Well, I've got myself into a complete state and I am really struggling to stay with my body at all.
I barely know where to begin. It has just taken me 20 minutes to remember anything about yesterday at all. I was blown out before I saw my therapist yesterday after two weeks' break. She helped me as she always does but the session just wasn't long enough to deal with everything that is going on.
The time I had seen her previously, I was cowering down in the left-hand side of me with no connection to my upper body or legs or to any part of my right-hand side. Actually, I was out of the top of my head like a straining balloon, but this cowering was the best I could do to still be associated with my body.
During the two weeks' absence, I had felt very powerful energy massing in my core. It was (and still is) so forceful that it actually really hurts and seems to be contributing towards pushing my ribs out of alignment. One of my lungs isn't inflating, which my chiropractor puts down to my ribs being in the wrong place. I cannot sit in the evenings; I have to lie down to give this energy enough space. I had begun to see that it was separating out in the central part of my body and the rest of me could not stand to have anything to do with it. At the edge of my consciousness, I realise that it is about to explode into a massive set of violent flashbacks to another assault from my childhood, and, I suspect, another attacker. I am doing everything I can not to engage with it, since I have so much work to do (but am failing to do). I am more dissociated, numb, etc. than I have been since the onset of my PTSD. It is costing me so much energy to cope.
As a by-product (maybe) of being in this state, I am forgetting to eat and am mushrooming into someone I consider even more ugly than I thought before. (I know now I wasn't ugly at all when I look back to any given age, but I am always ugly to myself in the present moment.) Now though, I feel out of control and I realise this is an expression of my self-hatred and need for punishment.
On the one hand, as I've tried to explain in the other thread, I've had to realise that I have massively internalised this rejection of myself on the basis of being abused and raped. I have seen this played out in the three major relationships I have had with men, and crucially, of course, it was played out from when I was about two weeks old. I don't know when exactly my mother found me being molested by my father, but she was pregnant with my younger sister, and from emerging memories I have, it seems she allowed him to continue to do so, as long as he didn't touch my younger sister. She wanted to hold on to him, and took her identity from being with him to such a degree, that she was prepared to sacrifice little me (with whom she had never bonded anyway). I guess she would do, and has continued to do, anything to hold onto him and not have the family boat rocked.
On the other hand, I feel I am stuck in the 3 days after my birth, when I was sent to a room with other babies, before meeting my mother (who had been unconscious when I was born) . I feel a strong sense of "where is everybody?", "I am hungry and panicked about it", and "how I am going to cope on my own?" I also know from another vantage point, then when I was introduced to my mother, she was angry with me, and she became angrier still when my father was delighted with me. She had had a tough labour, and blamed me for that (and still does when she talks about it) and she wanted a son. I know all these feelings are playing out in my life now again.
My mother has always, I now realise, seen me as her love rival and has sought to put me down at all turns. My father is a weak man in this respect and has taken her lead in so many ways when she chooses to take against a person. Occasionally he wakes up and corrects her, but they are complicit in the way they deal with me (and to some extent my two younger sisters). Not only have he and she both constantly undermined me but they see no value in any of my achievements. I guess it is all part of the pattern of abuse.
One example will perhaps explain how she goes about undermining me (I could go on for years but I'll spare you all that!).
I met them by chance on returning from my university city with a pile of copies of my MA, which I had just had printed. I completed it in the days when you did an MA by research over several years and it had attracted a lot of attention abroad. Institutions wanted to buy copies of it from me and I was asked to get involved in a variety of projects one would normally be invited to do only once one has a PhD. Anyway, I had worked stinkingly hard to get this research done and written up and I was in a state of amazement about what had transpired and the opportunities ahead of me. I had so lost confidence, having completed my first degree under a cloud of unassisted withdrawal from the stupid meds I was given during my year abroad to deal with my rape (which they diagnosed as IBS), and I had done badly in my finals as a result. I had lost any sense that I had a brain or was capable of anything. Now people wanted me to publish, get involved in conferences and other projects, and I had been offered the chance to do a PhD with a very eminent supervisor. I was really struggling to believe I wouldn't get found out by them all as a fraud (on the basis of what I don't know), whilst at the same time, delighting in the projects presented to me. This is my creativity and what makes me feel more alive than anything else on the planet.
So I arrived at the café where we were due to meet, asked them about their long journey (which they had broken to meet me), and slid a copy of my MA over the table towards my mother and said, "That is for you." It was a gift of something that was important to me (my baby, if you like); I certainly wouldn't have expected them to read it. She glanced down at it and then looked at me (whilst my father was fetching coffee) and said, "You used to have such lovely hair." As ever, her comments are so left-field that I don't know how to respond. And that was all that was said on the matter, ever.
Before seeing my therapist, I felt I must do something to improve my situation. I have explained elsewhere what I did to try and move things on in a healing way with my ex:
https://www.myptsd.com/threads/how-...n-there-is-no-one-to-comfort-you.41322/page-2 but I thought I should try and engage with my baby self and try to get myself out of this trapped state. I wanted to fetch her out of that room, send in healing light and detach myself from it permanently. I am very used to doing healing visualisations of this nature.
So I went to the room, but my cot was empty. I was just looking around to see where baby me was, when I felt a small hand in mine. I looked down and there was toddler me wanting to lead me downstairs to where I was with my mum. As she started to guide me down the stairs, I suddenly could see baby me sitting on my mother's lap as if through the floor. My mother looked like the devil. I was filled with such terror that I could not get down those stairs and could not rescue baby me. I feel such a dreadful failure.
So well done me, I manage to blow myself out even further. I've got another week before I see my therapist again, and a mountain of academic work to do. I have no brain and I don't know what to do.
Apologies that this is so long. I don't expect anyone to read it; I just needed to try to make sense of how it all fits together or to see whether I am dealing with several things at the same time. I am smashed to smithereens; I don't want to be here; I am trying to starve myself/kill myself by gaining weight, and my normal healing tools are not working too well.
My therapist said as I was leaving that it was not surprising that someone in my circumstances could not connect to the right-hand side of myself. There wasn't time to ask her what she meant. She checked both last time and the previous time whether I could do so. I must find out what she means. I know some people see the right-hand side as the male aspect and the left as the female one. Maybe that is what she means. I am terrified of the male and profoundly reject my female nature. Not surprising I don't want to be in my body or even here at all.
