that_1_girl
Confident
Hi everyone. Get ready for the new girl CPTSD brain dump, ADHD nonstop word vomit style. I am sorry if this is way too much. I’m terrible at intros.
I'm cisfemale (she/her) I have been asexual for the past 7 years due to a lot of childhood/adolescent trauma starting to come to light in my 30’s but before that I had a lot of unexplained trouble with romantic relationships and none lasted even a full 2 years. I was not in touch with my trauma and thought I just always picked people who were unattracted to me or that I was shameful and repulsive, and never realized until much later that the common denominator was ME and my extreme aversion to physical intimacy.
So that’s my adulthood, or part of it. Childhood was really not that bad (or so I thought), I was bullied in school and at home a lot (verbally, not physically) and my parents used food and force feeding as a method of abuse, but that was really the extent of my negative childhood memories for a very long time. I didn’t really consider myself an abused child until I was about 15. Most of the emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse I went through from age 2 - 18, I either didn’t remember or only remembered in horrific nightmares that started after I was sexually assaulted for the first time at 3 by a friend’s father. When I was 2 or 2 1/2 my mother started treating me as her confidante. By the time I was in kindergarten I was being regularly sexually abused by the therapist who my parents hired to help me after I mysteriously developed severe separation anxiety and nightmares/night terrors at the age of 3. I was in “therapy” with him for about a decade total but I took a break in fifth and sixth grade. I idealized my abuser and my parents because I was psychologically conditioned to. There was a strict family narrative that we were a healthy happy family, the very happiest family in town. I was alone for much of my childhood or felt alone at least because of the bullying and because I was an only child. I always looked to adults to be friends and support people because other kids didn’t like me and basically at home there were no other kids. That looking constantly to adults got me into a lot of trouble. I continued to struggle with anxiety from the age of 3 onward, which led to more and worse diagnoses in adolescence.
So I grew up and went away to college and became an expert self medicator. Struggled emotionally all through college Was diagnosed with psychosis shortly after college and was heavily medicated and frequently hospitalized for 13 years. 2 years ago I got new treatment providers and the diagnoses became CPTSD and ADHD. I’m now tapering off my antipsychotic and it is revealing a depth of anger, shame, and self hatred, and severe complex trauma and dissociative symptoms that I never knew were there. Actually it is starting to seem like it was the dissociative symptoms that fueled the schizophrenia misdiagnosis all along, which would explain why none of the meds helped and I continued getting worse and worse and needing to be more and more heavily sedated to be “manageable”.
Let me be clear: I am NOT psychotic and never was, except possibly briefly when I mixed recreational substances and psych meds. I was highly dissociative and had no language for it and the type of dissociation I experience (severe DP/DR with dissociative “parts”) can really make you feel like you’re watching yourself lose your mind. Unfortunately most of the treatment providers I have had in my entire 34 years of therapy have been ineffective if not overtly abusive either sexually (as a child) or psychologically and emotionally (as a teen and adult). Three different family therapists sat back and allowed my parents to scapegoat me and psychologically abuse me in front of them. And I allowed it because being conditioned from such a young age to idealize my parents and abusers, I just thought that was what family therapy was. Two of my individual therapists in my 20s and early 30s were overtly psychologically abusive and controlling of my thoughts and behavior, and refused to even consider the idea that I had been abused as a child/adolescent/into adulthood. I had many friends tell me they were harming me/not helping me and to get out of those situations but by then I just thought therapy was supposed to make you feel terrible (and they had both won my trust before becoming abusive) so I allowed myself to be coaxed back into trusting them on the few occasions I tried to leave. I didn’t actually leave the last one until he told me I had to go because he could not help me if I did not want to be helped. I left and found my own providers for the first time (instead of my parents finding them for me) at 34 or 35. I found support at a very affirming church among other places and actually found enough support to learn how to think for myself for the first time ever. There is still some financial control going on by my parents and it isn’t entirely cool, but I now have a wonderful team of 40-something-year-old female providers who are within 6-7 years of my own age and treat me like an intelligent human female who has an intense trauma history and who is the expert on my own self. I have been in regular talk therapy that actually helps for 2 1/2 years and effective trauma therapy on and off for 2 years. I’m at a crisis point right now with the med change and the severity of the dissociative symptoms and trauma symptoms. I’ll be around for a week or two at a minimum and then hopefully I’ll be getting into a complex trauma inpatient program for a month or so. I’m hoping to be in decent shape to go back to my regular life by September, but who knows.
I'm cisfemale (she/her) I have been asexual for the past 7 years due to a lot of childhood/adolescent trauma starting to come to light in my 30’s but before that I had a lot of unexplained trouble with romantic relationships and none lasted even a full 2 years. I was not in touch with my trauma and thought I just always picked people who were unattracted to me or that I was shameful and repulsive, and never realized until much later that the common denominator was ME and my extreme aversion to physical intimacy.
So that’s my adulthood, or part of it. Childhood was really not that bad (or so I thought), I was bullied in school and at home a lot (verbally, not physically) and my parents used food and force feeding as a method of abuse, but that was really the extent of my negative childhood memories for a very long time. I didn’t really consider myself an abused child until I was about 15. Most of the emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse I went through from age 2 - 18, I either didn’t remember or only remembered in horrific nightmares that started after I was sexually assaulted for the first time at 3 by a friend’s father. When I was 2 or 2 1/2 my mother started treating me as her confidante. By the time I was in kindergarten I was being regularly sexually abused by the therapist who my parents hired to help me after I mysteriously developed severe separation anxiety and nightmares/night terrors at the age of 3. I was in “therapy” with him for about a decade total but I took a break in fifth and sixth grade. I idealized my abuser and my parents because I was psychologically conditioned to. There was a strict family narrative that we were a healthy happy family, the very happiest family in town. I was alone for much of my childhood or felt alone at least because of the bullying and because I was an only child. I always looked to adults to be friends and support people because other kids didn’t like me and basically at home there were no other kids. That looking constantly to adults got me into a lot of trouble. I continued to struggle with anxiety from the age of 3 onward, which led to more and worse diagnoses in adolescence.
So I grew up and went away to college and became an expert self medicator. Struggled emotionally all through college Was diagnosed with psychosis shortly after college and was heavily medicated and frequently hospitalized for 13 years. 2 years ago I got new treatment providers and the diagnoses became CPTSD and ADHD. I’m now tapering off my antipsychotic and it is revealing a depth of anger, shame, and self hatred, and severe complex trauma and dissociative symptoms that I never knew were there. Actually it is starting to seem like it was the dissociative symptoms that fueled the schizophrenia misdiagnosis all along, which would explain why none of the meds helped and I continued getting worse and worse and needing to be more and more heavily sedated to be “manageable”.
Let me be clear: I am NOT psychotic and never was, except possibly briefly when I mixed recreational substances and psych meds. I was highly dissociative and had no language for it and the type of dissociation I experience (severe DP/DR with dissociative “parts”) can really make you feel like you’re watching yourself lose your mind. Unfortunately most of the treatment providers I have had in my entire 34 years of therapy have been ineffective if not overtly abusive either sexually (as a child) or psychologically and emotionally (as a teen and adult). Three different family therapists sat back and allowed my parents to scapegoat me and psychologically abuse me in front of them. And I allowed it because being conditioned from such a young age to idealize my parents and abusers, I just thought that was what family therapy was. Two of my individual therapists in my 20s and early 30s were overtly psychologically abusive and controlling of my thoughts and behavior, and refused to even consider the idea that I had been abused as a child/adolescent/into adulthood. I had many friends tell me they were harming me/not helping me and to get out of those situations but by then I just thought therapy was supposed to make you feel terrible (and they had both won my trust before becoming abusive) so I allowed myself to be coaxed back into trusting them on the few occasions I tried to leave. I didn’t actually leave the last one until he told me I had to go because he could not help me if I did not want to be helped. I left and found my own providers for the first time (instead of my parents finding them for me) at 34 or 35. I found support at a very affirming church among other places and actually found enough support to learn how to think for myself for the first time ever. There is still some financial control going on by my parents and it isn’t entirely cool, but I now have a wonderful team of 40-something-year-old female providers who are within 6-7 years of my own age and treat me like an intelligent human female who has an intense trauma history and who is the expert on my own self. I have been in regular talk therapy that actually helps for 2 1/2 years and effective trauma therapy on and off for 2 years. I’m at a crisis point right now with the med change and the severity of the dissociative symptoms and trauma symptoms. I’ll be around for a week or two at a minimum and then hopefully I’ll be getting into a complex trauma inpatient program for a month or so. I’m hoping to be in decent shape to go back to my regular life by September, but who knows.
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