What Now?

[Wolvescry]

Nothing is wrong, nothing, everything is fine, I am fine, life is fine, grades are good, work is fine, but why is it still so hard. I am so tired. and just plain sad. so sad all the time. People avoid me all the time, like I am a disease, and that hurts even more.

I am generally a very happy person, but my pain is so heavy. But I know it is my fault, people bring up subjects like rape, abuse and other stuff all the time, and it sets me off, I try not to give myself away but I know I do sometimes.

I understand that all though its not my fault that certain things happen the way they did (it took so much therapy to get to that point) but I do take some responsibility. I choose to party and go out with those guys, I choose to stay in a abusive relationship, I kept quiet to protect the people who hurt me just to let them abuse me more. I understand the complexity of all those situations. I know most don't understand, I get it all the time. I feel like i am poison. It just hurts. I am so sad. When I was younger I wrote a saying, "All people want is to loved and understood, but what they forget is to love an understand in return." I feel that so strong now.

To be honest I just want to be held and to feel safe. I just want to feel safe.

 

[maryel42]

I don't know how to help you feel safe, but I'm listening and I can tell you that you're real and your pain is real, and that might help a little.

Just because you made poor decisions or choices at some point, that may or may not have contributed to the abuse you've gone through, it doesn't invalidate the pain you are currently in. Painful memories and a painful past are painful. There's no way around that. Sometimes, eventually, that pain will ease up; the problem is that no one can say just for sure why and when. Shortcuts to that end are what lead to a whole lot of other pains... addictions and bad coping mechanisms, and all the many, many ways that we can abuse ourselves further.

I wonder if I chose to abuse myself further because I couldn't bear that my abusers finally left my life. I know that the most self-damaging thing I learned in therapy was that they taught me to do it to myself even worse than what they did... that I may have gotten rid of them but I'll never ever get rid of the part of my head that continues the emotional abuse to this day, if I'm not careful.

It's a default setting. When I'm tired, when I'm scared, when a specific set of triggers gets pulled and I lock into an internal loop where all I can see is that I'm damaged. I'm worthless. I'm cursed to be just the same as the people who damaged me. I'm poison, laying in wait to ruin and poison every person I come into contact with. It's hard. To be laughing with my kids one minute and then have the knowledge slam into my chest like an arrow that I'm hurting them just by breathing. That the faster I remove myself from their lives, they will be better off.

So how to go on, with the weight of all this pain, that never seems to shift no matter what you learn about yourself? /shrug/ I am still figuring it out. Sometimes it is easy. Sometimes I watch the seconds crawl by. I think it's something that everyone learns for themselves. I remind myself that I am more than the sum of my own dysfunctions. That sure, a lot of absolutely horrible things happened. I am still here. I am more than just someone who went through those things. The total came together and there's everything in between the broken places.

Light. Hope. A tiny blade of grass rooted between cracks in cement. The ability to get up and say that yeah, it sucks, but they did not take your soul. You can give it away, but nobody can take it. Even if you gave it away you get to change your mind and take it back.

Hope it helps.

 

[Introspective]

Of course you want to feel safe. And you deserve that. You will get there. There is safety on the other side of this.

Just because you feel you made some bad decisions back then, doesn't mean you deserved what happened to you. That wasn't your fault! We all make bad decisions, but we are not to blame for being abused.

You are not a disease and you are not poison. I'm so sorry you're feeling this way, it's an awful feeling to have, and I know that feeling.

*Hug*