Carlito2017
New Here
Hi! I'm a 37 year old man. I'm not officially diagnosed with PTSD but my recent struggles are related to me dealing with (what I think is) complex trauma, so hopefully there's a place for me here.
I had a rough childhood growing up in an unsafe and unsupportive home and being severely beaten and ostracized in school. Even people who were kind to me at first would eventually walk away and/or turn hostile. It definitely left a mark and created negative core beliefs, and is probably one of the reasons I fell behind my peers. Still, my life turned out fairly well - after all the struggles and tears and failures, now at 37 years old I got to do so many of the things I wanted to do, got my dream job, moved to a different country that I love, experienced genuine love, got married, had some really great experiences.
That said, I still struggle badly with relationships of all kinds. Through my entire life I've experienced a frankly abnormal amount of rejection, and it has left me feeling that there's just something fundamentally off-putting about me. Like people in all kinds of situations, in all contexts, keep me at arm's length, aren't interested in me and don't want me being interested in them. Like people have very little patience for me and very easily reject me outright at the first sight of tension, and at the same time easily become tense and angry with me for trivial reasons. And it's not like I have poor social skills! I have a job that requires me to entertain people by chatting with them! I can talk to people well but can't shake the feeling that most people just don't want me there, and the ones that do always keep me at arm's length. I see it in my professional relationships, in my friendships and even in my marriage.
Most of my life thus was spent in not quite complete isolation, but lots and lots of solitude. At some point in my early twenties I decided not to listen to the voice of insecurity inside me and just power through those moments where it would come up. I would pursue connections with people, pushing through the fear and insecurity, sort of accepting (but actually fearing) the sea of rejection that that invited. That did earn me a bunch of friendships and professional connections, but no deep ones. On the romantic front the approach was a total failure - I didn't get to experience any romance or intimacy until I was 28, and even that wasn't through any effort of my own - my girlfriend just sort of dropped into my life and "adopted" me. I'm not 100% sure of it, but I suspect that the abundance of negative experiences in adulthood, and especially the romantic failures, exacerbated my trauma and prevented me from healing. Despite the successes I have had, I feel like I'm less whole and more traumatized now approaching 40 than I was at 20.
It also doesn't help that I ended up in an abusive marriage. My wife has her traumas and isn't too hot on dealing with them. When something doesn't go her way in our relationship, she flies into rages, beats me and threatens to divorce me. It's funny - those rages started well into the relationship, they weren't there from the start. They started just as I tied my immigration status to our marriage, to allow me to start my own business. Now if she divorces me or even just walks away I will almost certainly get deported to my 'home' country which is not safe. I sometimes think it must be some kind of cosmic joke - all my life I've faced what feels like abnormal amounts of rejection and abandoment, and would always calm myself by reminding myself that even if a person does abandon me, that's not a death sentence. Well, I ended up in that one specific kind of situaiton where abandonment is indeed a death sentence, and my partner, whom I trusted, now uses that as leverage.
Recently I've had discussions about my past trauma with some friends, and multiple people have pointed out that my cognitive distortions might be more severe than I thought, and that I'm not dealing with the trauma as well as I think. My rational mind is pushing against this hard, but I've decided to pursue therapy again (for the third time in my life), this time with a provider who claims to be trauma-informed and also does EMDR. Frankly, I'm not hopeful with regards to either my marriage or my future, but it's worth a try. I'm currently starting on Shadow Work and considering IFS as well as well as doing general research on PSTD and CPTSD in preparation for the therapy, The last part is how I arrived on this forum. Hope to be a productive member!
I had a rough childhood growing up in an unsafe and unsupportive home and being severely beaten and ostracized in school. Even people who were kind to me at first would eventually walk away and/or turn hostile. It definitely left a mark and created negative core beliefs, and is probably one of the reasons I fell behind my peers. Still, my life turned out fairly well - after all the struggles and tears and failures, now at 37 years old I got to do so many of the things I wanted to do, got my dream job, moved to a different country that I love, experienced genuine love, got married, had some really great experiences.
That said, I still struggle badly with relationships of all kinds. Through my entire life I've experienced a frankly abnormal amount of rejection, and it has left me feeling that there's just something fundamentally off-putting about me. Like people in all kinds of situations, in all contexts, keep me at arm's length, aren't interested in me and don't want me being interested in them. Like people have very little patience for me and very easily reject me outright at the first sight of tension, and at the same time easily become tense and angry with me for trivial reasons. And it's not like I have poor social skills! I have a job that requires me to entertain people by chatting with them! I can talk to people well but can't shake the feeling that most people just don't want me there, and the ones that do always keep me at arm's length. I see it in my professional relationships, in my friendships and even in my marriage.
Most of my life thus was spent in not quite complete isolation, but lots and lots of solitude. At some point in my early twenties I decided not to listen to the voice of insecurity inside me and just power through those moments where it would come up. I would pursue connections with people, pushing through the fear and insecurity, sort of accepting (but actually fearing) the sea of rejection that that invited. That did earn me a bunch of friendships and professional connections, but no deep ones. On the romantic front the approach was a total failure - I didn't get to experience any romance or intimacy until I was 28, and even that wasn't through any effort of my own - my girlfriend just sort of dropped into my life and "adopted" me. I'm not 100% sure of it, but I suspect that the abundance of negative experiences in adulthood, and especially the romantic failures, exacerbated my trauma and prevented me from healing. Despite the successes I have had, I feel like I'm less whole and more traumatized now approaching 40 than I was at 20.
It also doesn't help that I ended up in an abusive marriage. My wife has her traumas and isn't too hot on dealing with them. When something doesn't go her way in our relationship, she flies into rages, beats me and threatens to divorce me. It's funny - those rages started well into the relationship, they weren't there from the start. They started just as I tied my immigration status to our marriage, to allow me to start my own business. Now if she divorces me or even just walks away I will almost certainly get deported to my 'home' country which is not safe. I sometimes think it must be some kind of cosmic joke - all my life I've faced what feels like abnormal amounts of rejection and abandoment, and would always calm myself by reminding myself that even if a person does abandon me, that's not a death sentence. Well, I ended up in that one specific kind of situaiton where abandonment is indeed a death sentence, and my partner, whom I trusted, now uses that as leverage.
Recently I've had discussions about my past trauma with some friends, and multiple people have pointed out that my cognitive distortions might be more severe than I thought, and that I'm not dealing with the trauma as well as I think. My rational mind is pushing against this hard, but I've decided to pursue therapy again (for the third time in my life), this time with a provider who claims to be trauma-informed and also does EMDR. Frankly, I'm not hopeful with regards to either my marriage or my future, but it's worth a try. I'm currently starting on Shadow Work and considering IFS as well as well as doing general research on PSTD and CPTSD in preparation for the therapy, The last part is how I arrived on this forum. Hope to be a productive member!
