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My mom has recently discovered boundary setting. Unfortunately she thinks it's about setting boundaries on what I'm allowed to do with my own life.

For me, it's more like templates that I can fit myself into. For example, I have Customer Service Me. Customer Service Me is "on" when I'm working a job that requires it. I smile a lot. Everything is awesome. Unfortunately Customer Service Me doesn't deal well with verbal abuse from dissatisfied customers. When that happens, I freeze. I also have Earth Goddess Me, homemaker extraordinaire, who's making the best cream soups from scratch and searching the internet for exotic jam recipes in between hand-dyeing wool and washing out the cloth diapers. Then there's Ladylike Me, which is largely made out of the voice of my mother. Sit with your ankles crossed and sip your tea. Nobody likes a negative Nelly. Smile, we all hate it when you cry. Sit there and take it with grace. And * Me, who stomps around in combat boots and wants to build her own rifle and blow up old cars. I am all those people and a few more, but I've compartmentalized myself because people, in my experience, can't handle the whole thing. It's just too overwhelming for them to have all their expectations defied.

My mom gaslights me. If I ever point out to her anything she's done or said that hurt my feelings, she will deny ever having said it and say "Don't put words in my mouth!" But I know she remembers it, because it gets back to me from my sisters that she went immediately and talked to them about why she said it and what she really meant. She's just getting "her side" on the record though; she isn't really sorry she said or did any of the things and she certainly won't apologize to me for doing or saying them. If she were really interested in me, she'd come to ME to get "her side" on the record.  Her latest tactic is to accuse me of emotionally abusing her for jumping over the boundaries she's set for me. That's really rich, because I was never allowed to have any boundaries of my own growing up, and when I complain that she's jumped over the ones I've set now, she tries to turn it around into me hurting her.

My next younger sister insists that I'm responsible for the hurt I've caused my mom by being absent from her life. She tells me my mom is worried literally sick about my absence from the family (which she, in part, made necessary) and that I should take responsibility for the hurt I've caused everyone by backing away from my FOO. I'm sorry, but I can't take responsibility for their feelings. If I'm responsible for their feelings, then it's only fair that they be responsible for mine; and nobody's lining up to take responsibility for mine. So I'll be responsible for my own feelings, since they're under my control; they can be responsible for their own feelings. If they've taken offense at me not wanting to be around my ex-husband, who is invited to EVERY family event whether he has the kids with him or not, then that offense is something THEY have chosen to take from my actions. But it shouldn't surprise me that my family has taken offense at it. My mom still thinks I got divorced at her, in order to make her look bad in front of her friends. (I know some of her friends... they're totally not like that. It's all her.)

I know that feeling. My response to "What do you want?" is usually "Do I have a choice?" The problem is that what I really want is definitely impossible. I want a normal, happy, loving family. But my FOO is not that and never will be, and my kids are damaged now from the choices I and my ex-husband made (my ex-husband being one of those choices). Two of my kids have Asperger's Syndrome and one just got out of the mental hospital. I will never be able to have the normal, loving, worthwhile life I've always wanted.

So, this is what's happening to me, I don't know a name to put on it.

I have times when my brain keeps drifting off into fantasyland. It's a pretty benign fantasyland, I imagine that I'm snuggling with my boyfriend, who is someone that I feel really safe around. I've felt safe around him since the day we met over a year ago, and he's never done anything to betray that trust. I try telling myself I have something to do and I need to get up right now, but I just slip back into it. I try praying and I can't focus on praying, I just slip back into it. My alarm rings and I snap out of it and turn the alarm off, and I can even get up and dressed and stuff, but I slip back into it. I try mindfulness, but my brain just doesn't want to be in my body putting the clothes on and remembering which job I'm going to this morning so I get the dress code right, it wants to be snuggling with my boyfriend. I don't blame it; I'd love to spend 24/7 snuggling with my boyfriend, but he and I both have to earn a living, do dishes, attend to our personal hygiene, etc.

Then I have times when I'm feeling really uneasy. Usually when I find out something my ex has done regarding the kids, or there's something I'm afraid he's going to do. I can't focus. This happened to me today. I went to the store thinking I'd do some retail therapy, and I'm there in the store but it's like I fell asleep and just woke up standing in the store with a grocery cart, except that I remember wanting to go to the store and buy groceries and I wasn't asleep. I have to keep checking all the time to make sure I still have my Four Things (phone, wallet, keys, and concealed weapon*) because when I've been in this state before, sometimes I've forgotten one of them at home or set my phone or wallet down somewhere and walked away. I fight to keep myself present and alert. My body will start to hurt and every ache will become magnified; I become reluctant to walk because of the pain.

What is this called? Is this an emotional flashback? Is this dissociation? What word goes with this?


* I never go anywhere without a weapon. Yes I have a concealed weapons permit and I've practiced and I keep it where the kids can't get it etc. etc. etc. No I'm not suicidal anymore, and I never was homicidal. It just makes me feel safer to carry it, after something that happened to me before. Thank you for your concern.

I'm still new at this, so this is probably wrong: but, after a flashback I go to work. Usually that's because flashbacks happen at inconvenient times, like on days when I'm in between working two jobs. But it really does help me to go to work. What I do puts me "in the zone" and I can literally not feel pain (I spoke for an hour once with strep throat and didn't even feel it until afterward). My job is something that reminds me that I have worked very hard, that I am a valuable member of society, and that I'm smart and I help people, and that I'm making it on my own without my ex and my parents and siblings. It is really, really hard for me to focus on anything after a flashback though, so it's rough getting started, but with a good set of notes I can do alright until the good-ness starts kicking in. Long as I prepare my notes in advance, so that I'm not trying to prepare notes in the middle of a flashback, I'm usually alright.

I know there are people who've had it much worse than me, and sometimes I feel bad that what happened to me hurt me as badly as it did. Compared to people who have spent 50, 60 or more years feeling worthless, the 40 I spent doesn't seem like much. And reading people's stories on here, they have suffered horrific sexual and physical abuse. For me, it was almost entirely emotional neglect.

My earliest memory of my dad is when I was 5 I remember him standing over me yelling at me that he never wanted me anyway. I had tried really hard to convince myself I didn't remember that. I didn't remember much about my childhood anyway, until I started remembering as I worked on a 12 step program and doing the moral inventory. I started thinking "OK, I did this thing, and I know it was wrong to do it, why did I think it was OK?" and I'd trace that back to something earlier that had happened that made me think that was OK, and then I remembered stuff. My dad liked to slap kids around, but he didn't do anything horrifying or prosecutable under the standards of the time. He threatened to beat my brother to within an inch of his life, he bruised my sister's face, but all that happened after I left and he never mutilated anyone or caused major physical injury. Nobody ever touched me inappropriately until my now ex-husband came into my life.

Mostly it was just the ignoring and the constant criticism that got to me. I spent most of my time in my bedroom, reading, because that was what I was allowed to do when I wasn't at school or at church or playing with my only friend. I had more freedom as a child than as a teenager. I was allowed to play outside and ride my bike. But I learned that if I wanted to get away from my dad's criticism, my room was the place to do it. One time my parents were mad at me because I hadn't cleaned my room, so I came home from school to find my bedroom door nailed shut, with a note on the nail that said "Condemned By Order Of The Fire Department". I was shut out of my room for three days. Luckily my mom had just done laundry and so I at least had clean clothes to wear. I was so afraid of my father's verbal criticism that when he accidentally caught some rope hanging on the wall on fire, I was afraid to mention it to him lest he tell me how stupid I was for not understanding why he set the rope on fire, in case he'd done it on purpose. I did mention it though, and he was able to put out the fire before it got out of control. I didn't know this wasn't right, because they sent me to a private school that was just exactly the same. Kids were routinely locked in dark closets, given 5 minutes to eat lunch (or not allowed to eat lunch until 2:30pm) so as not to disrupt the school day, I was made to stand for 10-15 minutes with my arms out and books on my hands, we were made to sit still not moving a muscle for a minimum of 5 minutes (and since we had to start over every time we twitched, I was there for about an hour trying to get my 5 minutes in), etc. They ran out of math to teach me so I was taught secretarial skills and I earned my own tuition starting in 4th grade.

The incident that had the most lasting effect on me was when I broke my foot in an accident at a swimming pool. My friend's parents brought me home, and my mom put me on the couch with my foot elevated and iced. My dad was a doctor and she begged my dad for probably 10 minutes to look at my foot and see if I needed to go to the hospital. He argued with her about it longer than it would have taken to actually look at my foot. He said I was making up the pain I said I was in, in order to get attention (bet I was making up the swelling and purple too) and that I had just bruised the bone and that I needed to shut up and stop whining about it. He allowed my mom to wrap it in an elastic bandage and for two weeks I walked on that broken foot. My mom's car was in the shop and my dad was on call so he couldn't give her his car, and in those days you had to walk everywhere to pay bills and such, and I was the oldest and only 10 and couldn't be left home alone, so I had to walk everywhere with my mom and siblings. The only reason it got any medical attention was that I had my annual checkup already scheduled. Luckily the fracture wasn't all the way through, and it had been well wrapped so it was healing correctly, so I only had the cast 4 weeks. But from that incident I learned that nobody gave a flying bag of horse crap about me and that if I was ever in pain I was making it up to get attention, and that attention was something I did not deserve.

As a teen I was very isolated. I was allowed to go to church, where the girls made fun of me. I was allowed to go to school, where no one would be my friend. I was allowed to play in orchestras, where I was too busy making music to socialize. And that was about it. I wasn't allowed to go play at friends' houses, even if I'd had any. In the six years I was in junior high and high school, I think I went out with friends maybe half a dozen times. Most of those were in my last 2 years of high school.

That's just my childhood. I married a man who paid attention to me, until he found more interesting things to do like hurting our kids, forcing me to watch TV with him for hours every night instead of cleaning up after dinner and putting kids to bed, stepping over me when I passed out due to a medical condition while pregnant, handing me a gun when I was suicidal, and many other things too numerous to mention here.

It wasn't really THAT bad... was it? Some of the people who know my story say "that's worse than what I suffered," and these are people who were thrown down staircases or passed around like party favors from the age of 5. I don't know what to make of it.

Hi, I'm tiasarah. A bit over a year ago my divorce from my abusive husband was final. He was physically abusive to my kids and emotionally abusive to me. Before that my parents were physically and emotionally abusive. It took me long enough to realize that the word for what they had done was "abuse". I knew that they'd done wrong but nobody around me seemed to think there was anything wrong with what they were doing. When I broke out of it I came to realize that I was held tightly inside a cluster of abusive people and isolated from non-abusive people. I had been taught that others would not assist me, but when I broke out I discovered that was false; many people supported me and many have even said they admire me for having the courage to leave.

The worst of what happened to me was like emotional starvation. To escape my parents' rage, I retreated to my room and read books. It was the only place I could go that was acceptable to them. I had a friend when I was school age, but after that I had no friends other than ones I saw at school. I wasn't allowed to visit anyone outside of school except maybe half a dozen times. I was allowed to go to church activities and excel at academics and music, but not to do anything else and especially nothing social. My ex-husband at first allowed me to have friends, but dealing with our kids' special needs with his active resistance made it impossible for me to have any friends, and at the end of the marriage he was not allowing me to have friends or even go out of the house without a child with me. But... he didn't beat me. It didn't stop me from spending years praying to die and trying to make it happen.

I wasn't able to be there for my children because of my depression and lack of support, and consequently they've experienced a lot of the same emotional neglect I did. I'm trying the best I can to clean up the mess I've made in their lives, but I'm also trying to heal myself at the same time. I've often found myself triggered by my kids doing things they learned from those years, mostly from their father but sometimes from me. I often have to discipline them to improve their behavior while I'm being triggered, e.g. I have a fear of thrown objects and to stop them throwing their toys I have to take away any toy they throw, but I'm in the middle of getting triggered by the thrown toys and all I want to do is go hide in my room curled up crying.

A few months ago I had a really bad thing that I think is a flashback. I thought my ex was coming after me and I became so fearful that I barricaded the doors with furniture, and I slept in my clothes with weapons handy, like I used to do during the divorce. It turned out he wasn't and it was just a letter about a debt I owed, but even after I found that out things got bad and there were sexual sensations even though I was alone and fully dressed. I was really messed up the next morning, couldn't focus on anything, students were asking me questions and I heard their words and knew they were English sentences but the words didn't register in my head as comprehensible sentences. It took me almost 24 hours to get over it. This morning I saw a video someone posted on Facebook showing surveillance video of a domestic abuse incident and I kinda freaked out. I got really scared on my way in to work and when I got to work, I was scared of the doors and windows and elevators and my heart wouldn't stop racing. I knew nobody was going to attack me, nobody has ever attacked me at work and I've never been unsafe there before, so I don't understand why I couldn't just feel safe there.

What's happening to me? I know you can't diagnose anything, but I read about CPTSD and I think "Gosh, these people have it worse than me... but the things they talk about are so familiar..."