Repeated Trauma When You Can't Do Anything?

[Sunset]

My trouble at this point...I've had repeated instances of trauma, and in all but one case when I went back over there was nothing I could have reasonably done to avoid it. I've gone over the situation with experts, everything, and it just keeps coming back, I did the best I could and I still ended up in traumatic situations.

At this point I'm just terrified. It seems like I end up trapped with abusers just for trying to be on my own. They're not generally people I really chose to be in my life, but people who ended up there because of circumstances...doctors, landlords, that sort of thing. And I can't just not live anywhere and never go to the doctor.

But I don't know how to handle this. I feel like I have to be on super high alert. I've done therapy and they try to tell me things are safe and I don't need to do that, but in my experience life isn't, generally, safe, and you spend as much time running and hiding and trying to cope with abusers as anything else.

At this point I'm asking...where do I go from here?

 

[darrenS]

from what i can understand , stepping into repeated traumas is a sign of c-ptsd. I have the same problem and when im at my most vulnerable i tend to draw the most questionable people around me. People that tend to either be violent or abusive or dangerous or all three. Only recently i traumatized myself with bad choices in people and it nearly ended up costing me my life. I have a battle with continually walking back into danger, at first i thought i was just an adrenaline junkie but later came to realize it was far more serious.

One of the characteristics of C-PTSD is its complexity - due to childhood abuse and neglect and trauma many kids grow up lacking certain social skills and awareness's. one of those is being unable to truly identify danger, this leads to many different problems later on. You may also be walking back into danger in the subconscious belief that if you can get control of it , you will have succeeded in controlling a fear or particular type of abuser.

Im amazed that many professionals can not see this.
And once you have an awareness you actually do this, then all you can do is proceed carefully. I am learning to put certain skills in place, that allow me the time and space to think about my interactions with people i dont know very well. I also observe actions more than words, and try my hardest to stay in contact with my true instincts, rather than ones cultivated from fear and simply take my time with everyone. Its really not that hard to identify a dangerous person or abuser , what is hard is listening to ourselves and our own warning signals , identify our own weaknesses that leads us there in the first place.

 

[Sunset]

The trouble I'm having is not with identifying them - I'm identifying them just fine. It's just that there's almost no time from meeting the abuser to having them entrenched in your life. Most of these cases I'm getting at most one conversation, if that. More likely they just sort of come with a situation and you don't even get to meet the person before the abuse starts. They just come with renting a property or taking a job or going to school.

The trouble I'm having is most of these people, because they're not social relationships, things basically go straight from "I know nothing about this person" to "I'm trapped in an abusive situation". We're talking largely legal or financial relationships. In one particular case I hadn't even met the abuser beforehand; he had everything set up to keep me trapped and under control by the time I had my first conversation with him.

And that's my struggle. We're talking situations where quite literally my first encounter with a person might be "you'd better do what I say or I'm going to kick you out of school/hurt you or your cat/have you locked up." It's no help being able to identify bad people because by the time you have anything more than a name and a face it's already too late.

 

[Deleted member 28702]

I know exactly how you feel, Sunset. It's like every human interaction goes from zero to EXTREME DANGER in a very short time. I no longer cultivate new relationships and I do not interact with straight men at all. I now characterize my necessary human interactions as one of two things. 1. They are trying to kill me or 2. They will eventually try to kill me. I wish I could offer advice, but all I can do is commiserate.

 

[Justmehere]

I did the best I could and I still ended up in traumatic situations.

This is true of almost all trauma that most everyone has survived. Most everyone has done the best they could with what they had, and trauma still happened.

At this point I'm just terrified.

Part of this is the common hypervigalence that comes with PTSD.

I've done therapy and they try to tell me things are safe and I don't need to do that, but in my experience life isn't, generally, safe, and you spend as much time running and hiding and trying to cope with abusers as anything else.

At this point I'm asking...where do I go from here?

What is your goal in therapy or when you have spoken to these experts?

I suggest fining a good trauma therapist who can help process some of the trauma's effects through EMDR or somatic experiencing or exposure therapy. Being able to choose when to be hypervigalent and when not to be, instead of always being hypervigalent, this will actually increase your safety and options. Will you ever be 100% safe in life or 100% able to reduce all possibility of trauma in the future? no. If that is the goal of therapy, it's probably never going to work. Same if the only goal of therapy is to try and figure out what could have been done differently in the past or for the therapist to convince you that you are safe now. Can you be safer and still also live a fuller life? yes.

 

[darrenS]

i understand , then its still the same rules in a lot of ways , just because they are offering a service does not mean they can be trusted , or by the same token, because they are business people does not mean they are not abusers. In fact in dealing with the daily life things like this can be even more frustrating, firstly because like anything, you must read the fine print, state your business wants and needs clearly and also ensure you not settle if at all possible with the first person you meet.

I have done business for many years , and one thing lve learnt, is research, both on their character and their business. Some individuals operate a business successfully because they are able to hide their pathological bents in their practices. In this respect you have to be even more cautious, and never give a business person power to be able to screw you , because the chances are they will. Some are as cold as ice and will happily remove you from all of life's necessities, money, employment, assets and will do so with the full weight of the law.

It sounds like you need to find out what you have to protect, how to protect it and most importantly how to assert yourself in the process of protecting it. I would take every step possible, but at the same time keep it simple. Treat all business people like sharks, their primary intent is profit and for some it is also power - until such time as they have shown through their actions that they are working with you towards the same goals, keep your guard well up and even when you've established a rapport, remember its business not personal.

 

[Sunset]

The abuser I mentioned, the one that had me trapped on the first time I met him? Therapist. I can't do therapy until I can feel safe enough that the therapist can't tell anyone at all that I'm a danger to myself or others, because them being able to say that is too much power and means they can abuse me. I've tried, but I just can't trust them enough to do anything, I can't be honest because I'm terrified of that happening again. Where someone uses the threat of forced treatment to ensure compliance, putting things that aren't true in my file and saying I said and did things in therapy I never did...or worse, putting a spin on things so innocent stuff looks like major symptoms.

In this respect you have to be even more cautious, and never give a business person power to be able to screw you , because the chances are they will.

The trouble for me here is "power to screw you" seems to be as little as signing a lease, or taking a job, or trying to get an education. Things that can't really be avoided, at least not without seriously limiting your life options. I was financially protected, but the trouble is financial protections don't help when you find someone for whom it is personal. So like with the landlord, I took all the proper financial precautions - but that didn't help when I turned out to be trapped in a lease with a sexual predator who lived right next door and could hear my shower (duplex).

 

[Seasounds]

A few thoughts come to mind:

• I know this may sound 'new age', but through mindfulness practice, mentioned above, I changed and you can shift the energy you give off. Also, you'll be able to choose your response to abusers, so as to protect yourself without aggravating them.
• There is a time that I reached, where I literally felt like I wanted to change the frequency of people that I engaged. Daily meditation/mindfulness, learning and practicing non-violent communication (google for info), dealing with and expressing my anger, and reminding myself that, even though it may not appear this way, everyone is doing the best they can do. And within that, you can peacefully choose and move out of the center, of abuse; empowerment, without the shame, guilt and blame game (on anyone).
• Give yourself time; with your mindfulness practice, the shift you want will change, as will your friends and daily acquaintances. It is like changing the radio station you tune into.

 

[Justmehere]

There are ways to get out of leases if the unit is too dangerous to inhabit. An attorney would be the best to advise you in such circumstances. Are you living next door to the predator now? If so, have you contacted law enforcement?

It sounds like you feel like no one can help you stay safe, not even you. Like there is not enough that you or anyone can do to make enough risk go away.

When we can't change the danger around us, we can still fortify ourselves and become as mentally and physically strong as possible to endure and live - and keep the bastards from totally winning ;) Doing things like mindfulness, like @change suggested, really helps do just that.

It sounds like you want the world to be a much safer place, and I would like that for myself too! All we can control is ourselves, and that is a hard reality to grasp and deal with in a world where there is great danger at times. :hug: So what to do when we can't change the danger around us? Become as strong as we can to get through, because love is truly worth living and we can build good things into our lives.

It also means learning to grieve what has been lost and what we can't control. I hate this part and struggle with it deeply myself.

 

[Sunset]

Not living there now, though it took me quite some time to get out. Contacted law enforcement, which really served only to make the situation much more dangerous for me. He was very careful to cover his tracks, even setting up plots to make it look like I was vengeful and out to get him. He would do things like stage photographs of problems in the house and then use them as excuses why he needed to check up on the property.

@Justmehere , that's sort of how I feel. Like the problem is I've experienced a lot of unsafe situations, and there wasn't much I could do to change them. Often it seems that I was forced to choose between options that were all unsafe. So I'm sort of asking, how do you keep these sorts of situations from just taking your life apart when they happen?

 

[joeylittle]

So I'm sort of asking, how do you keep these sorts of situations from just taking your life apart when they happen?

CBT is really good for that. So is DBT. You can start teaching yourself the skills through various online resources, books, or even webinars (search for things like "credit hours LCSW", "CBT certification", stuff like that.). I think @Justmehere is right on the money about how we can all end up with a way overdeveloped sense of hypervigilance, and it's very easy for that to link itself to paranoid reasoning - which will be paralyzing, really debilitating. Sometimes when I read your posts it sounds to me like you perceive yourself as being trapped in a minefield, where abusers are waiting for you underneath every step you take.

I do believe that we can passively attract a certain kind of abusive personality into our orbit (I think that's where the CPTSD piece that @darrenS is talking about comes in), but we also really need to examine how we ourselves create our own pitfalls - and once you start to really see how easy it is to make a pitfall for yourself, it becomes just as easy to avoid that pitfall - even, to make it disappear altogether.

 

[Sunset]

That's one of the things for me though. I feel like...I feel like my life is so unbelievable to most people that I can't trust what people say as paranoid or whatever. I feel like I've basically tried to work on cognitive distortions right into being abused again, because what I'm being told is reasonable and rational doesn't match up with what I've actually experienced.

Basically, the trouble I'm having is I'm getting exactly the same feedback to situations where I'm just overreacting, and to bad situations that people around me aren't seeing. And I can't really do much with that. All it ends up doing is looking like the "rational" way to be is in denial, because to be quite honest that's how most people in my life have reacted - the most common reaction to my actual experiences is disbelief and being told things like that don't happen, or that there must have been something to do (usually something I did do that didn't help).

If I told you 8 years ago that even half of what I've been through was even remotely likely, you'd say I was paranoid and catastrophizing and all those cognitive distortions. I've seen that happen in therapy even - my life experience is impossible to them. I understand intellectually what the cognitive distortions are, but what no one seems able to tell me is what is going on. What the difference is between a cognitive distortion and what's happened with every single major trauma for me, which was that I was the only one who saw that it was a bad situation until way later - they can't answer that.