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 Its hard for me to feel like I'm offering support when I don't often get support or I feel like anything that I might say is grossly inadequate or sounds shallow so though I've read many posts I may only lurk around without responding.

I appreciate this thread. Reading it helped me feel a little better, which I've been working on all morning (trying to make myself feel like myself again and not just a jumbled mess). Reading everyone's comments about how they're at different places and seeing people who might be close to my place in trying to healing helped stop the topple I've been in.

It's a noble and honest path.  I don't know where it leads.
There are good people everywhere and we just have to keep our hearts open I think.

It can be too hard for good people to believe us, sometimes.  They are trying to hold their own faith together and sometimes that depends on blocking out the darkness in the world.  It's about what they need to believe.  Ironically it's easier to be able to hear us if we've come through to the other side.  If there is a happy ending, it becomes bearable for them.

That's really depressing. Even though I know its true. Honestly, I can't sympathize with "good people" who ignore the horror in other people's lives unless it comes with a happy ending.

I don't want to keep going through this. Even to get help or get assessed for cPTSD, I have to continue exposing myself to the very system that keeps wounding and scarring me. Or stay stuck in the same place with no way out and continued to be damaged by a toxic environment. I don't think I'll be okay on the other side of whatever happens. I'm at the point where its all too much.

I am also afraid of being assessed. Since joining a few days ago, I've written about the trouble I've had with doctors. I am also on medicaid and have to find a new doctor's office and ask for a referral to be assessed for CPTSD. I doubt the system will help me or believe me. Even if I get to that point, seeing someone to be assessed, I am afraid the doctor will say I'm just as crazy as my abusive family is. That I won't be seen as a victim/survivor but just like them. Or they'll just say I'm looking for something to be wrong with me and I'm lazy and just need to go find a job.

Are there student jobs available at your school?  Because they feel a student's first priority is school they tend to have less expectations and be less stressful.  They also are not as demanding, not as busy, and on campus which might be a safe place for you.

Additionally, if you are diagnosed you most likely qualify for special consideration/priority placement.  If you are in the US it is called schedule A.

Oh I'm not a student. Just wanted to clarify that I'm not in school. Just having similar issues about where to work.

[I sent a comment to Text Crisis Line's support inbox:]

My uBPD mom and I got into a huge argument where she randomly raged at me for the first time in, I think, years and threatened me while claiming I was attacking her. I am ashamed to say it was a three hour circular conversation. I intuitively used many of the OOTF tools at many twists and turns my mom dragged me through but ultimately failed not to let my mom and my own pain and anger suck me into trying to reason with her. I couldn't understand why my mom was willing to accept that one event of abuse happened while denying an entire history of emotional and physical abuse and present emotional abuse. I was hurt beyond all reasonable bounds that my mom shouted at me, threatened to call the police on me (a big trigger from my days when she forced me and my siblings to co-habit with her mentally ill ex-husband) , said I was attacking her, told me to get out of her house, justified beating me and my siblings, said I was bad child/daughter, said that I was "always asking her for things", and essentially I should be grateful that she had taken me out to eat. I wanted my mom to stop hurting me and listen to me. I wanted her to be the loving parent I deserve.

Eventually, the conversation ended. I was very upset. The whole thing was partly my fault according to OOTF's What NOT to Dos--I hurt myself and my mom by engaging her after the verbal/emotional abuse started. My friend wasn't answering my text and had likely gone to bed or was medium chilling my problems to protect herself so I started googling. I found Crisis Text Line and decided I didn't have anything to lose and texted 741741. "Sally", the text counselor I texted with, came off as very nice and concerned. I'm under the impression that underage kids must be the majority of their clients because I revealed that I was in fact an adult, college-educated, and financially dependent on my abusive mother and her attitude changed. She became more direct. In the end, when I was finally getting emotional, "Sally" the Text Counselor disappeared for thirty minutes from texting. Leaving me totally hanging and crying by myself. Sally then came back, texting a  cursory 'You is smahrt, you is kind' kind of comment. Sort of, Work on your coping mechanisms. You're educated and brave and you've got a good plan. Good luck, S! Then I got an automated text:

Thanks for using Crisis Text Line. The Crisis Counselor has closed the conversation. You got this!

*? I .Wish.I.Was.Making.This.Up. I assure you, I am not.

I sent a comment to Text Crisis Line's support inbox:

Tonight I texted your crisis hotline and texted with "Sally". It rubbed me wrong that I got an automated cutoff message at the end of the conversation after a lengthy silence after I had said something emotional. I didn't expect the text counselor to hold my hand all night but that was hurtful.
--S.

This is Text Crisis Line's reply:

Hi S,
Thanks for your message. The way your Crisis Counselor ended the conversation was not appropriate, or what we teach. Crisis Counselors are instructed to check in periodically during those long silences, and, if there is no response after two check-ins, let the texter know that we have to close the conversation for the night, and are absolutely here for them whenever they're in crisis. I apologize that this was not the experience you had.
Best wishes,
JW
Read my other post--the lack of support in my life is not a joke and its not for lack of trying. The system is broken. At least for me. Who can you trust? Who do you turn to when there is no one there except "Sally the Text Crisis Counselor" and she just signed off after some good old lip service and left you in the wind? I think OOTF assumes that a support network is easy to come by and underestimates poverty and isolation. I can't surround myself with positive people who aren't there or continue to see good counselors and therapists that I have no access to. By the way, I saw the last terrible counselor I had once a month. Once a month, people. I deal with my mom everyday.

[But]

I agree with you,  the system is badly broken.

Abuse often leads the abused to have less status and resources, (financial, social, educational, personal, interpersonal, health etc....) Having less resources often leads to more abuse, more abuse leads to less resources, etc. etc.

I know a big difference between private and public healthcare, for example, is being treated with basic respect, as a human being with dignity.  There are so many other examples, they are everywhere.  Meantime your self-esteem and mental health snow-dives, which makes it so much harder to reach out.  With the vicious spirals some are left with almost no resources left.

And people wonder why we tolerate abuse.  Well, sometimes that is all that is on offer, and when abuse must be endured to just survive.....!!!!!!

Victim-blaming, racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, prejudices about people who don't have jobs, who experience poverty, who have mental illnesses, who look different, who are isolated etc. etc.  At every stop we are more exposed to and more vulnerable to abuse, more damaged by the cumulative effects.  * some of us don't smile enough either.  It all goes round and round and round.

But  It's not your fault, and good on you for keeping on trying.  Few people can possibly understand just how hard that can be.

It really does seem like a hole that just gets deeper and deeper, darker and darker with blocks and turns around every bend. Actually, thinking of it as a deep, dark hole makes me think of being buried alive and suffocating so I'm going to stop. I experience every single one of those things.

Part of me really just wants to give up, its all so tiring to keep exposing myself. How can heal or recover when the people who are supposed to help me keep making more wounds? My uBPD mom thinks I'm the crazy one and that I'm the liar (which hurts because she is my mother and I love her and she's the only family member I have left) and I'm constantly being plastered in people's labels and assumptions.

But thank you for this affirmation. Its hard but I can't see any other way than to die, stay where I am, or keep inching forward.

I have a similar problem, trouble feeling damaged or fragile, but also finding a job at all in my city which has a high unemployment rate. I want a job that means something and makes a difference. So since a master's degree is not an option with my current student debt and lack of financial assistance I plan to take the state teacher's exam. I can only hope  that I don't let my fear of being too damaged to teach young people and be around people get in the way. I don't have much of a support network despite efforts build one so I'm pretty much flying solo and trying do as much as I can on my own.

I am financially dependent on my uBPD mom who has abused me emotionally and physically since I was a child.  My family was poor growing up, likely due to my mentally ill single mom's choices in addition to other factors outside our control. I grew up poor and am now a financially dependent adult.

In the last two years since I rose out of my suicidal depression, I have gotten medicaid and started seeing doctors for my health. Its the first time in my life that I've been solely responsible for my healthcare needs since I was booted off my mom's insurance because of my age.

• Every doctor criticized my weight and one said my diabetes diagnosis was my fault for triggering it.

• Despite the fact that my blood tests were good, the lab technician spent five minutes lecturing me about my body mass index and told me to "exercise until I smell bad".

• My primary care physician said that the man who raped me probably didn't believe me when I said "No" because I was smiling.

• I joined a writer's group. Everyone in the group was white and consistently made casually racist/classist remarks from the moment I walked in the door and wanted me to read stories they had written that were inherently racist (stories written from the perspective of white slavers and colonizers) or sexist.

• The nurse who took my vitals told me that "everyone gets spanking for being bad as kids" and dismissed when I said my mom had abused me as a child while doing my intake questionnaire as a new patient.

• The counselor I was seeing answered (non-emergency) phone calls during our sessions; her answer to my uBPD mom's lifetime abuse and the rape last year I experienced at the hands of a man she introduced me to was for me to get a job; she also called my writing "a hobby" (I am an independent author).

• The dentist I went to caused me unnecessary pain and when I told him he was hurting me, he insisted I hold still until he was finished.

• The podiatrist I went to did not examine my feet but clipped my toenails and told me he wanted me to "be healthier"; when I asked him what he meant by that he said, "You wouldn't be diabetic if you lost weight".

• My work program case worker I was seeing never followed through on any agreements to help me find work knowing that the city I lived in with my mom has little to no job prospects especially for someone who doesn't have references or a recent work history. I was let go from the program without receiving any assistance after I got no contact from new case manager when the old went to a different job in the county. I talked to the program manager about it and she said she would see what she could do. I haven't heard from the work program since. Its been three months or more since then and, yes, I called more than once and I did leave a message.

• I have been trying to rebuild my resume with recent relevant volunteer experiences but I have to HUNT DOWN volunteer coordinators.

Seek help? Recovery? Are you kidding? I'M TRYING! I'm doing the best I can.

I don't think I'm being overly negative or catastrophizing when I say the system is broken.