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When Does Anger, Self-pity & Loss Of Childhood Feeling End?

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J_trustno1

MyPTSD Pro
My anger is somewhat lower than it used to be last year n the year before. Self-pity is still there and so is loss of childhood sadness.

I know that dwelling on past or crying about this shit won't get me where I want to in life but these feelings are always there in the back of my mind.
I am still mad at my mother and when she tells me how lucky we are to having completed graduation and all that bullshit. But in reality it was me who worked hard to get this far in life. I am the one who stayed up nights to study and graduate with my university degrees n getting those scholarships NOT some bloody luck or miracle. I f*cking hate it when people categorize your hard work into LUCK.

The next thing is the loss if childhood. I see my cousins enjoying life and doing shit they want to with their parents money yet they are never criticized or hated like their parents did with us. I tend to hate anything that comes out of pedophiles wife (mum's sister) especially when she says nice things about others or shows empathy for other people because all that nonsense was missing when I was a bloody kid!!!

At times I feel like the abandoned child who will never be loved, never be wanted or accepted. Relationship seem deceptive to me regardless of which form they are in...

I still don't see myself worthy or beautiful because my looks have always been joked about be it at home by my father , mum's sisters or narcissistic brother and was called "ugly" by other girls at school. Whenever anyone looks at me I feel that it's all in my head because why will anyone look at me when I've heard crap about my looks or intelligence all my childhood and adult life till now. Seriously, I'm screwed up by all these assholes and probably never live a mentally healthy life!!

That's all for now.
 
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I am a firm believer that going through the 'self-pity', grieving process is really important. Society doesn't see it as such I don't think. Most see it as a form of weakness. I don't. I see getting stuck in it as a dangerous thing, which can be an easy thing to do, imho because part of the feelings can include helplessness. Helplessness leads to frozen many times.

It is really good that you see this for what it is J. Now I wonder if you can decide an 'end goal'. What do you want when you are through with this stage? Do you want freedom from it? Do you want freedom from your current living situation? Do you want to be able to honour that piece of you that suffered? Then where to? What do you want to feel after that?

You are doing good work from the sounds of it. :hug::hug:
 
I think that once you get out of the environment that traumatized you, healing will accelerate. The anger can take years to go away. I couldn't let go of the anger until my mind was ready to let it go, and then I was able to make the decision to move on from my feelings of anger. The feelings of loss? I don't know if they ever fully go away. I've moved into a period of sadness where I am sad that I don't have the mom I need, I am sad that I had a crappy childhood. I guess this is what mourning feels like?
 
My opinion? That stuff ends when a person makes a conscious decision to end it. It ends when something else replaces it. You can make choices about what replaces it.

My own way of looking at it is Yes, bad stuff happened. Yes, it would have been better if it hadn't. But I can't go back and change anything. I can stay where I am or go forward. If there's a way to reverse the flow of time, we haven't found it yet. To me, if I decide to spend my life feeling like a victim, if I spend my energy lamenting the past, if I let the past dictate the future, then the "bad guys" win. Maybe, in the end, the bad guys win anyway, but I don't want to make it easy for them.

That's me. I'm sure there are a ton of different ways of looking at this. To me, it seems like "in the back of your mind" is a good place to keep this stuff. Way, far back. The farther the better. I don't mean deny it happened. I mean accept that it happened and focus on "what next?". What's advantage, to you, of dwelling on past injustices and regrets?
 
What's advantage, to you, of dwelling on past injustices and regrets?

I don't think J is necessarily dwelling. I know its hard for her to move through things. Her mind works much like mine. When these thoughts grab hold, its like a dog with a freaking bone. I don't think that its a matter of simply saying "I will move forward" because the mind doesn't always work like that. I think that when your mind is ready to let go, then you can make the choice to move forward.

And the dwelling bit? I think the same can (and has) been said to all of us from non-PTSD people in regards to our traumas as a whole. The crux of the disorder is that our minds do not let us move forward. In one way, shape, or form we are stuck living in the past. I think that in J this is part of how this symptom is expressed in her. That is, its hard for her to move forward with the anger and the self pitying and the loss of childhood because her mind is keeping her in the past. Maybe I'm off the mark here, but this is just my guess, based on my own experiences.
 
When does it end? Well, for me it's not constant and there probably won't be an end-marker, like a clear finish line. But it's sort of like what @scout86 said about replacement. If I don't like the life I have, it's not entirely because other people screwed me up a long time ago. I fill my life with things that I personally love and feel meaningful. I have a very hard time connecting with others, and that does make me sad, but I see it as something I am still able to work on. And in my alone time, I like to work on artwork and read and spend time in nature and with my animals. I also like the work I do. And I go to AA, which feels supportive but also gives me some chance to feel like I can be there for others. So, I'm always putting things in my life that feels meaningful to me right now. It has taken time to find out what some of those parts are, but for the most part I'm always creating my life, as I go.

It does help that I live far away from my family and feel my life and my space as mine. I also feel my problems as mine. That's not to say I take personal blame. I just finished "Healing Developmental Trauma" by Laurence Heller. He talks about "agency" and is careful to say that it is not the same as responsibility or self-blame. But it's about what can we do now. It's easy to get caught in feeling powerless because it is often a deep, familiar feeling. I have some triggers that put me there and I feel totally immobilized and helpless. But even with that I'm finding little ways I can be the one to help myself back out of those places, so that feels empowering, in small doses.

I do have sadness and honestly I'm not feeling it often. It would overwhelm me. I'm mostly day-to-day in my focus, involved in things I like to do or feel like I'm able to do well or in a helpful way. Or down time. I reserve sadness for therapy, mostly, but am working on ways to contain small amounts so I can cry on my own too, but not feel swamped. Anyway, for me it doesn't "end" but it dissolves. Space from reminders helps and also working on that stuff of agency in my current life.
 
The crux of the disorder is that our minds do not let us move forward
I didn't say it was easy. LOL What I'm trying to say is, I don't think any of this spontaneously happens just because you've gone down that rabbit hole enough times. Makes more sense to me to learn to avoid the rabbit hole somehow.

You're right, though, that we ARE different people and different things work for each of us. Something that works for ME is to learn to recognize those thoughts and then replace them with other thoughts. Something that takes some doing, isn't always done well and doesn't always work. The fact that it doesn't ALWAYS work doesn't mean it NEVER works and it also doesn't mean you'll never get any better at it. I've also found it helpful to have a few people around who can say "Hey, you're doing it again" just in case I don't notice.

I have a theory. Our brains are plastic and capable of change. There's some really interesting work out there to support this. The existence of PTSD supports it. If we can LEARN "disordered" thinking, I believe we can also learn "ordered" thinking too. Again, not saying it's easy or fast. I'm also not sure things can ever be "as if nothing ever happened", but I believe they can be pretty good,improved upon, and maybe even "good enough".
 
If you like where you are feel free to split hairs and stay the same... if you aren't, then endeavor to do something different. It is not fast or easy, but it can and does get better. As if nothing ever happened, eh, nope. But when you pause to consider the landscape... I know to save my ass I did something totally out of character, and busted out of my biases and perceptions and worked my ass of to get new ones. Guess what, it is serving me well.
 
One of the first ones to go/that I abandoned... was that I was entitled to my biases. I had to grow a pair and get willing to pause to consider other perspectives/facets of situations that were different than my own. Expansiveness rather than rigid clinging to the idea, flawed by the way, that I was being treated a certain way because of "who I was".
 
Jess, you circle round and round persisting in your own justification for your anger. Are you entitled and valid? Um yeah sure... does it impede your progress? You betcha.
 
Hi J,
I very much agree with Scout on this one, that it's a learning process. Learning to enjoy the present rather than to worry too much about the past that can't be changed and a future you can never accurately predict.

I seem to regurgitate a Zen story every time I reply to one of your threads. probably on the flawed assumption that I get something out of them, you might too, so here goes.

A poor wood cutter got charged by a tiger, and to save himself, he jumped over a cliff and grabbed the vines that grew over it. When he looked down, there was another tiger, looking at him hungrily from below, and when he looked up, there was the tiger that had charged him.

Then he noticed two mice, one black and one white (a very imprortant detail, that) gnawing at the vine he was hanging onto.

He looked to his side, and there was a wild strawberry plant with a single small ripe berry.

Hanging on with only one hand, he swung the partly severed vine over the sharp rocks of the cliff, and with the other hand, managed to get the strawberry.

It tasted so sweet.
 
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