A Question For All Who Have Abuse Induced Ptsd

[Recovery4Me]

@RussH ...

One of my most favorite of quotes of all times from Martin Luther King Jr.:

“If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”

 

[joeylittle]

... what makes you feel successful or happy or pleased within yourself. It can be anything!.

This question wasn't asked of me, but maybe others will identify with what I struggle with here.

I am not (yet) capable of feeling successful or happy or pleased. I'm pretty sure that's more the depression side of me than the PTSD side, but I also think my inability to experience positive thoughts or emotions about myself is a direct result of my trauma. Which came first, chicken or egg? Who knows. What is true for me, though, is that I don't feel any good feelings. So, if something occurs in my life that people congratulate me for, or tell me I did a good job, I can understand that objectively something good must have gotten done and I was somehow involved. But I've got no experience of it.

Anhedonia, I guess. But I think success is something so individual that it can only be defined BY the individual. And then, it follows that if you can't feel it, it doesn't matter whether you are successful or not by anyone else's standards. You aren't to yourself, and that's what counts.

 

[RussH]

@Recovery4Me thank you. It has just really been hard. This post was intended to be positive, and encouraging, and now, well lets just say that I feel like crap.

 

[Recovery4Me]

@joeylittle ... thank you for your insight and share. I will take that under consideration. PTSD is complicated, yes?

 

[RussH]

@joeylittle you may not feel it, but you are a lady with a good heart. I am honored to know you.

 

[Recovery4Me]

It has just really been hard. This post was intended to be positive, and encouraging, and now, well lets just say that I feel like crap.

I can relate, been there (will be there again) and bounce back. Success to me is bouncing back, again, again and again from PTSD.


To the mod who edited-(Thanks for the help with the quote!):)

 

[digger]

@digger ...share with me please in your own way, what makes you feel successful or happy or pleased within yourself. It can be anything!.

I appreciate that you're trying to help, but @joeylittle pretty much described where I'm at with this kind of thing. And when I do try to 'count' the little things, all it ends up doing is highlight that I can only count the little things.

@RussH it was not my intention to make you feel like crap. I am just giving my perspective on the subject. It is not my experience that I am able to feel a more worthy or successful person than my abusers. Sorry.

 

[greenleaf]

I think that I read years ago in a book called "The Secret Trauma" that in some study of a lot of girls and women abused as kids showed a lower average academic achievement and earnings than non-abused similar people. This book is from 1987; there are probably other studies out about other types of trauma and men too, by now.

My specific abuser has not achieved academically or professionally much at all; however, I remember that he was abused as a kid too, so it's not a comparison of an abused person vs. a non-abused person.

I thought as a kid that the way he was interacting with people essentially got him short term benefits but he wasn't going to get far with being abusive, manipulating etc. It's true from my perspective, but obviously not his... and he blames others for all his lack of "success" too...

I tend to think of these things in terms of taking responsibility for your own sh&t and not putting it on others in some manner; Patrick Stewart's latest character in an X-Men movie (of all places) had a positively wonderful statement about this concept and he just stated it so brilliantly. He watched his dad abuse his mom, you know, and tried to protect her as a kid.

It's often painful to take responsibility for your own stuff; being willing to face that pain (honestly) yourself, as you are able, and not put it on another is the key action, I believe. We all fail some, we all hurt people accidentally sometimes, but it's a sort of commitment to work on this and do our best, that I sense differs among people that I trust a lot and don't trust much at all, a "walking toward the light"...

The thing is, facing these things that happened to us is horrifically painful. Abusing someone else to get a momentary sense of power, when maybe the abuser is hiding from their own pain in a deep twisted way, seems to me to be where a lot of this stuff starts, and the cycle just keeps going.

So, perhaps we could honor everyone who is really trying to own their own pain in this way and be responsible for how they treat others (and themselves!!!), no matter what else they accomplish, and even if one never becomes totally "normal" (like most of us never get "normal"):alien:.

 

[xena21]

How many of you, who have been abused, are now more educated, and more successful than your abusers?

Good question! I definitely am! My Grandfather was a worker as far as I know, but I don't try to know much about the bastard. My Grandma knows nothing. She's just as bad as he is. She's evil. They were horrible.

 

[Notsowild]

@Notsowild I am truly sorry you hate this thread; it was never intended to cause anyone distress.
What is success? For some of us it is surviving. It is knowing that every day we get up, and we stand up in spite of the fact that others have tried to knock us down.

Well sorry it makes me feel like crap too. Thats my success - I survived. Big achievement. But congrats to all the highly educated successful people you were referring to. And why does God come into thread? Way to confusing and triggering for me. I'll bow out.

 

[Lionheart]

The reason I posted this question is simple: ".....I am just wondering is way back when we were abused, if our abusers saw something in us that scared them, and they tried to destroy us as a result of it.

Personally, I think that I shone too brightly for my abusers, not academically, or intellectually but spiritually. I shined a "spirit light" if you will, and they construed that as a threat to their "darkness".

The hardest part for me is the realization that I've been disabled for the past 16 years, and tied to a low, fixed income despite my above average intelligence and academic success. I hate the way that PTSD has limited me in my life and I am determined to make the best of things.

Fortunately for me, I do not define success based on educational or monetary values nor typical societal standards.

 

[rightkindofme]

@Recovery4Me thank you. It has just really been hard. This post was intended to be positive, and encouraging, and now, well lets just say that I feel like crap.

If you mean no harm and you are looking for information and other people get upset... That isn't entirely your fault. You are allowed to ask questions. They don't have to work for everyone. No one can adequately address the position that absolutely every person on this site is in.

If you asked me how successful I am on a bad day I might blow up. That is about me, not the question.

You are curious if some people can move on. The answer is yes. Can everyone move on and feel successful? No. Life isn't like that. You are going to find out about bad when you ask for good. That doesn't mean you should never ask.

I think that the ability to move on to what some people consider "success" is built on so many weird, hard to see layers of privilege and support and circumstance that it is basically impossible to figure out why one person can and another can't.

I loved teaching high school. I was given classrooms of "problem" children (mostly gang kids) and I could help them understand what the school wanted from them and I could explain it in a truly self serving way, so they listened and made progress. They wanted to make the progress because I could talk them into seeing how having that skill would be useful for selfish reasons. Many of my kids were highly traumatized (I wasn't the only one who could talk about the joy of having a gun at your head) and working with them was hard.

There will always be people you can't help. Some students hated me so much I couldn't teach them. Their minds were closed to a white (insert swear word). That doesn't change the fact that overall I did well by trying to reach people.

Communication is complicated; almost half of communication depends on factors about the listener that you can't control. Don't beat yourself up, Russ.