Around The Bend

[Powder]

To the extent that C PTSD and PTSD are the same, I wake up screaming. The key difference is that when it wake up, nobody hears anything. My screaming is so loud, yet it comes from inside my head. I am in the "the dark place" that I went during the traumas. From that place, I hear myself screaming out in pain, being tortured.

Always it is at 2 am, the middle of the night. Heart pounding. For days I cannot shake the feeling of horror. What was happening to the me left behind?

The splitting off of consciousness during the many truamas, and the weird ways that memory fragments and personality fragments surface, with no visuals, no memories, just the knowing that I abandoned myself, again, to not have to experience the trauma fully. There is tremendous guilt at leaving "her/me" behind to scream alone in pain. Being split and multiple is fraught with guilt.

For days, it's hard to lift my chin up and feel anything but like shit. I'm a shitty person for leaving her/me behind for "that."

At the same time comes the suicidal feelings. Better to die than to be that kind of person. To have had to repeatedly abandon oneself to survive the monsters in childhood. And not having access to the memory of torture by MANY people at once. Too traumatic. Not know other than the question, What are THEY doing to me now??!! I don't know I'm in the dark place.

All these pieces of my psyche that ran away are starting to come home. I have to forgive and love each of them for doing what they did. They were 4 or 5. They did what they needed so we could make it to 38, and now we're having depressing family reunion.

Seems that the dark place surrounds me, a place of refuge, dissociation, all the time, even when I'm not in it, it defines my consciousness.

When a child must live in the dark, it is never possible to undo the way that changes you. It has marked me for life, maybe for lifetimes. No use pretending it didn't. I now know the past's influences run deeper than my veins. Even after death, this will haunt me forever.

This has come back on me. I now see I was tortured at home by my dad and his friend, George, and at church by all his sick friends. At home in the garage, it involved being pressed almost to death under a sheet of plywood. They laid me naked on the cement floor and placed a large board bigger than me on my belly/chest. They put their feet on it and stood on it. I couldn't scream, because I couldn't inhale. My Sternum broke and rehealed only to be broken again. When I have this flashback, the pain in my chest is unbearable. They did this until I went into the black, then they took turns raping my lifeless and nearly dead body. :(

Other times, they waterboarded me with the board. Whatever they did, it always involved pain, horror, and the inability to breath/inhale. They made sure to strip me of my humanity prior to the rapes. The fun for them was inflicting near death experience. They were sadists. It wasn't enough to rape a child; they had to make it think it was being tortured to death first.

This is why I have severe DID. There was also the other traumas, like the rifle or shotgun being cocked first. Dad always had his own ways of putting us into shock first so that we wouldn't be strong enough to fight back.

But I know I did and that's how I got my nose broken. I tried to push him off me. He hated that I fought back. Made sure I never forgot who was boss. Broke my face. I spent two weeks in the basement while mom hid me from the world and my face looked like I'd just been very ill.

At church, actually a funeral parlor, they showed me a dead body (an old gray man) laid out in a black suit in a white silk lined open casket. This in a room with red carpet. They said if I talked about the torture and rape they would simply place me in this casket with the body and screw it shut. They said it was sound proof. Nobody would hear my screams and I'd have no air to breath (how familiar) and I would be buried alive and nobody would know what happened to me. Everyone would think I was kidnapped by a stranger. They would never get in trouble. Then they put electrodes on my skull and naked back, had me bend over some kind of table, and the electricity started. Most pain imaginable in my skull. Praying death comes fast. Barely able to feel the rapes due to the constant probably hour of electric torture. Unable to dissociate or leave my body like usual; just have to take the torture. Waiting for death, but it doesn't come.

 

[Powder]

I have been contacting the neighbor who I have been obsessed with forever. I don't care what happens to me anymore. I go to a new T. Friday.

I'm trying to be strong. I no longer care about the torture. I can live with it forever. What real torture is is that I could hurt and leave my love. I cannot forgive it. I will try. I don't know how. The pain is unbearable. I can not eat or sleep. My heart pounds and breaks in my chest. My blood pressure is in the red. I feel like I'm dying. But I actually want to. I don't care what happens next. I don't want to be a burden.

 

[ChildofGod]

I am sorry for all you've been through. Hoping that you are doing better. Your experiences were like mine, or mine as yours.

My heart is broken knowing you went through this and I hope you can overcome and hoping you can find/ found comfort or support.

 

[Powder]

Thank you, Zencat. I'm sorry that you went through anything of this nature. Nobody should, especially kids.

I'm doing better. I learned a lot from being mistaken about important things. Learning more on letting go.

 

[Powder]

PTSD has been much better in that I haven't had to think about it much. I have been triggered but by food allergies more than anything. Specific foods set me up with a bad reaction. Figuring out what was the allergy on my own was hard. Testing is too expensive.

Now, I have migraine symptoms often. This and nerve pain in arms and legs are the worst misery, along with the digestion pain from having undiagnosed ongoing pain. They just call it IBD when they give up.

Chronic migraine means no energy and weight loss. Can't finish coffee to wake up. Can't eat all day. Migraine hits even harder. You get the picture.

Doctors are never finding anything to pinpoint anything. Test after test.