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I remember horrible things without meaning to. Bad things that happened in the past, especially my young childhood. I don't think it's a flashback, because I know that it's something from the past and not currently happening, but the memories are so distressing. I don't remember those things on purpose. Usually I'll see or hear something and it'll trigger the memory and I'll see the memory playing in my mind and how I felt when it happened.

This is really difficult for me. My therapist has tried to get me to do a couple of things when this happens as a way to come back to the present, but it doesn't really work. The memory also comes and goes too quickly to really do anything about it...

I believe, in the case of my ex at least, that I've had no boundaries at all because growing up I was never allowed to have them, any time I'd try to have boundaries my parents or others would just plow right through them anyway. So when I finally tried to have boundaries with the person I was involved with, it became a problem, because I had pretty much just let him do whatever even if it made me feel bad or if I knew it was wrong. Part of me believed my feelings didn't matter at all. So when I finally brought it up to him that I felt like he was playing with me, jerking me around, using me, etc., he got so mad, made things up about me, blamed me, and then abandoned me. I don't know why he would have done that. Sometimes I think maybe he has serious problems involving emotional intimacy or something, and so projecting everything onto me and blaming me or everything was a way for him to push me away without having to admit a weakness or a mistake. He's hurt me terribly though, especially his betrayal of my trust. That just feels so violating and cruel.

Thanks...I'm still having a very hard time understanding. How do I know something abusive or not? What if I'm just making it up? What if I'm the one who's abusive and projecting my abusive tendencies onto others? What if what I think is abusive behavior is just someone else's normal reaction to my "craziness" and they're not doing anything wrong, I'm just upsetting them?

Hi, I'm new here and I've been trying to post a few topics but my mind is all over the place and I'm very afraid of saying something wrong. I'll try to keep this as short as possible while getting the point across, because I'm afraid of "flooding the board" by accident, which I read about in the guidelines, and then getting in trouble for it. For that reason I have to omit a lot of things and break them into separate topics, but right now I want to talk about one thing I struggle the most with, which is blaming myself for the abuse.

To provide some background, my parents were extremely abusive physically and emotionally and they also neglected me at times by being indifferent about whether I had enough food to eat, clothes to wear, if I looked presentable or not, they physically abandoned me at times by locking me out of the house or throwing me out of the car in the middle of nowhere and then driving away, etc. I've also been sexually abused by my mother, my brother, a few doctors, my parents' friend who rented a room from us for a few months when I was a kid, and a few others. I've been working with a trauma therapist for about a year and a half, and only recently have I been able to realize the extent of their abuse and how bad it was. Prior to working with my therapist, I figured there wasn't really anything wrong with anyone's behavior toward me, and I must have caused it somehow and therefore deserved it, or that it was just how people behaved in general. This was made even worse by my parents' denial that they behaved that way toward me, or they would rationalize it and say that they had to because I was crazy and out of control and a problem child or whatever. They even told me I've been abusive toward them all my life, since I was a little baby. I'm still not sure what to believe about that.

I was in a relationship with an individual for about three years and he abandoned me 14 months ago. The entire relationship was very odd. He used to push me around sometimes. He would also try to do sexual things with me (I think) without asking me or saying anything, touch me in ways that made me uncomfortable, and then suddenly get annoyed and become dismissive of me. Sometimes he would say hurtful things. He refused to have a committed relationship with me, almost always seeing someone else at the same time. After he abandoned me I found out because of his written correspondence with me that he was a pathological liar. He deceived me. He accused me of doing things I never did and saying things I never said and having intentions I would never have, and then refusing to let me explain myself. He also betrayed my trust in maybe the worst way I can imagine, blamed me for everything wrong with the relationship, mocked my PTSD and depression problems, called me toxic and abusive, etc...

Even though I have evidence of his behavior, and even though my therapist tells me abuse is not my fault, I still blame myself, and I punish myself severely. I've tried very hard to not do this, but whenever I don't, I feel like I'm just escaping responsibility and refusing to acknowledge my "badness", so to speak. My ex's behavior is similar in part to my parents' behavior, but then he'd appear so genuinely kind and loving that it's difficult for me to think his behavior toward me is not my fault. Then I wonder if his behavior was even abusive or not, if I'm just the abusive one and he was reacting to my abuse, because sometimes I would yell at him and say things I now regret because of his refusal of commitment and the hurtful things he's say. For the last 14 months I've been living with extreme cognitive dissonance, going back and forth between blaming myself and thinking it's all my fault, and then recognizing there was something wrong with his behavior, and then blaming myself again, like a circle that just keeps repeating.  (Sorry, I know this is getting long...)

My therapist has been trying to get me to understand that it's not my fault, but I feel like if I think it's not my fault, I'm just pretending in order to make myself feel better. I've read that blaming oneself is something a lot of people with PTSD and CPTSD do, but I still can't stop punishing myself for everything. I believe that I must be punished indefinitely because the experiences I've had throughout my life must be my fault, especially the things in the relationship that happened with my ex - if I wasn't so unstable, so crazy, so messed up, etc., he never would have treated me that way...

Thank you all again for the kind words. I'm not used to people being kind to me and my past experiences make me wary of it but thank you all the same.

Thank you for the kind words.

I'm glad to have found this website and that there's a message board here. However, I'm afraid of saying something wrong and getting in trouble for it so I've been trying to post but then deciding against it. I hope I'm not saying anything wrong here...

I survived extreme abuse at the hand of my parents, brother, and others in my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. I was also bullied a lot from kindergarten through college for various things. I've been working with a trauma specialist for about a year and a half now. She says I have C-PTSD and some serious depersonalization/derealization problems. A traumatic event that hurt me worse than I'd ever been hurt before occurred 14 months ago, and ever since then I've been really struggling. I've been trying very hard to feel better and fix things, working with my therapist and doing a ton of research, but my mind feels completely torn apart. I hope that it's okay for me to join the community here.