Can You Learn How To Accept Emotional Support/love?

[Err0r]

So many things in this thread resonate with me... it has been on my mind constantly and I think I've been able to wrap my mind around a lot of things that I have never really put together before.

I have been a major caretaker of other people.

I can totally relate to this. I had to take care of my siblings (who were not much younger than I was) to shield them from my abusive father and to shield them from what he was doing to our mother, who was unable to take care of them. Unfortunately, I know that my father sexually abused all of us - mostly my brother. But he took the beatings out on me, and controlled every breath my mother took.

Emotions. Hide mine most of the time. Feel numb most of the time. Big problem for me........ I put on a facade most of the time. I can be polite, I know how to act........Sometimes, it is hard to always be the strong one

In my case, the facade was required of me. I had to be obedient or there would be dire consequences. To this day, I am still very cognizant of the "rules" and of "instructions". I cannot go against them. If someone suggests that I should, I have a panic attack.

Most of the time I don't ask for help. But when I did feel a need for it and i did try to get help, the reactions were were very critical of me

This made me cry, because it reflects so much of my situation. I had called the police numerous times, and my mother and grandparents would tell them that I'm lying. Or my father would beat me and I would call the police and they would say that I deserved it because I needed "discipline". My father was in a high military position, and we were in a military town, so they believed him over me.
I begged for help from my mother and she told me that I'm destroying the family.
I don't ask for help anymore. I would rather die than ask for help.

I fear that if I accept emotional support it will show my weaknesses and will later be used against me. The other part is that I worry that I will become dependent on the support and then one day they won't be there to offer it and I won't be able to handle it on my own.

When I met my husband two years ago, I was finally able to let go of some of this. The freedom of showing some of weaknesses and not having them be stomped upon or used for advantage was a huge thing for me. Of course, it has only happened with him. And I have taken a few steps back recently (I was triggered recently and my symptoms have been out of control), but overall its not something that I regret. There is hope.

 

[piratelady]

When I met my husband two years ago, I was finally able to let go of some of this.

May I ask how you got to the point where you were able to let go or some of it?

 

[warathome]

I seem to run from those who try to care. I have never had it, and the few times someone wanted to give it to me, i fought them so hard, they left. Just wondering when someone will be able to stand against me as i fight them to run them off? To know better than I know, that I will live through someone caring about me.

 

[ms spock]

I have that problem as well. I don't take it in.

 

[Frida]

My Big issue with any relationship is trust. I fear that if I trust them I will get hurt somehow.

My boyfriend of nine years tries to give me emotional support, but I am always waiting for a shoe to drop. Like this can't really be real. He can't really care for me. But I stay with him. He deals with all these emotional ups and downs I'm constantly going through. But in my head I keep thinking he's going to kick me out. He's not going to come home to me.

I don't however have any close friends. I couldn't get close enough to someone to trust them. I have social friends that I put on a good act for though.

I'm not sure how to get over the trust issue.

 

[Err0r]

(sorry, I've been having internet issues)

May I ask how you got to the point where you were able to let go or some of it?

I think it was a combination of where I was mentally at the time and that he's always been a "safe" person to me.

The backstory: I moved between Hawaii and Germany most of my life. I was born and raised in Germany until the age of 6 and then eventually moved to Hawaii, due to circumstances surrounding the color of my skin (my father’s). I knew N (my H) when I was a child in Germany. He was my cousin’s best friend; six years older than I. My father controlled every movement my mother made, so when they would be having a very bad fight, my mother would have him babysit us, since she knew no one else (and wasn’t allowed to have any friends of her own).

When I was 10, my mom took my siblings and I, and ran away back to Germany. N came and helped us move in… and eventually, when she decided to go back to my father a year later, he helped us move out. My mom sent me alone to Germany four years later (at age 14) to stay with my grandparents. She had decided that I was destroying the family that she was attempting at holding together – I had started having major flashbacks of the sexual abuse from my father and he had started to beat me not shortly after we came back.

My symptoms were very out of control during that time: dissociation, self harm, etc. But N made an effort to take me places and put a smile on face. He would hold my hand if we were going through large crowds because he knew it made me feel like I'm suffocating. Holding hands with him was also necessary because of problems with dissociation, I had problems with figuring out where I was or who I was with.

In 2011, I had decided to leave an abusive relationship with another PTSD sufferer and to visit Germany once again. I hadn't seen N in 11 years. One night, we had - what I had thought in my mind at the time - was a one-night stand. But, I couldn’t help but feel something with him. I couldn’t help but feel safe – for the first time in my entire life.
I shouted at myself silently saying how stupid it was that I am putting myself in a position of weakness and that it was just a one night stand—that’s it. I put up every single wall that I had to try to protect myself from actually *feeling* something. I didn’t want to feel anything. Feeling nothing is so much easier.

I had been in therapy for two years before I went to Germany: twice a week, every week, including a 16 week group session for female survivors of childhood sexual abuse. My T and I had just started EMDR. My symptoms were not nearly as severe as they were when I was a teenager, but they were (are) present. We had been working on self-sabotaging, which through this forum, I have come to find out is part of distorted thinking, which is something I am still struggling with.

But, what I was feeling couldn’t be ignored. It felt like I was holding onto an electrical surge --there was no way I could ignore it : I was falling in love with him. I never believed in love. I never thought it existed. But it did. And it does.

And as much as I fought it and as much as I thought he was lying to me and was telling me what he thought I wanted to hear: he was falling in love with me too. And not for selfish reasons. Not because he wanted something from me. Not because he wanted to get in my pants. But because he really, truly does.

And that took a really long time for me to understand. But I just kept remembering a mantra that my T told me:

“I deserve to be loved. I deserve to be happy.”​

And, here I am, I guess. Married on the 8 of September 2012. It is terrifying to open to someone. To trust someone so much with the most vulnerable parts of you. But with N, it was worth it. And I wouldn’t take it back for the world.

I still struggle with it. I still am surprised that he comes home to me. But had it not been for the history of him as a “safe person” in combination with therapy, I am sure that this would have never happened.


Sorry that was so long and didn't really have a decisive answer... :shy:

 

[Err0r]

Followup:

I was addictively journaling at the time. I really focused on what my self-talk was and tried to analyze where it was coming from. I realized that I really wanted this and that had to keep reminding myself that the negative self-talk actually had nothing to with N. It had to do with me, and how I felt about myself, my past, the PTSD.

Everytime he would tell me I'm beautiful, I would cringe and tell him to F off. On the surface I thought it was because he was telling me this so he could get something out of me. I later realized that it wasn't that at all.

It's because I felt like I didn't deserve to be called beautiful. Some of my abuse had to do with my father putting me on diets (even though I was a normal weight), which started when I was 7, and calling me things like fat pig, disgusting, worthless, etc.

Being able to: 1. recognize how I felt (through journaling) and then 2. analyzing those emotions and trying to figure out where they came from made it easier to let go.

I realized it wasn't fair for N to pay the mistakes of my abuser.

 

[ms spock]

I feel like I may never connect with people again but that is just how I feel today hopeless and helpless.

 

[Meadowsweet]

Right now I want to connect with someone. But I feel like I can't speak. Or that if I speak I will say all the wrong things and be unable to get across how I'm feeling. Then the misunderstanding, or the reaction to it could make things worse.

That's one of the reasons I isolate myself when I'm feeling like this. I thought I'd write it down while I'm feeling this way.

 

[Abstract]

Right now I want to connect with someone. But I feel like I can't speak. Or that if I speak I will say all the wrong things and be unable to get across how I'm feeling. Then the misunderstanding, or the reaction to it could make things worse.

I relate totally. Awareness is a good step.

 

[Abstract]

I think for me it is founded in distrust and self hatred as well as feeling in danger. And yet only in recent years have I realised that there is a real need for other people and contact there too. It can feel like being torn in two.

 

[maddog]

I also totally relate to the push/pull of needing to connect and needing to isolate when you're struggling. It sounds impossible, but time and time again I experience the competing increasing tensions of a desperate need for human contact and an almost panicked fear of it, mixed with a shame and revulsion towards myself that presumably are a huge part of the fear.

It's when I can almost look inside my brain and see the miswired parts of it, the parts that associate human connection with suffering, and the parts which link seeking help to punishment, and the parts that link needing help to weakness and self-hate and failure. Yes, insight and awareness are important, yet sometimes feel like the scalpel I use to conduct my own autopsy. Sorry for the somewhat graphic metaphor, but honestly, that's how I feel sometimes, as though I can carefully dysect myself in exactly the right way and see how everything pieces together, and knowledge is power... until it becomes reality, and then all the knowledge in the world doesn't count for much.

Accepting positive emotional attention is one of the most frightening and insecure experiences in my world. I seem to have only a very strictly contextual ability to do so, in that over a long long time, I can learn to accept it from certain people, in certain situations, in response to certain circumstances. Therapy has been the classic example of that for me. And yet I absolutely cannot seem to transfer what I learn and do and feel in the therapy room outside of it, and so find myself asking what good is progress if it only happens in therapy...

And I still don't know the answer.

Maddog