Messages

Hannah,

It is very inspiring to me to see you pushing toward your goals; the hiking trips, the therapy, the healing.

I remember believing, like you did, that I would be "healed" and adjusted by the time I got to this age also, only to be sort of surprised that at retirement age, the CPTSD was still there.

A lot of therapists whose books I read say that Trauma is stuck energy and that it stays stuck until we find a way to address it. It seems like you, like many of us, are finally able to address it.

Again: Your future plans are inspiring for me too. I'm pondering my own future plans now. Where can I put a trip or a challenge in my future...something good to look forward to and prepare for?

Thank you for posting this stuff.

BB,

Good for you, for focusing on your own stuff today. And good on the dishwasher!!!! You've conquered that monster 

San,

I agree. It's nice that you are able to let yourself handle just what needs to be done and let the rest slide a day or two. Your D sounds like a real sweetheart to be so concerned about all you're doing for her. I always get a sense that there is a great deal of love between the two of you.

 

Thanks! You are all giving me great hugs and some really good conversation.

This is me hugging you all back:           

I agree with everything you all wrote. I really liked reading in TheBigBlue's response about how loneliness has many types, and that the type of loneliness that haunts me is mostly caused by feeling unsafe around people. I feel alone, even when I'm sitting face to face with someone I don't trust.



When I joined this forum I was on my own death row. I was so close to ending my own life that I found this forum out of desperation. When the forum guided me to create a name for myself, I chose Papa Coco because that's what my wife, kids and grandkids call me, and they were the very reason I didn't want to sink any lower. I wanted to live for them. So I named myself Papa Coco to remind me every single day of why it was important that I connect with others who understand life the way I do. Birds of a feather, as it were.

This forum Itself isn't the magic, it's the people who subscribe to it that do the magic.

I feel a lot better today. I'm feeling like writing on the forum today, and I'm grateful to have this community of beautiful souls to share that with. Some days I just can't get my head to formulate words, but today, I'm feeling a bit better.

Thanks for helping to fix the loneliness I struggle with. I DO trust the people here. I DO trust my wife, kids and grandkids. To heck with the rest of the world. I have my friends here.

Much love to everyone.
PC

Journal Entry for Saturday, February 14

Trigger warning: I'm not in a good space right now. This journal entry is not a happy one. I'm deeply depressed and I just need to write about it to try and ease the pressure as much as I can.

Loneliness. It's the top topic of my life this week. Sometimes it's so crushing, I feel like I'm about to reach my maximum capacity for containing it at all. I feel like if it gets any worse, it'll become more than I can handle and I'll implode.

And fear. When I feel alone, I feel more vulnerable to attack. It's in our biology to feel safer in numbers. We are community animals. Tribal animals that surround and protect each other. So I have to choose whether to be crushingly lonely alone, or hypervigilantly watching the micromovements of the people I'm with to be sure I'm ready to protect myself from my protectors if they turn to attack me, as my FOO and friends and peers have often done.

Two fear centers in the brain: One of being alone, and the other of being with someone. It's a conundrum with no solution.

In my attempts to find, identify, and embody my "authentic self" I'm learning that being a fawn is the opposite of being authentic. I don't know who or what my authentic self even looks like, but I know that as long as I fear being attacked for being me, I'll never find that authenticity.

If the choice is to suffer under crushing loneliness or fear the people I love, I guess I tend to choose the loneliness. The devil I know. The pain I'm accustomed to dealing with. Loneliness itself isn't fear. Fear happens when I'm alone and someone knocks on the front door, but if nobody bothers me when I'm alone, then loneliness is less painful than fear. So I choose loneliness.

I can't remember the last time I had fun doing anything. My biggest issue today is this crushing, crushing loneliness. I don't know what to do about it anymore. I have an amazing wife who loves me unconditionally, and I'm so happy to be with her I can't believe how lucky I am, and still, this loneliness is at the soul level. Even with her at my side, I'm lonely. I love that we are included in the race day events for my grandson's car racing sport, I cook for everyone, and set up a real nicely equipped campsite for the day so we can rest and enjoy a snack and some conversation, and the whole time I'm with these people who love me, I'm lonely. Wishing I could go home and do nothing somewhere safe where I have nobody to keep an eye on. Worried that the other grandparents who have more money than us are judging us because we don't have a fancy trailer or all the spare parts we need, because we can't afford them. Are they laughing at my walk? My voice? Are they being nice to me because they have to? As a little boy, I would ask my mother, "Why do you love me?" And she'd respond with "I'm your mother, I have to love you." Is that what's happening at the track? Are people being nice to the stupid old man because they have to?  I know that's not true, but my heart and my head seem to have two totally different perspectives on my social interactions.


I know how I got here. I know how and why my churches, FOO, and friends were able to terrorize me into becoming this skittish, fawning, lost, lonely soul, but even so, I can't make it stop. I can't find my way out of this crushing loneliness. I can sometimes find a few weeks here and there where I feel like I've ascended from this pit, but those weeks only last so long, until I oscillate back down into a freefall where I have no choice but to come to terms with the fact that I can't find simple joy and fun anymore.

My grip on the past is just too strong for me to release. I still feel guilty for every mistake I've ever said or done. I still feel like my little sister's death was partly my fault for not saying what she needed me to say during the days before her suicide.  I can't let go. I try everything. I sometimes think I'm accomplishing it, only to be shocked again when all of my past comes washing back over me from out of nowhere again.

I realized yesterday that I was trained to be this way by a family that never forgot anything I ever did wrong and never remembered anything I did right. They would make their own bad decisions, have problems, and then tell me that all their problems are my fault from something I'd said or done years earlier, and that they made that bad decision because, back in the past, I somehow made them make the bad decision. (I'm getting nauseous as I write this). I can't let the past go, because I was taught to be ready to feel shame for everything I've ever done. That nobody ever would let my past go, so if I forget how stupid I used to be, I'll become stupid again when they remind me of how stupid I've always been. That's how I was raised and I can't seem to break free from it. Even when I try to stop fretting the past, someone reminds me of something I did 40 years ago, and it floods all back over me again. All of it.



The one truly positive thing I have to report today in the journal is that I no longer hate myself. I don't trust that others don't hate me, but not because of who I am. People hated me because of lies they were told by other people. I know that now. I have digested that now and it's a fundamental part of me now. I don't hate myself anymore. I STILL feel loneliness, fear, shame, pain, etc., but I don't hate myself. I see this for what it really was: Abuse. I became what abused people become. That is not my fault. If anything, my survival has shown that it's true; my family chose their strongest child to put the weight of the world onto. I'm in pain because I'm strong enough to handle it. My little sister didn't survive the pain of being in this family, but I did. I feel no guilt for that. So, even when I'm in pain, I still feel love for myself. That's a new thing and a very good thing.

I'm glad my FOO is gone from my life, but I still struggle to get them out of my head. This is the shrapnel that's still flying after the family finally blew apart 15 years ago. I left them, but their ghosts didn't leave me. I suspect that I need to accept that their ghosts never will leave me.

Three weeks ago, I told you all how I'd finally found forgiveness for my FOO. Today, I'm retracting that claim and reiterating: I HATE THOSE PEOPLE! I really do hate them. Maybe as I oscillate between feeling okay and not okay, maybe forgiveness is something I can do sometimes. Enjoy the feeling while it lasts here and there. Like sunshine in Seattle. Enjoy it while it's around and keep the umbrella handy for when the clouds come in out of nowhere.  Three weeks ago I enjoyed a sense of forgiveness for my family. Today that feeling is gone. Doesn't mean it wasn't real, right? Three weeks ago, I had found forgiveness. Today I've lost it again. Doesn't make it any less real three weeks ago.

I'm sorry for how dark this post was. I just need people to witness what I'm going through as a sort of validation. Unwitnessed pain is far worse than witnessed pain. I'm not hiding my depression. Hiding it is just making two problems: 1) I'm depressed and 2) I'm depressed alone.  By sharing it, I only have one problem. I'm not alone anymore. I'm lonely, but I'm not alone. Normies won't understand that, but I do. It's a trauma thing.

Dolly and Narckiddo, no need to think of this as hijacking my journal. I invite my journal to be used for this deep a discussion on this subject. It's theee subject of the day for me. I've invited you all to enter into my journal because I require feedback any time I'm trying to figure things out. My personal journal in my computer's hard drive helps me formulate thoughts, but it doesn't give much feedback. This is a living journal that I can write my thoughts into and incite a healthy gathering with good, positive, helpful feedback.

This morning as I was trying to not get out of bed so early (again--my brain is still in fix-it mode because of the EF I've just endured, so it won't stop thinking, and I can't fall back asleep at 3 am anymore) I was thinking about the concept of Trauma Therapists as partners in our healing, rather than just smart-doctor/broken-patient relationships. It's well documented in the books I read about trauma therapy that any therapist who partners with their clients provides the best healing. I thought about how true that is with spiritual beliefs also. Rather than me laying around praying to a God or a Universal consciousness of some kind to please help me, I'm wondering now if taking a partnership relationship with our higher powers (God, The Universe, whatever we each think of as our higher power), could bring us closer to the peace that we seek. The way I see the world is an "As above, so below" or "Our inner worlds mirror our outer worlds" kind of resonance.

Just now, as I'm writing this to you all, I'm thinking about how partnership is working here too. I'm writing my deepest thoughts in a journal, and several people whom I trust are partnering with me to ponder those thoughts and flesh them out into helpful realization. We're all learning while we're all teaching. Partnering for healing from trauma is the least lonely way to slowly heal my deep, lifelong sense of inner loneliness.

I see Chart's comments about how being the family fixer was just as difficult as being a family dumping ground, and all the comments made by Dolly and Narckiddo around his response, really shines spotlight on the overall dysfunctional dynamic of the entire family unit. Any dynamic goes into imbalanced chaos when one of its balancing components either changes or falls away. It's always been so easy for me to think of the family as villains versus victims, but what if it's more of a partnership of imbalanced behaviors driven by a family of imbalanced emotions? What if they need me to heal from their "abuse" as much as I need me to heal from it? What if it's more like if I heal, they heal too?

It's been said that fawns often try to help everyone, but when we help someone who isn't learning their own lesson, we're sort of doing their homework for them. Nobody learns when someone does their homework for them. As I was running out of patience with my CBT therapist 25 years ago, he was teaching me that when you help someone, you're stealing their learning from them. (Helpful ideal, but a not-so-nice way of heaping more shame onto me for feeling ashamed of who I was already).

Whenever I witness a narcissist or a BPD sufferer having their meltdowns, I see a person who hasn't learned a darn thing about themselves. They've blamed me their whole life and as long as I carried that blame, their own personal growth stalled. That "smartypants" CBT doctor, (who loved to make sure I knew that he was smart and I was broken), would try to shame me into stopping being a fawn. Little did he know, heaping shame onto a person drowning in shame makes less sense to me than it did to him.

My current therapist is a Dialectical Behavioral Therapist (DBT) with a strong belief in partnering with his clients. He teaches that if I focus on healing myself, then the world around me will heal itself also. When I combine that sentiment with Chart's, Dolly's and NarcKiddo's thoughts on how the whole family falls into the trap of putting their blame onto someone willing to hold it for them, I see how the less willing I am to take their blame, the more chances we all have at learning how to be accountable for our own dysfunctional feelings.

Many true natural-born narcissists (like Ted Bundy and other profound serial killers) may never learn anything by losing their fawns, but people who fell into the cyclone of blame because that's how the family was evolving, DO have a chance at learning.

I can say that I was a Catholic for 20 years, then a Christian for 20 more, and now I'm a spiritually tuned believer that God is the force of creative consciousness that we are all a part of. But as a Catholic, I learned from Catholics how to be Catholic. We were judgy. We talked about people behind their backs. We believed in physical rituals rather than "be still and know". We prayed to a "father figure" who would only help us if we behaved how our priests told us to. As I left that world, I had a lot of learning and growth to do. I did all those things because I was taught to. Marrying Coco when I was 22 years old was one of the best things I've ever done, because she is a loving, caring, gentle soul who also has a strong sense of her Self. When I tried to be the person I was raised to be, (blaming her for my moods) she simply didn't take it. By not being my fawn, she didn't give me a place to put that dysfunction, so I had no choice but to learn to take accountability for my own moods. I owe her a HUGE lifelong gratitude for showing me the way out of the lifestyle I was taught by a dysfunctional family.

For me, I've become a much better person because I've had to take responsibility for my own behaviors. Rather than feeling like I'm going to be punished if I don't behave, I now see that I don't want to keep perpetuating a hurtful world, I now want to be the peace that I seek. It's not about eternal rewards and punishments for behaviors, it's about wanting to resonate with the energy of love and peace so I can "partner with God" to become the person I want to be, rather than behave like a good boy so I can go to Heaven someday. This feels so much more real to me. So any time I allow someone to put their own shame onto me, Both of us, me and them, stop learning how each of us can be accountable for our own emotions and fears and shame and peace and love, etc.

It's not about behaving peacefully, it's about becoming peace.

I use that word a lot, "peace."  It's the one thing I want more than anything in life. It's the one thing I've not yet been able to really resonate with. I drink coffee all day long so I can feel anxiety, because if I don't feel anxiety, then I feel depression. I haven't yet been able to accomplish feeling relaxed. Ever. At least not while unmedicated. I fear depression far more than I fear anxiety. I've been a Nervous Ned since the day I was born. Anxiety has saved me many times by keeping my guard up. Hypervigilance keeps me aware of danger. Any time I relaxed around my Catholic family or friends, I was vulnerable to their exploitations. So I'm terrified of being relaxed.

Again: I want what I'm afraid of. Peace. Relaxation. Letting my guard down. I intentionally stay anxious because, like those starships in the movies, I "have my shields up" 24x7.  It's safer than dancing freely in the meadows or swimming freely with the dolphins. Seeking the peace of safety is still my obsession. Anxiety keeps me safe. So I drink coffee and keep watch on my surveillance cameras always.

Whew. Wow. What an eye-opening morning this is proving to be for me.

Please, keep using my journal for this. I'm learning a ton right now.

Dolly, Chart, TheBigBLue, and everyone,

I feel a closeness with you and the other forum members that I can't feel with friends out in the cold, cruel world. I have friends who struggle as much as we do, but they still don't realize the value of opening up and talking about it, so they continue to suffer without any support.

I learned something beautiful from a book Dolly was reading. Rejected, Shamed, and Blamed: Help and Hope for Adults in the Family Scapegoat Role by Rebecca C Mandeville. I bought a copy and found myself crying while reading the first chapters, as it kind of triggered my sense of how serious their abuse really was to me. The book is a small, introductory book about how being scapegoated as a child affected me as an adult.  In the 8th chapter, the author wrote that families and social groups don't usually consciously choose to single out a child and blame them for all the problems, it happens organically to families or groups who don't realize their own traumatic damage, and they tend to usually, organically, subconsciously choose their strongest, most resilient, most empathetic and loving child to put all their grief onto.

Many times on this forum, I've said things about how I believe we are the strongest and most helpful people on earth. We're the "light of the world" and "the salt of the earth" and any other old saying that we've heard and dismissed. I see our suffering as a result of us knowing how unfair life is, and that's what makes us not feel okay with abuse. We can't even watch abuse done to others on the News or in movies. We're so aware of the unfairness, that we suffer. Not because we're bad, but because we're good.

This author makes sense when she explains why this is so: Subconsciously, people don't ask for help from people they know can't help them. People don't put burdens onto people who aren't strong enough to bear that burden. When I think about it logically, it makes sense: Broken people find stronger people to carry their burdens. We are chosen by broken people to carry their guilt and shame for them because we can. They can't give their weaknesses to other weak people. They have to give them to people who are strong enough to carry them. The author explains this much better than I do, but when I read that (over and over, almost in tears again), I started to see the truth in it. Our abusers are so fragile they can't handle their own burdens, so they find the best, and kindest, and strongest to put all their self-loathing onto. We are so strong that we take it. It's not fair, but it's how the dysfunctional family balances itself by putting its weaknesses onto the strongest, most durable and functional member.

In my own life, I can remember times when the evilest of my siblings was challenged by life and if she couldn't put the burden or blame onto someone else, she completely and totally melted down into crying and wailing and slamming doors and collapsing into herself. She believed she was stronger than me as long as she could deflect and blame her own evil onto me, but when she had to handle her own dysfunction, she completely imploded.

This really REALLY helps me in my newly formed ability to love myself even when I'm in a nasty EF that makes me feel weak and unsafe. I may be in a panic at times, but I don't hate myself anymore.

(Dolly, I have to give you another gracious thank you for mentioning that book).

HannahOne

Today I'm trying to remember what it was that helped me to come out of self-loathing, and I think I'm finally able to see how I came to be a traumatized, easily triggered CPTSD'r who finally doesn't hate myself for it. So I'll just bear witness to what happened to me. I know we're all as different as we are similar, so, I'll share my story, and hope there can be something in it that can help you with your story. (To be honest, when I share my stories with others, it helps bring ME more clarity to my experiences too).

For me, it's only been a few months since I started feeling like I don't hate myself anymore. (I found self-loathing at the age of 7, so I felt it for 58 years). I think the thing that finally got me to feel in my heart that I'm not the problem is when I read a book or two that helped explain the biology of how the mammal brain works. It was Peter Levine's book, In an Unspoken Voice, where he detailed out how any mammal is designed to recover from trauma by using the built-in survival techniques we were born with. We knew how to feed, how to breath, and how to cry for help. That's it. If we were feeding and breathing and able to get our tribes to help us when we cried, we could overcome nearly any trauma--just like Frank does. But when we cried out for help and our caregivers either ignored us or hurt us, then the natural flow of energy to our survival mechanisms were pinched off, causing a predictable and natural inability to get past the traumas that happened to us. When I read that, in his scientifically detailed and believable explanation, it's like I heard my brain say to me, "this really WASN'T MY FAULT!" I think I immediately came to the forum and wrote "I finally feel the one thing I've always wanted. I feel FORGIVEN!" And immediately after I wrote that my brain said one more thing, "Now you know that you never needed to be forgiven in the first place!"

What happened inside me to make me suffer for 58 years believing I couldn't be forgiven for being who I am, was I realized how it was 100% predictable biological altering of my natural programming that was playing itself out exactly how it does in any mammal that has its core defenses muted during the formative years. To make this even more innocent, I learned from Levine, that in lab experiments with mammals, it's been proven that if a mammal is restrained while being violated or hurt in any way (And this can include a child being held down in a dentist chair or surgical procedure), the brain's rewiring is far more permanent, because being unable to flail the arms or legs rewires the brain even faster. When a mammal can "go down fighting" they can recover from trauma easier than when they go down unable to fight back at all. I feel like being unable to defend myself against my own "tribe's" lifetime of lies, smear campaigns, and forcing me to live as a servant to them, was an emotional version of being defenseless against my abusers. I've been restrained physically AND I've been restrained emotionally. The only two ways I could go were: I either hated the world and became a bad person, or I hated myself so I could become a good person. I chose to be a good person, so I hated myself instead of hating them. I suspect that's common with us here in the forum. We were the ones who turned on ourselves so we would not become what our abusers were.

In me, this has made me, not only a fawner and a freezer, but it's made me feel completely unable to defend myself in any situation. I sometimes imagine what it might be like if I ever have to get into a fist fight, or run from a gunfight or anything, and for the life of me, I cannot imagine myself having the arm strength to strike any predator. In my own mind, when trying to imagine how I'd fight off a shark or bear or human attack, my arms and legs suddenly feel like they are filled with concrete. I've never struck another human or animal. I don't believe I have the physical ability to. I can lift more than most men. I can work harder than most men, but I can't find any energy in me that believes I can defend myself if I ever need to. That inability to defend myself used to be proof that I'm worthless and unlovable, but now it's proof that I was restrained and abused and ignored. Somehow, by reading the details of how the biological responses in me were absolutely caused by the removal of my defenses when I was young, I had one of those epiphanous "Ah HA!" moments that sometimes happen in life when we suddenly realize things are not how I'd previously believed they were.  Somehow, seeing under the hood to how my brain did what it did so I could be a good person, helped me overcome my self-loathing.

I don't know if this helps others as much as it helps me, but when I can finally get the chance to look under the hood to see how the engine really works, it helps me to know what I'm really driving.

I hope this helps in any small way.

HannahOne,

Frank is a creature to learn from. Before my knees gave out 5 years ago, I used to walk for exercise, at least an hour a day my whole entire life. Gads, I loved walking for exercise. I'm slow now and can only walk for about 20 minutes before my knees lock up. But back when I did walk far and fast, I had trails through the woods I could walk on. Many times, I'd admire and try to learn from the rabbits and bunnies that I would spook when I came around a corner. They'd quietly hop away, deep into the underbrush. I'd apologize as I walked past. I'd go 30 feet, stop and turn to see that as soon as I was gone, they'd return to their chewing. I wanted that so badly. I wished SO BADLY that I could handle danger and then get on with life. But no. I had to log my mistakes into the shame folder so I could run them on a loop through my conscious mind every day from then on. I have to spend the rest of my life avoiding anything that reminds me of that day when someone walked up on me and I had to hop into the underbrush.

I've given up a lot of delicious meals in life because I was too afraid to return to them after a scare.

I feel like I'm controlled by my past fears. Sometimes I wish I could get a memory wipe and wake up one morning knowing how to walk and talk but not remembering my past. 

But that only shines a spotlight on the reality that I am who I am because of every, single, solitary thing I've ever been through.

As of the past year or so, I've finally crossed a line where I still suffer with fear and EF triggers, but I don't hate myself anymore. All the incessant reading and research and pondering and meditating I do has finally pushed me out of self-loathing. But that didn't stop the fears and triggers and the chronic sense of panic that churns like magma just beneath the nice cool surface of my being. The earth is a hot ball of molten lava with a cool crust that grows pretty trees, and I'm a bit like that myself too. I can feel pretty good for a while, but when something breaches the skin, a stream of volcanic fear and trauma fly out from me, boiling my skin until I can get that gap closed again. I don't hate myself anymore, but I still live in fear.

I hope you can find that same ability to let the fear and trauma be fear and trauma without the traumatized belief that it's your fault. In this world where we are healthier to take responsibility for our actions, our traumas are not one of the things we need to take responsibility for. I believe that you are right when you say this self-loathing was given to us against our wills by the people who were commissioned to teach us self-love. So it's NOT our fault that we have trauma. We can still take responsibility for our lives, but we don't have to take the blame for how we are wired. And how we are wired is real. It's a real problem that we really have to deal with.

My hope for all of us on this forum is that we can each find ways to separate our Selves from our traumas. Both are real. Both can happen simultaneously. We can have explosive EFs while still feeling our innocence around why we're having them. It's a long road to freedom from EFs. I call it my Journey of a Thousand Steps, and I'm working hard to focus on today's steps, and know that as long as I'm on the journey, I'm right where I need to be. Progress, not perfection. On my bedroom wall I put up a note that says, "The journey is the destination". That helps me to stop focusing on the frustration I tend to feel as I keep trying too hard to be fully healed.

My path runs alongside yours. I'm really glad we can share these things with one another here. I find that for me the saying is true; We're stronger together.

SenseOrgan,

You are singing a song that plays in my psyche in a constantly repeating loop. Toxic shame. Imprisoning myself behind bars that aren't locked from the outside. I have, many times, said "Anything I say or do around my FOO can AND WILL be used against me eventually." I pasted mirror film on my front-facing windows so I could open my blinds in the daytime and still not be seen by neighbors. I hide in my house. I even blocked my front door from neighbor's views by parking a big utility trailer in front of it so I can open my door without anyone seeing me. I have mostly good neighbors, but I hide from them so that I won't get judged for how I walk or talk or dress or comb my hair. And to make this worse, I WANT CONNECTION WITH OTHERS while simultaneously hiding from others. We think the world is divided into right and left politics, but my insides are divided with the same duality! I want connection while I hide from connection. And it's painful.

When I read what you write, I feel like we're sharing a brain on some level and are both finding our own words to express the same affliction.

HUGS, brother!  HUGS!!!!

     

Dolly,

I have a great deal of respect for what you're saying about love being used as a way to tromp boundaries. That's such an insidious behavior in people who do that to anyone, but especially to their own children and grandchildren. I've been learning, here on the forum, to be careful to not use the hug emoji too much, unless I feel sure that the recipients are not triggered by them. Some are. And it's easily understandable that some of us are triggered even by the word love.

Your posts have always been helpful to me, and I've always felt a sort of a connection with you through them, and through the many helpful things you've said to me over the years.

The word Love has something like 52 meanings. We love pizza. We love movies. We love our car or a favorite piece of furniture. I hate one job and love another job. I have a romantic love with my wife, a fatherly love for my children, and another love for my pets, and so on. My favorite use for the word love is what the religious people call Agape. To me, that is a synonym for soul-to-soul connection. I didn't realize that meaning until my father-in-law passed away in 2000. He was one of my favorite people on the earth. And when he died unexpectedly at work, my heart went into a feeling I'd never experienced before. It felt to me like a 2-inch diameter tube had been yanked out of my chest, and my heart was hemorrhaging some sort of hot pain. My connection to him had been severed in a way that surprised me. I was Gushing pain from my heart. That's when I realized that we really are connected to some people through our hearts. It took a few weeks for that pain to subside, and that's when I started substituting that version of the word "love" with the word "connection." Now, I know that when my wife is in pain, or if she's late coming home from work, that it's in my chest that I feel sad or afraid for her safety. When my son is in pain or danger it's my heart that tells me I'm worried. When a neighbor is in pain, I don't feel it so strongly in my heart, because my connection to a neighbor isn't as strong as my connection to my son, or wife, or grandson.

I learned a lot about myself when my own parents died a decade after my Father-in-law did. In the 15 years since their deaths, I still haven't felt that pain in my heart like I did for my wife's parents. That told me something about my connections that I didn't see coming. In hindsight, I now can see that my father-in-law loved me with a healthier love than my parents did. We happily added a wing to our house and moved my Mother-in-law in with us. She lived with us for 14 more years, and all the while I kept telling Coco, "I'm happy to have your mom here, but no way would I EVER let my mom move in with us." With the exception of my baby sister's suicide that nearly killed me from heart-gushing pain, the rest of my family's love was more selfish, like what you said about your own family. My wife's family loved me for who I am. My own family loved what I could do for them--as long as I didn't embarrass them with my humiliating "empathy" problem. My brain was easily tricked, but my heart appears to have known the difference between the different variations of love that people have with or for me.

Love was used against me also. My BPD/Narcissist sister always loved me just before she took something from me or started another family smear campaign against me. My mom abused me in a variety of ways, including sexually-based boundary tromping, and always said it was because she loved me. I was always told to be nice to my mean siblings because we were a family bonded by love. So, even to this day, when I feel like I love someone, I have to ask myself if I'm being tricked or if my feelings are genuine love.

I use this as a litmus test; Sometimes I have friends who I wonder if I really love them. So I try to imagine that person leaving me or dying or suddenly turning against me (like my FOO and friends and churches did many, many, many times). If I sense a feeling of relief in my chest, then I know I don't really love them, but am just caught in another "fawning" behavior and being nice to them because I'm afraid not to. But if my heart hurts at the thought of losing the person, then I know I have some sense of love (Agape/soul-to-soul Connection) for them.

A few weeks back I did some self-evaluation. I started to ask myself what it was that drove my 4 genuine suicide attempts, the first two at age 19 and the final one at age 50. I have a family of my own now that I love with all my heart, so why did I feel myself being drawn into suicide? I thought and thought and thought. Then I wrote out what was happening in my life during each of the attempts, and VOILA! It hit me like a ton of bricks! Each time I felt uncontrollably drawn toward suicide, like a moth to a flame, I was feeling aggressively abandoned by someone I truly loved. (Perhaps there's a clue in this as to why I struggle so hard to forgive my siblings for how they used love as a leash to keep me in their service. They abused the single most important aspect of who I am: My need for connection)

Now I believe that I better understand how to manage my suicidality, which is pretty strong. I now know that when I'm left or abandoned by someone with whom I have a soul-to-soul connection, that the pain of feeling abandoned is too much for me to bear, and I need to call out for help, so as to not slide down that slope again into suicide. I now have the proof that I needed to believe that my life really, truly is about connection with others. Obviously, that's why I get so sappy when I talk about how helpful the people here on this forum are. Nobody here wants anything from me except connection.

It was how people abused my need for connection with others that hurt me almost to death, and it's connection with others that raises me back up out of the pits of despair. I feel like I'm being literal when I say "I live for connection."

-----TRIGGER WARNING: I didn't have a good experience in churches or religions-----

It's not the same as human love, this is some sort of deeply spiritual need that I have to not be alone in the Universe.  I left religion about the same time my FIL died, because the religious people who were in my life were consistently more about faking love, and using it as a word they didn't truly understand. It's been my own personal experience that religious people have proven to be the most dangerous for me, in that they will withdraw their version of love the quickest if I don't behave how they want me to. My family was Catholic. My wife's family, who didn't go to church, gave me a love that was genuine and real. They didn't use it as a tool with which to control me.

Dolly,

Yup. The past is what made me who I am today, and even though I struggle to be comfortable in my own skin, I do actually kind of love myself now. More than I ever have. Nervous fear is wired into me so I can't always escape it, but I have lost my self-loathing and I recognize that I am the product of absolutely everything that's ever happened to or around me.

In the study of human happiness, I've learned that our nervous systems are a differential engine, that assesses its moods based on their worst times versus their best times. Experts in Human Happiness say that "not only can people with sad pasts feel true happiness, but it seems that ONLY people with sad pasts can feel true happiness." Those who've never had a bad day don't know a good one when it happens right in front of them.

A lot of beautiful people have compassionately helped me throughout my life, and I have, in turn, helped a lot of people throughout my life, due, in part, to us having walked a few thousand miles in the shoes of each other. My need to be emotionally "felt" by others, makes me quick to believe that's what others want also. I like being with people who want to feel cared about, and who want to care about others. So, I find myself wanting to share myself with people while they share themselves with me...emotionally. I assume that other people want to be heard and believed and cared about as much as I do. So, as far as my complicated past goes, what's done is done. It drives me to feeling crazy when EFs come over me, but when I'm back to my non-triggered self, my past is the reason I am who I am, but I'm finally able to love who I am.

I'm sorry people have to suffer, but I'm glad when those of us who've suffered are willing to pick each other up and help dust off the debris.

Just wish I didn't get so panicky so often, but even the EFs are happening less often and lasting for much shorter times in duration.

Dolly, this is super powerful stuff we're learning now about how we became these frightened little empathic victims of other people's mental illnesses. I was mob bullied in Catholic school. The victim of a permanent smear campaign that only got worse and worse until I was 14 and could escape them. The campaign was started and fueled by my best, best, best friend, who turned out to be a narcissist that wanted to kiss me when I was 8 and when I didn't want to kiss him back, he smeared my reputation by telling the entire school that I was gay and he wasn't. Because it was a religious school, that was about the worst reputation a boy could have, and I had no way of defending myself. Even the teachers, priests and nuns believed it. The damage was especially horrific since at home, I was being blamed for the family's mistakes and unhappiness, and all of my medical and social needs were being discounted as me "trying to get attention."

(Note: About having been abused for being gay as a child in the 1970s; I grew up to be a fierce advocate for friends and peers within the LGBTQ community. I learned, the hard way, that it isn't about being gay that causes so much pain, but it's the way peers treat and isolate gay children that does the damage.)

The book itself is still on an Amazon truck somewhere, so I downloaded the Audible version and listened to the first two chapters this morning. It put me into the fetal position and had me holding back tears for a half hour. I had to stop at the end of chapter two as the immense weight of all that truth was coming down on me like 10 feet of snow in 20 minutes. I guess that could be likened to being buried under an avalanche.

I can't thank you enough right now for sharing that book with me. I'm right at the perfect point in my healing to be ready for the full weight of what it's saying.

[Dolly,]

Dolly, I'm expecting the book about scapegoating to arrive from Amazon today.
That comment you made, that fawning, and that for whatever reason we do it, it separates us from our authentic self is a good eye opener for me today. I can suddenly see how I am not living my life to be what I was created to be, but rather to serve others in order to feel safe. I spend most of my energy trying to feel safe, not so much from wild animals or storms, but from people. And not as much from strangers, but I mostly feel like I need to feel safe from the people I know; Family. Friends and peers.

Talk about a lose/lose dichotomy: I yearn for attachment, while being afraid of attachment. How does one find peace when he is afraid of what he wants?

HannahOne; I homed in on your comment that simulators do teach the body cognitive reactions to keep the plane in the air, but that accountability is absent. I hadn't thought it through that far. Simulations are excellent cognitive teaching skills, but without the accountability, they are only one leg of a three-legged stool. As an example, simulation video games do a lot to remove accountability from the act of shooting simulated people, and running them over with simulated cars, teaching the skills but not the emotional bond we have that should make us want to do no harm to others.

AI is a soulless therapist. It knows all the words but doesn't feel the music. One of the key components to modern day trauma-informed therapy, is that the true masters of the art become partners with their clients in the healing process. My therapist sits close to me, facing me, intently watching my eyes and body movements, and caringly adjusts his presence based on watching my reactions and "feeling my vibes". He knows the truth, that the one thing my traumatized self needs the most is that I need to feel "felt" by another human soul. Proving to me that he can feel what I'm feeling is how he expresses true care for me, and for his other clients, and that's what separates him from all the CBT therapists I'd had for the first 20 years of my searching for one that could actually help.

I live for soul-to-soul connection. A good human therapist who cares gives me that. AI is a research tool. It's helpful, but that's all it is. It doesn't smile at me. I find myself tempted to thank it when it helps, but that's where I feel the disconnect. How stupid is it to thank a machine for saying the right words?

San, Yup. Safety. The more I learn about myself from this credit card robbery, the more I see how many of my thoughts and actions would be far less burdensome if I could just feel safe. I spend more money and energy on insurances, locks, surveillance and backup supplies as I do on just living the life I would live if I felt safe. Ever since the robbery, I've been on edge. I'm feeling a lot more control now, but still not sleeping. All night long, I'm in dreams and nightmares that I'm being accused of things I didn't do, or that I'm being trapped and crushed under trees, and stuff like that. I wake up almost as tired as when I went to bed. If I could feel safe, I could feel free. And if I could feel free, I could do great things.

I am still buried under a mountain of past events and fears. I am still tyring to declutter my home, my files, my mind...and I'm still frustrated beyond reason by the pain and torture I do to myself when I try and try and try to declutter and organize my life. Everything I want to give away or sell or dispose of calls out to me "Papa Coco, you used to want me. Don't abandon me! You might need me some day. You'll be ashamed of yourself if you give me away and then find out you need me again."

I have recently begun to try to focus on the journey, and not the end result. It may take 10 years to declutter my home and garage. I have to stop being frustrated that the 10 years isn't done yet. I need to feel a small success at the end of each small release, rather than finish cleaning out a box and then focusing on the thousand boxes still in the pile.

My clutter is a security blanket that I'm suffocating under. I feel safer when I have more than I need, rather than living on the edge of trusting that I'll have what I need when I need it. Most animals live freely, eating when they find food and moving on. I can't feel safe doing that. I don't trust that there will be food tomorrow, so, to feel safe, I buy two of everything and store it wherever I can find a few inches of empty space. 

My clutter issue is about feeling vulnerable and not ready for anything and not trusting that life will provide what I need when I need it. Deep down, I'm still that little boy who can't keep up with the other kids, because I'm being lied to and lied about and whatever is mine, is up for grabs when I can't lock it up or hide it from my own family and friends.

That's where I need healing. Feeling safe. If I can feel safe, I can live more in the moment, and less in what I call "PRE-Traumatic Stress Disorder". I'm locked into past fears that I use to prove I need to be afraid that I won't survive tomorrow. I'm so focused on the past and future that I'm not enjoying today.

San,

From one overwhelmed soul to another, Just know you're not alone. We're all pulling for each other.