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hello dazed and confused. welcome to the forum. sorry for what brings you here, but glad you are here. i'll add my voice to @Sideways' choir. the amends will be a long haul affair. be gentle with all parties involved and patient with the process. i hope you can congratulate yourself for being...

for my psycho nickel, paranoia is part and parcel of hypervigilance. without the paranoia i would have useful, healthy vigilance to warn me of the clear and present dangers of life i could easily let go when the danger has passed and/or trust the precautions i have already taken.

hello ezrats. congratulations on having found the community you were looking for. i, personally, am too people phobic to have any cult experience, but i can certainly relate to the symptoms it has generated. seems to me that many, many ptsd symptoms translate between sufferers, regardless of the...

personally, i believe that ageism is as intelligent as racism. it's all in the surface details, folks. be sure you judge your books by their cover. don't weigh yourself down with pesky details like diversity and individuality. life is so much simpler when you keep it delusional and shallow.

over the decades of recovery, i have become pretty casual in talking about ^it^, but i still guard anonymity jealously, both for myself and my sibs-in-healing. even with my casual approach, knowing my sharing will not hit the grapevine frees the flow mightily. there is a fine and fuzzy line...

this approach tied some gnarly psycho snot knots in my own psyche. the things i most want to disprove seem to be the ones which haunt me the hardest, whether i choose to believe in ^it^ or keep tooling along in abject denial. not believing in my own inner demons only seems to give them more room...

hello gazi. welcome to the forum. sorry for what brings you here but glad you are here. personally, i don't believe peace is an all or nothing, either/or state of being. like all the other emotions in the human repertoire, it comes and goes. that worn out old cliche, "this, too, shall pass"...

hello looking. welcome to the forum. ptsd **is** an anxiety disorder. i think of it as the big kahuna of anxiety disorders. by whatever classification or definition, you are not alone. welcome aboard.

methinks i have two distinct styles of holding back. 1) fear of failure 2) reality checks on how much i can expect of myself. i let wants and wishes be part of that reality check. i get more out of an endeavor when my heart is in it. then we get to the superwoman syndrome which motivates me to...

joyful noise is my passion. birdsong gets my vote as the most joyful noise on the planet. whether i'm just going to bed, just getting up or just rolling over, i like to be alert and listening for the morning bird concert which happens every dawn here in the subtropics. even on the dreary, stormy...

i'm 69 and hoping i can enter my 70's feeling like an adult. . . just hoping, though i am not hoping as fervently as i did when i was entering my 30's. these days i'm wondering if it might be true that life is not a race to be won or lost. maybe life is just a journey to be enjoyed, should we...

i'll guess that depends entirely on the child. as @Sideways said, the range is extensive. on the generic child generalization, children learn what they live. at the very least, they learn both ends of the mechanics of gaslighting long before they learn words for ^it^. monkey see, monkey do.

it often helps me to separate my feelings from my facts. facts don't change, regardless of how i feel about them. not being able to feel my place in the universe doesn't change the fact that i have one. feelings are like a running river. they change constantly and i can feel more than one way...

i agree with my drinking buddy, willie shakespeare on this score. "there is nothing in life either good nor bad. 'tis the thinking which makes it so." everything in life cuts both ways. when this particular phenom leads to more flashbacks, et al, i take it as a marker that more healing is needed...

maybe it's a byproduct of my advanced years, but i'm not sure it is possible to lose my small place in the universe. that universe feels considerably bigger than my humble estate. my place in the universe is a journey far more than a thing collection. attempted humor alert life is like a roll...

"humbling" is a psycho snot knot which i still grapple on this score. when i have had the opportunity to watch and learn from people who are GOOD at asking for help, there is nothing humbling in their approach. not being able to do every job in the world is not humbling to them. just a fact of...

to my conditioned senses, asking for help is a brass ovaries confession of guilt. that childhood conditioning was administered by judges and juries who solidly believed in cruel and unusual punishment --for my own good, of course. more than half a century later, part of me still believes i am...

in my strictly personal psycho cauldron, i attribute this bizarre little dichotomy to a natural craving for familiarity. kinda like the controversial axiom that we don't naturally crave what is good for us. we crave what feels like home. something like the abused animal who will bite the rescuer...

hello skywalker. welcome to the forum. sorry for what brings you here, but glad you are here. gentle empathy on the difficulty of parenting children while under the influence of mental illness. i often envy the siblings who can blame self-medications, such as drugs, religion, alcohol, etc., but...

hello ocean spray. welcome to the forum. sorry for what brings you here, but glad you are here. i debated with myself whether to post this response here or in the "feeling like a sham" post. way back in the 70's/80's i received formal therapy for "the imposter syndrome." i just did a little...

hello coldfusion. welcome to the forum. i'm no fan of advice-giving, but i will share my strictly personal experience from 43 years of this very cycle. my hubs is too perfect for therapy, but those unresolved trigger events have solidly permeated out 43 years together. yes, dear, your...

i am gonna go grammar nazi on you and state that the act of excusing is in the receiver court. i give you my reasons. you may excuse them however you wish, by whatever name gets **my** life working in **your** head. there are a great many people in my life, both socially distant and closer than...

for me, that feeling of being a bother is directly connected to my perfectionism. i am a bother if my contribution to the convo isn't perfect. according to my perfectionism, perfect people don't have problems. electric lights are one of my meaner psych triggers. child pornography and gang rape...

hello labgnome. welcome to the forum. is it tacky of me to hope you don't figure out how to delete this post? on my own recovery road, it remains a reflex for me to regret any and all attempts to reach out for help. admitting that i haven't met my perfection quotas remains a reflexive shame to...

hello evie. welcome to the forum. sorry for what brings you here, but glad you are here. differing opinions is one of the stronger and more consistent threads in my own case, most especially as a ptsd sufferer who started psychotherapy while combat ptsd was still being called, "shell shock." in...