a new memory (maybe)

[sidptitala]

I just realised that I don't know my times tables because I was always in a trance for years of childhood.

I knew how to read before the fog descended - which it did, suddenly. When I was about 4 or 5. Not sure what if anything I learned between the age of 5 and 10 because i remember very little about then. Just always being in trouble for being spaced out.

 

[sidptitala]

I am avoiding so much today. I am supposed to get these series of letters together for my mom.

I'll see her this week and tell her not to call me on Christmas. Because I can't trust her not to pass him the phone again. I think maybe it's better to verbally say this but I'm worried I'll chicken out if I don't write it down.

Therapist last week called her reaction blaming me. And it made me realise it was. She blamed me for his violence.

This week I hope to tell the therapist that I'm reasonably sure he sexually abused me. Which is context I am not ready to discuss with my family, given how unhelpful their reaction to his violence has been. But it's important context.

I felt shame last time when I had to admit I have not always been working and functioning. I've done really intense things and burned out, over and over again. I've been so scared of men and authorities that it blinded me. She's going to ask me about this but I'm scared to talk about it. It feels too close and too painful.

I've always lost control of myself. One of the things that makes it happen is contact with him. Looking at him. His face. His hands, his fingers, his back, his footstep, his voice. Hearing him, seeing him, has always been hard. I've always gone into the floppy trace once any of these things pop up. It was the trance for so long before. The trance kept me asleep for months. Not working, not studying, nothing.

It feels worse now because when I have to see him the things I see are the flashback things. It's so undeniably him. He way he walks, prances, sits, smirks, whatever he does. It´s him. He is in my face and my sisters hands.

Being around him is worse now but was always bad.

I'm barely holding back the worst things. A lot of it is disembodied and fragments. Pictures without links and I don't want the links because I don't want more pictures.

I don't want feelings most of all. I don't want to feel those feelings I felt when I was being crucified

 

[sidptitala]

I feel so exhausted by people. Need a break from other people's thoughts and feelings. I seem to be accumulating people who depend on me for guidance and I myself don't get that anywhere.

I'm overworking as a form of avoidance. That's not helping with the sense of burden.

Kind of dreading Christmas but kind of looking forward to being alone for a day and really taking a day off from other people's thoughts and feelings. Feel like I need to do that.

 

[Midnightmoon]

I feel so exhausted by people. Need a break from other people's thoughts and feelings. I seem to be accumulating people who depend on me for guidance and I myself don't get that anywhere.

I'm overworking as a form of avoidance. That's not helping with the sense of burden.

Kind of dreading Christmas but kind of looking forward to being alone for a day and really taking a day off from other people's thoughts and feelings. Feel like I need to do that.

Before I became disabled this was completely me, really really recognise this feeling of giving and giving but there's nothing coming back abs work spiraling. It's exhausting . Can you lean on new T for a little bit of support?

 

[sidptitala]

Can you lean on new T for a little bit of support?

Thanks for this suggestion, she is off for Christmas for the next few weeks. I am really going to try and seek support from other places for myself in the new year though. I can see that things are unsustainable as they are.

 

[sidptitala]

A lot of things in my life are ending.

My relationship. My friendships are drifting from each other and from me.

My housing situation, the house is being sold.

My role in my family and potentially relationship with them at all.

My colleague I am most close to.

And this year being a student will end for definite.

Some times I can't stop crying. Other times my 'going on with normal life self' is just taking over and doing what needs to be done.

There is and has been so much pain in my life. I can't afford to feel it all.

I lost hope, that's the worst thing. I lost hope life can get better.

What I really crave is support. It's so hard to ask for that though, because for me in the past it made things worse to talk. I was abandoned or hurt again instead of supported.

 

[sidptitala]

There's no point being in a relationship if I'm not spoken to gently. If she lashes out and doesn't apologise, but expects me to forget and gets mad I ask her to reassure me she won't again. If we can't talk about my feelings. If I'm not allowed to say no to her.

She's behaving like an antichrist. It's not always like this. But I can't count on her not to be.

I would need signs she's over this to start investing hope in the relationship again. She badly needs therapy herself. I think I'm enabling her not going. The price of that is how much I have withdrawn from her and grown towards places where I do feel safe and liked.

 

[parrotthepolly]

There's no point being in a relationship if I'm not spoken to gently. If she lashes out and doesn't apologise, but expects me to forget and gets mad I ask her to reassure me she won't again. If we can't talk about my feelings. If I'm not allowed to say no to her.

That's right, especially if she's lashing out at small things and not apologising?
And not being able to talk about about how you feel or say no?

There must be something deeper going on if it haven't always been like that ...

 

[sidptitala]

Life has been such a rollercoaster.

Breaking up, being half relieved and half sad. Then not breaking up. Don't know how to feel.

Losing house and probably going to lose job as well. I hope not at the same time (it's looking likely).

A year from now I could be a homeowner with a stable job. I could be unemployed and homeless. Which one is not my choice and not in my hands.

What else can I do but try to survive and try to be excellent all the time, with no breaks? I am going to need those emergency survival skills to get through the disaster that is flying towards me.

 

[sidptitala]

I'm avoiding so much.

I can't sleep ever. All I see when I try are the faces of the people I said I would help. But I slept today (didn't go to the event I wanted to though to hear from the people who haunt me at night: so now I feel guilty about that.

Someone I know from there has been in and out of jail so many times since I saw her - I just realised that. She looks so thin and exhausted, she says they starved her last time. Detention without trial.

Sometimes I feel like I am in detention without trial too and that's why I care so much. I feel guilty for not appreciating simple freedoms. I also feel like I am desperate to be free and despair ever getting there.

I need to reply to everyone I'm avoiding. I want to give myself good contact with good people. It doesn't feel good to be alone all the time.

 

[sidptitala]

Therapist today. I feel like I got somewhere for the first time in a long time.

Talked about how I have trouble expressing feelings to people. But I also have trouble understanding them. What I am feeling at any given time.

She had anticipated that and brought me a handout that explains what feelings feel like. It's really helpful to me because it mentions the biological aspects too.

By the end I told her something as it came to me - that I've learned to be a self reliant person because I don't think I can afford not to be. But I've reached a point through a series of events, where I can't deal with things alone because they are simply too much. And that's why I know I need to learn to open up and believe doing it can be better this time.

Its next to impossible to open up about sexual abuse when you haven't done that about any thing in a long time. Not about seeing massacres, not about daily oppression, not about relationships ending and even happening in the first place, and not about violent attacks as an adult. Considering its been hard to handle all these things alone, I really don't feel like I can handle sexual abuse without speaking about it on top of all that.

But that explains why its so hard to open up. Because I've so much practice not doing it, and almost none of doing it.

I had to stop writing this four times because I genuinely thought I was going to throw up. I think I've managed not to, and each time I tried to finish this the nausea came back.

There's something about nausea and my past that i always try to avoid. One memory I have managed to suppress definitely involves it. Just before I started getting flashbacks there was a year where I was throwing up so so so much and getting those week long headaches too. Thats gotten better, as ptsd has gotten worse.

Maybe this is happening because just before I left she asked me if i had any physical health problems. And I said yes a strange one, but I personally think its just ptsd affecting my body. And I said how it was discovered when I missed my period for a year. That it went away all of a sudden. She asked me after something happened? And I said yes, it was a series of events. I lost it in war at a very specific time. So she said tell her next week what those events were.

And that leaves me somewhere useful. Its a starting point for the sexual abuse memories, its when I reported my colleague for harassment, when the massacre I saw before came to life again and they almost killed us too, its when something deeply changed in me and soon started the first flashbacks to all of it. War abuse and more war and more abuse.

I wrote it all down. But have struggled to speak about it. Because I'm not used to speaking about anything sad or hard if those are my own feelings.

 

[sidptitala]

Other than that, even before going there I've been so emotional about war today. And the first and worst event.

The anniversary of that is on Sunday I think. I had anyway come to the conclusion that I needed to try to see some of the people im avoiding this coming weekend.

But God, I really will need to now.