progress notes June 25... rosetta stone blues

[JamesG3]

Hi all, been a while since I've posted in here, so much life going on... wowza.

Mostly good tho, but a lot to reflect on and a lot of lessons learned that might be worth sharing so...

The big thing has been the ADHD awareness. I was completely blindsided on this, it just wasn't on my radar, but once I'd seen my partner's daughter going through diagnosis and seeing her struggles with the people around her it was unignorable really. I wasn't going to pursue it, given that it's a hugely expensive process and the health service is on it's knees dealing with the waves of interest in the subject, but then I was given health insurance wether I wanted it or not by my new corporate overlords and I thought, well, it's now or never.

So I'm at a proper shrink for the first time in all this story and out it all tumbled, the bullying, the condescension and the effect of trying to pull rabbits out of a hat, minus the hat, the rabbits or the magic wand and the trauma period with all it's hideous nuances and shame and it was pretty good. I have a counsellor, but truly, 'there, there, there' can only get you so far. this was proper psyche stuff and for once I felt I was being properly evaluated. I'm sick of having to self-diagnose, sick to the teeth of doing the work I needed someone, anyone, to help me with. It's exhausting and quite often, flawed. You do your best, don't you? But a damaged mind is not te best tool to fix a damaged mind. So yeah, it's been really helpful. But I don't have the results as yet and I've been hung up on the wait. If it's ADHD, I have to adjust in one direction, if it's autism or still ptsd, then each of those also have distinctively different approaches, so I really crave knowing, ya know.

Either way, it's been good to see the reaction to my story from a skilled practitioner.  Yeah... it was a lot. Seeing then only person in your life you trust being driven away from you by your own family, seeing them collapse in on themselves and die, it's not, despite the bad press I've had, NOTHING. It was everything. To survive you have to walk away from everything, impoverish yourself and fix yourself in the worst of gales, battered by narcissistic abuse, neglect from the people you thought were friends or scapegoated by associations who could have done so much to help, but never did.

It did me a lot of harm. You will all understand what I mean. HARM.

But the fracture lines were in place a long time before that storm, cracked in the bedrock of my personality just waiting for old family dynamics to switch back from the past to the future.

I've come to realise that so much of the fabric of my life had been badly chosen by me beyond the family though. I'd been so used to narcissists that I didn't swerve around them, and my 'creative' worklife, with all it's instability and unpredictability made me poor and vulnerable to a world of posers, the desperate and the fickle. That's arts and media for you. At each stage of my life I was marinating the future with past, again and again, using the same worthless flawed ingredients and wondering why my next great recipe always ended up like the slop it was the time before. So much is different now, a different world, different types of people, a new town, new landscapes, it's very different but of course, as the saying goes, here I still am, and it's time to systemically change.

Frustratingly, the trauma is still there, shaping my reactions to my relationship and my management of myself. If I'm tired, especially, the effects are really pronounced with a constant burnout vibe hovering around that can make me irritable, impatient and depressed. And I've been tired a lot. We've moved house, I had way too much work on, and my head has been so busy. If it really ADHD, and we shall soon know, then it's been getting very strong of late. I need new tools for this phase of my life, and I need a rest. Oh man, I need a rest.

The physical work of moving is nothing, good even, but the day job is just not enough to stop my mind freewheeling and it's just exhausting. I need it to stop. You can't really explain this to anyone really, the sheer energy sap of trauma and it's clawing aftermath. I'm like a laptop with the fan going crazy, running a million programmes and understanding little of what is happening.

At any rate, I'm expecting some proper advice this time around. If it's still trauma, then it's off for EMDR again. If it's ADHD, then adjustments and maybe, MAYBE... meds. Let's see. I want this over.

It's been too long.

I feel for you all in here. I feel it in my guts, it's a hideous condition. People don't, can't, won't understand. How can you understand such and invisible attractional effect, but we know.

We know.

Hang in there. Understand it, fight it.

[NarcKiddo]

Thank you for coming by to share your latest situation. I am really glad to read that you are able to access some therapy help that actually feels helpful.

I hope you may find some new avenues to help you. It's bad enough dealing with trauma as you know, so if there is anything else overlaying that then for sure it will be helpful to address it.

Please keep letting us know how you get on.

[Kizzie]

I'm so glad you stopped by James, your post is so articulate and evocative. It really captures what you and we go through so well, the exhaustion and sense of futility are palpable.

Just so you know, for the exact reasons you lay out in your post, a group of us here at OOTS have put together a book that we hope will educate both the public and professionals about the reality of living with CPTSD, and what we need, want and deserve in terms of validation, treatment, services and support. We're coming close to publication and will let the forum know when it's available.

Also, I am working on a project with a university here in Canada to develop a resource about the gap in healthcare (not being able to find medical and mental health professionals who know about CPTSD and are educated and trained to treat it). The results of the study and the resource we develop from the findings should be available here at OOTS in Sept-Oct. We will also be disseminating it widely to healthcare education and training programs and associations in Can and the US.

Both projects are intended to make our voices heard so I hope this gives you a degree of hope that things will get better for us.

 

[JamesG3]

that's fantastic Kizzie, it's certainly needed.

[JamesG3]

Thanks NarcKiddo.

There's so much cross over with C-PTSD and neurodivergence, you can never be sure where one ends and another begins, but the treatments need a different approach even tho the symptoms can be near identical. Tough unravelling. Ithink it's a lot like a house fire, the fire always looks like a fire, but it may have been electrical, a box of matches or arson, only the sifting through of the ashes can tell you which, and why.

I'm pretty sure that in my case, it was ADHD fracture lines that the later trauma blew apart, causing C-PTSD. I'd been pretty different to most people around me, which for the most part, wasn't that negative. I was funny, creative and alive and that went down well in my circle. But I was also struggling terribly with organisation, memory, maths, and the sciences. At school I could mask it, but at home I was relentlessly bullied by my brother, every mistake blown up into 80 foot neon letters and broadcast back out into the world. You live this double life, hiding your self in case it brought down this psychological warfare on your head simply for being the person you had no choice in being. I got over it tho, and for 10 years with my ex partner I was safe, happy with someone who I trsuted and who seemed to understand. Then both families went for us. She was equally messed up by hers, and I think both families, especially her abusive mother and sisters, and my Narc brother just couldnt cope with the idea that their written off scapegoats were thriving. We spent so much energy keeping them at bay, I cannot tell you. And it worked, until both mothers became ill. Then we were trapped.

People I've spoken to about this who have been through anything simliar, get it. They know how destructive these things can be, but those who havn't can be breathtakingly blase and glib. Why couldn't you just... that's what I would have done. Yeah, right. Try it. Walk in our shoes and tell us how easy you are gonna find it. It destroyed us. It killed my poor partner. It nearly killed me. Everything we'd built between us unravelled. Our time, energy and peace were just ripped away dealing with the unescapable mess that a dying mother can bring with them. Rrapped in place, we were subjected to wave after wave of game playing, manipulation and abuse. It broke us.

When it started breaking me, I broke along those old fracture lines, ADHD suoercharged my decline, no question. My brain just froze solid, I couldnt think clearly, but I could overthink, and boy did I overthink. My head was like a mass of pistons, thumping away in every direction, trying to keep 8 steps ahead of the next move of people who could outflank me simply by smashing through decent humanity and the milk of human kindness as if they never existed. That's why narcicissim wins, at least at first, they don't play by the rules, they don't think they apply. I just couldnt stop being the Eloi to their Morlocks, I clung to manners, empathy and respect to keep me afloat in a sea of bile and it didn't work. When it did finally stop, I slunk away, put my head down and then the C-PTSD really started. All the conversations, all the 5D chess I'd been playing in my head, rehearsing my responses, pleas to reason and desperate boundary management, it all began replaying to me. 4 or 5 conversations at the same time, rotating and spinning, flashbacking me in to a mess. It took a year for that to stop. I think that's the ADHD component there really, the obsessive repetative rabbitholes, the racing ill focussed thoughts.

Those fracture lines shape so much of what happens later I think. I'd been groomed for my trauma from the nursery.

Bit of a mind dump there, but I get it now. I get the way I went nuts for dopamine while being starved of every happy hormone I should have had. It made me reckless, out of control, a danger to myself. I got of lightly. I lost control of money very badly, something that has taken a long time to settle. I fought like crazy to get out of debt, and did well, too well really, because now I can't get my foot off the accelerator without my partner physically dragging out of the car. I got a very bad scare. I thought I'd had it, not gonna lie.

But you do get through.

You have to find out everything you can take in about what is happening to you scientifically, tough as that can be. You need to know why.

You need also, to hear other stories that show you which tramline you are stuck in, and how some of that is not as unique as it often feels.

You need to accept that no one is coming to put things right. Leave closure to TV dramas, they rarely happen outside in the wild. Closure has to be worked for internally, by you, for you. Narcicistic abuse isnt a crime, the people who did you such harm will not be arrested, they will not be converted and they will not be brought to book. If you don't seek that, you won't die on that hill, waiting. The punishment they have, is to go on being who they are.

You need to balance experience and regret. Learn from what happened, but don't live by it. Learn as much as you need to avoid such people and places again, learn your rights and your freedoms, learn that you can and should walk away if anything like that ever comes to you again. But don't live in fear, bitterness and regret. It's hard, I know, but if you don't try for that, it can't happen. Let those emotions win and the people who hurt you so badly will have you doing all the work for them. Don't let them live in your head.

You need compassion. You need it for yourself. You did what you could, with what you had availible to you. Who is born knowing how to cope with the intolerable? Of course you made mistakes, dropped the ball, failed to defend yoursef or were weak. You are human, these are very human responses and flaws that people under unprecedented abuse will always fall into. If you live in a flustered spinning storm, how can you walk a line that straight? The victim is not a perfect victim, nor should they ever be expected to be. There will be drinking, drug use, recklessness and personal chaos. OF COURSE THERE WILL BE. Excessive pressure leads to unpredictable behaviour. Be nice to yourself and let it go. A counsellor once said to me the line 'Not flipping suprising' NFS. It's a fine mantra. There's nothing to appologise for, you did what you had to do to survive.

You need to find beauty. The world is still full of wonder, love and delight. In spite of the layers of muffling cloying worry you've had, it's still there in nature, in experience and in, believe it or not, people. Just the RIGHT people. Find the things that shine their light through smog and let it wash over you. Get out in the trees, feel the sun on your skin, the sounds of a natural world that is oblivious to ego, pride and jealousy.

Do what you... YOU... need to do, to get well again. You do not need anyone's permission to live. So live.

[NarcKiddo]

The punishment they have, is to go on being who they are.

Yes.

So much food for thought and encouragement in your latest post.

 

[Kizzie]