Messages

L2N

You are very articulate. The way you describe what you go through is clear and easy to connect with.

I understand what you're saying. I'm grateful that you know that people really do love you, and that people (like me) really can see you and can feel your need for connection. I am also glad that you are aware that the problem is internal, and by how you describe it, I would agree that you seem to have a strong understanding of where it came from and why it haunts you. 

I have been trying to define what "cured" means in own life, and your posts are sort of helping me to find the answer. Today I realize that I don't need to feel like life has no problems. I don't need an easy life, and I don't even need to never feel threatened again. What I NEED is to gain the ability to feel the love that comes my way. I think that's what I'm learning here right now, thanks in large part to your posts on the subject.

Ever since you joined the forum, I think my loneliness has sensed the similarity with yours. Birds of a feather recognize each other in a crowd, I guess.

I assume you talk with your therapist about this. In my case, I wasn't aware of myself enough to know why I felt generically "bad" when I started therapy. It wasn't until one session about 5 years ago, when I told my therapist how I was feeling, and he said, "That sounds so lonely." It hit me like a flash of light. I'd never considered that the hollowness and inability to connect with the people I loved was called "loneliness" but that is exactly what it is. Once I identified my generic unhappiness as loneliness, I started working with my therapist to tackle it, and we are starting to make some progress. Finally.

I'm starting to feel a tad bit better at allowing myself to accept people's love. I have a long way to go, but for now, I just like sharing with you that loneliness and difficulty in accepting love are my own personal struggles also. And some days are better than others.

It seems we both know that we're loved and lovable, but we struggle to feel it. So, that's our shared challenge: to feel the love we haven't yet developed the skills to accept.

We both may feel lonely, but we are doing it in the same lifeboat together.

Blue Sky,

It's so great to have you back, stronger than ever. 2024 sounds like it was a novel unto itself. I'm very glad you survived it AND came out of it stronger than ever.

Your post is inspiring. I can feel the cheerfulness in your written voice, and it makes me feel a little cheerful too.

Good idea to change the title from "Blue's blues". That title was appropriate in 2023, but after rising up stronger in 2024, "Blue Sky Blooming" feels more appropriate to who you are now.

And congratulations on finding a new company that you more enjoy working with.

Happy 2025!!!! 

L2N

I couldn't agree more with everything you wrote here today. There is barrage of techniques emerging, and most of them only provide temporary relief.

I see you as a person with a deep and open heart. I can sort of feel your search for connection, which gives me a sense of closeness with your writing. Your heart is open. That is so obvious to me. I see you as an innocent soul with a wide-open heart just simply asking for connection with other souls, and I can't help but find that beautiful.

After trying to get help from 7 different therapists over 45 years and finally finding the one who doesn't rely on strategies and techniques, but who prepares himself before each client, and connects, heart-to-heart with each of us as we enter into our hour with him, I'm able to see that I'm finally, actually moving toward healing from my traumas. I'm not "healed," and may never be completely healed, but I'm so much more stable and in control, even during EFs, today than I was even just a few months ago, and certainly more so than a year ago. My pain was in how lonely I always felt, even when with loved ones. I don't feel lonely anymore. I feel like people really can see me now. I have to credit my therapist for this by his showing me what it feels like to be respected and seen, at the heart level, not just the intellect and emotions. When I'm in his office, I feel like he truly wants me to be there. He's more like a friend first who just happens to also be a highly skilled therapist, and it takes BOTH of those angles to reach into me and help fill the loneliness.

7 previous therapists, even the kind ones, were not really connected with me. Some were kind and polite, but nobody really made me feel like I was as important as they were. I was the patient, and they were across the room as the doctor. No matter what they helped me with, the benefits were temporary. Within a year of them "curing me" with their book-learned tricks and techniques, all my problems returned, but just a little more serious than when they'd left. I'd connected only intellectually with them. The problem is that my intellect is already fine. It's my heart that is reaching out to the crowded world in search of connection. So, any therapist who wants to help a trauma survivor, has to connect with the heart. The heart is the opening to our damage. When my current therapist connects with me and guides me into a feeling of being important to him, I start to find my way out of the emotional and heady chaos that has defined me for 6 decades.

What he does was taught to him by someone somewhere, and I believe he now teaches a bit of it to other therapists as well.

After a deep search on Amazon, I just took delivery of a book called Relational and Body-Centered Practices for Healing Trauma, 2nd edition, by Dr. Sharon Stanley, PhD. I've never heard of her, but the book looked like it spoke to what I find to work, and lucky for me, the second edition came out just last week, so I've gotten her most updated information. In the rapidly evolving landscape of trauma, and Trauma Informed Care (TIC), her book, released a week ago, is about as up-to-date as it could possibly be. (As the old TV commercials used to say "The only fish that's fresher is still swimming in the sea"). TIC is evolving quickly, so the fresher the information, the better.

I just finished the long introduction and will start chapter one tonight or tomorrow. I can't believe how lucky I am to have stumbled onto her work. The book appears to be written more to teach therapists how to put down their textbook tricks and gimmicks, and truly connect, empathetically, with their clients. I can't be certain, but I think my therapist might have learned what he does from the same people she learned it from. I'm going to show him the book and ask him that next week when I see him again. so far, everything she's saying about a therapist being more of an empathetic person than an intellectual doctor is tracking exactly with my experience with my therapist. I will be surprised if he says he hasn't at least heard of her books.

The thing he's been giving me with his approach is a feeling that I'm as welcome in the game as everyone else is.

I've long believed that the most insidious cause of my CPTSD was the crushing loneliness from feeling unprotected, unwanted and unwelcome on the earth right from birth. My need to be connected with the people around me was treated like a joke, and I have always felt like I've been standing on the side of the road with my arms open just hoping someone would finally love me.

I think that what's helping me to feel less in my head, and more in my heart, and connected with others is that my current therapist cares more about me being a person than me being a patient.

I've told him that I worry he'll retire. His response is, "Why would I retire when I love what I do so much?"

I just had a thought: As a boy I had two favorite celebrity heroes. Victor Borge and Red Skelton. As a small boy of only about 6 or 7 years of age, I would watch them on TV and listen to their jokes, and I could just tell that they truly loved their audiences. Borge, especially, was extremely talented as both a pianist and a comedian. But what made me want to go into comedy myself was his and Skelton's obvious love for the people who came to enjoy an hour with them. I think that might be what I see in my therapist's demeanor. He loves his patients the way Borge and Skelton appeared to love their audiences. And I really, really respond to people who can squeeze in through my loneliness and who will open their hearts to share an hour with me.

I think, next session, I'm going to tell my therapist how he makes me feel the way Borge and Skelton did. If I were younger, and just a little more stable, my therapist might have motivated me to become one myself. It's a little late for me to go to college for that, AND I'm still not certain I could do the job. I still have a few too many ghosts walking the halls of my haunted brain.

On my public email, my signature block reads, "The shortest distance between two people is a smile" --Victor Borge, 1909-2000. L2N, if you could see my face right now, you'd see that smile. You're not actually alone. You may feel alone, but that's just trauma playing its tricks on you.

PC.

Thanks to all of you for the support.

It appears most of us here at home are doing pretty well with this latest loss. Death happens, and I seem to be getting used to it. The grieving is already starting to release its grip on me.

I have a little downtime today and have made the conscious decision to try disconnecting from all the things I do to keep from being alone with myself.

I've become that guy who has to have stimulation going every second of the day. Even when I'm in a quiet place like the beach, I clutter the silence with outside stimulation. I have lost myself in the noise of constant music in my ears, or having the TV on, or even just playing solitaire on my cell phone to keep from being alone with no outside (intrusive) stimulation. I don't even eat in silence. I turn the TV on at lunch time and eat on the sofa. When I'm done eating I barely remember what I ate. I don't even savor the food I'm eating anymore.

I now see why people go camping in the woods, or fishing on quiet lakes, or even just going for day hikes without being connected to anything but nature. I realize that I miss it terribly.  When the world goes quiet, and I don't fill the void with music, tv, puzzles, housework, or solitaire, time slows down. The silence itself becomes the music that fills me with natural nothingness. I've lost that. I want it back. Most of my best memories from childhood were those times when I just laid in the sunlight and let it warm me. Our cat does that. In the summer she lays on the ceramic tiles of her little patio that I made for her and suns herself for hours. Coco and I chuckle when we see it, but not-so-deep down I'm more envious than anything. As a younger man, I used to like to rent apartments that had outdoor pools where I would lay in the sun like my cat does for hours at a time just being with my thoughts and enjoying the warmth. Never really falling asleep but just letting the muscles relax while listening to the sounds around me and feeling the sun. I miss that. Not the pool, just the being with myself. Content. Sunning. Listening to the world's motion. So peaceful.

I will start my disconnection from stimulation in small doses. I will take short walks without my earbuds playing music or audible books. I will stop playing solitaire when things get quiet.  I'm SO GLAD I disconnected from social media a year ago. That's an addiction that takes serious work to break.

There was a time when I would intentionally separate myself from my cellphone, but there were too many instances that came up when someone needed to talk with me and I didn't have my phone on me. I didn't get their text or phone call until the next day. That became a problem, so I had to start keeping my phone on me 24x7. With kids and grandkids who live on their phones, then I need to be near mine too if I want to be available at all. Now I feel like I need to have that cursed device on me all the time. And now that it's always a fingertip away, I fall into the trap of looking at it all the time. Also, it has apps in it that I use to check surveillance cameras and my glucose monitoring. With the glucose monitors, you have to always be within a few feet of the phone, or the ongoing measurements don't record.

It's a trap. It seems like all our cool inventions are more like ropes that are used to tie us down tighter and tighter to the chaos of the world.

I miss the quiet of the pre-computer age.

I pray for peace in the chaos. So, therefore I need to do my part now and stop voluntarily connecting to the chaos.

There was a time when being alone was frightening, but with the therapy and releasing that I've been doing, I'm starting to find times when peace doesn't bring up the ghosts of the past so boldly anymore. I am starting to feel moments during the day where I'm not so afraid of my past anymore.

Today will be a good day, especially if I can find myself enjoying a few moments of quiet stillness.

One step at a time.

Slow down, you move too fast
You got to make the morning last
Just kicking down the cobblestones
Looking for fun and feeling groovy

--Simon and Garfunkle.

StartingHealing,

I'm really glad you share your experiences with the various trauma treatments that you continue to explore. Reading the reports of my peers here, is very helpful to me. We don't have to be an expert to share our experiences with one another. It's like we are each a beggar, telling the other beggars where we found food.

The only TRUE way to be certain you never catch a fish, is to never go fishing. And when I read your posts, I see a peer who is also truly rooting around in the world in search of the morsels of healing that might be hidden in plain sight. In the spirit of peer support, as we share our experiences with one another, we expose the treatments and we all benefit.

I have led a similar life. I'm never okay being damaged. I'm finally able to stop apologizing to my wife for spending our money and time on my various therapy attempts. She has NEVER criticized me for this, in fact she sometimes thanks me for diligently pursuing healing. But my trauma tells me to apologize for it anyway. At least it did up to recently, when I've learned that I'm doing what's best for both of us.

I'm so grateful that this forum is free of charge and accessible anywhere I have internet because it fills in for me when I can't afford or access treatments that I hope will help.

I once learned that our brains attach to people differently depending on who they are in our hierarchy. I respect and get benefit from my professional therapist with one part of my brain. He teaches. I learn. It works. But it's a different part of the brain entirely that connects me to peers. Peers connect and share and comfort and support on an equal plane. I learn from authority in one part of my brain, and I learn the glory of support and comradery from peers in a different part of my brain. My therapist gives me knowledge. My peers give me the experience of not being alone with this. I need BOTH of these things. It's important that we connect with peers AND that we find authorities, whether in therapists, teachers, experts, books, podcasts, blogs, documentaries, etc.  I love this forum for giving me peers I can relate to so well, and I love my therapist for how he speaks from a position of authority on healing and trauma.

Today it became starkly obvious to me that I adapt quickly to what I'm reading or learning at any given time. It makes me feel like I'm a different person each day. I read a lot of books that explain how physical and spiritual realities blend. Levine's books, which I'm reading now, are teaching me how physical and emotional realities mix. I realized this morning that I'm not praying quite as much as I did last week while I was all up in the books about spirituality. Now I'm really into the psychology again of how and specifically why our pasts continue to ravage our present moments.  This is okay. When we're in a college program, we think the world is made of numbers while we're in math classes. We think the world is made of fruit bowls and forests when we're in an art class. We think the world is made of horrors while learning about the dark ages, or wars and tortures. All of the courses deserve their turn at the front for long enough time to teach us, and to allow the knowledge to sink in and become part of our global, multidimensional perception of the world.

When I read your comments about how memories are EF'ing you right now, I imagine that somehow, the past has something it wants to say to you, and it's come up to the front of the room to get your attention. During EF's the possible healing is greatly increased. I don't learn when I'm happy and satisfied in life. I learn when I'm in need of learning and while I'm open to it. My therapist often says "Good!" when I come in during an EF. He says, "We can do some good work today."

I hope that whatever your past has woken up for these last few weeks helps you to move a few more steps away from the traumas of your own past.

We're all in this together, and we're stronger when we share together. Thank you for your open sharing.

PC.

[fLight]

Chart and StartingHealing,

Thank you for the supportive responses. I know that shame is a huge part of CPTSD in a lot of people, not just me. And when friends jump in and help work through it, well, that just feels amazing. To feel supported is why a lot of us joined this forum, and for me, this forum did not disappoint. I feel support from so many people and I enjoy lending my own support to others in return. I like to think of it as I have two hands; one for giving and the other for receiving, and love flows when both hands are doing their jobs at the same time.

Journal Entry for March 25

In my focus on shame itself, I'm becoming more able to see under the hood of what shame is, why it exists, and how it was able to achieve a lifelong grip on my nervous system. On Saturday, I got to see how being restrained as a child is playing out in my life today as we were headed to the bowling alley for a grandson's birthday party. It's a local bowling alley, so I had a hundred different routes I could take to get there. I chose the fastest route, which includes 5 miles on the freeway. I didn't realize that Saturday traffic has gotten as thick as it has. As soon as we were committed to the onramp, unable to turn back and stick to sideroads, we saw that the 4 lanes of the freeway were now a parking lot. Movement was happening, but not much faster than walking speed. I told my usual two traffic jokes: 1) "Honey, if you're in a hurry you can walk from here and I'll meet you there when I can." and 2) "I hope we don't get a parking ticket for sitting here too long." But all joking aside, I felt the anxiety in a much more obvious way than ever.

Because of the books I've been reading by Peter Levine, I was aware enough of what restraint and entrapment do to me, to recognize that my heart and throat and shoulders tightened, and all my organs felt like they were vibrating in terror. As you may have noticed through my past writings, I have an unnatural anxiety around traffic. Nobody likes being stuck in traffic, but being stuck in traffic makes me feel terror. Horror. My fingers grip the steering wheel. My arms stiffen. My driving foot begins to shake uncontrollably, and I begin to drive aggressively. I have to own powerful cars because if I'm in an underpowered car I feel even more trapped. I floorboard it to get around people. Many times, I could have been ticketed for aggressive driving, even though I feel like I'm not being aggressive. I'm not in fight mode, I'm in fLight-mode, desperately trying to escape in a panic as though my life depends on it. Up to now, I have routinely planned my entire life around traffic and crowds as best I can.

Because I've been studying Levine's work, I was able to see that my unnaturally over-exaggerated terror of being stuck in traffic, or trapped in a crowded room, is a monster that has burrowed its tentacles into every aspect of my life. For me, traffic is not an inconvenience, it's another experience of being restrained and helpless. The terror I feel in crowds or in traffic is the same terror I felt as a child being held down and abused. (PS: It didn't happen often to me. Only a few times when I was about 7 years old, but in the world of trauma, it only takes one near-death event to create PTSD). Restraining a mammal flips all the survival switches in that person's mammalian brain. You cannot fight or flee while restrained. You can't "go down fighting". All you can do is retreat into your brain and hope in helpless abandon that the predator doesn't kill you. When they don't kill you, the damage is now done. The brain knows that being trapped is always possible and it remembers what it felt like to succumb to the reality that total 100% helplessness is always possible.

Why I feel forgiven now

My fear of being trapped without an ability to fight or flee, has been a source of massive shame. I have lived mostly in the shame of how I react to non-life-threatening things like traffic, and more specifically, I'm very ashamed when my normally calm and polite driving becomes aggressive when I'm in a life-threatening panic. I'm ashamed of my obsession with cameras, alarms, locks, insurances, stored emergency supplies, etc. I'm embarrassed/ashamed of how much time and money and energy I spend trying to feel safe and never accomplishing a feeling of safety. So I try harder to make sure nobody ever traps me again. Ever. But it's a treadmill to run on and get nowhere. I keep buying more cameras and more alarms and more insurance, but that feeling of being unprotected just keeps coming at me like from an eternally gushing firehose aimed right at me.

The reason I keep saying "I feel forgiven" is because I now recognize how all of my embarrassing reactions to normal daily stress are rooted in how my own survival instincts were abused and stripped away from me. Somehow, truly knowing WHY I act like a nervous Ned, helps me feel forgiven for it all. Learning the mammalian function of how I am the product of a traumatic childhood, is releasing me of feeling like I'm the * who can't handle life because, as the Catholics always said, I "chose" to be a nervous wreck. Another fact I put in all my novels is how the Catholics who abused me never said, "Oh you made a mistake because you're young. Let me help you learn". Instead, they would scowl and grab my arm or earlobe, or the short hairs on my neck, sometimes nearly bruising me, and say, "What made you think THAT was a good idea?" Of course I had no way of knowing that the reason I didn't know how to fly a 747 from birth wasn't my fault. Their treatment of me not knowing how to do advanced math on the day I was born was THEIR bad. Not mine. To me, the only answer I could come up with at age 6 for "What made you think THAT was a good idea?" was because I was obviously stupid. They used the words ALL THE TIME: "SHAME ON YOU!"

So, what Levine has finally been able to get through my thick skull is that I truly am not shameful in wanting to survive. I think his books are proving to my deeper inner subconscious mind that all the embarrassing reactions I have to life are not because I'm stupid, but because my survival instincts were stripped away and I've been forever stuck in the loops that ABUSE PUT ME IN. All my embarrassing behaviors are the result of what I was created to do: Survive. And for once in my life, I finally feel like that's okay. I'm not a bad guy. I'm earnestly just trying to feel safe in a world where safety is an illusion.

The trick now is to hold onto this feeling of forgiveness indefinitely.

On a quick journal note: We lost another kid. The boy (J) who'd grown up with our two sons from age 3 to 37 died suddenly of a Deep Vein Thrombosis last week. A blood clot broke loose in his leg and was pumped into the heart which killed him instantly. We are delicately watching our younger son in case the distress of losing J brings him to another bipolar episode. Our poor son has a gift that he feels is an affliction. The day before J died, our son texted us saying, "I feel it again. Something bad is about to happen and I don't know what, so I'm just warning everyone to be on the watch for an earthquake or a death or something."  He actually feels death before it happens often. This contributes to his imbalance. He does not like being warned. He calls it a curse. And it often goes in conjunction with his bipolar episodes.

So far I think we're okay.

J's mom is not a fan of funerals, and neither are we. We've been in too many funerals where the true evil in family members bubbles up. My evil sister made such a disgusting narcissistic fool out of herself at my mother's funeral in 2009 that I have never been to a funeral since. J's mom was raised very similarly to me, and her family has all the same players in it that mine does, so she isn't ready to subject herself to another disgusting family event. J's life was not going well. Her Catholic family likes to judge just like mine did, so with J being gone after bouts with drugs and homelessness, just opens her up to being treated like she deserved to lose her son, so she's going to wait until warmer weather and she's going to have a celebration of life rather than a disgusting, family feud of a funeral.

On a side note: What I'm learning about myself is teaching me about others too. It turns out we are all mammals with mammalian brains and nervous systems. I am far more acutely aware now that non-narcissistic people who are judgmental and cruel are just as damaged as I am. It's not their fault any more than my anxieties are mine. True narcissism is born into about 4% of all people, but the rest of us who are beaten and abused into becoming mean or judgmental are more the product of our own past abuse. I see it for real now, that except for narcissists, we are all more forgiven than we realize. I choose to not let my family abuse me anymore, but only one member of my entire family is a true naturally born narcissist, so I can forgive the rest of them, while continuing to stay estranged from them just for my own health. Like I often say, "You don't have to hate alligators to know not to swim in their pond with them." It's like that thing people say, "You be you and I'll be me." We just don't have to be together.

Perhaps as I continue to study and evolve from the books and treatments I'm absorbing, I'll one day even find myself able to forgive narcissists. For now, that's not yet happening. I still think my sister is an actual witch---and is deadly dangerous. Everyone else in my family are just damaged goods interacting with other damaged goods and doing so in damaged ways; judgementalism, criticism, conditional love, selfishness, finger-pointing. All the usual sins of human life.

As they say, Hurt people hurt people.

[I'm having deep reactions to Pete Levine's books]

I'm having deep reactions to Pete Levine's books

I feel like my understanding of how I became who I became is very alive right now. Really awake. Levine is giving me the information that's turning cold, tired information into warm, living thoughts and feelings.

Actually I feel like an accident victim. When a person is lying on the ground after an accident, they are no longer concerned with the shopping list, or the price of eggs, or who is winning what election where. When lying on the ground, the greater world vanishes. The only focus is on the moment, and the hope that help is on its way. That's how I feel right now. Like I'm hyper focused on the present moment and my injuries. It feels heavy, but it also feels better than the normal sense of numbness and apathetic acceptance for how I've lived my life.

I read Trauma and Memory once and listened to the audiobook twice. I think I got everything he was saying. So I downloaded another of his books and have so far listened to more than half of it just since yesterday so far.

These books are pulling me into a deep emotional state of grief. (in a good way). (I hope this makes sense, but grief feels alive. People who don't grieve live disconnected to feelings). I'm at the edge of tears. I feel like Levine not only knows what I go through, but he truly grasps why I'm going through it. As a child, when we cry out for help and nobody comes, it traumatizes us. As an adult, reading Levine's books now, after having cried out for help 60 years ago, I feel like Levine has finally answered the call, and I feel really emotionally engaged. I can't tell if I'm happy or sad, but tears for some reason keep slipping down my face.

This book, In An Unspoken Voice by Peter Levine, is BLOWING ME AWAY with what feels like the answers I've been looking for my whole life. This book was written apparently before the term Complex PTSD was ever coined, but everything he says is like the intelligence behind Pete Walker's book. Levine's book is a lot more scientific, and he is blowing my mind with how well he's describing how and why I became who I became.

In this book, Levine says that children who were restrained while being abused have a lot more serious residual unresolved trauma than those who were not restrained. I was restrained. Everything he's saying is touching me so deep I'm ready to cry. This feels like someone has finally pulled the fire alarm and my rescue is finally now coming. This mammalian reaction of becoming far, FAR more traumatized through restraints includes children who were restrained by dentists and doctors during medical procedures. Restraining a mammal activates the deepest, most raw sense of helplessness in the conscious experience. He explains the Freeze response as a "going immobile" to either die in peace or watch for a chance to escape and run. He explains these things in a way that truly makes me see that I can't fix this myself. I am almost in tears reading (actually listening to the audio file of the said book). I will never be a man who wasn't abused as a boy, but the most I think I can hope for is to try, try, try to find some daily peace from the embedded guilt and shame that has defined my entire life so far.

In his books, Levine describes the damage from restraints as being given the experience of 100% helplessness. (OMG! He's talking about ME!) Our survival instincts are to fight or flee. When we can do neither we go immobile. We freeze and dissociate. If I were to get into a fist fight with another person, even if I lose the fight my body and soul know that I fought back. I had power. It may not have been enough power to win, but I held my own. What some people say is "At least I went down fighting." That's significantly better than being restrained and ignored. Instead of being able to say with pride, "I went down fighting" the restrained victim can only say to themselves, "I was helpless. There was nothing I could do. And nobody would help me." That message, because it was given during experience, becomes the root of the follow-on years of repeating the shame over and over again in what I call, the looping walk of unresolved past ghosts wandering and repeating the emotions of helplessness and freeze through the halls of my inner haunted mansion. When restrained we can't fight back or flee and when ignored we can't even scream out and get help from our fellow man. Our bodies have now experienced 100% helplessness. THAT brings the shame that our bodies remember we didn't fight back, and it brings the freeze response, which Levine calls the Immobilization of our awareness so we can either die in peace, or watch for a moment where an escape might become an opportunity.

I live with so much shame of being the broken person that I am. I still feel horrific shame for all the money I've spent on trying to find happiness in new cars and tools and toys, and for all the money I've given away under duress for fear that if I don't give my money to others I'll be punished. I feel stupid for spending so much energy and money on cameras and locks and alarms and backup generators and all the expensive crapola I do to try and feel safe in a body that can't feel safe. I am on the treadmill of running toward a sense of safety that I'll never achieve. I feel ashamed of every addiction I've had to fight off. I feel horrific shame at my inability to stop isolating. I have the most amazing, awesome, beautiful wife of 42 years and still I hide alone as often as I can. Levine talks to great lengths about how helplessness at age 6 and 7 is still haunting me today, and how much chronic and constant shame people like me live with. His book is a message to me that the shame I feel is trauma and it's normal and It isn't real shame. I didn't do anything wrong. I can't rewire my mammalian response to being attacked, but today I can say with clarity "I, at the very least, want to stop feeling ashamed of feeling ashamed."

He mentions in an early chapter that we shouldn't call it PTSD but PTSI. D is for disorder. I would be for injury. Having a broken arm is not called Broken Arm Disorder. It's called an arm injury. Why does having my healthy brain damaged by bullies have to be called a disorder? CLEARLY it's injury from attack, JUST LIKE a broken bone or stab wound, neither of which are called "disorders". Not a disorder. Maybe we could keep the D but change the word it refers to Damage. Complex Post Traumatic Stress Damage.

Anyway, for me, today is all about shame. The shame that I have lived with all day and all night for 60 years. The more I learn about the science of CPTSD, the more my intellect knows I have nothing to be ashamed of, but holy moly, I can't seem to convince my heart that I have no reason to be ashamed of who I am.  It makes so much sense when I look at it this way: I once cried out to my people for help and nobody helped. I was restrained, which takes away 100% of all sense of ability to protect myself. I cried out for help, which is what we are designed to do, but nobody came. It makes perfect sense to me why I feel slightly better being alone and isolated from the society that let me down and proved physically that they are not on my side.

I'm not going to say "I want to be cured" again. I'm finally starting to realize that I really need to focus on being okay with being damaged. There is no cure. The trick is to be okay with what just is. It's when we want something we can't have that we suffer. Wanting a cure where there is no cure just prolongs my suffering.


I'm feeling really kind of weak at the moment, but glad, at the same time, that this realization is hitting me so hard. It feels like I'm getting connected with the real truth. I think the part I like most about it is that if I can truly grasp that this was damage done because of restrained abuse, that at least I can say it isn't my fault that I'm a mess who can't handle money or who hides in a run down little cabin on a beach where nobody knows me. I have been so ashamed all my life for being broken. I don't know if I can truly heal from the shame, or if simple awareness and daily struggles to remember I don't need to feel ashamed is the best I'll be able to accomplish.

For the moment, I feel very much alive. Sad. But alive. Like in during a time of grief, I feel like my world view has shrunk to the 10 feet around me. Like the rest of the world just lost all its meaning and my entire body and brain are focused only on the present feeling of loss and change.

I don't feel a need to run my hands under icy water, because I feel very much alive right now. I think that what I read yesterday about how any child who is restrained and harmed like I was would be as damaged (or more damaged) than I am. For the moment...I wish I could say "from this moment on", but I only know that "for the next 5 minutes or so", I hope to at least feel forgiven. Forgiven.

I realize today, in the rawest way I've ever felt it, that all I want in life is to feel forgiven.

I live in regret for things I have no need to regret. I see only my sins when I look back. I feel ashamed and I just want, more than anything right now, to feel forgiven for every stupid thing I became after that abuse. Shame is the feeling of being unforgiven. Unforgiven for becoming a hot mess after an attack. This is today's great challenge. Knowing this was trauma is one thing. FEELING the forgiveness for being damaged is a whole different story.
 
In Love and Light, Papa Coco:

Here's the song that speaks to me today so deeply that I wish I had written it myself.

Wannabe
By Taylor Kingman

I wannabe strong
That time I proved I was right, I was wrong
That time we talked all night, man I was drunk
Last time I came, babe, I was gone
I wannabe strong

I wannabe kind
I wannabe all open windows and warm apple pie
I wannabe slowly blowing breezes in the sweet by and by
I wannabe arms open wide and baby it's alright
I wanna be kind

I wanna be wise
I've sat stoned until sunrise, and I bet I looked divine
And I've cowered with conviction, and I bet I looked wild and sly
And I've talked too long too loud, and I bet I look proud and right
But I wannabe wise

I wannabe clear
I wanna wear out my wanderin' and I wanna be here
I wanna sober up and let sleep be the vintage of my ears
I wanna wake in my walking through the valley of voyeurs and mirrors
I wanna be clear

I wanna be true
The blossoms of love are blighted with fear in the roots
And that moment was honest, untouched by the next moment's truth
And I'm sorry for all I've taken and I'm sorry for all I've let loose
I wanna be true

I wanna be forgiven
For giving up on everything I knew
I wanna be true

I finally started reading some of Peter Levine's books. He invented Somatic Experiencing. I tried reading his books a few years ago but they seemed rediculous. But now, reading them is a whole different story. I think I wasn't ready for him back then, but I'm ready for him now that I understand the difference between hearing words versus experiencing events. Somatic Experiencing brings the past back to life and allows us to fix it.

I can now see where my therapist got his skills. He's never told me that it's called somatic experiencing. He just does it. And I respond very well to it.

Levine lives by the rule that for people with trauma disorders, the past is more real than the present. The past is real. It is made up of real things that reach into the present and pester us, like EFs, sleeplessness, isolation, fear, depression, anxiety, digestive issues, inflammation, etc., etc., etc.

For me to realize that the past is still real, gives me a feeling of hope. I started reading his book, Trauma and Memory on Sunday and by today I already feel like the past is opening up for me to explore. Normally, the past would feel intrusive on the present, but today, this connection to the past feels like I've been given a back stage pass, or access to holy ground. A lot of authors say that we can change the past, and up until now I thought those were just poetic words, but after reading how Somatic Experiencing works, I realize that the past is still real, and I still have a chance to heal it.

A lot of stories are told of apparitions (ghosts) who wander the halls of a house or hospital. Many times, it's reported that these ghosts are stuck in a loop, where every night, they repeat the same walk down the halls in search of something that wasn't resolved in their past. That's how I see my past. I am stuck in some loops that make me repeat self-abuse and addictive behaviors. I have no reason to be afraid of my neighbors and yet I continue to believe they are judging me and laughing at me behind my back. I know it's not happening in present reality, but it IS happening in my past, which is still alive in my head and heart and emotions. My past ghosts are still wandering my head searching to resolve what wasn't resolved. In Somatic Experiencing, I can experience things again, and have my therapist help me resolve them once and for all. A good therapist will know how to set up a physical scenario, usually using a pillow in my therapist's office, where my muscles get a chance to push off an abuser or grab onto something that was taken from me in the past. By making sure I'm emotionally in the past while giving my body a chance to finally defend itself, it helps that ghost find the resolve it didn't find when the original abuse took place.

I have a lot of problems with self-defense. I tend to move very slowly while fighting in Tae Kwon Do or the self-defense classes I've taken. I have strong slow-twitch muscles and very weak fast-twitch muscles. I'm strong but not agile. I believe in my heart of hearts that I'm too weak and slow to ever protect myself if violence ever befalls me, so therefore I have made this belief from my past into a current day reality. No doubt this belief keeps me afraid of everyone, and it is rooted in having been taught that I'm too stupid, too weak, and too worthless to be able to defend myself. In somatic experiencing, I would need to feel that sense of helplessness and let it connect me with the child in me who is being taught that I'm weak, only with the aid of a pillow or something that mimics the feel of a person, I can push away my abusers now. I was too small to push my abusers off of me in 1967, but I'm big enough now to do it, so if my therapist will indulge in some roleplay exercises, I can push that pillow off me next time. My understanding of how this benefits me is two-fold. 1) My body and brain get to work together to feel that pushing an abuser away is possible, and 2) My past "ghosts" of believing I'm too slow and weak and stupid to defend myself will be set free from their wandering loop in the hallways of my brain.

At least that's what I gleaned from Levine's book. It's affecting me pretty deeply. Changing my paradigm from believing the past is done and unchangeable, to seeing it as still in play and still able to be healed, is connecting me to the past in a happy way right now. Like I said above, I feel like I've been given a backstage pass to the holy ground of the past and that the past is still malleable and still able to be worked with. That's a sensation of empowerment.

GettingThere,

I can really feel the frustration in your post. I'm sorry all this happened to you all those years.

Having been abused by men and women also, I am not unfamiliar with the anger and confusion that it causes. Friends, strangers, young, old, it seemed that for a long time I was fair game to all sorts of the boundary-tromping behaviors of others.

It's good to read that you're tired of being sad and ready to be angry. That's a great line. Anger is where we put power to our sadness so we can rise up from it. Sadness feels powerless. Anger is where our power begins to help us heal.

My therapist calls that "good anger" when it gives me the strength and courage to start correcting what I've been letting bother me for too long.

Journal Entry for Saturday, March 8

I'm still wondering who I would have been if I had been raised by supportive parents and teachers. I clearly remember exactly when and how my personal desires were pushed away and "lost" and then replaced with the fear of being shamed for not being what others needed me to be at any moment. The old question comes up in my mind, "How can I find and resuscitate my authentic self, and then experience being that Self at least for a while before I die?"

Personally, I'm trying to find that answer but I'm softening my approach to consider thinking the true answer might be that there are no coincidences, and that I've lived the life that I came here to live.

I experienced being denied a healthy self-image, and now I am experiencing whatever emotions or challenges that I came here to experience as I heal from it all. For example, art imitates life, and fiction novels are art if they evoke emotion in the readers. A fiction writer who wants to express an emotion in the mind of the readers, needs to create a scenario for the characters to have to overcome. The readers who read fiction to feel what the characters are feeling need a conflict to overcome, or they'll put the book down and go find a better one to read. The deeper the mystery/challenge, the more intensely the readers can get emotionally involved and the better reviews the book receives. For me to enjoy a novel, I need characters I can relate to so I can experience overcoming their challenges with them. In the novels I enjoy, characters who I can relate to always teach me a little something about myself through following how they overcome the heavy challenges they face. I tend to learn through conflict. A character without inner conflict is two-dimensional and not interesting enough to read about.

This supports the old saying "It's about the journey, not the destination." If it was about the destination nobody would read more than just the first and last pages of every novel. The journey is what what we are interested in. Life is probably like that too. How I deal with what was taken from me is my story and my experience.

What if that's what my purpose for life is? To experience rising up out of a challenge. Getting knocked down had to happen so I could experience the courage and healing in how I struggle to get back up again. Most good stories begin with a life that is going along fine somewhere and then BAM! A conflict or a challenge threatens to change everything. The main body of the entire book is then written about all the pitfalls and successes along the pathway of resolving the conflict that disrupted the original status quo. If the book had no challenges, no pitfalls, no rivals, and no resolution to strive for, then nobody would read it.

What if my life is happening exactly as it should? What if I came here to feel and resolve the emotions of involuntary separation and abandonment? In order to resolve separation and abandonment, I would have to experience being abandoned or singled out at the start of my story, so that I can spend my life being the main character in the story of how I resolved and mastered a lifelong inner conflict. In my case, the inner conflicts are around fighting to find my original life's purpose and my authentic self. My own parents, teachers, siblings, peers, etc., took me off my authentic path, and as a result, I have experienced the deepest desire to find and experience being my true authentic self. If I had never felt isolated or emotionally abandoned, I'd never ask the question "who am I really supposed to be?"

Thats the stuff I tumble around with in my head all day now. Everything in the Universe is in constant flow. Even the coldest, hardest steel is made up of bazillions of spinning, rotating, flowing molecules and atoms in constant motion. For me to feel the peace of life, I guess I need to start being okay with flow and change, and stop trying to hang on looking for old answers to old questions: So, what happens if I never experience being who I wanted to be? What if I never find my life's dream?

Maybe a better question would be: "why did I spend my life obsessing over something that changed?" Everything in existence, including thought and emotion, is in motion. I suffer because I try to hang onto something that was flowing. True peace is in adaptability. When the world changes, those who change with it are happier than those to resist and try to hold onto yesterday's world.

I'm trying to learn how to accept how things really are, and how to get into the flow of them, rather than try to fight against them. I hope I can experience a feeling that I'm right where I want to be, but if I don't ever experience that, it's okay, because I have things in this life I can treasure too. They say suffering only happens when we attach to something we can't have. I've suffered for decades by wanting to remember who I really am beneath all my fawning and people-pleasing fear-driven social behaviors. I've suffered because I've always felt like I'm not living the life I'm capable of living and I can't figure out how to fix that.

Maybe that was the whole point of this lifetime. Maybe the purpose of my life was to simply feel that disruption in my life's purpose and resolve it through acceptance and release. Maybe I'm the main character in a story that's worth reading because of my depth of character and my lifelong struggle to survive in a world I couldn't make sense out of. For one thing, People who've had really easy lives don't have the empathy or the capacity to appreciate goodness like those of us who've had to fight to feel good. Who wants to get to know someone who can't relate to struggle? I definitely cherish my ability to connect with others, and if being knocked off my original path is how I gained that ability, then, maybe letting go of the worry that I'm not my authentic self is the best move I can make.

If trying to hang on to something that's changed causes suffering, then letting go of that which I can't keep should, in turn, bring me to inner peace.

Maybe this life is more about experiencing the emotions of the journey and less about just waiting to reach the final destination.

    "People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

StartingHealing,

I share a few similarities with you. It seems we both share a sense that we are bigger than our physical bodies and that our physical lives were altered by the behaviors of our tribes. I found this post to be especially interesting today because I'm exploring the same question: How can I find, recover and experience my authentic self?

I for one was never, ever, ever allowed to talk about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I gave up early on all of my dreams and my self-image as a human with equal rights as other humans. I know who I became--a servant to everyone--, but I'm still bothered by trying to remember who I'd come here to be. On my death bed, will I suddenly remember "Oh YAH! I forgot I was going to do ______ while I was here."?

I'm learning to accept that being knocked off my own path as a child may actually be what I came here to experience, like in the old sayings around "it's not how we fall that defines us, but how we get back up again." What if my life's path was to be taken off my life's path by toxic people in a toxic culture, and then learn a ton about life by how I gained the strength to overcome a bad start to life?

You're inspiring me to go to my own daily journal and post about this right now. I won't hijack your journal with my own dramas, but your post has inspired a lot of thought in me this morning

Be well

Desert Flower,

I can really feel the distress in your post. I'm so sorry to hear that you're having one of those weeks where a lot of little things are creating an overwhelming pile of problems. And I do understand the EF. Being laughed at on the bike ride to school is an extremely triggering thing to happen to a person whose past was built on that kind of unfriendliness.

I imagine that riding a bike that was too big for you only added to feeling small and vulnerable.

And I am glad to read that you are aware that this is a trauma EF. That doesn't make it easier, but at least you know this is related to trauma. Chart, another member of the forum, once said to me that neurotypical people, those not hampered with traumatic pasts, start every day at stress levels 1 or 2. So when overwhelming car and eBike problems all happen at once, they rise up to a stress level of 5 or 6. But we here on the OOTS forum, never get below a 5 or 6. So when overwhelming problems occur, we shoot up to a 9 or 10, so our distress is a lot harder to manage.

Just knowing that helps me when I'm hit with too much at once. The EF is still painful and difficult, but knowing it is trauma induced helps me to not feel completely defeated. EFs are temporary. I didn't used to know that. But I do now. It helps.

It was an act of intelligence for you to share your EF on the forum. My therapist tells me often that opening up at the right times and asking for help and comfort when needed is wisdom. Functional intelligence. Posting this on the forum was you asking your peers to understand what you're going through, and that's how you get support from your peers. As we heal from our traumatic pasts, sharing the journey with others on the same road is how we gain strength and support. We truly are all in this together.

For now, I hope you are able to find some calm. When my EFs get too severe, my wife and I intentionally call it "the flu" to help us both deal with my emotional distress without thinking of it as a permanent problem. The flu comes and goes, and so do EFs. At least that's how Coco and I deal with my EFs. We just let them happen.

For me, EFs are made worse when I am afraid of them. For me, accepting them and trusting that my family will support me while I'm feeling like a tormented school kid again, helps me to at least lose the fear while I'm miserable. I can't speak for everyone, but in my own trauma-life, accepting the EFs as if they are a debilitating medical condition in a temporary flair up, gets me through the EFs faster. Accepting them for what they are helps me get through them faster.

I certainly don't know what works best for others, so I'm only speaking for myself. I guess I share it just in case it can help. We're all in this together. We care about each other on this forum.

I hope the storm of problems starts to calm down soon for you. I really feel the pain you're describing, and I truly hope it starts to wane away now.

SH and Chart; I often believe that I am more connected to the other realm than I am to this one. I understand it better than I understand this realm. It's more real to me than waking life is. I trust the energies of the other realm more than I trust the energies and words of people in this realm.

My therapist is 77 years of age and has done therapy since the late 1970s. He has told me that his patients who have Complex PTSD are his most spiritual patients.

Authors like Robert Falconer, of The Others Within Us and When you're Going Through H*ll, Keep Going, teaches that without a spiritual component of some kind, the treatments for CPTSD are hindered. We are all body, mind and soul. We were damaged as body, mind and soul. The best treatments should address body, mind and soul.

I have been visited many, many times by those who've gone on before me. Including my pets. When a loved one passes, I swear a part of me goes into that realm with them, and for the next several days after their departure, I swear I can feel the Love and peace of the other side as if I'm there with them myself.

I have noticed that saturating a room with peace, either peaceful prayer, or peaceful music, seems to temper that room with the energy of peace deep into its furniture, walls and decor. I can meet a person and if they touch me physically, I can sense whether they are safe or dangerous. Just by the touch. More often than not, when I suddenly feel an urge to do something different, I find out later that I avoided an accident or a confrontation. And if I don't answer my intuitive warnings, I'm pretty much always sorry I didn't.

I am not a religious person. But I do feel a sense that we are all one, whether we like it or not. And I've visited the other realm when under the spell of dreams, meditations and medications.

I've never had a super good experience with a hypnotist. I've never been put under to the point that I feel like I'm connecting to anything or anyone. I would love to find a hypnotherapist who can actually put me under.

Desert Flower,

It's really encouraging to hear that this type of therapy is working so well for you too.

I really like your story of the baby and how your amazing therapist knew how to help give that baby what it needed. The details of my experience varied a bit from yours but the outcome is eerily similar. It's been my experience so far that every IFS part, or inner image, or inner child, that comes to the forefront is helped after very few treatments. I've come to understand that our inner children/inner parts --whatever we each call these identities that live within us-- seem to want one thing more than anything else: To be seen, heard and validated as real.

Once that happens, it seems they are instantly able to live happily ever after. My therapist teaches precision in language. He says that if we choose the correct words to describe our situation, that we have more power to work with it. I once said that I wanted to get rid of the inner voices that haunt me, but he reminded me that we don't want to get rid of our IFS parts; we want to unblend them, validate them, love them, embrace them, and in turn that will satisfy their pain. Rescripting is a good word. It doesn't cast the sad child out, it redirects the energy into love energy. We don't want to get rid of our beautiful little children, we want to unblend them from the tangled mess of other parts and embrace and love them as friends.

It works fast. I now credit IFS parts work as the most healing thing I've done, and my MDMA and Ketamine experiences as the only medications that ever promoted healing. All other meds I've taken only masked the pain while I was on them.

I'm happy that you're finding that love within yourself. I'm finding it within myself as well. Good therapists can be hard to find, but it seems you and I hit the jackpots with ours.

Wishing you a nice, peaceful relationship with your newly freed inner child. I feel like celebrating!

PC.  

Quick update to the journal

I've declined the request to officiate my DIL's grandfather's funeral. Too much dysfunction in her family. I can see that she is the family fixer, meaning that she's the only member of her big, complicated family who is intelligent and kind enough to be there when they get themselves into trouble. They require her to fix all their problems, and when she needs help, they blow her off like she's a problem they don't have any reason to help. She was No Contact with most of the family, but her grandmother is insisting she organize the funeral because nobody else in the family is able to do something that complicated. And now that the eldest family member has passed, the firestorm of the funeral is looming like a war. I recognize it. My mother's funeral was so toxic because of ONE narcissistic sibling that I have forever wished I hadn't gone to it. It was only a few months later that I had to go full no contact with all of them because of the toxicity of that narcissistic monster. My DIL's family would likely never let her live it down if she brought HER husband's father in to officiate their *-show.

I have witnessed it multiple times: American funerals are often where the claws come out for real. The family members who feed on the vulnerabilities of better people can't resist to attack when their victims are emotionally vulnerable.

In fact, it was the very moment that the more unsavory family members walked past my wife and I as they headed back to the Emergency room to see their grandma, that the TV in the lobby showed the closed-caption line on their Alligator TV show that said, "Uh oh! Looks like Jimmy's in trouble!" I am, at this time, feeling pretty darn sure that was a sign. The timing was perfect. The line was perfect. I've learned to listen to the voice of reason, feel the intuition, watch for the signs, and NOT ever have to say "I should have listened to my gut" or "I should have heeded the sign."

I will not do that to my amazing, loving, compassionate DIL. She is too good a person for me to become another wedge in her toxic family. She doesn't even want to attend for the same reasons I am sorry I attended my own mother's funeral. And if I back out, she can be freer to come in or go out of the funeral on her own terms. She won't feel obligated to protect me, and she won't be punished later for my presence. Her grandmother needs to pay for a 3rd party officiate. It's the only way to not add fuel to the fire that's been burning for a very long time.

I hate funerals. Too much toxicity. Too many angry people at funerals.

I'm leaving town tomorrow. I'll hunker down out on the coast where I can be alone for a few weeks and get myself rejuvenated. I have the internet out there, so I will still be online, but I will be where the world is quiet, and the surf is a loud, comforting roar all day and all night long.