PreciousChild
Platinum Member
I feel like I've posted on this more than once, but I still need to make sense of it. To what extent can we expect fairness from a partner with ptsd?
I've been seeing someone for 3.5 months, feeling very vulnerable because I'm starting to have feelings for him, and it brings up complicated feelings of both longing for love and feeling incapable of being truly loved. I'm actually more "shaky" now than in the beginning. At least in the beginning, I could keep my guard up and put up a facade. But now the feelings are coming out. Recently I told the new guy just a few details about my history with my parents and my ex husband. I guess I felt safe enough to. And every detail I reveal, it makes me feel even more exposed. But this new guy told me that though he's not perfect, he would be "easier" than my ex. And he made me feel okay for revealing that stuff. I don't get a sense from this new guy that he's looking for a "helper", which is a role I'm comfortable with. I think that's adding to my sense of feeling vulnerable because I'm questioning am I worth anything on my own without having to sacrifice stuff to be with him?
The vulnerable feeling is that all is not what it appears to be, and I think experiences with my previous partners with ptsd helped create that. There's a part of me that expects that this new guy will turn around and reveal that he was just using me or he was just pretending to be okay with me, but the joke's on me. There's this fear that how in the hell could I really believe someone could actually like me for who I am? Well, my ex husband used me, and my ex boyfriend created a facade of super niceness to cover up his dark side. They both had complex ptsd. They might not have intended evil, but they still left me with an eroded sense of trust, turned on me when I fell in love with them, and confirmed what my parents did to me - made me feel unloveable at the core. They themselves had a hurtful past in which they associated love with pain and projected onto me the anger and hate that they split off from in order to protect their own psyches. So they probably would never agree with my interpretations of things and would actually see me as the bad guy. But that further makes me feel gaslit. It's like they can have their cake and it too because they don't really have the intent. But again, they helped create a reality that left me less trusting and feeling more worthless. I'm just feeling like it's all so unfair.
I've been seeing someone for 3.5 months, feeling very vulnerable because I'm starting to have feelings for him, and it brings up complicated feelings of both longing for love and feeling incapable of being truly loved. I'm actually more "shaky" now than in the beginning. At least in the beginning, I could keep my guard up and put up a facade. But now the feelings are coming out. Recently I told the new guy just a few details about my history with my parents and my ex husband. I guess I felt safe enough to. And every detail I reveal, it makes me feel even more exposed. But this new guy told me that though he's not perfect, he would be "easier" than my ex. And he made me feel okay for revealing that stuff. I don't get a sense from this new guy that he's looking for a "helper", which is a role I'm comfortable with. I think that's adding to my sense of feeling vulnerable because I'm questioning am I worth anything on my own without having to sacrifice stuff to be with him?
The vulnerable feeling is that all is not what it appears to be, and I think experiences with my previous partners with ptsd helped create that. There's a part of me that expects that this new guy will turn around and reveal that he was just using me or he was just pretending to be okay with me, but the joke's on me. There's this fear that how in the hell could I really believe someone could actually like me for who I am? Well, my ex husband used me, and my ex boyfriend created a facade of super niceness to cover up his dark side. They both had complex ptsd. They might not have intended evil, but they still left me with an eroded sense of trust, turned on me when I fell in love with them, and confirmed what my parents did to me - made me feel unloveable at the core. They themselves had a hurtful past in which they associated love with pain and projected onto me the anger and hate that they split off from in order to protect their own psyches. So they probably would never agree with my interpretations of things and would actually see me as the bad guy. But that further makes me feel gaslit. It's like they can have their cake and it too because they don't really have the intent. But again, they helped create a reality that left me less trusting and feeling more worthless. I'm just feeling like it's all so unfair.
