TheBigBlue's Recovery Journal

[TheBigBlue]

I'm still new to all of this: new to naming what happened to me, new to understanding the depth of my CPTSD, new to realizing how long I survived without ever feeling safe. I'm only now seeing that I never had a place to form a self at all.

I didn't minimize my trauma because it felt small. I minimized it because for decades I blamed myself for everything. I believed the emptiness in my life, the lack of romantic relationships, the isolation, the shame about my body were all proof that something was fundamentally wrong with me. How could I have thought I was "fine" when I'm in my mid-fifties and have never - not once - had a romantic relationship, or a first kiss, or anything close? I assumed it meant I was unlovable, unattractive, defective. I thought my body was the enemy.

I never imagined these patterns could be symptoms of attachment trauma, emotional neglect, parentification, and a childhood spent carrying burdens that were never mine.

The past nine months have been a brutal awakening. Therapy kept getting interrupted - first because my therapist moved, then because I was out of the country for a month, which became its own trauma: hospitalization, retraumatization, and the exhausting pull of an enmeshed parent. It felt like being cut over and over again.

Only in the last six weeks have things begun to stabilize with CBT twice a week, but my nervous system is still trying to understand what safety even means.

And this week, with the holiday break and no therapy, everything feels louder inside. The loneliness. The freeze. The shame of not getting any work done. The feeling of being stuck outside of life while the world keeps moving.

Then my sister's comments - tone-deaf at best, hurtful at worst - landed right on the oldest wounds.

Earlier today I sat in the dog park alone, throwing the ball for my dog in the late-afternoon sunlight. It should have been peaceful. Instead it felt like watching my life from the outside, just slightly out of reach.

I'm trying not to numb this away. I'm trying to believe that naming it helps, even when it hurts. Maybe that's why I'm writing this.
Maybe I just needed somewhere to put the ache tonight.