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Undiagnosed 28, on the path of being diagnosed, neglected childhood, sexual assault and domestic violence

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coraxxx

Policy Enforcement
Hello there. I’ve found this forum via the papers on cptsd, which I’ve been researching.

I am going to try to keep it concise. I am from a multicultural background and my parents aren’t from the same nationality. He’s European, she’s from Latin America. I so have been displaced twice and dragged around the planet according to their breakups and makeups, which was pretty horrid as I moved more than 5 times in my first 12 years, with constant intercontinental flights. Lots of arguments and lately I have been having disturbing borderline sexual memories coming up about my dad in the last past 6 months.

All along when I was a child I had a strong belief I was an animal and not a human being.

At primary school in Europe, I was bullied because I was ’different’. A teacher decided I was a mental retard because my language wasn’t well adjusted (which now I believe was a racist incident even if I’m white) and I’ve been regularly humiliated in front of the class because I was drawing Pokemons. At home, my mom found my stepdad who was just 9 years older than me when I was nine. I constantly was called names, forced to clean the entire house oven an over again, beaten with a brush by my mom at times, locked in my room, I had been given a first cat that my mom had made disappear and another one that my stepdad literally threw away by the window. Lots of petty rules, lots of name-calling, told that I was a psychopath when I was 9 years old because I protested against the abuse. I knew it wasn’t normal and became systematically resistant, just waiting for it to go away, time was with me.

At secondary school, I ended up managing to stay with my dad that wasn’t aggressive with me or sexually abusive anymore (of that period I am certain), but was so heavily depressed it was like living with a ghost whose actions were to be into conspiracy theories and leaving bread with tuna salad in the kitchen out of the fridge. There was also his girlfriend that he met in a psychiatric hospital that was living with us in a small apartment. I just lived in my room and tried to keep with my circle of friends with whom I was constantly sleeping over, almost every day by age 16. I also had a IQ test where I scored 160 at 12, which caused rejection and bullying from the other kids. I also was called a sexual freak and a whore for completely unknown reasons, as my life was so boring all I did was eating and reading. At that point I couldn’t sleep, stopped having periods, was extremely anxious, believed I was going to die from 5 different forms of cancer and was constantly battling with myself about the absurdity of the idea. I still managed to pass my final exams with 80% on average. I went to a counselor complaining about all these somatizations and she gave me sleeping pills based on plants without any follow up. Also, I waited for this to just end so I could start my life by myself and leave all this shit behind me.

My first boyfriend was super cool at first, we hanged out and spoke a lot. Then he developed schizophrenia and disappeared all at once. That was brutal.

A second boyfriend cheated me while on work in Congo with a local sex worker and didn’t tell me. I kicked him out when I discovered and spent 3 months in the terror of having gotten HIV.

My third boyfriend was my partner (almost a husband even if we didn’t marry) for 6 years and an ex junkie. He is still the most precious person in my life, yet he is 27 years older than me and it caused loads of stupid judgement from people I deemed were my friends. Nevertheless, the times with him were really good times. We did a lot of stuff together and I managed to calm a lot of the anxiety and thrive and go for my dreams. I do regret he’s so much older than I because it made the relationship ultimately impossible given too different timelines. It has been possible in the last two years to de-escalate it in a very strong, trusting and healthy friendship. I know he is the person I can call in the middle of the night and he would cross a country under the rain to help me out if I need it. Even then I was struggling with execution dysfunction and constant body tension, I saw a completely useless counselor for two years that just thought it admirable that I managed to do things and to speak so well given all that happened to me. I was telling myself I was going to let myself die by just doing nothing. She didn’t tell me it was passive suicidal ideation.

Then when the relationship ended, I went for a second masters in a global top-tier art university. My first year was made of sexual adventures that were more or less ok, actually quite very disappointing with one guy, and meh with many, but I was quite entertained and happy about discovering things sexually and having my time in the date scene. But a friend of a friend raped me after a dinner and I hated myself for having fawn. I did consider myself to be an extremely combative person but at that point I couldn’t do anything and it has disturbed me. It took me a week to think of it as a rape.

Then I met my now ex-partner who happened to have a severe form of BPD and has made my life a hell for a bit more than a year, with crisis every 3 days, quizzings about my rape and my past partners, invading my files and making me have to respond for thing I’ve written to other people or in my journals, stalking me at night ringing the bell and every 3 months beating me badly. He tried to jump off a balcony and I managed to rescue him. When I also ended up trying to throw myself from a bridge and had been sectioned and landed in observation, all he’s done was to break in my files and read my journals. My face is scarred, he has broken my thumb, my hands have marks from the moments he dragged me on the ground and kicked me on the face while calling me names. I did respond in the violence at times by wrestling in disorganization, but with my 43 kilos it was just hopeless. It was a dark year of constant fear and control, I just couldn’t see how to get out of that. He was obsessed by the fact I was raped and persuaded that I wanted it and that my fawn response was the proof of it. I ended up taking krav maga classes in June because I was scared of being overpowered by anyone, but especially him. One night we were hosted at a friend’s house and he tried to commit suicide, tore all my stuff (more than $2000 of damage, inclusively my photo camera that I loved and a pair of leather boots that were priceless and almost an identity for me) and covered that apartment in blood, which I had to deep-clean everything using special chemicals so my friend wouldn’t see. Towards the end, he tried to pull out my shirt and I freaked out so badly I started to hit him repeatedly on the face and scream as if there was no tomorrow which made him back off. He then never assaulted me physically again neither made a single comment about the fact I was raped, but left me a month later telling me I was an aggressive freak.

I recently (2 months ago) started a psychiatric therapy with 2 doctors (messed waiting lines in different places because of covid caused this weirdness), one thinks of GAD and CPTSD, the other one thinks of CPTSD aften had thought of a mild form of BPD. The official diagnoses aren’t released yet but they are quite confident and the second one asked me to document myself about it, which made me find this forum.

I’m now plagued with nightmares of this ex stalking me, reading my messages, chasing me in the night to fight to death, waiting for me at buses stops, in parties, behind curtains. I have this scare of him strangling me in my sleep. I wake up in puddles of sweat. I feel I’m a burden to all my friends, even if deep down I do know they do support me and that I am a lovable person. The only person I dared to say the entire story about my ex is my other ex who is my friend. The other friends I’m just too ashamed of the extent things went. I have nightmares of my dad becoming sinister (which he is, I deem him to be a really toxic person) and trying to intervene in a sort of plot and making me having to stay close to him. I am disturbed by the memories of violence against me and by me, I hate the idea I did hit my ex repeatedly and so aggressively, even if I know it was self-defense. I am treated with lorazepam and a deep sedative but I have to take almost twice the dose advised to have them to work properly, I don’t sleep well but get awful sensations the day after, but when I stop I just can’t sleep at all.

When I do drugs, they don’t seem to have the same effect. I don’t get the high that much and I don’t have a comedown neither. Classically when my friends are completely knocked out by the cocaine and mdma I’m out at 8 am buying breakfast for everyone. When I took mdma for the first time 3 years ago it was the first time I understood what people meant by feeling together. Until then I just told myself I was an alien, an animal, I had nothing to do with all these people even if I spoke their language. I don’t do drugs much but I prefer them by far from alcohol that I find quite evil in its loss of judgement and control. With mdma and cocaine I’m capable of telling myself to stop and remain in a good space and have it in very specific settings with friends I trust and very occasionally, with alcohol it’s just asking for having me knocked out, so now I completely avoid it unless I’m in a family setting with the two casual glasses of wine.

I am extremely hard to knock off and difficult to manage when triggered. I can’t stand people ordering me things, talking over me or even vaguely shouting at me. I sense irritation very rapidly and it makes me wary. This always has been the case but it worsened since that horrible abusive and violent relationship. All the way through my life except for the 6 years with my ex-husband, I’ve been fighting and struggling. It’s just so exhausting. I have good professional prospects and if people do at times perceive something isn’t completely right with me, I have correct relationships and support system. I can be a loving friend but I feel quite alien to their experiences and sitting in a constant observing position, waiting for my time and struggling to take initiatives, except in a few critical moments when I do everything at once.

I feel like I’m promising and always fail at my promises. I know I am still young and that things can be tinkered and I can recover, but that it will take a lot of work and having relapses. I struggle with a lot of rage, insane amounts of energy that I don’t manage to redirect easily in something useful. I sit in ruminations and get more and more angry at everything that has happened, but don’t want to end up blinded by it and being awful to everyone around me. Days are rollercoasters of rage, sadness, emptiness and complete tiredness. I have to reason myself not to throw my head against walls. I just go out in the days I know I can be soft and nice and entertaining and not show this dark side, so I have spent a lot of time sitting in my distress and got used to it. Social relationships were a matter of calculation on how much I can drop my guards without unloading too much but stay authentic.

So far I never allowed myself to think I deserved to be psychiatrically helped as I still managed to achieve brilliant study goals and stable relationships, but inside I feel broken and on edge like a chased and bleeding wolf. When I read the paper about CPTSD on this website it made me cry. I never had realized that I did meet criteria for something serious like this and that the functional impairment is part of it. I am angry at what happened to me as I child because I know I have far more potential than spending so much time licking my wounds.

Anyway, thank you for reading my story. I had to take it out of my chest.
 
H
Hello there. I’ve found this forum via the papers on cptsd, which I’ve been researching.

I am going to try to keep it concise. I am from a multicultural background and my parents aren’t from the same nationality. He’s European, she’s from Latin America. I so have been displaced twice and dragged around the planet according to their breakups and makeups, which was pretty horrid as I moved more than 5 times in my first 12 years, with constant intercontinental flights. Lots of arguments and lately I have been having disturbing borderline sexual memories coming up about my dad in the last past 6 months.

All along when I was a child I had a strong belief I was an animal and not a human being.

At primary school in Europe, I was bullied because I was ’different’. A teacher decided I was a mental retard because my language wasn’t well adjusted (which now I believe was a racist incident even if I’m white) and I’ve been regularly humiliated in front of the class because I was drawing Pokemons. At home, my mom found my stepdad who was just 9 years older than me when I was nine. I constantly was called names, forced to clean the entire house oven an over again, beaten with a brush by my mom at times, locked in my room, I had been given a first cat that my mom had made disappear and another one that my stepdad literally threw away by the window. Lots of petty rules, lots of name-calling, told that I was a psychopath when I was 9 years old because I protested against the abuse. I knew it wasn’t normal and became systematically resistant, just waiting for it to go away, time was with me.

At secondary school, I ended up managing to stay with my dad that wasn’t aggressive with me or sexually abusive anymore (of that period I am certain), but was so heavily depressed it was like living with a ghost whose actions were to be into conspiracy theories and leaving bread with tuna salad in the kitchen out of the fridge. There was also his girlfriend that he met in a psychiatric hospital that was living with us in a small apartment. I just lived in my room and tried to keep with my circle of friends with whom I was constantly sleeping over, almost every day by age 16. I also had a IQ test where I scored 160 at 12, which caused rejection and bullying from the other kids. I also was called a sexual freak and a whore for completely unknown reasons, as my life was so boring all I did was eating and reading. At that point I couldn’t sleep, stopped having periods, was extremely anxious, believed I was going to die from 5 different forms of cancer and was constantly battling with myself about the absurdity of the idea. I still managed to pass my final exams with 80% on average. I went to a counselor complaining about all these somatizations and she gave me sleeping pills based on plants without any follow up. Also, I waited for this to just end so I could start my life by myself and leave all this shit behind me.

My first boyfriend was super cool at first, we hanged out and spoke a lot. Then he developed schizophrenia and disappeared all at once. That was brutal.

A second boyfriend cheated me while on work in Congo with a local sex worker and didn’t tell me. I kicked him out when I discovered and spent 3 months in the terror of having gotten HIV.

My third boyfriend was my partner (almost a husband even if we didn’t marry) for 6 years and an ex junkie. He is still the most precious person in my life, yet he is 27 years older than me and it caused loads of stupid judgement from people I deemed were my friends. Nevertheless, the times with him were really good times. We did a lot of stuff together and I managed to calm a lot of the anxiety and thrive and go for my dreams. I do regret he’s so much older than I because it made the relationship ultimately impossible given too different timelines. It has been possible in the last two years to de-escalate it in a very strong, trusting and healthy friendship. I know he is the person I can call in the middle of the night and he would cross a country under the rain to help me out if I need it. Even then I was struggling with execution dysfunction and constant body tension, I saw a completely useless counselor for two years that just thought it admirable that I managed to do things and to speak so well given all that happened to me. I was telling myself I was going to let myself die by just doing nothing. She didn’t tell me it was passive suicidal ideation.

Then when the relationship ended, I went for a second masters in a global top-tier art university. My first year was made of sexual adventures that were more or less ok, actually quite very disappointing with one guy, and meh with many, but I was quite entertained and happy about discovering things sexually and having my time in the date scene. But a friend of a friend raped me after a dinner and I hated myself for having fawn. I did consider myself to be an extremely combative person but at that point I couldn’t do anything and it has disturbed me. It took me a week to think of it as a rape.

Then I met my now ex-partner who happened to have a severe form of BPD and has made my life a hell for a bit more than a year, with crisis every 3 days, quizzings about my rape and my past partners, invading my files and making me have to respond for thing I’ve written to other people or in my journals, stalking me at night ringing the bell and every 3 months beating me badly. He tried to jump off a balcony and I managed to rescue him. When I also ended up trying to throw myself from a bridge and had been sectioned and landed in observation, all he’s done was to break in my files and read my journals. My face is scarred, he has broken my thumb, my hands have marks from the moments he dragged me on the ground and kicked me on the face while calling me names. I did respond in the violence at times by wrestling in disorganization, but with my 43 kilos it was just hopeless. It was a dark year of constant fear and control, I just couldn’t see how to get out of that. He was obsessed by the fact I was raped and persuaded that I wanted it and that my fawn response was the proof of it. I ended up taking krav maga classes in June because I was scared of being overpowered by anyone, but especially him. One night we were hosted at a friend’s house and he tried to commit suicide, tore all my stuff (more than $2000 of damage, inclusively my photo camera that I loved and a pair of leather boots that were priceless and almost an identity for me) and covered that apartment in blood, which I had to deep-clean everything using special chemicals so my friend wouldn’t see. Towards the end, he tried to pull out my shirt and I freaked out so badly I started to hit him repeatedly on the face and scream as if there was no tomorrow which made him back off. He then never assaulted me physically again neither made a single comment about the fact I was raped, but left me a month later telling me I was an aggressive freak.

I recently (2 months ago) started a psychiatric therapy with 2 doctors (messed waiting lines in different places because of covid caused this weirdness), one thinks of GAD and CPTSD, the other one thinks of CPTSD aften had thought of a mild form of BPD. The official diagnoses aren’t released yet but they are quite confident and the second one asked me to document myself about it, which made me find this forum.

I’m now plagued with nightmares of this ex stalking me, reading my messages, chasing me in the night to fight to death, waiting for me at buses stops, in parties, behind curtains. I have this scare of him strangling me in my sleep. I wake up in puddles of sweat. I feel I’m a burden to all my friends, even if deep down I do know they do support me and that I am a lovable person. The only person I dared to say the entire story about my ex is my other ex who is my friend. The other friends I’m just too ashamed of the extent things went. I have nightmares of my dad becoming sinister (which he is, I deem him to be a really toxic person) and trying to intervene in a sort of plot and making me having to stay close to him. I am disturbed by the memories of violence against me and by me, I hate the idea I did hit my ex repeatedly and so aggressively, even if I know it was self-defense. I am treated with lorazepam and a deep sedative but I have to take almost twice the dose advised to have them to work properly, I don’t sleep well but get awful sensations the day after, but when I stop I just can’t sleep at all.

When I do drugs, they don’t seem to have the same effect. I don’t get the high that much and I don’t have a comedown neither. Classically when my friends are completely knocked out by the cocaine and mdma I’m out at 8 am buying breakfast for everyone. When I took mdma for the first time 3 years ago it was the first time I understood what people meant by feeling together. Until then I just told myself I was an alien, an animal, I had nothing to do with all these people even if I spoke their language. I don’t do drugs much but I prefer them by far from alcohol that I find quite evil in its loss of judgement and control. With mdma and cocaine I’m capable of telling myself to stop and remain in a good space and have it in very specific settings with friends I trust and very occasionally, with alcohol it’s just asking for having me knocked out, so now I completely avoid it unless I’m in a family setting with the two casual glasses of wine.

I am extremely hard to knock off and difficult to manage when triggered. I can’t stand people ordering me things, talking over me or even vaguely shouting at me. I sense irritation very rapidly and it makes me wary. This always has been the case but it worsened since that horrible abusive and violent relationship. All the way through my life except for the 6 years with my ex-husband, I’ve been fighting and struggling. It’s just so exhausting. I have good professional prospects and if people do at times perceive something isn’t completely right with me, I have correct relationships and support system. I can be a loving friend but I feel quite alien to their experiences and sitting in a constant observing position, waiting for my time and struggling to take initiatives, except in a few critical moments when I do everything at once.

I feel like I’m promising and always fail at my promises. I know I am still young and that things can be tinkered and I can recover, but that it will take a lot of work and having relapses. I struggle with a lot of rage, insane amounts of energy that I don’t manage to redirect easily in something useful. I sit in ruminations and get more and more angry at everything that has happened, but don’t want to end up blinded by it and being awful to everyone around me. Days are rollercoasters of rage, sadness, emptiness and complete tiredness. I have to reason myself not to throw my head against walls. I just go out in the days I know I can be soft and nice and entertaining and not show this dark side, so I have spent a lot of time sitting in my distress and got used to it. Social relationships were a matter of calculation on how much I can drop my guards without unloading too much but stay authentic.

So far I never allowed myself to think I deserved to be psychiatrically helped as I still managed to achieve brilliant study goals and stable relationships, but inside I feel broken and on edge like a chased and bleeding wolf. When I read the paper about CPTSD on this website it made me cry. I never had realized that I did meet criteria for something serious like this and that the functional impairment is part of it. I am angry at what happened to me as I child because I know I have far more potential than spending so much time licking my wounds.

Anyway, thank you for reading my story. I had to take it out of my chest.
Hello @ruborcoraxxx,
You have been through a ton of crap. Yes! Be angry! You don't deserve to be treated like that by anybody. Period.

Trauma is so hard on us. Especially trauma at the hands of those who are supposed to nurture and protect us. It strikes at the very core of who we are. It attacks our very character.

You will find many great folks here who will encourage you, embrace you, and even relate to you on many levels.

You are not alone as you feel.

Woodsy1
 
H

Hello @ruborcoraxxx,
You have been through a ton of crap. Yes! Be angry! You don't deserve to be treated like that by anybody. Period.

Trauma is so hard on us. Especially trauma at the hands of those who are supposed to nurture and protect us. It strikes at the very core of who we are. It attacks our very character.

You will find many great folks here who will encourage you, embrace you, and even relate to you on many levels.

You are not alone as you feel.

Woodsy1
Thank you very much. This helps really a lot. I am looking forward participating here.
 
Hello and welcome!

I'm glad you found this place where there is lots of good information and understanding people who truly care! So sorry for the circumstances. Best wishes on your healing journey!
 
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