the support you're all giving each other - it's great!) so I might start there... if anyone else has any tips don't hesitate to let me know!

[Armee]

Hi, and welcome. It's a bit of a slow process to get the fawning under control and to learn what you need for yourself but it sounds like you are with a good therapist who can help guide that. I was in that same space when I started therapy too. I remember T asking me what I hoped to get out of therapy or what I wanted to change and I'd just sit there frozen and speechless.

We started on small things and I remember being embarrassed about that...like knowing there's this huge avalanche of issues just out of awareness but we were working on me saying how I feel about every day things or getting me to stop and sit instead of doing more around the house when I started to feel like I had to do more. Like literally it was just stop and sit on the kitchen floor when I had an urge to clean or make breakfast for my family. I had no idea why we were doing that when under it all I felt I wasn't doing enough and wasn't good enough. It was the right start though.

So start small and slow. You'll get to the big stuff.

[CrackedIce]

Thanks for the advice Armee!  Baby steps seem to be the order of the day... it's kind of hard focusing on the small stuff after reading some of these books and having your overall big-picture condition so succinctly narrated, but my therapist is good at giving me small, concrete things to work on every two weeks.

[paul72]

Welcome to the forum CrackedIce
Thank you for sharing... I hope you find lots of support here It really is wonderful to connect.

[Blueberry]

Welcome the forum CrackedIce 

[woodsgnome]

Greetings, CrackedIce. Small steps indeed, and you've already taken a huge one -- reaching out in therapy and now here to dare diving in a little more as you grapple with lots of issues. The only tip I'd like to point out is -- be kind, and patient with yourself. Parts of this trail can be rough and foreboding, so being easy on yourself is a good set-off point.

[CrackedIce]

Thanks for all the greetings everyone!  There's so much content on here... I might just spend some time reading and catching up before getting too active.  I also have a tendency to dive in head first with new things like this, need to make sure to balance it with work (I work from home) and family life.  Looking forward to working my way into the supportive group here

[Blueberry]

There's so much content on here... I might just spend some time reading and catching up before getting too active. 

That's totally fine. There is a ton of good content on here. If you're reading old threads and find something interesting, feel free to add to the thread. Sometimes newbies ask if that's OK. It is. But I see you have started your own Journal. 

[Papa Coco]

Crackedice,

Welcome to the forum,

I'm 62-year-old grandfather of two, father of two, married now for coming up on 40 years. I'm a Fawn > Freeze > Flee > Fight. We have a few things in common. I hope this forum turns out to be as helpful for you as it's been for me. A safe place to say what I really think or how I really do respond to life. I'm so tired of people telling me how I should respond. As a fawn I tend to believe them, which then exposes my failure to handle stress the way I "should."

The reality is this: I respond how trauma makes me respond. Period.

Having a support network that I can talk about what I DO feel is so much better than having one where I talk about what I think they want to hear.

I started therapy in 1990 after two suicide attempts. Back then, therepists were nothing more than Cognitive Behavioral modification therapists, who, since I was a strong Fawn, I did everything I could to be what they told me to be, and to act how they told me to act, and to respond how they told me to respond. After 6 of them, I realized their "cure" was only temporary, because within a year or two of being healed the way they told me to, all my symptoms would return with a vengeance. I now see a Dialectical Behavioral Therapist (DBT) who's goal is to help me find and accept what really IS inside me. He knows IFS but doesn't use its terminology. He does, however, give me the same treatment, of finding the parts of me that think they're helping, and having a loving talk with them, thanking them for their support. DBT was created as a therapy style meant to help merge a trauma victim's fragmented parts back together.

I'll be in therapy for life. It helps. So why would I stop?

Welcome and I hope this forum is a good place for you too.