Out of the Storm

Symptoms => General Discussion => Topic started by: Contessa on June 10, 2016, 03:32:54 AM

Title: Personality Change
Post by: Contessa on June 10, 2016, 03:32:54 AM
Just want to put a question out there and see what others might have experienced.

Over a period of four years in my adult life, I unfortunately suffered through not one but several traumatic experiences which overlapped. Support from friends and family at this time was on the whole non existent. I would not go so far as to say that I had suffered trauma during childhood, though there was plenty of room for a more positive upbringing.

I feel like my entire personality has completely changed from before the events to after. Its like an actor performing a different character from one movie to the next. Does anybody else feel the same?
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: Three Roses on June 10, 2016, 03:46:30 AM
Yes, I felt completely different at one point. My personality changed, I was not entertained by the same things; things felt heavy and leaden. For me, this was grief over the death of my mother. With some work it lessened although I don't think I'll ever be the same. And I don't want to be.  ;)
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: chairmanmeow on June 10, 2016, 03:32:04 PM
I only become more myself.
Experience generates depth in a person.
https://vimeo.com/123004006 this comes to mind...
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: Danaus plexippus on June 10, 2016, 05:08:02 PM
Yes, Chairmanmeow and then life knocks the stuffing out of us. I have changed a lot in almost every way. I miss the old me sometimes. She may not have been as "deep" but she was fun, trusting, energetic, interesting, outgoing, an all-around great gal. Now I'm suspicious, guarded and not easily amused. My life used to be exciting. Now I'm sitting here reading other people's problems and getting a good whine in myself occasionally.
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: chairmanmeow on June 10, 2016, 05:52:21 PM
Quote from: Danaus plexippus on June 10, 2016, 05:08:02 PM
Yes, Chairmanmeow and then life knocks the stuffing out of us. I have changed a lot in almost every way. I miss the old me sometimes. She may not have been as "deep" but she was fun, trusting, energetic, interesting, outgoing, an all-around great gal. Now I'm suspicious, guarded and not easily amused. My life used to be exciting. Now I'm sitting here reading other people's problems and getting a good whine in myself occasionally.

Anxiety shuts down our emotional parts of our brain limiting our ability to feel, I feel it in particular when it comes to other people I am very social but when Im put in a anxious situation my interest in others vanishes and I have little to say. It makes me not myself, this is the nature of the depressive state of mind. If I had to bet under all this that person you miss is still here, just disconnected and more developed, because we grow empathy through experiencing out own suffering...
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: Wife#2 on June 10, 2016, 06:07:21 PM
Contessa,

I think I've done a few 180's, meaning at least one full circle in there.

My cPTSD is based in childhood experiences. I was considered sullen, sulky and a chatterbox. I personally felt lost, lonely and unworthy.
As a young adult, I chose to redefine myself - a well-timed move by Mom made this easier. I chose bubbly, funny and smart. I like that me. She wasn't quite so concerned with what other people thought, at least it didn't rule her.
Before emerging too far into adulthood (before I was 25), my sister who was also my heart-mother died. I was parentified by my mother, asked to shelve my grief to help my (ahem) real mother through HER pain. Sullen was back. Unworthy was in her luggage.
Years of depression and things not going well and therapy that helped and finally, Cheerful was back. Fun had found her way home.

Then, I got married. I started out loving, hopeful and open. After a decade with a totally different type of cPTSD (angry, volatile) I have been slowly pushed back to sullen and unworthy again. It was like the frog in the pot - I didn't see what was happening until it was too late.

I'm hoping that, if I can get strong enough to ACTUALLY do this, after divorce I can rediscover cheerful, fun me. It would be great to have my DS8 meet her. I think he'd like her more than he likes sullen, depressed Mom.
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: Contessa on June 13, 2016, 10:17:04 AM
Thank you all for sharing your stories and points of view. Its very good to find people that do understand.

Three Roses and chairmanmeow I agree that there are some positive changes (for want of a better word), like a lesson learned or a greater sense of empathy. I remember from the first nasty thing that I worked through, that once I started to come out on the other side I really did appreciate the lessons learned from it, and was even able to embrace what happened in terms of recovery. It was horrible, but it showed me how resilient I was at that stage. I still wasn't completely who I was before though, but I came to like myself again.

Then, almost immediately, the swift kick to the guts came over and over, and over time the big changes occurred just like Danaus plexippus describes. I could not keep up with it all and life has just gone downhill since. Like Wife#2 it does feel like a complete 180, i'm not anything like I used to be. I miss the old me, and I want to be her again.

After reading your responses I began to actually remember why I was the way I used to be, not just who. To me, and to my T it was quite a breakthrough. It was exciting to remember that part of who I was stemmed from my choice to be who I was (thanks for the memory jog Wife#2); I wasn't just who I was, I also made deliberate decisions to be who I was. And to some extent its true for the me that I don't like now because I am no longer completely out of control.

The challenge now is to maintain this optimism throughout the steep uphill climb.

Thank you all again for your views. It sounds like we are all at very different stages on the path to greener pastures from Sleepy Hollow. I hope that hill we're all climbing flattens out sooner rather than later.
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: arpy1 on June 13, 2016, 10:39:15 AM
interesting thread. me, i have trouble identifying any personality that defines the true me. i have been many people in my life, all of whom were constructs i put in place in order to cope/fit in with/alleviate/survive the life-situations i was faced with. i was like this from a very small child. 

so the truth is i don't know who i am, what my personality is, really. the one illuminating realisation i had a few months ago about who i may be inside, was the realisation that i am an introvert, not an extrovert.  i have been living as an extrovert since the moment, when i was 13, when i decided that being shy and introverted was too painful.  that was the only time i consciously 'altered' my personality. the other constructs were unconscious and survival motivated. 
so i guess i can't say i have changed and miss the 'old me', as it were.  i have changed, and now i am having to work out what i would have been from the very few clues that remain after six decades of constructs.
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: Danaus plexippus on June 13, 2016, 01:06:26 PM
I occasionally catch myself showing different aspects of my personality depending on who I'm with. Conversely there are parts of myself I share with no one, not even my T. Sometimes I feel like an emotional chameleon and wonder what I hide even from myself. There seems to be a tug of war between the meds my shrink has me on and the self-revelatory process of therapy. I think I know what I want, but I'm not accomplishing it. It's so frustrating!
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: Wife#2 on June 13, 2016, 02:08:46 PM
Danaus - between your post and your avatar, I remembered that, in high school, I encouraged friends to call me social butterfly. It was how I made sense of the fact that I could 'hang out' with the bandies, the theater crowd, the GT crowd, the druggies, the 'IT' crowd (though they made fun of my behind my back when they were polite enough to KEEP it behind my back).

Part of my flexibility was in the fact that I didn't judge people harshly. Part was my desperation to 'fit in' at least somewhere. I was the new kid again, we'd moved again. So, if the druggies needed to see the accepting but concerned side - that's what they got. If the bandies needed to see playful and silly until marching time, no problem. The GT's needed to see that I had some sense. Ok, I can fake that well enough if I keep a good eye on the others who seem to have sense.

I thought I'd done a pretty good job of fooling everyone into thinking that I was an OK person. I found out later that I had not, but at least some let me believe it during high school!

Still, to this day, I am different around my 'red-neck' friends and my friends of color. I still try too hard to be liked. My own husband doesn't know who I am a lot of the time, because at some point he made fun of either my friends or the way I was 'different' around them. It's all in my 'make them comfortable however you can so they'll like you' attitude. By the way, it only works on a limited basis. If they're around me a whole lot, I have to end up getting real. Only the truest of friends stuck it out as friends when I couldn't 'perform' anymore. They are still my friends and for that I am grateful!
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: woodsgnome on June 14, 2016, 03:27:45 PM
Contessa wrote:  "I feel like my entire personality has completely changed from before the events to after. Its like an actor performing..."

I have a personal take on this, in that for a large chunk of my life I was an actor in a small troupe that performed mostly improv (unscripted) style theatre within a historical context. Within the group I settled into a 'character' that I eventually took solo. But rather than ever leave the act entirely, I kinda moved my personality into the role to where it took over my whole being.

This was actually a good thing, as far as I'm concerned; it probably saved my miserable life by presenting an opportunity to not just act, but to become someone who finally mattered and was recognized for what and who I was. It felt like the role actually helped me bring out an important aspect of my inner self that had been trapped inside for 20+ years. So I treasured it.

In effect I was stuck in what's called obsessive compulsive behaviour. The role took over and wonderfully masked the earlier self. Without denigrating the importance of what that did for my psyche, I can now understand that I was in bypass mode. Stuff from the pre-acting years--flashbacks, etc.--created an emotional storm that I couldn't shake and finally, couldn't ignore. I'm still on that slow recovery path, sifting through the deep layers of pain from what I'd valiantly tried to push aside. 

In one sense I'd 'killed off' the earlier self, but only to a small extent.  I went from bruised personality to new one. For a while the new was what I needed, but the bruises were never adequately dealt with. This became glaringly so once I semi-retired from the acting gigs.

That said, it still seems life isn't set up to where any of us has consistent lifelong personalities anyway. Maybe instead of a continuous, meaningful story, what we're really looking for is a missing sense of wholeness. In that way we're all actors, or as my favourite line of Shakespeare puts it: "All the world's a stage..."; and each of us has many roles within the play. Or, as Mark Twain explained, "There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside the dullest exterior, there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy."
 

Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: bruisednotbroken on June 14, 2016, 07:50:25 PM
Contessa,

I was just saying this to someone over the weekend! Actually, true to form, I was apologizing for being different than I normally am and for being a "bad friend".

I, too, suffered multiple tragedies at the end of last year which have left me feeling not myself at all. I no longer try to make conversation with people, I no longer joke around at all. I feel very sullen, and serious all of the time. I also feel very different from most other people right now. (Of course, I'm sure it doesn't help that I keep crossing paths with the main person who perpetrated this latest trauma in my life.)

The way I see it, I was trained and taught to always ignore, overlook, and disregard my own feelings. But not this time. If I don't feel like making conversation or joking around, I am just not going to do it, and there is nothing wrong with that. All people have ups and downs, and we forgive everyone else's roller coaster ride through life, so why not our own??

Also, my husband is the one that pointed out to me this past weekend that I was apologizing to a friend for it. He said I owe nobody any apology for having feelings that aren't always positive, and he's right. So I'm determined not to apologize for my feelings anymore either, especially since I usually do so out of CPTSD habit. I will just explain to anyone who cares enough to ask that I am going through some difficult times, but I have faith that I will bounce back and feel more like myself again in the future.

I may always carry with me the damage from this latest series of traumas, but I will learn from them and grow to be a more complete person. I have always stayed strictly away from drugs and alcohol because I want to truly experience my own life. So I will take these experiences as well and use them to sculpt a newer version of myself.

I believe that we all have times when we don't feel quite like ourselves, and that's ok. I know a lot of us are just beginning to really learn who we truly are anyway.

:hug:
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: radical on June 14, 2016, 10:31:51 PM
I'm in the middle of overlapping traumas.
Often I feel like I don't recognise myself anymore.  There are ways in which the fog was a comforting illusion and I'm almost jealous of those who can remain. 

I got to the point where I just blew and it was self-destructive in the sense that I burned a lot of bridges.  I have no idea where this is going to lead.  There are no guarnatees of a happy future, but I know if I'd carried on the way I was going continued misery was certain.  I guess I could have been "strategic" in dealing with things and maintained a bit of dignity, and protected myself from some of the fallout, but I learned and I'm still learning.

At core, I haven't changed, but the way I am in the world has to.  It may be that burning bridges will be a kind of salvation because there is no way back to where I was before.  I certainly need to be more "for me" and to put my own needs into every equation in a way I was unable to before.  I still don't know how to go about that.

The part that hurts most is losing my belief system, the way I understood humanity, how I thought I should behave, what I thought the answers were.  I wonder at my former "kindness".  I used to just react in a way I thought was kind and humane.  But just reacting rather than responding with wisdom and reflection isn't true kindness.  It can be self-indulgent, it can be unhelpful to others,  far too often it was self-defeating.  So I feel unkind, I feel selfish, I feel cynical and harsh.  I stop myself and watch where once I acted with generosity.  Even when I see someone else's sorrow, I stop myself from blindly reacting because I still don't know how to respond in a way that is truly kind and compassionate, to everyone concerned, including me. 

I don't keep giving away my own power in every situation, but I don't know what to do instead.  I feel guilty about holding onto it, as though I don't deserve it.  I certainly don't know what to do with it.
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: arpy1 on June 14, 2016, 10:52:46 PM
radical, you could have been me writing there!!  the burning of bridges, the loss of belief system, and the thing about no longer giving away our power , even tho we have no real idea what to do with it when we keep hold of it.

it helps enormously to realise i am not alone feeling this way. thank you :hug: :hug:
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: Contessa on June 15, 2016, 04:06:33 AM
Wow! YES to everything woodsgnome, bruisednotbroken, radical and arpy1.

"For a while the new was what I needed, but the bruises were never adequately dealt with." - that's the point I have reached now woodsgnome. That was an amazing post to read  :)

"I was trained and taught to always ignore, overlook, and disregard my own feelings" - me too bruisednotbroken. But now that I have developed a habit of no longer apologising for anything i've turned into a bit of a b**ch. Need to come back to centre again. I have to cross paths with a perpetrator as well, might need to ask for advice on how to handle it. It sounds like you have a very loving and supportive husband too, i'm a tad jealous  ;)

"The part that hurts most is losing my belief system, the way I understood humanity, how I thought I should behave, what I thought the answers were" - radical, I used to be a school teacher, and had a very strong sense of respect for others and self which was integral to creating a safe learning environment. It formed the basis of how my students were expected to behave and interact with each other, as well as other students in school and people within the community. It was amazing to watch each of them develop when they knew they were completely safe... but then... no need to go into details but my head has been a mess since.

"the burning of bridges" has been necessary at times but sad. I hate it arpy1 and radical. Oh well.
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: bruisednotbroken on June 15, 2016, 07:16:28 PM
Quote from: radical on June 14, 2016, 10:31:51 PM
The part that hurts most is losing my belief system, the way I understood humanity, how I thought I should behave, what I thought the answers were.  I wonder at my former "kindness".  I used to just react in a way I thought was kind and humane.  But just reacting rather than responding with wisdom and reflection isn't true kindness.  It can be self-indulgent, it can be unhelpful to others,  far too often it was self-defeating.  So I feel unkind, I feel selfish, I feel cynical and harsh.  I stop myself and watch where once I acted with generosity.  Even when I see someone else's sorrow, I stop myself from blindly reacting because I still don't know how to respond in a way that is truly kind and compassionate, to everyone concerned, including me. 

Well said! This really strikes a chord with me.
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: bruisednotbroken on June 28, 2016, 04:45:23 PM
Contessa,

I recently went through a "do not apologize" phase of life. I feel like I have reached a good middle ground with it now, though. Now I refuse to ever apologize for my feelings. I will however, apologize for my actions if necessary. Sometimes I have to stop myself and analyze the situation... is this a "feelings" issue or is this due to my "actions"?

For me, it's a good rule of thumb to only apologize for my actions. It gives me permission to finally have feelings and express them freely. I need that permission, as it's something I've never had in my life.
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: Contessa on June 28, 2016, 09:03:49 PM
Bruisednotbroken,

Just checked over my old posts to see where I'd written that too, but I hadn't. Definitely went through that phase too!

Sinse being on this forum i've begun to settle - heading for that middle ground! Very wise words bruised.n.b. Good way to keep those actions in check too which was something I also lost control of for a time.
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: Gentian on August 01, 2016, 06:48:31 AM
Yep. Absolutely.  In fact I often lament privately that I used to be so much more patient and "nice".  I think I was better liked in general, though I'm not sure if this is true or just seems that way now.  I was really good at placating troublemakers.  Now I have been accused of being intolerant. I used to joke that I didn't have an anger "button".  Now I feel silent flashes of rage during which it's all I can do to not smash something (haven't done it yet lol). I seem to have lost some of my ability to fake I'm "ok" effectively. It goes way farther than this, but you get the idea. By way of backstory, I grew up in abusive homes but seemed to do alright, I could fake normal and even "happy" so well that people would comment on how envious they were of me, and I was always blown away by this because I'd been miserable with what I now know were cptsd symptoms for as long as I could remember.  Then, in my early 40s, an event which I refer to as the "Blitzkrieg" happened, during which I was taken down by two psychopaths in my family--I didn't know what psychopathy actually was until then--and lost nearly everything. I mean everything.  Home, job, reputation, marriage, multiple animals dead.  I went No Contact with both of them and by necessity most of my other family, and have not been the same since.  I am quick to anger (though I stuff it), I mistrust everybody, I lost confidence in every area of my life from my profession to my appearance to my hope for the future.  I am far, far more afraid and sometimes don't leave the house.  I catastrophize constantly.  It feels like my entire life prior to the blitzkrieg exists on the other side of a wide chasm. So, again, yep.  It's weird isn't it.  For me, It's like my memories of myself are of someone I used to know, and I'm not sure who I am now because it hasn't been long enough ( a few years).

On a brighter note, I'm trying to use this as an opportunity to create a truer, more honest life for myself and my chosen family.   :)  Thanks for making it through this long post.  :blahblahblah: ;D
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: Contessa on August 01, 2016, 09:35:59 AM
What a story Gentian. Sorry that you have gone through so much hurt. Thank you for sharing.

On a brighter note, just by having the understanding of others in this forum (finally somebody gets it), my anger has lifted amazingly. There hasn't been a resolution as such for the reasons why, but the empathy of this community has given me much needed peace. I hope the same can happen for you too.

:hug:
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: Danaus plexippus on August 01, 2016, 11:50:26 AM
I have suffered similar losses thanks to bat $hi+ crazy people in my life. I likewise no longer know who I am, now that so much of my former identity has been stripped away from me. It's a terrible feeling of groundlessness. Torturous days and nights of ruminating on how easily I could have dodged their bullets and the hyper vigilant state of not knowing what's coming next. I feel for you buddy. This is no way to go through life and right now my meds seem to be making everything worse. Panic, anxiety, blowing little things way out of proportion, mistrusting my own perceptions. It sucks! Right now I wonder why I'm alive.
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: radical on August 01, 2016, 01:11:35 PM
Gentian,
Please don't thank me (can't speak for anyone else) for listening to your story.  I wish I could delete that last sentence you wrote, especially that awful blah blah blah.... emoticon.  I used to feel like that.  Sometimes I revert to it, out of habit, I'm not sure?

Anyway, you never have to apologise for who you are, thank people for paying attention to you. I had a previous series of traumas years ago and it led me to become pathetically grateful to anyone who treated me with the most basic courtesy or kindness and afraid of my own shadow.  Weirdly, after this latest "blitzkieg", (which had the most bizarre echoes of the last one - like a kind of repeat, but shorter and with a different set and cast)  has led me in a different direction. I feel less afraid, less apologetic.  Yet I get so little sleep.  I have terrible emotional flashbacks in which I can't think and can't deal with people at all, and yet...  I said to a friend that it was like the scene in old cartoons where a character hits their head and loses their memory, and they don't get their memory back until they hit their head again.  I'm sure this friend doesn't much idea what I'm talking about, but she cares about me, she tries to understand. She tries to understand what happened to me, but within her belief system it does not compute, even though she was a bystander to some of it. 

I have horrible experiences yet I'm not as afraid of them, myself, or of other people.  I know there is no-one I would not walk away from, which is almost the oposite of my previous 'loyalty' mindset.  It's not that i have no loyalty, it's just that I'm also loyal to me.   Somehow I never learned that before. 
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: Three Roses on August 01, 2016, 04:58:45 PM
Gentian, welcome! We're glad you're here :)

As radical said, you don't have to apologize - we are here to listen to each other, and hold each other up. Glad you've added your voice to the mix!  :wave:
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: Gentian on August 02, 2016, 04:45:46 AM
Wow thanks everybody for the kind responses.  Contessa, didn't mean to hijack your thread...I do understand where you're coming from.  You're the first person I've encountered besides myself who's raised this question.  This is an amazing community.  :thumbup:
Title: Re: Personality Change
Post by: Contessa on August 02, 2016, 01:07:37 PM
You have hijacked nothing Gentian. Its what the post is here for  ;)

I for one am glad that this is something I no longer struggle alone with, and I hope others feel the same way.