• We are a multilingual website again. Read the notice about this.
  • Understand AI use at MyPTSD: all AI use is explained in our AI help page. AI use is by choice here. It exists if you want it, but does nothing unless you choose to use it.

Sufferer I’m new here: struggling for a long time

I joined because I’ve been through so many traumatic things in my life all before I even turned 30. I have been struggling for years with trying to deal with all of it. Some of my trauma is difficult to hear or possibly relate to but I need to be able to talk about it freely. I’m also autistic.

I guess I’ll begin with the trauma I have from my dad’s secretary and my abuser who is now deceased. She volunteered to help my dad raise my sister and me after our mom left us and that’s where all the problems began. From the very start, my abuser (I’m not sure if I can use real names here) planted seeds of manipulation and control over me by telling me all the time that my mom didn’t want me or even a son and that I could always trust my abuser. I was four years old and still too young to understand the world around me. Of course I’m going to believe what she said because I didn’t know any better. She was so loving and caring and nice towards me until I turned ten when she slowly started the abuse. She’d punish me by slapping my face and she called it “spanking.” The abuse became verbal and emotional as I grew older. She used my autism as a way to keep me under her control as an adult. I only managed to escape from her after she physically attacked me. I will explain more of what she would do to me at a later point.

The second most traumatic thing I’ve been struggling with is my entire high school years. I was sexually assaulted and severely bullied and then victim blamed by all the adults including the school psychologist. It got so bad tha5 I tried to kill myself one day in class but couldn’t go through with it and I noticed that no one had even noticed my crisis or even tried to stop me or talk to me. No one cared about me. The car accident the popular kid had right before our senior year also severely traumatized me because of the thoughts I had begun to have. I began to self injure myself just to stop the thoughts and forced them to leave me alone for awhile.

And then there were the months of me being sexually assaulted by a classmate and he was barely punished for it the first time. Yes you read that correctly. There was a first time that actually happened right in front of others. No one made me feel safe afterwards or even tell me my rights and that it was okay if I didn’t want to talk about it yet. I kept trying so hard to repress the memories of the assaults for years. I was victim blamed for it after I kept refusing to talk about the assaults because I was still in denial about it and blamed myself and believed that I had done something to deserve it. Adults kept trying to force me to talk about it. I eventually became so paranoid in that class that I refused to turn my back on anyone and refused to leave when the bell rang until I knew that it was only me and the teacher left behind. They all said that I was doing this for “attention.” I didn’t tell anyone that 5he assaults kept happening because I knew no one would believe me without any physical proof and I couldn’t be sure that anyone would believe me and not blame me for being a victim. It took fifteen years before I finally told someone because I couldn’t take it anymore. I can’t get any justice because I missed my state’s statute of limitations by two years because no one told me that I even had the right still to file a complaint. I often blame myself for the kid still being out on the streets and I’m afraid that anyone else he has hurt like he did to me is my fault. I’ve developed a fear of going to the doctor for the past two years because I’m afraid that I’ll be told that I need a prostate exam and that terrifies me because that’s exactly how I was being sexually assaulted.

I can’t find anyone who is interested in me after two weeks and all we do is talk and I’m so lonely. I’m afraid to make new friends and open up and let them get to know me because my best friend abandoned me literally a week after my mom had died from cancer and that broke me so much for five years that I stopped cleaning my apartment because I didn’t see what the po8nt was anymore and became really really depressed. I got evicted and everyone thought I was being too lazy to clean even though I kept saying that I didn’t see the point of cleaning anymore and showed signs of serious depression. I’m afraid that people won’t like me if I’m myself.
 
Welcome to the forum. Sorry for all the reasons that have brought you here - hopefully this place turns out to be a community where you feel more able to be yourself and less isolated.
 
Am I allowed to use first names here? Because I’d rather not have to keep using “my abuser” for my dad’s secretary. She was a major part of my life got a long time and half of my trauma is from her treatment towards me after I turned 10. I also have religious trauma that actually doesn’t involve priests or sexual abuse. I struggle so much from all this trauma and I only started to talk about all of it eight years ago. I also am a survivor of an aborted suicide attempt and there’s the trauma I have from that as well which I really don’t think anyone could ever understand or relate to what I found out and have to live with from that day. I don’t know if I can give all of the details or not but I will say that I tried to do it in class where there would be people and could clearly see what I was going to do. I had planned the entire thing carefully for a week. I told myself that I would go through with it unless one person saw what was going on and immediately stop me and tell me that I mattered. I had begun to suspect that no one cared about me and I just reached a point where I couldn’t take it anymore and I was tired of trying to keep myself from falling apart in school and then there were the horrible thoughts about the car accident I was having that kept plaguing me and wouldn’t go away, and no one ever tried to listen to what I had to say because every single time I tried to say anything, all I heard was, “Shut up! No one cares.” Those words still echo inside my head every time I spoke. So there I was trying to end it all and I hesitated. Time slowed down and I noticed that literally no one had noticed me or what I was about to do. Tears started to stream down my eyes as I continued to hesitate and I just stood there staring at the object I planned to kill myself and no one cared enough to even notice that I wasn’t okay. The entire class was ready to just let me kill myself and do absolutely nothing to stop me. That day I learned the truth of how literally no one cared about me in that high school. No one tried to stop me and no one even told the teacher that I was acting so strangely and staring at what I had planned to kill myself with. No one knows how awful it is to live with that type of knowledge. Twenty one years I’ve lived with the horrible fact and trauma that absolutely no one cared about me in high school and that they probably wouldn’t have even noticed if I had suddenly disappeared or died. I never went to any of my class reunions and last year was the 20th and I doubt anyone noticed that I never once showed up to any of the other reunions or even care or missed me.

Even the principal didn’t think I was valuable as a person because he literally told my dad right before he (the principal) died of cancer that I was telling the truth the entire time I had kept telling my family that I was being bullied and it was just as bad as I had I had claimed and that he should have tried to help me sooner so that the severe meltdown I had less than a month after graduation hadn’t happened. It’s even worse that I know for a fact that if it were my older sister who was being bullied, the principal would have acted immediately to help her because she was one of the smartest students to graduate from the high school and went up Harvard and made the school look good academically. I struggled because I was undiagnosed with autism for so long.

I meant absolutely nothing to that entire school. No one cared about me and I’m forced to live with the trauma that I actually had it confirmed literally before my eyes. I don’t think anyone could ever understand what that feels like and how horrible to have flashbacks to that day and seeing absolutely no one trying to stop them and just listen to what they had to say for once.
 
I often just feel too broken for anyone to want me. I mean who wants someone as damaged as me when they could have someone without any problems? I have way too many triggers and some simple sentences and phrases can cause me to have a flashback and cause my brain to shut down and I become unresponsive and barely able to move.
 

Donation drives

2026 Donation Goal

Goal
$1,800.00
Earned
$910.00
This donation drive ends in
0 hours, 0 minutes, 0 seconds
  50.6%

Trending content

Featured content

Back
Top Bottom