You know what? You're absolutely right. People here CAN be discouraging and even disparaging, out of all proportion. And thank god! Why?...
At one point I had reached such an extreme of full and outright retreat from the world that I might as well have been curled up in the fetal position in the corner for years on end. True, my symptoms were severe, and pdoc and tdoc advice was consistent with this approach as being necessary at the time, in order to reestablish a sense of basic safety.
But if I had not had small, non physical...relatively inconsequential challenges to face, and surmount (ie not related to family, work, anything else that could potentially affect my future negatively...those things cause me to go into full-on dissociative freezing...literally "freezing")...if I hadn't have had such relatively harmless obstacles to surmount as negative feedback on this site, at first...I would never have begun making progress. Truly.
This time around 2 years ago, that is exactly where I was...and this forum was the first place I was able to begin to reach out...first place EVER. And the nonthreatening nature of a)not knowing any of the respondents personally b)there being no face/physical presence which would have stood to convey an overwhelming prospect of threat, etc...I honestly think I would never have made a start. That's not hyperbole. I do thank you, greatly, for bringing up this very subject, however...as it had been some time since I'd thought of the matter in such stark terms, and remembered just exactly how hopeless and overcome I had become. If I had let myself be scared off by negative posts, and whatever oppositional or insensitive posts...I honestly think I would have just continued to retract into myself until I winked out of existence.
That's how it feels to me now, at any rate. As it was...that was, in fact, the turning point...where the "anger turned inward" which had been aimed that direction for 42 years...the entirety of my life, as it happens...was turned around the other direction...and I began facing it and getting it out of my system by engaging it in a safe manner, such as that presented by this forum. And it was in this very forum, in fact. This is something you're likely to read about in trauma related literature, you'll find...needing to turn that firehose of venom around in the other direction in order to begin "expressing the wound", so to speak...getting out all of that pent up festering horror that we've been stuffing and allowing to draw us inward and away from everything else.
Mine was virulent enough that it happened to begin coming out "sideways", when it finally did...against a moderator on a related forum...resulting in my begin banned, in fact. A Crazy, frenetic, screeching kind of mindless railing which defied all reason and rational proportions, or any sense of decency at all, in fact. I'll be the first to admit it. But that's what mine looked like. And if I hadn't had a safe place to direct it, here, at first, until the apocalyptic, horror-show tone began to have the edge worn off of it..I think I would have had to just keep it stuffed. Where else are you going to have a chance to get out that first burst of...earth shaking murderous fury, after all..if not here?
So...a word from someone who's been there....when we're at that delicate, precarious place...of keeping it all safely frozen in place, and immobilized...just so it can continue to be how it's been for us for so long...that doesn't accomplish anything, in the end...but keeping it how things HAVE BEEN for so long. If nothing changes, nothing changes.
Unless you begin challenging your comfort zone, you haven't really begin to recover...because protecting your comfort zone, and expecting the world to 'work around it'...not only does that NOT demonstrate a true desire to finally move out of that corner you've found yourself backed into...but it represents, in my view, a "death-trap mentality", which, like a siren's call...will be the death of us, if we don't challenge and overcome it.
After all...we can't hope to just build a thick enough, impenetrable enough barrier between us and the world, and call that progress. Yes, you may be in a place where it's necessary to reestablish a sense of basic freedom from a sense of immediate threat, and to need a stress free environment in order to do so...but if that's the case, maybe you should consider just focusing on getting that down, before doing anything else, further...and not dividing your purposes so to speak (speaking from experience).
Because if attempts were made to constrain us all...to prevent us, as damaged people (if only temporarily damaged)..from ACTING AS damaged people are BOUND to act (if they're honest about their feelings and perspectives, that is...)..and from having this one safe place where we can vent whatever negativity we need to to begin to get a handle on it, and "get it out"...and get safe feedback and responses from others, in turn, in a situation which won't cost us a job, or family...then what is the forum HERE for, exactly? Yes, you deserve to have your fragile state acknowledged and respected, and to be supported while within it...but not only will that, alone, not serve to bring you round, in the end...but it's interfering with the therapeutic needs of others, in my opinion...as well as the simple fact that it's patently unrealistic.
Glad you're here, and that you've shared your real feelings about this matter. That's progress in and of itself, if you ask me...you yourself said that you were "almost afraid to post this"...but guess what...you did it anyway! And have found out that the world won't come to an end...which is somehow the place most of us have all worked our way into, in the end...fear that to do ANYTHING might upset the delicate balance we've been trying to bring about in order to avoid experiencing any more pain. You've just barked that wolf from your door, in the first round. Feel free to PM me.
