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Was I so out of control everyone was scared to deal with it?

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I am trying, it is hard. After 45 + years of disassociation facing all head on is a challenge. How do I rewire what I have felt for 5 decades without taking away the good parts?


How do I stop judging my actions or better put, inactions at 10 through my 61 yo eyes?
I am in similar place....at 65 as just a couple of years ago I started my journey. I looked at my life like it is a tapestry...I didn't like the images of what I saw in mine and I believed I had wasted my WHOLE life.....over actions that occurred when I was young, innocent, and out of my control. I had to rethink how I wanted to live my life.....find the good things I had done up to date, re-establish my values....and how I could reframe my life to be seen differently thorough my own eyes......because when I died....I didn't want all I saw when I looked back in my last moments of life to be self-hatred, blame, and disgust......

Overall Goal: Find peace and contentment with just living everyday.

Evaluate/Change My Value System: AS AN ADULT and kept it simple.....walk my life with integrity, treat others as I want to be treated....and always walk my own talk.(be reliable and do what I say I'm going to do without false excuses)...and make and keep healthy boundaries

Evaluate/Change Life Purpose (I think a purpose in life is essential to motivate one to keep living): Make good memories

Evaluate/Change How I Choose to Live Every Day: By avoiding/not creating any drama, by trying new things that make myself and choosing others in my life who are happy-want to have good times, and being with people who walked their talk and treated me maturely and appropriately and realize time is precious.

Make a List of Things I Wanted to Accomplish: I also made a realistic bucket list and am working that.......things I want to do before the end of it; and things I enjoy doing and want to continue doing (like taking art lessons, going on a photo safari to another continent, losing weight and keeping it off, learning to kayak, go horseback riding one more time, go out west and to California and put my foot in the Pacific there, keep playing my music with a music group, go to Alaska, learn to make pottery animals, and enter photo contests (not necessarily win....just enter)etc.) There is life beyond trauma........and if I want to live life beyond trauma....I had to figure what was important to me.

So, the tapestry thing....life I think is like a tapestry. A tapestry can have many pictures of the past (like the mind does).....and it can be rewoven to change the images or the images fade... ....a person can reweave it with more positive memories or not and keep doing the same dysfunctional things and keep looping over the same guilt/blame keeping them stuck.........which keeps their thinking in a more dysfunctional place...keeps one stuck and unhappy......

I believe each thing we do....leaves an imprint on our life tapis (positive or negative)......so most things NOW in life are within my choice/and control and I can choose to make it positive, and let the bad memories fade....so to do that....I had to let go of the guilt and shame, stop owning shit that wasn't mine to own, stop what iffing....... so I could move on but first I needed to see my past for what it was....not my fault.

Realizing I was in the fourth quarter of life helped me see that all of my life was not bad, just parts of it were......and being able to say and believe that it wasn't my fault helped the awful memories fade.....and they have over the last couple of years....so they aren't haunting images anymore. Dissociation was also a huge part of my life....for most of my life....but I came to realize it all wasn't bad .....moments/times with people where I had fun...I couldn't remember at first....when I was working through self-blame......and I actively had to work at recalling positive stuff because my negative parts of me were in negative mode....and that's all I could see.

Now as an aware adult....I have the choice -you have the choice to make your life memories good ones.....

What do you want to remember when you are at the end of life? How do you want to feel-bitter? or content.....one for sure path to contentment..is to change how you are perceiving your life when you were a child and throw the blame on those who hurt you........and find a way to let it go. As I already told you....I let things go with a fire, paper, and a pencil. You need to find something that works for you.

Then spend the time you have left on earth with good, kind people. There's still lots of time ahead as you know it....so realize.....it wasn't your fault and let it go.....then spend your time building quality memories....with quality people and live today, each day, like it was your last..... drama free. How can you reweave your tapestry? What do you want to be thinking about in your final hours.....horror or the goodness you have found in life? This kind of a motivator helped me get unstuck from where you are.
 
Everyone on this site has suffered horribly in one way or another and I have nothing but well wishes and piece of mind for all. Unfortunately I hav no way of applying that to myself.
Where does this cognitive distortion come from that you are helpless to change? The self talk of "I can not be helped" - what started that thinking?

Is it true now?
 
This is one of my core issues, how do you balance the need to be responsible for your own actions with the abuse and what followed with what part of it is not my fault?

BTW - MovingForward10 I really appreciate all your posts and advice. They are insightful and demonstrate where I would like to be some day
Thank you @David1959 , that's kind of you to say.

I'm not sure I can explain it too well, but here goes.
What I have learnt is this:
I did those things (drugs/drink/sex etc) to ensure the child narrative I built (nothing happened to me and I am intrinsically bad as I feel bad and that's why I do bad things etc etc) could continue. No one stopped me. No parents. No teachers. No one. So I was free to get myself in to unsafe situations; actively seek out danger etc etc etc.

I can now understand why I did those things.

It's understanding where that behaviour came from.
It's understanding why we treated ourselves like that.
It's totally reframing it in the context of trauma.
So, it doesn't stop the fact I hurt me and others along the way, but it helps me to understand why. That understanding makes it easy to forgive myself. To see it was a very sad, lonely, traumatised child trying to just live somehow.
 
what started that thinking?

Is it true now?
Good question. Throughout my life I have been very self sufficient not wanting to ask for help. At the same time I am always trying to fix things for others whether family or work. I address any comment of a problem with trying to fix it

No one stopped me. No parents. No teachers.
Through Therapy I am beginning to understand this. Everyone says you can change and heal but I think inside I feel that if I discard what I have been for 50 years what will be left is an empty shell
 
I feel that if I discard what I have been for 50 years what will be left is an empty shell
As luck would have it, it's not really that easy to get rid of the old stuff. You might think of it as "an experiment". "What would life be like if i DIDN'T put all this energy into blaming myself?" "What other options are there?" "What function is all that performing and what could I substitute?"

It might sound like I'm being silly, but I'm not. From what I understand, this is the kind of "trying things on for size" that most people do when they're kids. It's just that you were too busy trying to survive to do much experimenting back then. When it comes right down to it, while there are REASONS for things, there doesn't actually have to be BLAME.
 
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