yet another thing I need to remind myself!
Honestly it helps to know your guy is as big of a dork as I am! and yep -- that's kind of exactly how it happens with me. I get convinced that I'm not a monster by my ever patient supporters (including the ever patient ones here! :laugh:) and then it's like a light goes out in my brain and I'm right back in "They can't find out!!!" mode.
yep. Or I'm doing that whole mind reading thing -- where I'm just sure I know what they are thinking, because as
@Woundedhealer said -- I havent reached forgiveness yet. Ergo - they must not be able to forgive me either.
The frustrating thing about all of this is that I know damn well when I'm in the supporter role it makes me nuts when people do this crap! Talk about a hypocrite :laugh:
I keep coming back to this......
I do try to listen (can't retain crap but I try!) when my supporters yammer at me about not being at fault, not being the bad guy, blah blah.
But
It's like they just don't ......que dramatic music.... KNOW THE TRUTH!!!!! dum de dum dumm." :banghead:
Any thoughts on when you
have been able to get thru to your sufferer to get them out of that cycle? That I can pass on to mine IRL? So maybe I don't make them quite as nuts?
Did ya ever think you would end up supporting the unseen supporters of the sufferer?? :laugh:
Yeah Freida, that's the cognitive distortion shit-ton-o-fun talking. Picturing this as a light going out helps me visualize how it feels to Marine.
If you haven't read Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now" I highly recommend. It was like salve, gospel for my wounded brain when I was recovering from PTSD five years ago. Every word that man writes is like an ax that chips away at PTSD's wicked effort to deep six normal thinking!
The crazy thing is, as a supporter who's recovered from PTSD, how is it so hard for me to support now I ask myself? Maybe because I'm ready to LIVE and it irritates the crap out of me that he refuses help, for 18 years he has chosen self-hatred, that is a loooong time. When you recover, you feel as though you can do anything, you feel so much joy it's like a drug, you want to share the secret formula!!
Sometimes I feel like a hypocrite because of this, it's its own catch 22 being both sufferer and supporter....I think the thing that frustrates me most with M is his refusal to take healing seriously. I want to yell "fight to live Marine!" but I know this is his experience and it's unfamiliar battle ground, and he is fighting in the best way he can. All of our experiences are different. So many here are working so hard at it, humbly, and he's going to crack his own nut seriously with stupid pride; his health is declining and he's working himself into a grave.
I remember when it had a hold of me, I got to a point that I stopped trying to hold the lid on and got outside of my own head for just long enough (thanks in part to Mr. Tolle) to design myself a 'program' to exorcise the monster. I decided to rip the lid off the shit pot and dump the goo out and a spent nearly a year filling the pot back up with healthy stuff. Every single step was like walking on glass and I begged every time I opened my eyes for the pain to be gone, nope. Every second of awake HURT. Like my head was in a blender, panic, nightmares the whole shit-kit.
I finally quit a stressful six-figure job that was making it all worse and that day, wandering around saying holy wow what have I done, but sort of relieved, I passed a yoga studio so I joined it, I started a blog soon after, I journaled, I skydived, I took horseback lessons, I hiked, kayaked, cried, some days slept all day and hugged the dog till he was sick of me, I read Eckhart and every article I could about PTSD, learned about experiences of others. When I felt good enough six months later, I took a new job with DOD and met lots of vets recovering who shared experiences, that helped bring me the rest of the way.
For me, it helped to reframe PTSD as a beast to be slain, or like a tumor - not a part of me but something that'd attached itself to me. One night I had a dream I was a caged tiger in a circus cage. I was battering myself against the bars roaring trying to get away from a man outside poking me with a sharp prod and at the end of the dream, tiger-me noticed the side door of the cage was open and that I was a huuuge tiger with the ability to walk the hell out and I woke up in a sweat. That image made me see, that's PTSD, the door is OPEN, it always is, we just can't SEE it in the anxiety, obsessing and spinning we do. Does that make sense?
For now, I'm letting M go on his way, to have his energy to survive and I'm moving on with my life until he can choose to work on healing. He's still thrashing in his cage and mostly comes back to me when the lid blows off his pot and he needs to be rescued. That is the only time he's open to sharing his TRUTH, the horror stories which I listen to GRATEFULLY (the stuff of the worst war movie yes). Only when he cracks on rare occasions will he consider healing, help, or reaching out to resources I offer, but he then won't - he crawls back to the cage and disappears for weeks....I will talk to him again if/when he ever decides to WORK on himself and STOP HIDING.
Sorry for the rant, whew, I guess I needed that! What I meant to share was this: Supporters need to learn too, some of the same things I did when I was my OWN supporter, read, connect, get outside, take care of themselves. Sufferers, choose one or two trusted souls and SHARE your truth, find your tribe, here and in the flesh, engage every sense, and above all know you are tigers and there is a door, fight to find it!
Final thought for now, embrace your special variety of madness, there are others who understand - after recovery, you'll feel like a MOSAIC, lots of little pieces you rebuild into something that looks a different but is actually much stronger and really quite BEAUTIFUL :)
