Messages

[StartingHealing,]

StartingHealing, Thanks for sharing your take on this stuff. It's helpful. I'm not the only one who feels responsible for the whole world.

Armee, Our Atmospheric river never materialized on my beach. I hope it stayed away from your neighborhood too.

SenseOrgan, I clicked the link. Very powerful. My T informs me that suffering is a learning tool. But the quote you sent today is going on my wall to say it in a more positive and "blessed" way. I like it!  Wounds are where the light enters. It's true.

I have long believed that pain has a purpose, which is to drive change. When we don't feel pain, we don't have any reason to change. This quote about how wounds are where the light enters is saying the same thing to me, but in a much more poetic and positive selection of words.

Journal Entry for Saturday, November 23

I guess I'm not alone in this, but I'm a zombie now. I honestly feel like my soul is disconnecting and leaving my poor body to tumble around in a stupor. Rudderless. I feel weakness in every muscle and bone. I feel like my blood has drained out and my joints just haven't seized up yet.

As I practice "letting go" by using some of the techniques in the Sedona Method for allowing my feelings to just happen without me trying to suppress or repress or distract from them, I'm finding myself feeling ageless. I'm still here in my childhood. Anything that's ever caused me to be afraid is here in this realm of sustained fear that I'm in right now.

This year I have been triggered into the same fear that I felt as a child who was once pretending to be asleep while someone was tiptoeing around my bed. At 64 years old, as I close my eyes and feel the fear I'm in today, I can feel myself as a child. I'm still in that same fear.

Some teachers teach that we are not afraid "OF" anything. We're just afraid, and all the things that we think caused the fear, are not causes, but mere triggers. Access doors into the realm of fear.

Today's triggers are getting the blame, but in truth, the fear in me began at birth and just needed a trigger to remind me that it's all still there and it's all still working on my moods but is often buried so deep in my core wiring that sometimes I forget it's there. My fears today are not new fears, but the trigger is a new one. The trigger just reminded me that the ancient fear is still burning like a perpetual underground tire fire in my gut.

If I couldn't be happy before the trigger, why should I blame the trigger for my unhappiness now? Even before the election, I wasn't terribly happy. So what have I lost, really?

I'm a zombie now. I'm still not able to maintain a balance to my moods, or to my appetite, or to my energy levels.

On a positive note, while struggling to maintain a mood, I'm experiencing random hours of gratitude and joy, but I can't find anything to attach those moments to. It started last Tuesday when I was in the grocery store, looking at the canned soups, trying to find the one I like, when out of nowhere, I suddenly felt absolute peace wash over me as if someone had just poured a bucket of warm love onto me. I suddenly felt completely connected to "god" or to the peace of the Universe. I just felt grateful to be alive and like the whole world was made of milk and honey and marshmallows and daisies and warm blankees....

Since then, this is happening to me one to three times each day. For a few minutes or an hour here and there, a deep gratitude for being alive comes over me. It doesn't stay. In fact, I'm a little concerned. As I feel this zombie-like feeling of apathetic defeat, I feel my body failing. Muscles are weak. Knees want to buckle. My head wants to droop. I feel too tired to walk up a staircase without taking a break.  I've read how infants who are fed and taken care of, but who are never held or loved, have a VERY high mortality rate. They lose their appetite, and die without any medically sound reason or cause. I feel like I know now how they can do that. When one feels completely unable to figure out what's happening around us, this kind of weakness can overtake us. We see people fall to their knees, or drop their coffee cup, or faint altogether when something happens around them that shocks them. To top it off, my mother had a strong connection to spirit, even though she didn't want it. After my little sister's death, mom, who was generally healthy, vowed to not live to Mother's Day that year. 9 months passed, and when Mother's Day was 3 weeks out, she started a rapid downhill spiral. Her liver and kidneys were suddenly shutting down. In those three weeks, she went from being a normal 77-year-old, to hospice, to passing away of natural causes 9 minutes before Mother's Day that year. So I know we can will ourselves to leave. Babies do it. Mom did it. I worry that I'm doing it now too.

Well. I don't know how to conclude. I don't think there's a conclusion to be made from this topic. So I guess the best way for me to close is to just stop writing.

I hope that those of us who feel this way are able to cling together a bit until we start to feel better.

Welcome VB,

I like your last line, ..."But I was born gifted and that has made all the difference..."

It's great that you can see the giftedness you were born with and that it has made a difference for you.

I hope the forum, and all other things you are doing, are helpful as you navigate this world as a gifted, yet traumatized soul.

Welcome to the forum.

Thank you for the feedback on courage. I can say the same for you all too.  We are all here because we knew we needed help to survive, but didn't want to give up. It required courage for each of us to join the forum, and it requires ongoing courage for us to post our most vulnerable thoughts for each other to read. Not everyone survives what we've been through. Courage joins us together as we hold each other up through all of this.

I have always loved the quote, "And the time came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
― Anaïs Nin

---------

I may be preaching to the choir here, but for the past two weeks I've felt like I just landed on this planet, and I can't figure out how it works. I grew up thinking I knew how the world worked. But the past ten years have been throwing one unpredictable thing after another at us. EVERY year we break records for heat, cold, wind, and rain. It's getting worse, not better. How do I navigate this world now? I'm from a world that's gone. Vanished. POOF! The world I'm in now makes no sense to me.

The last two weeks have been like I'm not fully connected to my body. I'm numb to the barrage of terrifying news of all the shootings, hurricanes, tornadoes, nuclear threats, carjackings, aggressive home invasions, AI's gift to the criminal mind is helping thieves make even more clever traps for us to fall into. Prices, shortages, pandemics, political overthrows by the extreme right in several countries all at one time.... This is too much to take. So, I seem to have blown a fuse, and can no longer regulate my thoughts, expectations, beliefs, feelings, emotions, diet, appetite. A massive storm is coming across my beach in a couple of hours. An Atmospheric River. I'm not scared. I just did a few preparations in case my power goes out in the cold of night.

Hurricane force winds? So what? Maybe I should be afraid, but my fear button is broken so my fears and reality are not synched quite right at the moment. I'm fearing things I don't need to and not fearing things that I should be fearing. I can't so easily tell the difference between appropriate or irrational emotions. I don't want bad to happen, but I'm done trying to stop it. Today is just another day in Crazytown. No big deal. Do the laundry. Write the posts. Whatever happens, happens. No human body lives forever.

Over the course of the past few days, I've been in a precarious balancing act between a full-blown panic attack on one side of me, while a total surrender and acceptance of "what just is" no matter how good or bad is hovering on the other side of me.

What I find interesting is that during the recovery moment after I calm myself from a random near panic attack (which I'm having to do several times a day now), I've caught myself looking up at the ceiling and thinking about the impending doom that I'm ignoring by not watching the news, shrugging my shoulders and just saying, "Eh. I've had a good run." All day long I vacillate between total panic on one side and total surrender on the other.

My curiosity now is how much of this new attitude has been assisted by all the work I did this last summer on the art of Letting Go. I've read Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender more than a dozen times, and from June to about Late August, I practiced letting go through using his techniques. By September, I started to kind of think I had wasted my summer trying to learn something that doesn't work, but I may be wrong about that. The way I feel right now MAY be due in part to the practice of letting go of the things I can't control. MAYBE I learned more than I think I did. I should open that book again. I haven't read from it in several weeks. Maybe now that I'm practicing it, the book will have a deeper meaning for me if I read it again.

I'm giving in. I'm STARTING to grab a hold of a new belief that maybe I'm not responsible for all the pain on the earth. Maybe God is not punishing me by making me view the pain of others. Maybe my brain is finally starting to digest this new information.

As usual I don't know if this is a core change in me, or a temporary visit to la la land that will end and I'll be the same stuck person I was before I spent the summer learning how to let go.

For now: In summary: I'm dysregulated on many fronts. Can't control how I'm feeling from minute to minute. Don't know when I'm hungry or full. Don't know when I should run or stay put. My window to leave the beach before a storm is closing. I have no sense of urgency to leave. I may be offline tonight and tomorrow depending on how well our power grid holds up.

No matter what happens, in my attitude of gratitude I always feel grateful for being a member of this forum with you all.

Papa Coco

SenseOrgan,

I'm sorry to hear of the possible upheaval in your future. Not knowing if we're going to be okay tomorrow is a big worry.

I'm glad to hear you aren't panicking over it, just expressing concern.

Please don't feel obligated to respond to my long posts. I know I write too much. It doesn't hurt my feelings when I'm not responded to on every topic. Just writing a quick hello lets me know I'm still welcome here and that's all I need to feel good about myself.

My joke, which people who know me find quite funny is: The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The longest distance between two points is found when asking me for directions.

Papa Coco

L2N

If canceling holidays was something we could vote on I'd vote to cancel all of them. Year round. They are catch basins for trauma memories for far too many of us.

The more I get to know you, the more gentle and strong I see you as. Yes, you can be gentle and strong at the same time. The strength you show is in not passing your traumas onto your wife and kids. You did not carry forward your stepdad's abuse, nor do you refuse to participate in the Holidays. You care about your wife and children so much that, every year, you intentionally push through a jungle of traumas and memories so you can give to them what you should have been given. I'd have to look it up in the dictionary, but I would believe that what you do is most likely categorized as Heroic. You push yourself through something you don't want because you have others counting on you to give them a good holiday experience. That's heroic. You're saving your children and grandchildren from the pains of loneliness that you know would hurt them if they had to endure it too.

I have heard those words before also, "Why can't you just get past it?" My answer is now, "When I figure out how to do that, I'll let you know."

But that's why we are all here on this forum. Nobody on this forum would ever say that to anyone else on this forum.

We'd never say that to you--or to anyone else.

And when the Holidays are in full bloom here, just remember that the lion's share of us on the forum are feeling similar distress. Our family's weren't that loving on Christmas or Thanksgiving either. I remember the fights. My family didn't do violence, but they'd storm out of the house and drive off in a huff from time to time. As a child, That's not quite as traumatic as watching Mom get punched, but it's still enough distress to make the Holidays into a pariah on our calendars.

I vote we cancel them all.

HEY I have a trick that I use from time to time for when I need courage or at least endurance and I'm feeling alone with it. My T once gave me a small stone. He told me to put it in my hand whenever I felt abandoned. When the stone is in my hand, my brain remembers T gave it to me in a spirit of connection. While I'm holding that stone, I'm constantly aware that my T cares about me.

Sometimes, I suggest it on the forum here. Find some small thing. A trinket. A stone. A Rabbit's Foot. Any small item that you can tie to your wrist or carry in your pocket or hang on a chain around your neck. Think about how the people on this forum care about you. (And I'm here to tell you that people on this forum DO care about you. You're a particularly gentle soul, and it shows. I see it. I believe others can too).  Maybe hold that item in your palm every time you write to us on the forum, so that your brain and body start to connect that trinket with us all. Then, when you are forced into a Holiday party that you are regretting having to attend, just rub your thumb and forefinger across that trinket to help your brain and heart both remember that you are not alone in this distress. Your brothers and sisters on the forum are with you in spirit. Many of us will be suffering the same distress as you are.

I definitely do know the loneliness of the Holidays. Somehow, because they are billed as "The happiest time of the year", they highlight how Unhappy loneliness really is. I didn't always hate the Holidays, but as I age, my childhood traumas feel like they are more in my face than they were. So I have come to hate them.

I suffer with intense loneliness too. I know how painful it can be.

You're a heroic man, L2N. I'm not saying it as a compliment. I'm saying it as a truth. Water is wet. The sky is high. And L2N is an endearing and heroic patriarch of his household. Your family is lucky to have you. You put their needs first. You are a hero. That's what the word means to me.

Papa Coco

SenseOrgan

I've been absent from the forum for several weeks and have been just now trying to get caught up with the posts I've been missing. So, I just read this entire thread from start to now.  First off, I can really feel you. Nothing you say is foreign to me. I feel the same way about most things as you write about on the forum.

I was also a late bloomer, and I also paid the price. Like you I was also surprisingly strong. Starting at age 9, my dad bought a pickup truck, a wheelbarrow, a chainsaw, two axes, two weed whackers (which were not powered back then: they were a blade on the end of a wooden stick. I literally beat the underbrush to death with it) and he would take me up into the woods on Saturdays to log the forest, and cut a roadway into the side of a hill, by hand to make a clearing on some land he owned. That went on until I was about 16 and he sold the lot. As a boy in Catholic school the other boys tried to beat me up a few times, but they had no idea how strong I was. It was core strength from years of heavy lifting, climbing and falling trees, swinging an ax, laboring over a chainsaw, pushing an oversized wheelbarrow, overloaded with firewood up into the bed of the truck. I did not have those pretty gym muscles that make us look stronger than we are, so I was stronger than them, but looked weaker. But like you said above, we aren't taken for who we are, we are taken for how we look. While my strength was on my side, not much else was. Smaller boys get picked on. Period. And the issue stayed with me my whole life. I always felt a need to find ways to sneakily show my strength.

Before I retired, when I was working in my cubical, the water cooler was right next to my desk. Whenever it would empty, I'd make sure people were watching and I'd go over to it and lift the 5-gallon bottle of water bottle off the floor, spin it end over end and flop it into the water dispenser, 4 feet above the floor, all using only ONE ARM. I'd pretend I didn't know anyone was watching. I was 59 years old then, and like a little kid, I was still trying to show my peers I was strong. And yes. THAT'S WHY I DID IT. It would have been easier to use both hands, but I was making it about showing off. Why? Residual pain from having been treated like a weakling for too long.

In my twenties I experienced what you talk about with people thinking I was young and stupid. I once heard that Hydrogen Peroxide could turn brown hair gray so, without knowing what I was doing, I used to put a little in my sideburns to try and start going gray young just so people would stop treating me like a dumb kid. It didn't work. And now I'm 64 and fully gray.

I get really into your posts. I just feel like you are saying so many things that I can connect with.  Your friend's maga hat photo was a good story. I'm impressed that you took the courage to write to him about it. I know the feelings of an upset stomach after hitting send, but I'm impressed you didn't hold back. Courage is the act of working through our fears. What you did took courage.

I'm so sorry to hear of your sleep disorders. I have them from time to time. I do sleep on a CPAP machine because of Apnea, but also, I have times when the only way I can sleep is with some now-legal pot edibles I can buy here. I eat one a night, otherwise I'm up all night, or waking up every hour to pee or just stare at the ceiling for a while.

I'm sorry to read of how out of sorts you've been feeling lately. I'm feeling it too, which is why I was so uninvolved with the forum for a few weeks. I was too isolated to even write.  I do know that this time of year adds to my distress. The fall is a trigger time for so many people, me included. I don't know if you have seasonal moods, but I have a few. My best friend turned into a monster when I was ten. It happened right after Spring break 1970. Ever since then I have bad depression and abandonment issues that flair up big time during the Spring break time frame. During the Holidays, right now, I find myself really connected to my childhood abuse. Sometimes it gets so bad that I wake up from a sleep not knowing if it's 2024, or 1974. Dissociation draws me back into the past as if it's happening right now.

I am writing too much. I write too much. I say too much. I'll go now. But I'll be checking in more regularly as I'm starting to feel a little better.

Papa Coco

SH,

So true. No doubt today's rise in anxiety and mental health issues correlates closely to the same rapid uptick in technology and social media.

When my son was in 28-day rehab, I could visit him on Sundays for up to 4 hours. The rule was NO CELL PHONES on the property. I was to lock my cell phone into my car. I would then spend the next four hours without it. We'd have two hours of presentations by the staff, telling us what to expect when our loved ones finish their 28 days, then we'd have two more hours of recess with our loved ones. This facility had a small, wooded area that people could smoke in. My son smoked, as did almost everyone in the facility, so we would stand at the side of this creek, in these woods (like 20 feet of woods) with highways and parking lots all around it. We'd talk. We'd stop and just look around. We'd pluck a twig and fiddle with it. We'd talk some more. Time was slow. Stress levels were nonexistent. It reminded me of my entire life pre-cell phone. Wonderful. Slower. Quieter. Calmer. My son was young, so I had to share with him "This is what life used to feel like all the time." My Gosh. Riding our bikes to the beach and spending an entire day doing nothing but splashing and sunning and buying snacks and meeting a few other kids...a day then felt like a month in today's world.

While it's nice that I'm always in touch now, I truly miss the days when I could leave the house for a walk or bike ride with NO cell phone in my pocket. I leave it home sometimes, but the ship has sailed. I'm addicted. I feel vulnerable out on the beach alone with no phone. So, I shrug and keep it in my pocket all day long. Stressing me out. Like any addiction, I guess.

When I was growing up, my dad refused to wear a watch. He used to say that the watch was controlling him and making the day go too fast. He preferred to have a general idea of what time it was by the sun's position or whatever, rather than have that watch telling him how many seconds it is to this or that. I now feel the same way about cell phones. I carry it. I hate missing texts from my wife or kids. So I carry it begrudgingly, while sincerely missing the slower, more human life we used to live when we had to talk to people face to face.

I wonder if empathy is born into us or taught. My guess is both. We are each born with a predesignated capacity for empathy. Then, for those of us who were born with the capacity for empathy, our elders teach us how to use that power and we grow up to be compassionate, caring people. For those who were born minus the ability to feel empathy, they can't learn it no matter who tries to teach them.

I wonder if the sudden explosion in the population of tween and teen murderers, car thieves, etc., is due to the rise in screentime raising our children. Nobody seems to be asking some of these children, "How would you feel if someone did/said that to you?" If nobody ever asks that question, the child may miss their chance to learn while their brain was ready to learn how to be empathetic.

I was born very empathetic. But that wasn't enough. I still needed to learn how to handle empathy. As a boy, whenever I said something mean to my little sister, (We were close, but we were siblings), I could see her face drop. I'd feel terrible immediately and ask for forgiveness. If we had been two kids across town from each other, playing online games instead of living in the same space where we can see each other's reactions, I might have never felt the remorse for the mean things I said as a big brother. I saw what my mean words did to other kids, and I learned how to not say those words. A kid being raised today by TV and social media sees a LOT of selfish, narcissistic interactions, which are considered to be funny in their world. They learn what they are taught just like I learned what I was taught. If they were taught it is good to be mean, they learn to be mean.

Not everyone is smart enough to know how to teach empathy. I can still remember being 6 years old, in the cafeteria of the Catholic school, while our principal, "Sister J" shamed us by yelling, "There are Pagan children in Africa who are starving, so you need to eat everything in your lunch." I first remember wondering why she had to say Pagan. Back then, in our school, Pagan meant "non-Catholic". So, I wondered why Catholic children didn't starve but Pagan children did. Hmm. Secondly, I remember having a huge problem trying to figure out why my eating habits affected the starving, non-Catholic children on the other side of the world.

Okay: Now to my point. I was just perusing my Bing Homepage and reading the headlines that looked interesting, but didn't have anything to do with politics, and I found some headlines about the Russian war. Immediately I felt a very familiar EF wash over me, making me feel horribly responsible again for the millions of good people who are being attacked. I FELT IT! I felt myself feeling responsible for their pain. THIS time, rather than just feeling it and its associated pain, I also remembered Sister J's training that if I didn't eat all of my lunch, I would be hurting the starving Pagan children on the other side of the world in Africa.

I guess that was my "Ah Ha!" moment for the day. I made a connection between a current struggle and a past origin of that struggle. The day that I learned that I have to eat my lunch or I'll starve a child in Africa was not the only time that logic was misused on me. That was the first day in a lifetime of being told I need to pray harder, send more money, be a better person, or others get hurt. It took me a good couple of decades to figure out what Sister J was failing to teach us back then, but as I learned that my family and church's mission was to raise me to feel bad so I'll serve others, I finally figured it out. The old meanie was just trying to shame us into eating more food. More coercive control meant to control us into behaving as we are told for their benefit.

Managing this struggle that I speak of is a massive undertaking. So, now that I know where the early messages of my being responsible for everyone's happiness, all I can say is, "Okay. I see where it started." But knowing that isn't helping me. I have to catch myself going into the shame each time I see pain in someone else's life, and each time, I have to remind myself that I am NOT NOT NOT responsible for the pain in the rest of the world.

It was a good thing that I learn so fast, but learning what I shouldn't learn is a pitfall I have to find a way to navigate. Trauma disorders are all about the pain of the past becoming the fear of the future. In other words, One who's never been burnt isn't afraid of the stove. Our past pains give us our future fears. That's what my trauma story is all about. Every EF I have is from a time when my body remembers pain from the past and converts it to fear of the future. So, for me, the pain of learning that I'm responsible for everyone's well-being has become my fear that more will die in the future and it'll be my fault because I wasn't good enough, kind enough, prayerful enough. I guess I should accept that I'll never be free of this weight, but I'll be wise to always be diligent to diffuse it as soon as it starts from now on. I'm finally grasping that there's no cure for Trauma disorders, but there are plenty of tools and techniques we can use to mitigate it.


I love this forum. I love you all.

I hope for a good week for every one of us.

PC

Aphotic,

Your post really speaks to me also. I often call myself CinderFella because I was apparently born to serve others. My parents did the same tricks yours did. I can remember being very, very small, and sitting at the dinner table with my 4 siblings and parents, and somehow, I acted my age, like a child, and that made Mom mad. I can remember with crystal clarity her saying "Nobody look at Jimmy until he behaves." Mom intentionally withdrew her love and attention in order to make me be her servant who wanted nothing for myself.

I am writing to tell you that I resonate with you. I WISH I was writing with some good information to help you with the issue of being overwhelmed and confused, but I'm right there with you in all of it. I am really frustrated these days with my ability to verbalize how I'm feeling, and even why I'm feeling it, but am completely clueless on how to fix it.

Anyway I just wanted to share that I'm in the lifeboat with you. We can be confused and cluttered at the same time.

SH,

I'm out of step with the modern world also. I was forced to retire in 2020 during COVID. I've been trying to figure out retirement ever since. I basically grew up believing I knew how the world worked, only to retire at 60 in a world I don't even recognize.

I don't believe it's us. I believe it is the world. Chaos and danger is rising faster than I can fathom.

Wishing you all the best in return.
PC

Rainy and SH

Great responses. As I read them I can see clearly a probable correlation between survival stress and appetite. I've known for years that stress messes with digestion and hunger. How did I miss this today? Rainy, I think you are spot on, that regulating digestion and panic are connected. It makes so much sense.

And SH, your post plays into this perfectly. Your relationship with the x was obviously not a happy one. It messed with your body regulation also.

This is good information. Great feedback. I've got something to work with now.

This is why I always say that we are stronger together. As a community, we are smarter than the sum of our parts.
Thanks,

PC

[1) I'm hungry and full at the same time.]

Thank you, Starting Healing, Blueberry and Senseorgan and Chart for the kind words. My gratitude is real. While living in this world, I seldom find places where I can be my authentic self and not be told I should be different. This forum is a place where we accept each other for where we are and what's working or not working in our lives on any given day. Yesterday, my wife told me how she always does a gratitude prayer every morning at the coffee pot. I did not know that about her. It prompted me to tape a note "I am thankful for..." on the coffee pot that I use 5 times a day so as to remind me to do the same. On the top of my list is my wife and kids and grandkids. This forum, and the people I chat with here, is next. I am immeasurably grateful for this place where I can chat with people who accept each other for who we are, as we are. This forum is a safe place to open up. We have a really good thing going here.

Journal Entry for Saturday, November 16, 2024

Two things have changed in my normal baseline physical/emotional daily health.

1) I'm hungry and full at the same time. I can't regulate my appetite so easily right now. For the past week, I've been waking up and not eating breakfast because I am not hungry. This is not good, because I'm Insulin Resistant, which, I'm told, Is the step before Pre-Diabetic, which is the step before Diabetic, which has plagued my mother's side of the family for generations. As I'm eking toward diabetes, fasting is NOT a good practice. But I'm not hungry. THEN, all of a sudden, BAM! I'm starved. Or I've felt a hunger pain so intense it causes a moment of weakness and nausea from the empty stomach. So I make some food, sit down to eat it, and I can only manage to eat a few bites before I feel full again.


2) For a few weeks now I've been living at the very edge of total panic. I can feel a very serious panic attack simmering just beneath my skin. It's getting worse each day. Yesterday I felt that panic almost break out of my shell.

During my latest round of 6 Ketamine Infusions, I started to uncover a panic that has been living deep down in the darkest wells of my nervous system for my whole life. My T says he can feel a scream living down inside me that wants to come up and out. He assures me this is because my brain is starting to feel like I'm ready to see what I've been hiding from for a lifetime. I told him I HATE it when therapists pull that BS move, "just scream into a pillow and you will magically be healed." He told me he hates it when T's do that to him too, BUT that doesn't mean I don't need to scream. He can feel what I'm feeling now: That there is a raging panic attack living dormant deep within me and that if I want to move forward in my healing, I have little choice but to allow it to erupt.

BUT! I'm taking it slow. I'm taking a passive approach to allowing the panic to bubble up in its own time. I'm giving it permission to keep getting closer. I'm not taking the aggressive approach to healing that I usually take. I usually JUMP in at anything I think might ease the pain of the past. This time, the panic is too serious. When it starts, I distract immediately. Change my thought. I feel like I almost got run over by a bus and saved myself at the last second. This looming panic attack is that frightening to me. It's like the panic is a living organism that's dwelling inside me, waiting for its chance to show itself, but it is being respectful of my fears. Maybe this would be a really good thing for my T and I to put to IFS therapy. Maybe the panic has a voice. Maybe it will talk to me if I can get my T to act as the mediator.

I'm terrified of this panic living deep down in me, but maybe between T and I, we can finally release that last precarious grip I have on my mental stability, and the scream will come out. Rather than some CBT Therapist trying to force me to pretend to scream into a pillow, T believes there will come a time soon when I won't be able to stop it. The scream will come out on its own terms. The panic that lives deep down in me is powerful and I'm very afraid of it. So I'm only moving forward as fast as I'm willing to move forward. I am NOT pushing it. I'm letting the panic grow slowly and I'm getting used to knowing it's there. Once I no longer fight against it, maybe it will finally blow its top and I can find the relief that my T believes I'll feel. Then, maybe, I can start eating a normal diet again.

T and I both suspect that the memories I still haven't yet dealt with could be from an extremely young part of myself. Possibly preverbal, which makes identifying the memories much harder to do.

I'm starting to have random memories pop into my head from early childhood. They're insignificant memories. Playing with Legos. Laying on the floor in the stream of sunlight from the living room picture window. These snapshot memories come out of nowhere and surprise me each time. I seem to be connecting more than normal with my childhood. So far, nothing significant, just hints that I'm closer to my origins than I normally am.

HI Roy

Welcome to the forum. If you came looking to take on your loneliness, and to share your lows and highs, then you found exactly what you were looking for.

I just turned 64 also. I became suicidal at age 12 in Catholic school. The abuse at home, plus the abuse at school, had become too much for me to take. I spent a couple of weeks out of school on tranquilizers. Then when I could hold down food again, they sent me right back into the fire. The first 25 years of therapy were useless, as, like you say, they didn't consider trauma to be a problem until just a few years ago. I found this forum 3 years ago and joined because I just didn't know if I could keep going without someone to talk to that understands what goes on in my stressed brain.

There's a lot of compassion and empathy here. Occassionally, some of us even help the others with good information about trauma and treatments. Most of us are just here to be with people who get us. It feels good.

I'm of the opinion that feeling unwanted is at the core of our residual trauma sadness. Most of us on the forum have varied backstories, but with one thing in common: We felt unlovable as kids, and many of us as adults also.

So here on the forum, we are kind and compassionate and interested in each others highs and lows.

I'm glad you found the forum. I look forward to more interactions.

PC.

Azul

Welcome to the forum. You are using the platform perfectly right now. Your new post came up right where it should. I'm sorry to hear of your struggles, but glad you found the forum.

I want to quickly address your comments about how you are just starting to find treatments and are struggling to afford them. Treatments for CPTSD are just coming online now. It's kind of a free-for-all as different treatments come in and go out. How do we navigate such a disorganized front of varied treatments, different practitioners, different costs, different insurance situations, etc, etc, etc.?

I've been struggling with a long list of problems, including depression and anxiety and dissociation and night terrors and recurring nightmares, etc., all my life too. I'm 64 now. I've been in various treatments ever since 1981. Most of the treatments that work are new. Nothing they did in the 1980s-2010 helped any trauma disorders at all. The help for Trauma disorders is just now coming online in most first world countries.  The problem we have, like you, is being able to afford it. BUT opportunities come up in many ways to get into this or that to give it a try.

Over the past 40 years, I've at least tried quite a lot of the therapies that exist right now. Here's a list of the 5 things that have been a help to me. I can't speak for other people, but I get help from these things:

1) The forum. Having peers who already understand CPTSD with me to chat with is one of the strongest components of my healing path.

2) ANYTHING that contains a spiritual component helps me. Anything that is science only is a waste of my money and time. When I talk about spirituality, I do not mean religious. I just mean that it respects the notion that we are all connected on an unseen level. Therapists who understand this truth can do really good work with their trauma patients.

3) I have a Dialectical Behavioral Therapist (DBT). DBTs are specifically focused on connection and merging the fractured parts of trauma survivors back together.

4) MDMA and Ketamine. These are expensive, but I do have practitioners I go to for treatments on these two things as needed. They are not covered on medical insurance so I can only do them when I can afford to.

5) IFS Therapy. Internal Family Systems therapy is giving me the most healing of everything I've done. It's the only treatment that sort of has a permanent arc. The Ketamine and MDMA only help for a few months and have to be revisited multiple times per year.

I'm so grateful that this forum is free to join and managed well by Kizzie who keeps the focus on kindness and compassion. I have made some truly good friends here on this forum. I hope it is helpful for you too.

I have a theory that we suffer with CPTSD not because of the specific traumas, but from feeling like we aren't welcome on the earth. We aren't normal. We aren't loved or lovable. So connection with others and compassion between abuse victims is a big help. We came here looking for understanding, acceptance, support, validation, and even information. And that's what I get from the good souls on this forum.

Welcome. I look forward to more interactions.

Journal Entry for Wednesday, November 13, 2024

I've been off the journal for quite some time now. The world here is very somber since the election. Nobody is really talking much. The grocery store is quiet. People are just walking around like zombies. While the calm is nice, the reason for it is suspicious.

And for me, self-torture is as easy as it's always been. In fact, I can't stop thinking about all the things that are wrong in life. I struggle impossibly with an ability to let go of the past and the people who've led me to where I am now. I try SO HARD to stop thinking about the people who've bullied me. My family. My church. My schools as a kid. And politics. I want to forgive and forget, but my brain won't stop thinking about them.

It always baffles me that we have enough on this planet to all enjoy ourselves. But we don't. I held a job that paid well for 42 years. I didn't like the job. It was a good job. It just wasn't what I'd wanted to do with my life. It was what my parents guided me toward and forced me to apply for. I had money. I had friends. I had health. And I had misery. Why? Why do we have to live in this misery from our pasts, and from sticking our noses into drama. Trauma and drama. Two things that have kept me from fully enjoying a simple life. It's not just me. I know SO MANY PEOPLE who are healthy and intelligent and making money and having friends, but who are just as miserable as if they were starving. Just like me. I was living a good life but struggling to enjoy it. It's midday. We're between rain showers. I could do a quick bike ride or a run to the store to find someone to talk with for a few minutes. But what am I doing? Nothing. I'm sitting in the house. Waiting to die. Why am I doing this to myself? (That's an actual question: I really don't know for sure why I am sitting around bored in a world filled with things to do).

In my morning meditation, where I like to reach out to the spirit world and ask if anyone has any guidance for me, I heard the words, "You get tangled up." As I heard the words, I knew that they meant that I get tangled up in everything I do. I overthink. I over worry. I pause with second thoughts. I try to find every possible outcome so I can prepare for anything. I can't say no to people, so I end up tangled up in their dramas with them far more often than I need to. I get tangled up in my inability to know what I want for myself. Getting untangled is my current project. Stopping, every so often, and asking myself, "Is this what I want to be doing right now?" If the answer is no, then I need to stop doing the things I've gotten tangled up in and I need to release my grip on the leash that holds me in decision paralysis.  So, physically I have NO REASON for not being happy right now. It's all about past pain creating future fears, and allowing myself to get dragged into too many dramas, some mine, some are other people's dramas.

IN the end, that's the part that gets me. Physically we can have good lives. But our brains, our traumas, our wiring, have created in us an unseen force that keeps us from enjoying the simple things of life.

It doesn't matter how dim our global future looks, at this time we don't live in the future. We live in the present moment. Our pasts bring us pain. The future brings us fear. But right here and now we are in the present moment, and right now, I'm in a safe place. I have food in the fridge. I have heat. Winter is coming outside and I'm warm and fed inside. So, why am I so unhappy?

I wish I knew why we are like this. The ancients taught us that we think too much. If we could live in the moment more like the animals do, we'd be more relaxed and authentically ourselves. Animals only stress while they're hiding from hunters. They go right back to enjoying their meal as soon as the danger leaves. Wouldn't that be awesome? But we're not like that. WE COULD BE! But we are not. I'm not like that. I stress over things that might not ever happen. I still feel pain from things that happened 60+ years ago. I worry about tomorrow like my life depends on it. I keep emergency food, water, medication, electricity, propane, power generators, and more, around because I'm so sure I'm going to need them in the future. I'm letting my pain from the past and my fear of the future darken the fun I could be having today. I KNOW I'm doing it, but somehow, I can't find my way out of this emotional cycle of self-torture.

I've told this to the forum many times: I wasn't allowed to want anything during the first decades of my life. I was to want what my family was kind enough to decide to give me, and nothing else. I wasn't even allowed to talk about my future. As a boy, I wanted to be a general contractor and land developer. In my city, anyone who did that when they were my age, is a multimillionaire today. AND I LOVE Working with tools. I love it, I love it, I love it. I feel invincible when I have a firm grip on some good tools. My dad scoffed at me anytime I ever said, "I want to be ___ when I grow up." He did this right up to my 18th birthday. Usually, he'd scoff and say, "You can't do that." Or "You need to be smarter if you want to do that." He literally told me that I wasn't smart enough to do most things. Or he'd just repeat that famous family line that was used on me thousands of times over the years, "You don't want that." Then, ON the morning of my 18th birthday, after 18 solid years of telling me I can't be anything when I grow up, my father stormed into my room and screamed at me: "You're 18 now. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO?" I leapt out of bed, put on my clothes, and hit the highway looking for anyone who would hire me. I wasn't allowed to go to college. Dad said, "Anyone who goes to college is just doing it for four more years of free childhood." I wasn't allowed to start my own business, or contract myself out, even though I'd been doing it for years as a teen who would take on any task in the yard for reasonable price. Rather than pursue my own desires to build homes and own my own business, I ended up going to work where he worked. The factory was hiring, and they knew my dad to be a hard worker, so they hired his son in hopes I'd be like Dad. I was. I worked very hard. For 42 years I worked hard at a job I didn't like because I wasn't allowed to want to follow my own heart. Fast-forward to today--I can now make my own decisions, but wait...no...I can't. I have to torture myself by still being unable to know what I want in life. So I'm paralyzed by the decisions. I'm sitting around the house waiting to die while the world is offering all sorts of fun things to do just outside my door. And I can't decide what to do, so I don't do anything. Decision paralysis.

Yep. I'm good at making up ways to torture myself so that I don't enjoy what's right in front of me.

And yes, I know: This is trauma. Trauma is what does this to us. So, on some level I DO know why I torture myself. But on some other level, I still see it and go, "DUDE! The cage isn't locked! You can leave if you want to!"  Or can I?  My son deals with traumas from his childhood too. When people ask why he can't just get past it and go on, he responds with, "When I find out why I can't let go, I'll let you know."

The ancients might have been right about how thinking is our downfall. Ignorance is Bliss. The less we think, the less we stress. If we lived in the moment, and allowed ourselves to be led by our hearts and the wind, we'd all love and care for each other, and we'd all be managing stress very well, enjoying our lives and being happy for more hours a day than being miserable. Even when we don't have much money, we can still go for a walk with a friend. I am 64 and have lived a pretty complicated and fast paced life. I've been on a few fantastic vacations and have had some very big experiences. But when I think about the things that I miss most in life, it's sitting around the campfire with Coco, and my son, his wife, our grandsons, maybe even a friend or neighbor or two. Sipping on hot chocolate, snacking on chips, and talking about every possible topic we can come up with by the firepit in the front lawn of our broken down little beach hut. I don't lament over not going on expensive trips or accomplishing big things. My fond memories are of playing with my sons and my grandsons when they were little. Throwing them in the air onto the couch while they laughed so hard that everyone within earshot laughed with them.

When my sons were boys, around 10 years old or so, there were 26 children in our neighborhood, all roughly the same age. I came home from work one day at 3 PM. Parked the car. Opened the door and had a line of neighborhood children lined up to take turns giving me a hug as I got out of the car. They were all trying so hard to not giggle. The smiles on their faces were unforgettable. These kids thought that was so funny. If I had to choose, I would keep that memory and give up my memories of our two weeks on the Carribean in 2018. For me, 5 minutes in my driveway with two dozen giggling kids is far, far more memorable than a 2 weeklong expensive vacation. In my own personal life, it is true: Connecting with other people means everything to me. I'd rather hug a line of giggling kids than go on vacation somewhere for two weeks. I'll remember the first one far longer than I'll remember the latter.

IN summary: I'm miserable but I know I don't need to be, and yet I know I can't stop it. I'm frustrated that knowing how trauma has messed with me isn't enough to cure it. It's good that I know what CPTSD is now, as it explains most of my medical and emotional downfalls, but DOG GONE IT I'm so tired of being unhappy in a world filled with things I could be doing. I just want to know: What will make me happy?  I like riding bikes. But I don't like riding with other riders. They go too fast or too slow. So I ride alone. And that is sad. I go out and ride for an hour and when I get back home I'm just sad. I rode my bike alone as a kid to escape my family. I would go out after dinner every night and ride for hours so I could avoid being home with my family. Somehow I can't get that lonely boy out of my head. He still lives in me. He still likes his sad bike rides. The only place he felt he had any control. I couldn't ride just anywhere, but I did have a fairly nice sized play area. I could go into the school yards. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the US. Mostly it was still all woods when I was growing up. So the school was built deep in the woods and I could ride trails all night long uninterrupted. Other kids were playing ball with other kids. SO I was the only loner out there looking for quiet solitude and nobody telling me what I'm allowed to want.

I'm so frustrated. I want to have fun while I still can, but I can't think of ANY activity that I want to do. I'm trapped in an invisible cage that I can't escape from, even though it's unlocked.