If You Didn't Have A Chance To Build A Self Before Complex Trauma

[ms spock]

Perhaps the first need is to find out how we can build safe relationships with others?

Thanks for your comments.

I think even having a safe relationship with myself is really the starting point for me.

Good idea about the diary writing. I have had a diary for years, you can read it here. Link Removed

I have actually done a phenomenal amount of work on myself. I just came from along way through the eight ball.

 

[ms spock]

You say "I don't even know if I have the right questions or even strategy of enquiry, but it is what it is. I have spent my whole life waiting for things to be safe, or something to be in place, before I could start to live life"
I can identify with this.

It is not easy.

I think it is a case of wanting the perpetrators of the tortures to acknowlege their wrongs before we can move on. In my case this is an imperative because I have no choice but to still rely on those who abused me and treated me badly.

I can't imagine how hard this is.

My guess is that sometimes it can be easier to feel sorry for ourselves, live in a continuation of our symptoms as victims, rather than try to set forth on a path of becoming a survivor.

I have done an absolutely phenomenal amount of work on myself. It is not having anything to build on, that has been my biggest challenge. The fact I was profoundly dissociated since I was a small child. I still am struggling with the concept of being grounded in my body. I had no idea was a sense of safety was, so I didn't know I need to move out of social housing, to be away from the drug addicts and violent men.

As I can barely connect to my own feelings and thoughts - I have no idea what my needs and wants are - I go to default people pleasing who are in charge.

Because conflict meant a danger of being beaten and living with the constant threat of being killed. I have on the surface very good communication skills, but whenever anyone gets close I run away, or lash out. So where I live now no one knows my history, other than my partner, so I stonewall and don't tell anyone any things about myself.

I was desperate to not be like my parents, so when I ran away from home at age 15 to get outside authorities involved to prevent my Father completing his threat of killing us all and then himself, I latched on to a "psychologist" that used and abused me, and passed me around as a client to their posse of psychologists to be used and abused, emotionally. physically, intellectually, sexually, financially. I almost got it together an this person moved in with me in my mid-late 20s and sabotaged me. I had to move out of my flat for three months because of how abusive she was.

I had no ability to define who was safe, and who was not safe. I struggle with this on a daily basis. After five years we have gotten rid of the dodgy guys attached to this house.

So I have no idea what a home that is safe feels like. I don't feel safe with myself, because if only I could have made the right decisions I could have had a better life. My self hared and self doubt cripple me every day.

Perhaps you need to identify whether the negative survival strategies you created to survive continuing abuse are holding you: either in an active ongoing trauma suffering,

This thread and the other threads like it, that I have started, are actually an attempt to do what you suggest here. I have been desparately trying to do that for three decades. I kept choosing the wrong psychologists, who used me to get their needs met, and that was like my parents so I had no skills to defend myself, nevertheless assess what was going on, and having a choice to walk away. It wasn't in my emotional vocabularly to even think I had a right to express and idea, thought or feeling of my own.

Only you know the reality of whether your perpetrators are no longer able to hurt you again, if they are gone, then it follows that you are free to try to build a real life.

My Mother is trying to get to me through one of my sisters. And the perpetraters will never be gone from my life, because of the lies of my Mother and my Father I am almost totally excluded from my family. I have never met my nieces and nephews. I have nothing much, inside of me, and I am trying to be present, in a room, with one other person being present in that room. And the terror of this means I come home and binge eat, like I did last night, after drumming. Like I keep working and working on things, but as this thread illustrates I don't have a lot to work on. I have a hell of a lot more to deal with since I have been working so hard on this, but for decades before that I was working fiendishly hard and I was being used and abused by psychologists and other borderlines (diagnosed by psychiatrists) and such like people. I was being eaten alive by these people, and I still have to avoid them because I am so vulnerable and gullible, because I be a good little girl and believe all the lies.

Yes, the world does include other people who are in need of help, but when we are still so much in need ourselves it is not necessarily us who should allow ourselves to support others.

I had a crystal clear understanding of this when I ran away from home when I was 15, but never the skills to even get close to not automatically doing and helping whoever asks me for something. I still have a hellish time saying no. It is something I have written in my diary about.

Knowing when to help somebody else and when to hold back needs boundaries, you cannot help others fully when you still do not know yourself and are not living a balanced life.

My whole live from being 2 years old was all about me meeting the big people's needs. So that is what I ran away from home with at age 15. I was so vulnerable that unprofessional "alternative" psychologists used and abused me in multiple ways in multiple ways. To know someone is not safe, you need to have at one point in your life, felt safe, if you don't have that baseline, then you have nothing to compare your current situation to.

I was aware of needing boundaries when I was 15 years, and now I am 47 years old, I didn't have a place to go to learn boundaries, and because the psychologists used and abused me - at one point knocking at my front teeth - and when I almost got it together, moved into my house and undermined me so my life fell apart again. If you have no where to live for 3 months because your psychologist moved in and is being abusive to you - well it shows that instead of helping me learn to have boundaries, my boundaries, were, once again truly violated.

What you say is all good and true, and I have been intellectually aware of all that from my early teens. I just have no way of translating that into a lived, physical environment. You write well for someone who actually has a sense of self, and is in contact with some of what they feel. I barely have that. I cannot be in my body when someone else is in the room. So I can't work on boundaries with anyone because I am not there enough to know what my boundaries are.

To allow ourselves to be somebody else's support when we do not know who we are ourselves understandably will likely leave both parties feeling abused.

And I was groomed from a very early age to just immediately meet the perceived big people's needs or be cruelly mindf*cked out of existence or bashed until I was black and blue. When I went to other parts of the family I was sexually abused there, and witnessed horrendous violence.

Perhaps the first need is to find out how we can build safe relationships with others?

I don't know how to find out how to build a safe relationship with others. I can't respond in real time. I recently realised that every major person in my life has told me huge lies this year, or manipulated me or dumped their shit on me, and the couple of times I asserted myself dropped my like a hot potato, attacked, character assassinated or treated really poorly. Once again, I feel so much bone crunching self doubt, that I can barely be there/here. So thus the title of this thread If You Didn't Have A Chance To Build A Self Before Complex Trauma.

Thanks for the considerable time and effort that you have put into answering me. Everything that you talk about is why I hung in there for decades with these abusive psychologists. I didn't want to be like my parents, and I know I had no interpersonal or life skills. I can't tell who is safe and who is not safe, for me, as a person. So having no sense of self or selves had been a huge impediment. I don't trust my own judgement calls, and I don't know how to work out what is reasonable and unreasonable in real time. I got so screwed over this year that I am moving towards having very few people in my life.

 

[ms spock]

I keep losing what I wrote to you, so I will let it go now. Thanks for your commentary, but it doesn't really apply to me because I have been aware of all that since I was 15. I just didn't have enough of an experience of being in my body to know what and who were safe. I couldn't tell what psychologists were safe. I couldn't tell which friends were safe. I couldn't tell what was safe housing. I couldn't tell whether I was dissociated or not. I couldn't manage my emotions. Every developmental phase was severely disrupted by extreme abuse.

 

[biaaw677]

@Disco Dancing Queen. It is terrible the psychologists have abused you. I have a little experience of this too, but nothing like physical abuse, mine is emotional abuse. The psychologists who did this went beyond their professional boundaries - its professional misconduct .
I don't have Borderline, I have CPTSD, so there is definitely differences in our conditions. You say "You write well for someone who actually has a sense of self, and is in contact with some of what they feel. I barely have that. I cannot be in my body when someone else is in the room. So I can't work on boundaries with anyone because I am not there enough to know what my boundaries are." but you are wrong, I do not have a sense of self at all; like you my abuse started before I could deliver a self, like you I'm not sure how to build a self, and certainly not a self that is connected to my body - it is why I was attracted to this thread, like you I am trying to find answers.
I too use structured dissociation to cope within my CPTSD 'negative survival strategies'. When I say what I do about safety and boundaries etc. I say it knowing just how much it is important to establish safety and boundaries right from the start of a relationship.
I do not live in a safe environment but even without a safe place, I can recognise that any health professionals I come into contact with have professional codes of conduct, if they do not keep to these there are complaint procedures to deal with what has been done wrong.
My contact with others is often superficial with only one close friend whom I can trust. The inability to trust is just a feature of complex trauma, its something we have to live with, but if the relationship we are seeking is a therapeutic one with a psychologist truly expert in trauma then that therapist likely already knows the onus is on them to maintain therapeutic boundaries. When they don't maintain the therapist-patient boundary, they are in the wrong not you; likely the hard reality is that too many psychologists try to practise beyond their actual knowledge of complex trauma.
I have no contact with my family and it grieves me that I do not have a family life, but we can only work from the position we are in and try to improve our lives for ourselves.
Creating our authentic self requires us to start to recognise our character (both the pleasant and unpleasant parts), our values and beliefs. A bit of our authentic self is probably within every dissociated alter we have, its just that we have added to the true self features in ways that ensure our safety when we are in an unsafe place. Everybody has parts of their true character that they do and do not like, but we have to accept ourselves as a whole - not easy, but we have to be honest with ourselves at least. Perhaps you might look at the charity website NAPAC, in their resources they have a free book entitled "Recovering from Childhood Abuse"

 

[ms spock]

Thanks for so clearly explaining to me what you mean.

@Link Removed I don't have borderline either. I have PTSD, Complex Trauma, (apparently CPTSD is like a idiom that doesn't exist in the disagnositc books) depression, anxiety, reactive attachment disorder, social anxiety, profound dissociation at times. I wtote you two very long posts and one got lost when I hit the reply button, and the other one, after I had retyped it all, well I added that information to another post and that post got deleted when I tried to save the changes. I lost several thousand words. Sorry I am not sure what made it into this thread and what didn't.

Yes it was professional misconduct, and retraumatised me in a whole range of ways.

What you write is really interesting to me, but I don't want to spend hours replying and lose it all, so I will write a reply later on.

You are really lucky to have enough sense of self, and insight, to know that there are professional boundaries that must not be crossed. That is the crux of what I didn't have, and don't have. You can see that clearly. It is a really important life skill, and I have not been able to express it so that I am understood. I guess now I may never express that and be understood. It does matter to me, but it is more important on me to focus on doing skills that are actually going to have a benefit to my life.

I was 15 when I started with the abusive psychologists, and having just run away from home, in order to bring attention to my family's situation, so my Father didn't carry out his threat to kill us all, then our Mother, and then himself. I didn't have any sense of self to know how to protect myself from these people. I had no way of knowing who was safe and who was not safe. These psychologists reframed things to suit themselves, and to use me, and abuse me. So I am now learning how to stand up and assert my reality, and what is happening for me.

When I realised or had insight, I was unable to connect with that insight to actually make some choices to move away. I was so totally frozen.

 

[ms spock]

I didn't have enough of a self to know how to be self protective of myself. It would be a good idea to be away from the drug addicts, ice dealers and violent men who bashed each other or other women or set cars on fire. I lived in social housing, and it was a waste of my time, and my life, and I had no ability to even think that stuff though. I was so frozen. I was so dissociated. I just watch from a far most of the time. I was ripe for exploitation. I thought it was good, but being the accomodating little soul that I am I just tried to avoid all those people, and you know as well as the abusive psychologists/ professionals, living in such a disordered place with such huge amounts of violence, where I was continually exposed to late night and middle of the night bashings, well I was triggered a lot of the time I was there. I was there for 25 years, and it did retard my ability to heal, but as I grew up with that I had no idea that this place was doing me damage. I lived with a constant fear of being pulverised, smashed about, kicked, things being thrown at me, the constant fear of rape, the fear that this time he would kill us all, for most of my first 15 years, so there was nothing there to manage anything. My life has not been as hard as some others, I do know that, the thing is this is my life, and not having had those selves to manage things, makes it hard. And I did go to therapy because I was never going to be like my parents, I just ended up with psychologists that were a predatory, exploitative, manipulative, vindictive and undermining as my parents, and I didn't have enough of a self to actually be with that knowledge, because you can never tell the truth, because if you did the consequences... Anyway that is just how it was/is for me. I can't really explain it better than that.

 

[biaaw677]

@Disco Dancing Queen
It is even more terrible that you " was 15 when I started with the abusive psychologists, " The onus of responsibility for maintaining proper boundaries was even greater on them than if you had been an adult - shame on them!

But now you are an adult and you can use other ways of understanding boundaries that are out there; thos is what I have done in respect of therapists professional conduct guidelines, these guidelines if used by patients, can help to us to appreciate the therapeutic relationship boundaries.

Much harder to work out what are the boundaries with other people though. Personally I have a physical disability that also limits my awareness of how to handle boundaries and understanding within other forms of contact with other people other than clinicians. It is something now I'm still only learning. Luckily for me, my one trusted friend helps me here, but I have to be extremely careful to safeguard myself during any contact with others whilst I'm so in need of proper CPTSD treatment.

To realise the position clinical meaning of this CPTSD diagnosis perhaps you need to see the articles about how the ICD-11 incorporates a diagnosis of CPTSD (I can't include the best link here but it is available on the internet). Also, the Publications of the International Society for Stress and Trauma Studies ( you will need to do an Internet search) include what constitutes as the accepted CPTSD treatment standard and this might help you understand what treatment from a therapist a patient ought to be able to expect.

 

[ms spock]

@biaaw677 Yeah I got done like a dinner!

Thanks for your suggestions at ways to look at boundaries I found that useful.

 

[biaaw677]

@Disco Dancing Queen The ICD-11 is going to be finalised in 2018, but in the Beta version, which is available online, it does include CPTSD as a diagnosis that is distinct from PTSD; albeit that the ICD-11 BETA version includes within CPTSD the existance of CPTSD sufferers having PTSD systems plus a few others such as some that were originally identified by Judith Herman, you either have PTSD or CPTSD but not both. The ICD-11 Beta codes are 6B70 for PTSD and 6B71 for CPTSD. 6B71 then has several varients depending on the exact presentation in the patient. One varient is with a starting aetiology within infancy, another with it starting in childhood under 5, and others referring to other times.

If you look up the definition of infancy it is either "up to one year old" or "up to two years old", so the childhood under five years old actually covers the life time period of "between 1-5 years old" or "between 2-5 years old".

There are other starting time aetiology points for people whose first trauma was during their perinatal or neonate period (and there is recognition that the act of giving birth might result in the mother getting PTSD too.

 

[ms spock]

@biaaw677 it is not currently a diagnosis, and won't be until it gets certified, and thus now it is a shorthand for Complex Trauma and PTSD, and it means different things to various people, both professional and non professional in various countries. So as a diagnosis it doesn't exist at this time. There have been a few times that diagnosis has been up for inclusion, and it hasn't gotten through so far. So I am not holding my breath.

Anyway the time and effort that I have put into this thread and generally pulling it apart has been really useful. So when stuff intrudes about all the mistakes that I have made I can put it in perspective (sometimes), and I can think of strategies to manage it all. I don't go cascading into immediate suicidal ideation, which I did for many years.

 

[biaaw677]

o cascading into immediate suicidal ideation, which I did for many years.

Really pleased the discussions in this thread have and are helping you heal. I feel it is important to recognise this positive change, both for you and all of us who contribute to this thread.

In other ways you have helped me by giving me opportunity to realise their is somebody else out there who goes through similar things to me. You've helped me identify some things in my own complex trauma presentation. Our histories might differ, but the same infancy exposure to abuse does seem to create some of he same symptoms in the both of us.

Not having an identifiable authentic self or a safe experience to fall back on for comfort does bring so many challenges to us. In my case I think the basis of my authentic self must be in what I inherited in my genes; beneath all my trauma suffering I have an indestructible zest for life and a strong belief in the sanctity of life and I've come to perceive that this is the likely core of my authentic self, certainly it stunts any suicidal ideation I might be lead to feel. I also wonder if we can have an inherit awareness of the trauma our parents experienced; might start a discussion thread about that.

 

[ms spock]

@Cyberluddite you might find this of interest? You have obviously suffered a lot so this might be relevant to you, if not then please ignore.