Messages

Dear Boat, you don't deserve to feel hopeless.  You deserve love and acceptance and safety.

Big hugs to you on your journey toward being treasured the way you deserve. 
   

Riveting stuff.  Reminds me quite a lot of my own childhood.

"We are not really creatures of free will."

"Re-enactment happens."

Hi Angel423.  I am so glad you found this site.  I am a veteran, too, and only a bit older than you, but I was in the Navy.  PTSD nearly destroyed me, too, and it was the Veteran's Administration that helped me survive my years o f worst incapacity.  My own PTSD was caused by childhood abuse, but I met a lot of women at the VA who had been abused while in the service.  I am so sorry it happened to you and to your daughter!   

Glad to hear there has been help made available to you, though of course the journey is long and hard.  Please make yourself at home here on the site.  You deserve so much better in life, and I hope you find peace and safety increasing for you.  All the best to you, and big hugs.     

Hi Purplesjs77, I am glad you are here.  Making that first post can be so challenging, so give yourself a big pat on the back for taking a courageous first step here.

You are dealing with quite a lot of change in your life.  I hope you will take loving care of yourself as you settle in to your new circumstances.  We are here to remind you that you do indeed deserve loving care.        All the best to you.   

Hi banjosaxophone, welcome to the site.     Yes, that self-loathing sure can be hard to bear!   You deserved to be showered with love as a child, and it is such a tragedy that that did not happen.  But you are a good person, worthy of love and safety and respect, and I hope that every visit to this site will help you to love that neglected child that you were.

All the best to you in your journey, and big hugs.          

Hi Poodle, welcome to the site.     I am almost as elderly as you, and there lots of us here in this age range.  Some of us don't "wake up", start to emerge from dissociation, until late in life.  It takes courage to try to deal honestly with the accumulated results of a lifetime of "misadventures."  I applaud your efforts in this direction.

Please read around on the site and make yourself at home.  Many of us here find comfort and wisdom in a book by Pete Walker, "CPTSD From Surviving to Thriving."  It helps me make sense of the chaos I have survived.

You do deserve comfort and safety, and I hope you will find that here on this site.
Big hugs.               

Welcome to the site, Ladybug Mary.  I am so glad you found your way here.   

Isolation is a main theme in my life, too.  Human relationships of any sort are so scary for me, and yet human contact is almost as necessary as food.  For me, coming here to this site gives me a bit of human companionship with less scariness.  Even though every time I post I get very nervous, still it gives me also a little boost of connectedness.  I hope you, too, will find a sense of connectedness here, a sense of self-worth, an idea for what baby steps might work for you to find more peace and safety in life.

Congratulations on finding the courage to make your first post here!   I hope you will read around on the site and make yourself at home.  You are deserving of respect and love and safety and peace.  We connect together here to remind each other of that.

All the best to you in your journey, and big hugs.           

Welcome to the site, rlg6859.  I am sorry your journey in life has been so rough so far.  Kudos to you for getting sober!  Also for wanting to give your daughter a decent life.

There is a lot of information here on the site, and also a lot of support and compassion.  I believe you will find a number of people here with lives and concerns like yours.

My favorite book on the subject is Pete Walker's "CPTSD From surviving to thriving."  It is full of information presented in a very compassionate way.

All the best to you and big hugs.           

Hi Shadowlight, welcome to the forum.  I don't know what PCOS stands for, not knowing the whole alphabet of diagnoses and not finding it in our list of acronyms, but I have a lifelong history of anxiety and also cortisol problems.  And I have been trying to understand the biochemistry of cortisol disorders.  Could you explain a bit what you are looking into?

All the best you.     

Welcome to the site, Hermione.  Your tales of the FOO are harrowing, and they remind me of my own FOO.  For me, going NC was necessary, but of course it is never easy!

I hope you will stay in touch here and read around the site to see how others are dealing with similar situations. 

You do deserve safety, and also love and comfort and respect.  Here we try to keep reminding each other of that as we remake our lives and even our entire mental landscapes.

Please keep trying to take good care of yourself.  All the best to you on your journey, and many hugs!
               

Hi there, selfcompassion, and welcome to the site. 

Your chosen name is such a perfect reminder, a lovely pair of words that to me has an almost golden glow like a dimly visible goal looming on the horizon.  Self-compassion , learning to give our desolate child-selves the love we have needed so desperately, some of us for many decades.

What a tragedy your childhood was!  Mine, too.  You deserved love an d tenderness and safety, and you still do.  Here on this site we remind each other that we do deserve the love we never received.  We are learning to give ourselves the caring we never received in our FOOs.

I hope you will stay in touch.  All the best to you on your journey, and many hugs.
          

Thinking of you, foggy.  So glad to see you are still here.

I hope you are looking around the site, finding things to read that might give you some comfort.  I also like reading in a book by Pete Walker, "CPTSD From surviving to thriving."  It is full of helpful information, and also compassion.

Please take care of yourself.  You deserve to be well cared-for.           

Jimena, I am another one who has spent a lot of time bobbling around in those scary doldrums.  Woods gnome describe it all so vividly.

Also, I know all too well what it's like to have no one.  I really empathize with you there too.  I often just have to hug me myself, in private, of course.  Learning to love ourselves and feel compassion for ourselves is not easy for people like us.  But we keep on trying.  And we come here to hug each other online and feel a little less alone.

Thinking of you, Jena . . . .           

Hi sue, welcome to the site. 

I totally get it about flashbacks that are "pure blobs of fear."  I have had lots of those over the years, and they are really awful.  And all my dealings with people are colored by all the fear in me.

This site is meant to be a safe place for people like us to talk about these things, to share comfort and understanding and information.  Coming here has helped me feel less isolated and less strange and even a bit less fearful.  I hope you will find safety here also.   

Our basic frame of reference comes from Pete Walker's book, CPTSD From surviving to thriving."  This book is another place I go to find information and comfort and compassion.  Pete can put into words so many things that I find unspeakably daunting.  He is teaching me compassion for myself.

All the best to you in your journey, and big hugs to you.   

Welcome, JAD.  I am glad you found this site.  I am sorry to hear your boyfriend was overwhelmed by your cptsd.  I had to deal with a similar situation in the past, and it was very very hard for a long time.  So you certainly have my sympathies and empathies..       

It's as also very sad that your own cptsd is giving you excessive empathy for the refugees and victims that your are helping.  How brave of you to do such work!  For me, excessive empathy has made me unable to watch shows about animals because they just seem so vulnerable to me, either captive or in the wild.  And I have become mostly a vegetarian because just looking at meat makes me think of suffering animals.

Do you know how you got arsenic poisoning?  Do you have symptoms?  There are some nutrient supplements that do help detox some things  like that.  And I have a heard that kombucha can help also.  I really do get your fear of the hospital!   Mainstream medicine is not informed at all about how to deal with cptsd. 

I hope you will stay in touch here with us.  You deserve peace and safety and love.  You are doing a great job dealing with a really difficult situation that is not of your making.  Lots of hugs to you.