Introduction

[BillB]

Hi everyone. My name is Steve, although I use BillB as my username, but that's another story.

My qualifier? 23 years living crisis-to-crisis with a depressed wife diagnosed with BPD (borderline personality disorder). We came to the US in 2000 with our 2 youngest teenage daughters (we have 4 children). Within 9 months, all 3 were in different psychiatric units. At one stage, one was in VT, one in PA, and their mother was in MD (we lived in NJ, and I worked in Manhattan). My daughters were also diagnosed with BPD and were inpatients for 17 and 29 months respectively. Their mother did everything she could to sabotage their treatment. Doctors refused to discharge them while she was living at home, forcing me to choose between my daughters and my (now ex) wife. I choose my daughters. I witnessed every one of them trying to commit suicide at least once. Every major decision I made required me assessing whether one of them would commit suicide because of it. An ambulance siren still sends shivers down my spine. My daughters eventually returned to the UK, but I decided the only way I could survive was if I stayed here in the States and become a citizen.

I first heard the suggestion I had PTSD back in 2004-5 when my therapist suggested it. Since then, I've come to the conclusion it must be CPTSD, although I often feel like a fraud. Others have been through far worse than me. I spent years doing EMDR therapy, and thought I'd found a miracle cure. Sadly, symptoms have gradually returned over the last couple of years. I've come to realize that this is a life-long journey, and this is the main driver for me joining the group.

I feel I am a survivor, having been happily remarried to a wonderful woman for over 13 years. I have distance, and strict boundaries, between me, my daughters, and my ex-wife. It works. But it can be very hard to accept I have to do this.

Steve

[Bermuda]

Hi BillB, welcome to the forum. Unfortunately, feeling unworthy of CPTSD seems to be par for the course. Your experience sounds terrible. I hope you find the support you need here.


 

[Moondance]

  Hi BillB,

A warm welcome to you. May you find all that you are looking for on your journey here.

[NarcKiddo]

Welcome! Do you prefer to be addressed as Steve, or as BillB?

I think most, if not all, of us here are familiar with that fraud feeling. It goes with the territory of C-PTSD. I think you are correct that it is a lifelong thing. As far as I can tell you don't get cured of it. That sounds hopeless, I know, but I think one has to be realistic. That said, I have made great strides after a year with a good therapist (therapy continues) and I have every hope of getting my symptoms under control such that I will feel like I am cured most of the time.

Your story is sad to read. I am glad to hear you are now happily married. I hope your daughters are doing well.

[Kizzie]

Hello and a warm welcome to OOTS Bill 

As others have said feeling like a fraud is very common but you were exposed to a lot of trauma and it's the accumulation that leads to CPTSD. I'm so sorry for all that you went through and I'm glad you made your way here. It can really help to share with other survivors because we get it.

 

[Papa Coco]

Welcome to the forum, BillB

Thank you for sharing your story here. And I would like to say that having a BPD wife and two suicidal daughters sounds like a lot to deal with. I can't imagine the pressure you must have felt when every decision you had to make, forced you to consider the lives of both of your children. Raising kids is hard enough, but when you have to fear that every move you make might hurt them, you've added another ton of responsibility to yourself. I call that "walking on eggshells" to try not to hurt someone by accident. You definitely have the right to accept a CPTSD diagnosis, and I like to remind myself and my peers of this: You don't get trauma from a bad day at work. You get trauma from serious events or circumstances. Sometimes we don't even realize our own struggles until we start to heal from them.

It seems like the first hurdle after accepting the CPTSD diagnosis is most of us feel like we don't really deserve it. The words you wrote: "Others have been through far worse than me" have pretty much been the words most of us said early on.

My story bares resemblances to yours. Years of walking on eggshells because I was always blamed for causing other people's misery just by being me. I've struggled with my own CPTSD since early childhood and with suicidal issues since I was 12 years of age. My older sister, 11 years older tham me, was a sick BPD. My parents were immature, anxiety ridden, both traumatized in their childhoods. I was put into a Catholic school that was abusive in its own way, and I made friends with people who reminded me of my family...Narcissists and BPDs. They turned on me, bullied me so severely that I became suicidal at 12.

But it's said that half of our personality is prewired in at birth and the other half is developed as we experience life. I seem to have been born with a humorous personality, so even as I suffered with suicidal depression and fairly severe anxiety, I carried myself well out in the world. "Don't air your dirty laundry for others to see" right? I held a job for over 40 years with the same employer, and while people knew that I was "wound too tightly" with my nervous anxieties, they were fooled by my happy face. People just didn't realize how much I was suffering. And, frankly, neither did I. I had never been beaten with a stick or burned with cigarettes. I had never been abandoned or starved or bruised where people couldn't see. How could I call myself "abused?"  Like you, I got the PTSD diagnosis in 2005 and was shocked that, even though I had never been in a war or accident, I somehow mysteriously got PTSD. The symptoms matched and the treatments worked. So even though I didn't know why I had it, I apparently had it.

In 2010 I finally voluntarily estranged from my entire family of origin. They'd finally become so ugly that even I couldn't love them anymore. When I did, the flood gates of realization opened in my brain and I started to really grasp the depths of what had been done to make me hate myself so badly. My creative juices GUSHED out of me and I found myself feeling forced to write a novel about a boy who'd suffered as I have. I told my friends at work that I was writing a novel (which ended up being the first of three). Their first question was "What's it about?" That's when I would disclose to people who'd known me for decades, that I was writing a fictional story about a boy who'd been through what I'd been through. As I told them what that was, most of my friends would first say, "I never would have expected to hear that from you. I thought you had the world by the tail." But then, in the majority of these disclosures, my friends, who I thought were having better lives than me, would ask "Can I tell you my story?" THEN these friends I'd known for years would disclose stories that shocked me in return.

I think that we are born with a survival instinct to shake off the dust and move on. And I sometimes think that's why so many of us feel like we aren't suffering as much as we are. I think, that to survive, we toughen up inside ourselves and push on in hopes of forgetting the difficult times. It's only a theory I have. But I do know that when I open up to people about my struggles, (When I finally do "air my dirty laundry") it often gives others the permission to open back up to me. Every friend who shared their struggles in return started their story with "I've never told anyone this before, but..."

It taught me that we all have baggage, and we all want to tell our stories, but most of us feel like we shouldn't. When I open up to them, they open up too. I don't prompt them. They voluntarily jump in. While writing, I coined the term "There are more novels walking on sidewalks than there are in the bookstores."

I'm not trying to make this post about me. I'm just trying to share enough of my own experiences with you that I feel are similar. I happen to believe that empathy is the greatest healing tool in the world. Empathy, which is missing in BPD, narcissism and sociopathy, is the ability to connect with each other. When we learn the ways that we are similar, we feel safer.  In all the books I wrote, the common theme was "We're stronger together." I'm very glad you found this forum, and I hope that by sharing with others you find the strength that I've found on this forum. There are some amazing people here who have helped me quite a bit over the two years I've been a member.

Welcome and I look forward to reading and writing more of our shared experiences.