Lies Are Truth

[Sandstone]

If you forced me to pick now, I'd say it obviously can't be true, I'm making a fuss and looking for an excuse to hide from the world. Much easier to a selfish malingerer and be blameworthy, and simplifies a lot of peoples lives.

 

[shimmerz]

Is there a difference between someone who is a liar and someone who is mistaken?

 

[Ronin]

Much easier to a selfish malingerer and be blameworthy

You see, but selfish malingerer still isn't blameworthy.

Someone in so much pain &/or suffering needs compassion, not blame.

 

[Tinyflame]

I agree with the above.

Dear @stenni , is it possible the angle you're looking at it is very minimizing? I've done that. Also, things get 'unremembered'.. until they don't.

Sometimes too it is too painful to accept some realities, from the past. For now. (I find that not to be a conscious choice. I can't explain it well.)

Please be kind to yourself in the process. :hug: (The fact that is difficult, may be a tip off. You are not betraying anyone.)

 

[shimmerz]

You know, I used to have a saying while I was in the house of horrors. Keep in mind I didn't think that was 'so bad' at the time. Crazy shit happened in that house. And my favourite saying, that kept me on track was 'how do you make sense out of nonsense?' Because I kept trying to figure out WHY (because I was solidly left brained at the time and needed to find 'reasons' for everything that freaking happened in my life). Sometimes there is no reason besides someone else looking to make one look crazy and feel crazy.

I don't lie either. And when I started to feel insane the only grounding point for me was having to trust that I didn't lie. I believed other's lies. Why? Because I didn't lie and I didn't understand that other people did. And that was the fatal flaw in my thinking process.

 

[Tinyflame]

One example, decades after my dad died, I still didn't understand 'why' it should be a problem (though it was with just some hours of warning from diagnosis), until I could finally remember & re-tell that he got knocked off with a x2 consecutive fatal doses by a nurse while I watched & didn't say anything or stop her (I was the only one who ever knew & didn't tell, & I left him too after she did it, though I ran back to check & he was barely breathing, thought he was dead & wasn't surprised, minutes later he was, total of less than 10 minutes from her action), when I knew the second (immediate) horse-syringe was wrong. Years of working in health care confirmed that 'normally', it is not so easy to die- people don't go like that from that condition especially, It was only 30+ years later confessing I was a near-murderer/ was one I understood I had always lived with that belief about myself all my life. (My dad & I were super-close/ like best friends btw/ inseparable. And of course too I did not want to see him in pain, but..)

Patience Dear @stenni. It's so so so so very difficult to unravel stuff. :hug:

 

[scout86]

I want someone to give a sensible answer that addresses the issues I'm trying to discuss.

I think I'm lost, trying to sort out what the issues exactly are.

There are situations when a "lie" can be true, depending on how you define "lie". Once upon a time, in a discussion was a fundamentalist Christian friend (who also had PTSD, which made him a bit paranoid) he yelled at me "Are you calling God a liar???" I was NOT in fact, calling anyone a liar. MY point was a story, told to illustrate a point, may not have literally happened, and yet the point of the story is true. My T likes to tell stories to illustrate points. There was a time, early on, when I decided he was "lying to me". We have, since then, agreed that "a story told to illustrate a point is true, as long as the point it's illustrating is true." Those kinds of stories are sometimes called "parables".

So, in our brains, maybe, sometimes, the literal truth just can't be dealt with. Perhaps a different story appears in it's place. To illustrate the point. The idea, the feelings, behind it may be true, even if the events are not literally true.

(Probably way off???)

 

[Suzetig]

The truth may be that what you do remember was enough to cause dissociation. Or that you aren't experiencing dissociation but something else is happening psychologically, or that others are trying to put you into a box that doesn't fit you. I often find these times of real struggle with myself do end in better understanding but it's horrible to go through.

 

[Sandstone]

I think I'm lost, trying to sort out what the issues exactly are.

Of five therapists, the three better ones have all believed I'm quite dissociative. The first suggested I hold "board meetings" of myself, and at the time I had no idea what he was on about. The third was never very specific, but said I scored unrepresentatively low on the test because i was so literal, and the fifth, current, one certainly believes Structural Dissociation fits me and claims I've attended sessions as an EP. ( Number 2 tested me for dissociation, but like everything else, never told me a result and left me wholly bewildered, the 4th assured me I didn't even have PTSD as I could list my big 5 traumas without emotion)

As I began to read about PTSD I dismissed dissociation in even its most minor forms as being nothing to do with me, with only the vaguest possibility that occasional light headedness was Dissoc rather than anxiety.

Reading more about Structural Dissoc. has opened up more possibilities. But it could equally be the sort of hypochondria we develop when we read medical dictionaries, or simply a willingness to comply with authority, or acting up in the hope of prolonging therapy. I don't trust what I experience or what I think or what I feel.

Sometimes I believe it fits, but even when I believe it I don't. So to say

sooner or later, you'll have to decide with which version to stick, for better or worse, and do it thoroughly.

is to ask for an impossibility, because whichever I decide to believe I wouldn't believe. So anything I said I believed I would immediately have to deny or I would be lying. I'm carrying a massive conflict that consumes me.

 

[Ronin]

because whichever I decide to believe I wouldn't believe

Why is this conundrum even necessary, though?

Just work at the issues at hand. Leave the what if land to when things become actual. Pick the pieces you can work on without spiralling yourself into theoretical batshit meantime.

 

[Sandstone]

I can't work on any of it without immediately coming up against huge internal conflict. I wrote 3 days ago "T also said that looking in, working on myself, clearly activated the destructive elements of myself.I suppose that would be why when I thought about inner child stuff, my response was to threaten it with a knife if it ever came near me.' but I'd already forgotten I'd written that.

And then I step aside and cease believing any of it, so there is nothing to work on except to stop being so idle.

 

[Ronin]

Work on the needs & self comforting & self soothing.

Leave all that destructive self-punishing stuff for later. If it's worth it? You can always do it later. It probably won't seem so appealing with more comfort.