Messages

December 11, 2025

I've long believed there to be a strong connection between people with C-PTSD and HSP. HSP is "Highly Sensitive Person". Unlike C-PTSD or ADHD, HSP is not a condition that requires healing or support, it's an attribute that defines our identities, like how tall we are, or what color our skin is. Everyone is born with some level of sensitivity, and about 30% of all humans are more sensitive than the remaining 70%.  When a child is born with higher sensitivity, then we can be more easily traumatized by people who torment us for that superpower from the beginning.

I have a confession to make: I sometimes dislike wealthy people because I'm not wealthy like them. I admit to a jealousy there. I liken this to the narcissistic, low sensitive adults who give birth to highly sensitive children and end up hating us because we have something they can't achieve: They can't feel life, love, and joy like we can, and they know it. One of the most prolific attributes of narcissism is jealousy. Narcs are insatiably jealous of anyone who is smarter, prettier or more loved than they are, so they take advantage of their size, and torture us indefinitely while we're small and in their care.

I am one of 5 children and I am also the most sensitive of the 5, and I am also the one they all targeted and belittled and treated like I'm too stupid to handle life. What psychologists call "the identified patient" in the family is the one who everyone automatically blames all their problems on, and I see a correlation between my hightened sensitivity and the abuse they lobbed on me for 50 years until I walked away and changed my phone number.  Imagine a family that feels so bad about their own lives that they need someone to shift that hatred onto. Who would they pick? Some insensitive child who doesn't respond to their abuse? Or to the sensitive one who is easy to hurt? Easy to get reactions from? If you want to abuse someone, you want them to feel abused, right? So I was the one who was easiest to abuse because I was the one most easily hurt by abuse. I became the identified patient.

During the past few days I've turned my obsessive need to find agency by learning and reading as many books as I can find on any topic, to the topic of HSP. I went out looking for a book that would teach me some good stuff about HSP. The internet guided me toward a small, easy to read little book called Sensitive, written by Jenn Granneman & Andre Solo. Within only the first two chapters I'm almost in tears as I read the reasons...the actual, scientific reasons...why being HSP is a good thing. It's considered a super power. Most of the world's most influential characters throughout history were HSP.

When a person is born sensitive, and then raised in danger, they hone that sensitivity to become literal superheroes, as we become far, far, far better at noticing details, and linking thoughts, and preparing for trouble, and protecting ourselves from dangers less sensitive people don't even know they need protecting from. We're alert, aware, cautious. We're survivors. We are less apt to follow the crowds off a bridge because we're asking, "why is everyone jumping?" We aren't followers. We're critical thinkers.

Many of us have been lied to by being called "Too sensitive" all our lives.  In the story of Jesus, he was tortured and killed for being sensitive and "awakened". Today's low-sensitive people have turned "awakened" into a four-letter swear word, "woke." They criticize and laugh at people who are wiser, kinder, more compassionate, empathetic, and more aware of real life than they are. I see that as another example of how it's just easier to make fun of sensitive people than it is to make fun of numb people.

What's happening within me this day is I'm finding another avenue for self-forgiveness. The more I read into this one book, (and I plan to find more books when I'm done with this one), the more I find an ability to forgive myself for being kinder, more compassionate, and more "sensitive" than the numb blokes that run around bullying people and calling that "manly."

DF:

I agree about the lousy electricians. Bad wiring causes fires, misfires, smoke, system and appliance failures: I'm talking about both house wiring and brain wiring.

I have recently begun to understand the "Identified Patient" concept. I think of it as the Gilligan concept. In the 1960s, the TV Show Gilligan's Island was about 7 castaways who always blamed everything on Gilligan. Poor kid couldn't do anything right it seemed. In all too many families, or even work crews, or teams, one poor soul get's tagged as the Identified Patient, or, as I call it, The Gilligan. Once that reputation is bought into by all, it is nearly impossible to shake off. It's not only the targeted person who lives with the reputation, but everyone else becomes comfortable with it also. If we are the unlucky soul to be tagged as "the Gilligan", then pretty soon, we just can't do anything right anymore, even when we really DO everything right. We become "typecast" as they say in the Entertainment Industry. Once we are "the Gilligan" we just remain there because that's just what everyone has decided we are. The convenience of having a Gilligan to blame everything on is not an easy convenience for them to let go of. It might make them reassess who really was at fault for their flaws.

I'm very sorry to read how badly you fear, even for your life, that people will be unhappy with your doings, even those doings that you didn't know were assigned to you. I remember well, being hated by people who had heard things about me that weren't true, AND that to this day I still don't know what it was they had even heard. How unfair to be shunned and scoffed at for something that wasn't even true. But a rumor was generated, in case by an "unkind" sibling, and was robustly spread around behind my back, so that when I showed up with a big, stupid smile on my face, I'd be horrified to suddenly discover I was unwelcome and half the room hated me for something I didn't even know I had been accused of.

I do resonate with how terrifying that is. It really does feel like a fight for our life.

You're not alone, DF. Your friends on the forum respect and trust you, just like you do us. There are a lot of us Gilligans on this deserted island together, and we are good people. All of us. You included!

 

PC.

[TheBigBlue,]

TheBigBlue,
Your hugs are well received. Thank you!

Desert Flower,
Your hugs are also as well received and thank you too. AND No apologies are needed about responding to my post. I welcome the responses. I love the responses!!! I always hope for responses. I feel less alone in the world when we all respond to one another. I don't see your response as rambling, I see it as joining with me and connecting our Holiday stressors in the spirit of togetherness. I hope that the absence of your mother's criticisms this year does indeed make this Thanksgiving a lot less stressful than any in the past. I hope that as the remaining family becomes allowed now to view you through their own eyes, rather than through hers, that you find some rest and inner peace within your relations with a few of them too.

My critical family is mostly all gone now, and I do, I truly DO find it nice to not have to defend myself against their twisted perspectives of who I am and have always been. I'm finding it easier to forgive a few relatives now that the antagonist is gone and the abuse has pretty much stopped finally. (I remain No Contact with them, but I don't hate or even fear them anymore. I just remain NC because it's just better to leave sleeping dogs lie).

I wish you a new Thanksgiving wish with an extra dose of relaxation this year.

PC.

SO,

Thank you for sharing this inspiring report of how connecting with nature, and hard work, and off grid exercise, and sleeping when it's dark and working while it's light is being so healing for you right now.

My focus went mostly onto your comment that  "It's a lot better to have already accepted that it's not really up to me what happens. Makes the journey so much lighter."

I just finished a novel where a man walked a 2000 mile highway from Chicago to California, Route 66. He brought up that same comment, that the journey IS the destination.

You are on that journey now in your isolation, and you are where you want to be and it's inspiring to read about it.

Again, thank you for sharing this experience with us, and I'll be thinking about you more while you're still in it and while you're coming back from it. I hope that the experience gives some of that irreversible growth that sometimes happens. Sometimes, when we experience something new, we never forget it. We never return to where we were before we knew it. Once we learn how to ride a bike we never return to a person that didn't know how to ride a bike. Growth is a one-way journey that IS the destination.

PC

San,

I so understand the bedtime stressors. Bedtime has been difficult for me lately too, so I feel extra compassion for what you're going through.

I'm glad your extra medication helped you sleep soundly once it took effect.

I also feel a lot of truth in what you said about how this is an entanglement of more than one emotion layered on top of each other. 3 marriages makes for 3 times as many traumatic experiences. Dealing with just one emotion is difficult enough, but as we realize that there are a bunch of them all piled up, it helps us to better understand why we're struggling as much as we are. It's more like we're in a tornado and a flood and an earthquake all at the same time.

I'm glad you shared your feelings on this thread so I can feel some of the stress with you, and share that I often feel very similar things to what you are reporting now. I know these online hug emojis are just emojis, but I also know that I can feel them when people pass them to each other, so I just want to send you a nice long emoji hug for today. Here on the OOTS forum, our physical addresses are scattered all over the world, but our hearts are sharing the same space in time and empathy. So, this extra-large emoji hug is from my heart to yours, right here and right now.



PC

San and Chart and everyone else who reads these posts,

I've been finding that binaural beats are available in many places. These meditations I'm doing on this app are only one place. I have iTunes, and plenty of binaural beats are available there. Also on YouTube. I'm exploring some of them also now.

I'm reading My Big TOE, by Physicist Thomas Campbell. (TOE stands for Theory Of Everything) He said that in early EKG tests of people during binaural beats that if one ear is being fed 100Hz, and the other is being fed 104 Hz that the difference of 4 Hz is where the healing happens.

There's a great deal of science behind how this effects brain function. I'm no physicist, so I have to take their word for it.

One of the big changes for me is that these Binaural beats have been altering my digestion. I thought I was imagining it at first, but it turns out after some Ai Google searches, that it's well known that Binaural beats do alter digestion by calming the nerves in the Digestive tract. This includes my tummy and below. At first I was experiencing some needs to stay near a bathroom for about 2 weeks, but now I'm settling into a new, more relaxed digestive state, and I'm normalizing to the new vibration.

I guess it makes sense: My dentist uses a sonic cleaner on my nightguards when I visit her. Sound waves clean any bacteria off the plastic without harming the plastic. I guess that even without a physicist, I can see now that sound does affect bacteria, and our digestive systems work by digestive enzymes and bacteria. So, I guess if I can accept that sound cleans my appliances, it can clean my tummy too. Right?


----Holidays and Traumas----


New topic: Thanksgiving in the US tomorrow.  Big trigger for millions of us. Why we do this to ourselves is the mystery. If most people dread Thanksgiving, maybe we are just gluttons for punishment for keeping it going.

Here, we don't know if this will be our last Thanksgiving dinner or not. Our family and friends have mostly died or left the state. There's a sadness there, mixed in with the 64 years of memories of big events on this day. One of our sons was born this week 41 years ago. He's now off grid, dealing with schizophrenia alone, refusing to connect with anyone anywhere ever. He was such a beautiful boy. He's, of course, on our minds constantly. The sadness is deafening at times.

Traumas are still happening. We deal with past traumas all the time, but I sometimes forget that there are still more traumas in the chute awaiting their chance to burst into my life. While the family wars of past years continue to trigger residual traumas, there are some new ones happening now in my old age that have to be dealt with also. Losing our son is one of them. My former best friend from my career died ON Thanksgiving two years ago. Losses just keep building up.

There's a lot of acceptance that needs to happen within me. If I keep thinking that I'll find that happiness that little PC thought I'd have when I grew up, then I'll keep expecting things that aren't coming. (Self-induced torture?) It reminds me of that quote, "Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man." ― Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).
   Nietzsche is said to have been a pretty badly traumatized man who'd lost all hope in his life, and sometimes I feel like I can really resonate with him. But that's a road I can choose to take or not take. I can rely on my own newfound understanding of how micro-moments of peace are found between the familiar moments of pain and focus on those micro-moments instead. I guess the Law of Attraction sort of says that if I focus on what peace I can find that I will attract more peace. I'll become better and better at finding peaceful moments if I'll start looking for them as much as I can.

Baby steps. We don't heal from trauma quickly, but we do make progress if we work at it. I'll take any progress as it comes along.


The Chesire Cat once told Alice in Wonderland that if you don't know where you're going, all roads take you there. I can see in my own life that if I can stop worrying about where I'm going, perhaps I can sit back and enjoy the ride to "wherever this train is going".

I was reading a novel last week about a guy walking Route 66 and was getting frustrated with how long the journey was taking, where the author had the realization that, "The journey IS the destination". Might as well enjoy it. Maybe life will be a lot easier for me to deal with if I'll stop worrying about where I'm going and just enjoy the journey itself. In any given moment, I can take a deep breath and just love the feeling of air going in and coming out. The Traumas of Thanksgiving are there, but between each breath is a microscopic moment of pure peace. I guess I can endure the sadness of the Holidays if I will focus on the peace between each triggered memory.

For any and all of my OOTS friends who are being triggered by the Holiday season this year, I wish you all the peace you can find in the moments between breaths.

We've survived them every year up until now, and we can survive this one too.

To everyone here on the forum and everywhere that someone is working to find peace, my heart is with yours. I pray for inner peace to befall all of us, not just myself.

I believe that through sharing on the Forum and by connecting our own hearts in the ethereal world, we can endure this Holiday season together.

PC

In a book I'm reading now, the author says that it isn't the abuse/neglect that caused the long-lasing trauma, but the fact that we had to deal with it alone.

I am now of the belief that human connection is the one thing that we all need, and our lack of it is the biggest reason we suffer.

I'm really happy to read that you had such a profound healing through feeling connected with others.

Dissociation is so easy to fall into. I've always said that if Catholic school hadn't had windows, I might have been a better student. I spent all day, every day, staring out the windows pretending I was somewhere else. Then I grew up into a world that then invented the internet, social media and 24-hour TV.

Distractions are so incredibly easy to fall into. When I get frustrated at life, I do like you: I go to the internet and sift through endless images of beautiful places I'd rather be than here, or I read articles about other people's problems. Then, every evening, my wife and I sit on the sofa and watch mind-numbing TV shows for hours on end. The next day we don't even remember what we watched.

You're not alone with this. I'm glad you talk about it here. When I first joined the forum a few years ago, I thought I was unique and when I talked about my dissociative problems that I was confessing something others would gasp at. It didn't take long to come to realize that I was joining a group of people who already understood what I was going through.

Knowing I'm like others helped me feel less alone in life. I hope it helps you in a similar way.

I'm really glad I found these Binaural meditations when I did, because I really need them now, and they are helping me to connect with a more peaceful sense of calm energy.

My family is struggling. My kids are struggling. If I didn't have the OOTS forum, my therapist, and the tools I have been able to connect with, I'd be in pretty bad shape right now.

So, as I'm dealing with the chaos of human life, and of trauma life, I'm also connecting with the peace of the meditations. I do one each morning, another after lunch, and I go to sleep with one each night.

This morning, during my 40 minute meditation I thought of how there are three ways to propel forward. 1) Incremental Propulsion: A bird flaps its wings, both wings at the same time propel it up and forward, but then the wings stop propelling so they can recoil for the next "flap." Why doesn't the bird fall to the ground at the end of each downward flap? Because of the momentum it achieved with the flap. The momentum gives it a chance to recoil and get ready for the next flap. The momentum keeps it moving while it readies for the next propelling flap. 2) Continuous Propulsion: A jet engine needs no recoil. It burns fuel and provides constant propulsion. But, momentum is still a part of it. Most airplanes can fly for a little while if the engine shuts off. A 767 can fly for up to 18 minutes after it runs out of fuel. 3) Alternating Propulsion: The third way I think of how propulsion works is the two legs of a person walking. Each leg does like the wings of the bird. Each leg propels us forward incrementally, then recoils for the next step. The bird flaps both wings at once and then recoils both at once. But the legs of a person take turns propelling. We're like half bird, half jet engine. Momentum isn't as needed when we walk, because one leg or the other is always pushing us forward.

My meditations, for now, are like the flapping of the wings. I go up and forward three times a day. The momentum of what I get from the meditation keeps me moving forward, but, like the bird, if I stop flapping, I'll fall back down to the earth. Momentum between "flaps" only lasts for a little while.

Posting on the forum, or participating in any therapy, are also like the bird's wings. I sometimes wish I could see my therapist every day, but I've learned that the two-week intervals between sessions gives me enough momentum to keep moving forward, while the true healing happens in the two weeks where I practice whatever I learned in the session.

I guess the healing happens during the moments between propelling flaps. Sometimes I think that true peace is found in the space between past and future and in the brief silence between words or the pause between inhales and exhales. The clutter of life is deafening, but between each and every breath is a moment of silence and peace.

My goal for today is to try and anchor myself to the silent moments between the words and the empty space between the flaps of the wings.  Chaos and clutter are happening all around me, but so is the peace between each flap of the wing. Maybe, if I keep focusing on those moments of recoil, I'll connect better with the peace that's happening between each flap.

SO,

I too am terrified at the doorbell and the phone when it rings. My heart goes into my throat. I see some growth in you though in that you didn't fawn over the partier who wanted you to give him booze. Good for you!!!!! That's something to put in your pocket as a win. I'll always take a win, even a small one.

I have a noisy neighborhood too. For years I've been angry and hurt and frustrated over the music and barking dogs, but more and more I'm giving in and just wearing earmuffs and turning on loud fans at bedtime. If I thought I could find a better place to live, I'd move, but so far, I can't, so I'm doing plan B instead. It's starting to be easier for me to deal with a little. Still...maybe someday I can find a quieter home.

I'm deeply fascinated by your upcoming trip alone off the grid. The battle going on inside you is what's got me so enthralled. You want to do something that you find has value. You're doing it for you. Even though these trips make you feel alone and stressed, you still do them because you see a true value in them. BUT then you feel like you shouldn't do them. Like a little part of you is telling you that you shouldn't, while a bigger part of you is encouraging you to do it.

Some of the members of the forum have taught me a saying, "You're shoulding all over yourself." HA HA! I love that saying and I use it all the time now.

If going off grid for extended time periods helps you find any healing at all in your soul then I'm impressed you are working up the courage to do them, and not letting your little should-head guilt you into stopping.

What I've learned in my incessant reading of any books written by successful trauma therapists, is that courage is the fence that we stand on.  With each event of our lives we choose which side of the fence to step off into: the "retreating" side where we continue to hide in fear or the "go for it" side where we risk actually living in success. I know it's a good thing to pick our battles, and retreat when it's appropriate, but I'm starting to see that it can be a good thing to step off into the "go for it" side once in a while too. The doorbell rings and we feel fear. If we choose to cower to the fear, we hide and remain afraid. If we choose to gather enough courage to open the door even while we're afraid, we find resolution. Sometimes hiding saves us from harm. Sometimes opening the door does. I guess that's what's called Discernment: Knowing when to advance and when to retreat. It's a good skill to cultivate.

Courage to face our emotions transforms fear into accomplishments.

The emotion I deal with more than all others is the emotion of Apathy. Apathy is when I give up and roll over and decide life isn't worth living and my values mean nothing and it just doesn't matter anymore. What I've learned through my studies is that if I can add a little courage to my appathy and decide that I AM worth something, the emotion of Apathy transforms into the emotion of Surrender.

Surrender is to say, "I am willing to let go of my own desires in favor of getting with the program". It tends to lead to acceptance of the things I can't change, which then diverts my energies into the things I'd forgotten I CAN change.
 
Apathy is to say, "I'm letting go and I don't care anymore." It tends to lead to an inability to accept the things I can't change, and takes all the energy away from the things I CAN change.

When going for it is the right choice, courage is alchemy. It turns lead into gold within our hearts. Courage is being willing to open the door even though we're scared to do so. Courage is being willing to take a long trip off the grid even when parts of us are screaming in our heads to not do it.

I'm impressed by your courage. I have never had the courage to go off grid alone like what you're doing.

Good luck and I hope it's the best off-grid trip of all so far.

PC

San,

It's good to read that you are starting to get some sleep. Sounds like the medications you and your MD are exploring are doing what you need them to do. That's always nice.

I can't possibly know what you should say to your D, but I can absolutely resonate with what it is like to have people whom I love being poisoned by the words of the unscrupulous. Knowing when or how to talk with her is a "sticky wicket".

In my own family, I tried for decades to defend myself against the lies and gossip of what was being said about me. In fact, I have come to know that what was said about me all those years was far more damaging than anything said to me.

Each family is similar but not identical. What worked to help me get past it in my own family was a decision to take the high road and just be the better person. Every time I tried to defend myself I just looked more guilty. So why bother trying? It didn't fix things with the family. I ended up being abandoned by all of them, but in my own heart, at least I'm not having to defend myself anymore. I no longer care what they say about me. BUT this is your D, who you want very much to stay in your life. So I'm not so sure that what I did is the right path for you.

BUT there is something to making sure that no matter what you decide to do, doing it from the high road is still a good thing. Out in the world, people say "Don't lower ourselves to their level" and I guess that's what I chose to do in my family. If anyone can't see that they're being lied to, we aren't really able to change that. It isn't until they look at him then at you and realize that one of you is a lying gossip and the other an honest victim, that they will fix this within themselves.

I recently learned a term: "Identified Patient." The quickest way for me to grasp the concept is to think of the old TV show, Gilligan's Island. Gilligan was the identified patient. The screw up. He was honest and well-meaning, but he made mistakes. And after a short while his propensity for mistakes defined him. Now, no matter what happened, the other 6 castaways on his island always just knew Gilligan was the one who was the mistake maker. Even when he wasn't making mistakes, they saw him as the mistake maker anyway. He couldn't ever break free of the reputation they were forcing on him. After a discussion with some friends last week, I started to see that I was the designated patient in my own FOO, and when anything went wrong, everyone just knew I was the screwup. I couldn't shake the reputation. I'd been typecast. No matter what happened, PC was the screwup so let's do like we always do and blame him. It had gotten to the point where all 4 of my siblings could marry and have children and be congratulated for it, but whenever I'd date, or when I married, or when I announced my wife's pregnancies, the family would panic because I was doing something stupid.

My wife's family was the opposite. They loved me and trusted me. They were overjoyed to welcome me in when I married their daughter, and they celebrated and supported all our pregnancies. I wasn't "the Gilligan" on their island. They saw me for who I really was. My own FOO saw me for who they had all decided I was.

Some people are able to fix their typecasting, others aren't. So I don't know if you should talk to your D or not, but I am sending you all the love and support I can to help you find your way through this decision. From reading your posts, I view you as a loving, compassionate, beautiful soul, and I hope you can feel that from more than just me. I think there are a number of people on the forum who write things that support that same sense of trust in you.

Maybe, I guess, just take your time and think this through until your heart finally feels like it knows what to do.

Journal Entry: 11/18/2025

Lots of changes lately. I've found an inexpensive app that provides a fairly robust listing of guided meditations that include binaural sounds (recorded with two microphones, providing different sounds between my two ears) that sort of do what EMDR does, but with ears instead of eyes. As the sounds move back and forth and up and down and around me through my headphones, I'm able to stay focused, and I think they do something like what EMDR does to open up different parts of the brain to receive the information that's being given to me through the guided meditations.

As I've been learning how to let go of the pain that is associated with my memories (A technique I learned from the book: Letting Go: the Pathway of Surrender, by Dr. David R Hawkins), I'm now getting even deeper help through these meditations.

This morning I selected a 40-minute meditation on self-forgiveness. It really dug in deep into my psyche and helped me to feel the true pain that I've been holding onto in my chest. I can truly see the reality that is taught to us through books like The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel Van Der Kolk. Van Der Kolk's book told me that my body keeps energy and manifests illnesses in the areas where I'm holding stuck energy, but this meditation, this morning, was the first time I've ever truly experienced in my body what the book taught me in my intellect.

I've been learning that books tell us what it's like to experience something but experiencing it for real is a whole different learning. For example, You can write a book that tells me what it feels like to swim, but until I actually jump into the pool, I don't really know.  As of this morning, I KNOW what Van Der Kolk's book is saying about how stuck energy from the past ravages the body in the present. I felt it. I still feel it.

For my self-forgiveness, I do have a short list of things I've done in my past that I have never been able to forgive myself for. There were times that, because of my own abandonment issues, I've abandoned people or pets that loved me, and after a few years I discovered how badly my leaving had hurt them. Even though it was my own trauma that had me flee from them, I've never been able to forgive myself for those few times when my own trauma led to me hurting someone else in the same way.

This morning, as I was instructed to call up one of those instances so I could bring it forward for healing, the pain in my chest was greater than any I'd ever felt. Somehow, I knew, this was always there, but I'd always masked the pain over by stuffing it back down. A lot of the authors we read for trauma healing tell us that many heart attacks are the result of the pain we hold in our hearts from feeling abandoned, and as of this morning, I no longer just believe this, I now KNOW it is true. I feel it.

This morning a pain burst out into the open in my chest, and I was able to begin the process of releasing it. I plan to revisit this meditation at least once a week for as long as it takes to make that pain start to shrink. I hope that if I can do this repeatedly, every so often, that each time I do it, the pain will be less and less, and the self-forgiveness will be greater and greater. One time in the meditation isn't enough, but like an antibiotic medication, we have to take it every day for a while before we are healed, right?

Hi San,

I can understand how your talk with your bro has put some doubt into you. If he was raised by the same people you were, and he says he's fine, what does that say about you? I grew up being "the broken one" and taking the blame for it every second of my life until I was 50. Personally, I believe your doubts are just that: Doubts. I agree with your thought that he is just not as open as you are to the truth about how things were.

I'm #4 of 5 kids. My elder sibs were 13,11 and 8 when I was born. My little sis came 3 years after me. We were two distinctly different litters to the same parents. I have experienced the same sort of thing as you did with your bro recently. When I was 50, my family fell apart finally. My oldest sister, who I really didn't know well, connected with me, and we had a long series of similar conversations as yours. It took me some work to help Sis understand that we did NOT have the same parents. Little Sis and I grew up in the shadows of their childhoods. #2 was a sister who is a demon by most descriptions. Toxic in almost every way. Murderously toxic. I put most of the blame onto her for our little sister taking her own life. After raising that monster, Mom and Dad became very suspicious, and treated me like I was a thieving, conniving monster like #2 was. #2 broke their trust in children. My room got searched every day while I was at school because Mom once found hundreds of dollars worth of stolen jewelry in the closet of #2 who had been babysitting neighbor kids and was helping herself to their bedroom drawers. There were so many reasons my parents were different to #5 and me. It was an epiphanous time in #1's life as she, at age 63, heard for the first time from my own mouth what it was like being raised differently than she had been. Her parents were young and vibrant and building a new life. My parents (Same people) were old and working toward their retirement plans.

Personally, I believe that we are born with unique personalities, and then are raised under unique circumstances, making our own lives unique, even from the lives of our own siblings.  Just look at litters of puppies or kittens. Born together on the same hour, these siblings all have unique personalities even before they are raised.

As I read your words about his different take on life than yours, I'm drawn to my belief that we, the members of this forum, tend to be the ones with our eyes open. We see the damage. We feel the pain that everyone is living in. People who are like your bro, just close their eyes to it and don't deal with it. (Spoiler alert: Ignoring it doesn't heal it. I like to say that if we don't face our dragons, they will eventually turn and face us. Who knows? Perhaps his day to face his own dragons may still be coming).

I currently live my life by this rule: The whole world is traumatized, and those of us who recognize the trauma are the ones who are working through it. Those who pretend it's not there (like your bro) are doomed to repeat their pain until the day comes that they finally address it like we are doing now.

There may still be a day when your bro will need to deal with what you've been dealing with. He's on his own path. You are on your own path.

For what it's worth, I enjoy chatting with people like you more than I do those who hide from their pains.  They're shallow. We're deep. we are far, far more interesting conversationalists.

San.

I'm going to totally get on board with your comments that maybe it's not worth figuring out which fears come from which source. We are who we are because of everything we've been through. Whether we remember going through it or not, we went through it and it shaped us and now we are who we are.

A bunch of today's most current authors on trauma are starting to teach that we need to stop dividing our internal parts within ourselves, and to love and embrace every part of ourselves, even the broken parts. My IFS parts, even the ones that give me trouble, want to be loved. And if I can love everything in my life, even the pain and suffering, then I'm gaining the love I need for my healing.

So I try to catch myself now whenever I get down on myself for dropping something, or losing something, or breaking something by remembering to love my clumsiness as a part of who I am. The holistic feeling of loving even the parts of myself I didn't used to love, is reeeeealy empowering. The love grows quickly. Even through my Autumn Anxiety, I suffer, but I love my suffering-self as much as I love any other part of my Self, and it seems to be giving me a new sense of inner strength and stability.

It feels like I've been broken into pieces my whole life, and those pieces are starting to come back together. I feel like I'm becoming less fractured, more like I'm being put back together.

I'll talk more about this as I get comfortable with it. I'm only just getting started on self-love. I need some time to practice it and see if it lasts or if it's temporary.  But I will say this: If someone like me can learn to love myself holistically, then that's a powerful statement on the power of love. Up to now I couldn't even muster up enough self-love to be able to stand looking at myself in a mirror.

 

San,

I'm glad you got your bison. My mom was like yours. She'd rummage through my room while I was at school and throw away my possessions. When I'd find them missing, I'd ask. She'd say "You didn't need those anymore." If I ever argued back (which I only did once, then learned not to bother arguing ever again), she'd laugh at me like I was an idiot. 

So I resonate with how your bison gives you comfort AND with your scars from losing the doll you once loved.

Even though they were our mothers, I still call it bullying. Bullying is when we use whatever advantage we have, (age, size, authority, wealth) do something to someone without their permission. And the one thing I hate most about bullying is that it works. They win. Bullies win. and I HATE THAT!

I'm glad your D loved you enough to give you a bison and I'm very happy to hear your spirit animal is with you physically now at slumber time.

PC