Strange Star

[Hope4Now]

Yes @Pietro that seems to be his take on approach. He has been working really hard to keep me from getting overwhelmed and take things really slowly. Working directly with the child parts of me is very powerful and has been making a lot of emotional vulnerability much clearer to me. It's a lot of stuff for which there are no words. But today some words came...not from my cognitive self but somewhere else. This is progress, cyclical though I know it is.

And, you will appreciate this...I haven't yet managed the 10 minutes to be alone with my inner 3 year old. I am determined to do it before I am too tired to do it...but there was dinner to be had and 12 year old homework help is calling now (literally..."moooooommmm where are you?) and my son is now puking with the stomach bug. Ugh. And supposedly he will be suspended if he misses any more school. Ugh again.

So onto history and Spanish and delivering chamomile tea. Then we'll see what little me has to say.

 

[Pietro]

No rest for the weary. ;)

The illness spread through my house the same way -- first my son, then, two days later, my daughter and me. Unlike me, though, they each beat it in 12 hours; took me 3 days. :shifty: Not a great selling point for age.

As for your 3 yo, my therapist tells me that, when I can't be immediately attentive, I can explain this, and promise to return soon. And, as she tells me, you must keep your word, or all hell breaks loose. :)

Why would your son's school suspend a child for absences? Sounds kind of ridiculous. Of course, my children's schools and their innumerable, antediluvian rules have been one of the largest sources of stress for me over the years.

Anyway, buena suerte con su noche. :)

 

[Hope4Now]

So, I finally found my 10 minutes last night at 11:20 PM to spend with my little self. Had to tell my husband what I was doing. He doesn't get it but is trying to be supportive. He is so busy and overwhelmed himself, and I am so inarticulate about all that is happening with me that we've basically stopped talking about it.

@Pietro, your T is right...when you don't keep your promises to your inner children, all hell breaks loose. It was better after the 10 minutes last night. She still has more to show me, I guess. Not ready to show me any feelings...just showing me things. Started to "talk" a little. Still doesn't trust me. Who would with all the toxic energy that keeps overwhelming me so that I run away. I'm trying to keep at it though. I was "led" to write about a memory. One of the lines in the 1-page "story" of that night was quite telling of the insidious ways my parents managed to undermine any sense of security in the reality and acceptability of my feelings. It was, after a whispered shaming apart from the person involved, my mother saying to me--at 3 or 4 years old and terrified/screaming--"You should be ashamed of your behavior. I'm embarassed. This (meaning my terrified behavior) is not the (my name) we know and love." Message taken: if you show any feelings that are uncomfortable in any way, your parents will a) be embarassed; b) be unavailable for comfort; c) won't love you.

I awakened at 3:15 AM with a near full-blown panic attack. Tried to breathe through it. Don't know where it came from. Or maybe it is just coming from getting too close to scary feelings. And all feelings are pretty scary to me, I'm realizing. The good feelings are scary because I don't trust them. The negative feelings are scary because they feel life threatening. All feelings give me uncomfortable physical reactions.

That last was a breakthrough realization while I was driving the other day. Lots of traffic. Got nervous about crazy drivers cutting me off too close. I was fine. I'm a good driver. But the physical reaction to that little bit of stress really set me off physically and the shaking and nausea and body movements kicked in. Took a lot to just breathe through them and get myself where I needed to be at a certain time. I did it, but it took a lot out of me.

The bodywork guy I used to work with told me early on that "trauma is sticky." This phrase has stayed with me; I think because it is so true. That's what triggers are. Trauma sticking to things that are not always truly threatening but feel threatening...sometimes for the most peripheral of reasons. Like stress from driving on the highway and navigating other cars driving dangerously.

 

[Pencil]

 

[Hope4Now]

I have had a roller-coastery kind of day. Internal freaking out, then fine. Hour to hour, sometimes 10-minutes to 10-minutes. The only potentially good thing about it in terms of my healing from all this mess is that I am vaguely aware that I am up to my old ways. This entry is sort of a random rant.

In the "fine" times I was just shutting off everything...busying myself with the various real and perceived crises of the day. By the time I got home from work, I knew I was exhausted, so I lay down on the bed. I'm trying to rest a lot because it seems to help relieve the pain a bit.

For 30 minutes, there were constant interruptions...phone ringing, husband and kids coming and going, expecting attention, dog demanding attention (hard to meditate or rest when a droopy-eyed 48-lb lap dog puts her nose about an inch from yours and stares at you waiting for you to open your eyes). I really need to figure out a way to find time when things are quiet. I've tried earphones with brown noise, but my proprioperception is so highly developed that I am still aware when people are moving in the hallway or walking through the room. And our doors don't close because the previous owners took off all the hardware to de-lead the house and then never put it back. And of course, we haven't replaced it because, god-forbid it not be historically accurate. And doing it "right" costs too much. So, can't close the doors.

Then things quieted down (they all gave up on me). But I couldn't quiet my own brain. Literally...just a quiet body and a manic brain. Tried everything to quiet the thinking...then tried to just accept the manic brain. That worked a tiny bit. Then it was dinnertime (my husband cooked yet again, and for that I am grateful!) Everyone emotional in weird ways tonight. Husband in one of his foul/angry/disappointed moods that always triggers me to try to fix whatever is bothering him. Usually it is something about the kids or about what we are doing in our lives. Son in super-happy talkative mode (love the new ADHD meds!). Daughter started in super-happy talkative mode that turned into a major meltdown at 9:30. And, of course, I am doing all of the interacting because for some reason the kids and their dad are not getting along well at all in these past few months. I have really upset the delicately-balanced apple cart of our lives with this PTSD stuff. It is becoming clearer all the time.

I find I am excruciatingly tuned in to their emotions. This isn't new. I don't think they are to mine (except the dog). But this isn't new either. It's just that now I care. I mean, they ask, "Are you OK?" and what am I going to say? Fundamentally, the answer for the past several months is always going to be "No." So, of course, I say, "Yes, fine." or "Kind of tired." and then go on with what needs to be done.

I think my husband has given up on talking to me about most of this stuff. I don't know why. I sense that he feels I have abandoned him in some way. So he withdraws or shuts down or just goes very very busy (out every night last week and through last night). He is deeply loving of me, I know, but he seems to be going through his own difficulties right now. Failed attempt to see a therapist and now he has given up. Have son connected with an okay therapist. Working on one for my daughter. I can't seem to find a good balance in between falling in to their stuff and just trying to shut out their stuff for my own self-preservation. I really need strategies for this. The only one I can think of right now is getting them all into therapy so that someone else besides me can be supportive of them/help them work through their own stuff.

I guess what it all comes down to is that I am feeling very, very lonely and abandoned by everyone today. Not only my family, but my boss, and the few people I count as close friends.

Today, my boss (who is really more my co-worker functionally, but technically my boss) told me something he did yesterday. I have worked together with him for 14 years and this was so uncharacteristic that just the fact he did it freaked me out. We/our program is in a pivotal situation at the moment, and he made a decision about the future direction without consulting me, then he layed it on the three women who work with/for us. They completely flipped out, apparently. Tears, anger, all of it. To his credit, I think he realized what a mistake he made and he backtracked and tried to remedy it. But it's not remedied, and today I had to meet with the co-workers and try to process all of it with them. It is a monumental mess. It was only later that I realized in all of this that my own job could be at stake. I was so focused on calming them down that I didn't even think of what in the world would happen to me. So I'm feeling very abandoned by him.

And...the pity party goes on and on. There are 3 people with whom I have shared my diagnosis and a little detail. Two are very old and dear friends. One is an old acquaintance, new friend. I have told all of them, as clearly as I am able (which isn't always very clearly), how much I really need their friendship and support...mostly by just staying connected via email/phone/getting together, etc. They have all disappeared on me. I have tried to reach out and am getting nothing. So, of course, I understand. I do...people are all busy and overwhelmed. I generally expect very little of people. But yesterday and today an odd thing happened. I suddenly realized that I was FEELING hurt and abandoned.

So, it took this long bit of writing for me to connect the dots. Maybe I am so overwhelmed and falling back into shut-up/shut-down/get busy mode and manic thinking mode because I am starting to feel things, things that are reminiscent of how I felt as a child. Hurt. Abandoned. Unloved. Expendable.

Sigh. Maybe I will try to sleep now.

 

[Hope4Now]

@Pencil, thank you. This is beautiful. I listened to it twice with no clue as to what it means, but that's okay. I felt the love and connection in it. Then I found a rough translation. I like the original! Thanks for thinking of me and sharing this piece.

I hope you are managing? I think of you often, and am always glad when I see one of your posts pop up.

 

[Pencil]

I'm SO glad you like it. I love both the original and the new one. The lyrics are hectically colloquial so a translation is extremely difficult, and now matter how sensitively done, much would still be lost.

Managing, thanks.

:hug:

 

[Echo]

Hi @Hope4Now - I've got myself into a similar situation. Really feeling utterly alone with no-one around - all too busy and I suspect in some cases avoiding me - with no-one to talk to except my therapist once a week (and I'm paying her, so it doesn't count - though, God knows is a major relief). Anyway, I suddenly realised, what with the distortion in my eating and a flashback to a room I don't remember, that I had gone back to the three days after I was born and the huge sense of abandonment or rather loneliness I felt then. Where is everyone?

My mother had a rough labour with me and I was born by forceps. She meanwhile was unconscious. Once I was born and before I met her, I was packed off to a ward with other babies for three days, the view then being that mothers needed to rest. I get the sense that I wasn't fed, but I don't know that and cannot now ask. Certainly I felt hungry and desperate with it. If I was fed, it was not by my mother. When I was introduced to her, I was met with anger. This I have now remembered as a major traumatic moment. No rush of love at any point. She had been fostered and then adopted and has real problems with attachment disorder, as far as I can see (my therapist corroborates this). She still expresses anger at the memory of her labour, and the time I "bit" (gummed) her when I was breast-feeding and then was too shocked to take the breast afterwards. My therapist thinks she has mental problems. Anyway, whilst I have great compassion for her awful childhood, her ongoing need to offload onto me all her hurt feelings around this, on and on into my fifties, is in large part the cause of my original CPTSD anxiety and trauma. So that expressing my needs is associated with rejection and, most prominently of all, anger from the Other.

I wonder if you have similar experiences whereby expressing, and, indeed, even FEELING your own needs is dangerous. I have had similar conversations to you with girlfriends, and although I feel I have not demanded anything from them, and probably haven't even explained myself properly in respect of my needs, I wonder whether my rampant apologies and general fear of voicing them, has come across in a pretty chewed-up kind of way. I have generally said that I'd like to do gentle, fun things with nice, gentle people, meaning them. Maybe they think me too demanding in saying this, but I suspect, more likely, they just haven't heard what I need because I just don't actually know what it is and how to say it. That coupled with the fact that I seem to have surrounded myself with people who love it when I am there for them, ad infinitum, in detail, for hours, and love me being their social secretary (which I can no longer do), but actually have nothing to give me in return (AND I HADN'T NOTICED BEFORE - typical - too busy catering to others' needs to notice my own were never being met - just like you in the work scenario).

 

[Hope4Now]

@Echo, thank you for sharing this with me today. I'm really really needing connection.

Your relationship with your mother from such a young age seems so fraught with unmet needs. I am sorry. I understand to some extent. I think my abandonment issues go back to birth and the months until I was adopted. And, to be mothered by someone with mental illness is, well, stressful to say the least. No wonder we have cptsd. Just that alone--the unpredictability of response, the chaos because they can't generate a consistently safe place for us to grow and develop--causes problems. Then you layer on all the things they DO (versus don't do) and it's a recipe for creating people like us.

no-one to talk to except my therapist once a week (and I'm paying her, so it doesn't count - though, God knows is a major relief).

Yup. I feel utterly alone right now (with the exception of the raging babel of "voices" in my head. My therapist is currently my lifeline. And I feel the same way...somehow it doesn't count when you pay them to be that. I've moved to twice a week seeing him and that is really helping. I'm trying to get over the "pay for loving attention" thing. I wrote a lot about my therapy hangups in my paper journal--it was actually quite enlightening and continues to help me feel actually, genuinely cared for by my therapist even beyond the job thing. Sometimes I wish I could see him 5 times a week until I can get better at all this emotional stuff. I think, at 50, I need some really good parenting. He's trying to help me do it for myself, and that's good, but I'm not feeling like the foundation is there. I don't know how to build that. I don't even really know what I mean. Maybe it just happens magically through the therapy itself.

whilst I have great compassion for her awful childhood, her ongoing need to offload onto me all her hurt feelings around this, on and on into my fifties, is in large part the cause of my original CPTSD anxiety and trauma. So that expressing my needs is associated with rejection and, most prominently of all, anger from the Other.

Yes yes. When I really focus on it (lovingkindness meditation etc.) I can feel real compassion for my mother. I have to be careful though, because then I end up completely blaming myself for my own situation. That's a tough one to balance. My mother continues to offload and gaslight and complain etc. She is completely unaware of it and continues to do it even when I am able to make quite reasonable and emphatic demands to change the subject etc. She is a constant, if unwitting, trigger for me, even though, intellectually, I see what's happening and understand it. I guess I still just process emotionally it like a child.

Expressing my needs or feelings feels very very dangerous. It did as a kid and it continues to feel so. Rejection, shame, guilt for making others unhappy by my feelings and needs in some way, etc. Then I usually turn it all back on myself...I am to blame for my own abandonment and shame. I built some superpower shields a long time ago. I guess I always thought I could let them down at some point in my life and that everything would be okay. But they got stuck in the locked position. In fact, they've been locked up for so long that even if I recognize them, they're pretty faint/blunted. Guess you call it emotional numbness.

expressing, and, indeed, even FEELING your own needs is dangerous

Yes. I don't seem to be able to cry. Certainly not in front of other people. Rarely by myself. This is an issue because I have felt like I've wanted to cry for the past 48 hours. It's just all locked up in there because it feels dangerous to have feelings. My therapist knows this...I'm not really sure how because we haven't talked about it. Maybe it is just glaringly obvious to the practised eye. I have this terrible fear and anxiety that arises when I feel like I'm going to cry. That's quickly followed by nasty "voices" in my head about how I should suck it up, others have it worse, don't be a baby...etc. Then I need to run away and be alone (of course right at the very time when what I really need is a safe shoulder and comforting arm around me so maybe I CAN cry).

I suspect, more likely, they just haven't heard what I need because I just don't actually know what it is and how to say it.

I am the same way. Nobody really knows what's going on with me in any deep way except my therapist and anyone reading my stuff on this forum (although my writing is pretty random...unedited and all over the place according to whatever's going on in my head at the moment). I don't really know what I want or need. This is a big problem. I used to know better, but then I subsumed it all to marriage and family and work...all the must dos and should dos. I do need to figure out what I want and need. I know I need to be able to express it to myself first--but that in itself is terrifying and shameful. What right do I have to have wants and needs? I need to figure it out, to feel it, though, if I am ever to have a prayer of expressing it to others. Writing and reading on this forum has actually helped a lot. There are some things I KNOW I need that I simply cannot bring myself to ask for. There are some things I KNOW I want that I can't yet figure out how to ask for or get for myself. But those are just the tip of the iceberg.

I have no idea, really, how to manage a friendship that gets to deeper levels. I have moments when it happens, but then the people seem to disappear. Then I feel like it's my fault. But I don't know what I did, other than to just try to show some of myself in a vulnerable way. My therapist thinks, from what I've told him, that doing this is a bit of a surprise to others, because I come off to most of the world as a calm, well-put-together, articulate, successful person. The gaping hole between what's outside and what's inside is pretty shocking actually. The few friends with whom I've shared some things, and even my husband, are (I think) stunned. I guess they thought they knew me when they only knew part of me. Maybe it just takes getting used to.

I wonder whether my rampant apologies and general fear of voicing them, has come across in a pretty chewed-up kind of way. I have generally said that I'd like to do gentle, fun things with nice, gentle people, meaning them. Maybe they think me too demanding in saying this,

What do you say? I don't even know. I know how to hang out with people socially...I am well-practiced in the motions. But rarely is it fulfilling in a deep/emotional/supportive way. It's just empty. It makes me feel like an alien with needs that are a complete mismatch with the rest of humanity.

uh oh. got to go. I am trying out a chronic pain management group today and I'm going to be LATE. I hate being LATE! (That's one of my toxic parts too).

 

[Pencil]

Yup. I feel utterly alone right now (with the exception of the raging babel of "voices" in my head. My therapist is currently my lifeline.

You are blessed. I don't have a therapist, and there are times (quite often) that I start feeling panicky because I am so isolated. I have to ignore it or push it away or I start feeling as if I'm drowning. This is the main reason I'm not on here often. It may sound odd, but I found that when I posted on the forum - especially on my diary - at those times when I felt really lonely and really needed to feel understood, I easily felt worse when someone responded in a way that made me think they didn't get what I was trying to say. And the idea of therapy scares the hell out me. I make no sense even to myself.

 

[Hope4Now]

@Pencil Therapy still scares the hell out of me and it has been almost six months. Until about two months ago I ONLY went because it was the last resort to get rid of this chronic pain. I am still wildly anxious and scared when I go. But it is helping me, as miserable as it is to start to feel like I can maybe just a little trust someone else to listen and be caring and supportive and not feel judged or rejected or ignored or belittled or fill in the blank with your childhood experience.

I was vey lucky to find a really good guy on my first try at therapy. Many years ago, I went to 3 or 4 over a period of months and then gave up. I wish I hadn't.

I am sorry you do not have a trauma therapist. Or even another kind of therapist...body worker, yoga therapist, etc. it is deathly frightening but really helpful to know that there is at least one person there.

I am not getting all I need for sure. But I'm getting something. It is hard to digest but it is keeping me alive (or making me come alive...which is sort of miserable and complicated and suffery).

For people like you and me who need physical connection, the forum can feel lonely if it is your only therapeutic connection. I understand that. Have you thought about (and do you have the resources for) cranial-sacral therapy? Or reiki? You don't have to talk in either of them if you don't want to and they are extremely gentle touch-based therapies. I think these and massage helped me with being able to manage psychotherapy.

I'm sorry you are feeling isolated and lonely. If I could open my real arms to you and invite you in, I would. The best I can do is to wish you the feeling of that comfort.

 

[Pencil]

I have attachment issues, as well as zero finances. Thank you for your last statement, it means a lot to me (and makes me weepy).