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Slashy,

I spend a lot of time on Zillow looking for a secluded place too. Coco and I live in the city, not far outside of Seattle, but we build fences and grow trees all around us so as to make our yard as private as possible. We also have a small house out on the coast, where we spend a lot of time listening to the ocean surf and not much else. It's not terribly secluded, but it's in a quiet community where most homes are empty vacation homes, so it's very quiet and, again, we plant trees and build sheds strategically to block views from neighbors. Currently it's illegal to rent homes near us for weekend partiers, but if that changes, I'll demand we sell the house. When I go to the beach, I like to stay for 3 weeks at a time, several times a year. I try to spend 40% of my life there.

Coco won't consider moving out of either home, so my Zillow searches for secluded homes on 10+ acre wooded lots are just me pretending to be in the market. When I get really stressed, I do Zillow searches the way other guys do porn. I call it my real estate porn. I can't have the houses, but I can sit and pretend I can buy them. Sadly, with Coco's love of living in town, there is no acreage in my foreseeable future.

I will, instead live vicariously through you and your GF, hoping you find a fantastic, secluded acreage with a good house on it so you can breathe.  I agree, that when I feel alone, I can breathe better. Nobody judges me when nobody can see me or hear me.

Good luck, and I'm jealous (in a good way).

Slashy,

Sounds like your first therapy appointment was definitely energized.

If your inner critic returns, it's probably because it needs to.

My experience with IFS therapy, also called Parts Therapy, is that in my case, I have a lot of inner critics. The interesting thing is that they are not talking to me to hurt me, they are trying to protect me.

When I want to do something risky, and one of my parts shouts out, "You aren't smart enough to make it work" that critic isn't trying to hurt me, he's trying to stop me from doing something that I was taught as a child would be dangerous. My inner critics call me "too emotional" and "too sensitive" and "You'll fail." Which is what my parents used to say to get me to stop wanting to do things with other kids. My inner critic is trying to stop me before someone humiliates me.

Parts therapy isn't designed to stop the inner critic or send him/her away, it's designed to make us into friends again and to find the right way to help me now that I'm not a helpless child anymore. Our inner critics are frozen in time. They think we're still the age we were when they were created. Once we talk with them and thank them for their service, they sort of discover that we're not helpless anymore, so they change their method of working with us.

My therapist works to join me and my inner critic together and find our love for each other.

So if your inner critic(s) become(s) active again, that's good, because you and your therapist can work with them if they're willing to come out and talk.

Parts Therapy, or IFS therapy, is about merging our voices back together and giving these terrified little critic voices proof that we're all grown up now and we can merge back together as strong and competent adults.

Trauma disorders are a fragmentation of the brain into individual pieces that don't work together. GOOD IFS therapy is all about merging our brain's isolated parts back together, one critic at a time. Like putting a thousand-piece puzzle together, it goes from a thousand pieces to one completed puzzle as we work with it. It's proving to be a powerful type of therapy for a lot of people. 

One thing my therapist, as well as the writers like Richard Schwartz and Robert Falconer, say is that the therapy isn't done by talking about these inner critics, but is done by talking to them. The critics don't hear us when we talk about them, but they respond very quickly when we listen to them, and talk to or with them. Like children, they want us to listen to what they have to say. If your therapist truly understands parts therapy, she will help you listen to them, and they will speak to you, and resolutions really do happen.

I'm truly amazed at how, once I've made contact with a critic, they change to a positive voice very quickly and permanently. The true slowdown for me is that I have a lot of inner critics. The good news is they are all willing to talk when it's their turn in therapy.

After 40+ years of therapy, IFS and Parts therapy are giving me more traction than all the therapies I've tried put together.

Larry,

I'm glad to hear you're feeling the joy of being around other people with like minds.

Hope,

I agree, and I'm glad you feel like it's an oasis of peace here.

 

L2N, Slashy, NK, Armee, Chart,

At 3 am this morning I woke up in dread. I checked the forum to try and find some comfort. I saw your posts. I was overwhelmed by your support. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the supportive comments.

I have a chronically difficult time keeping my self-image above the waterline. I post this same fear from time to time, and always receive support from you all. I always think, "okay, this time it'll stick" but as my post says, I keep going in and out of these moods, sometimes so fast it makes my head spin. I expect that you all understand this next sentence:>> I can remember every bad thing that's ever happened in my life, but remembering good things is like holding water in a kitchen strainer.

I feel like I'm doing and saying good, and then all of a sudden, I feel this revisit to the terror that I'm annoying people. I suppose there's no need to explain, as many of us already know that the giving and then withdrawing of love was used as a weapon for many of us as children. I don't mean to sound needy, but if I'm going to be honest, then in a way, I guess I am a bit needy. The fragility of love from the people I needed in my early life still haunts me today.

Chart's comment "I wish you could see yourself through our eyes" actually made me cry for a moment.

I just watched a Tonight Show interview from Tuesday, April 16, between Stephen Colbert and George Takei, who had been imprisoned at age 5 with his family during WWII just for being Japanese in America after the Pearl Harbor attack. Mr. Takei brought a photo of a beautiful tree root that his father had dug up from the encampment and had turned into a sculpture to celebrate the resiliency of the family during the imprisonment. Mr. Takei's father had told him that survival was not so much about fighting and resisting but was more about finding and appreciating any beauty during adversity.  I didn't quote it perfectly here, but, as I heard this interview, I feel like I learned what Mr. Takei was teaching.

What I focus on is my reality. In this thread, I've been focusing on all the times I was cast aside for talking too much. All the while I could have been focusing on how my friends today are still my friends even though I talk a bit more than most. Survival comes through the latter.

Not everyone survives what most of us have been through. At least two of the boys I went to Catholic school with ended their own lives as they were trying to enter adulthood. Even my own little sister didn't survive the world we were both brought into. But I did. And all who are reading this post did. You all are my tribe. My clan. My people. My cohorts. Your kindness is the beauty that came from the adversity of our youths.

I just want to point out right now, that the love and comradery I feel with the people here, and with all the survivors of the rampant narcissism on earth right now, is the beauty I see. The care we have for each other continually and repeatedly saves me and furthers my own survival.

The people I share healing with are my statue and are the beauty that I cling to. We struggle still, but we have each other's support. And that's what keeps me going.

San,
Your compassionate responses are always comforting to me. Thanks. I accept your hug and return it with interest:   

Journal Entry for Tuesday, April 16, 2024

I've been compelled to spend a lot of time on the forum lately. I always hope I haven't become a problem for people who get tired of seeing my inputs on too many of their posts, and I am always worried about my propensity to write too long of posts. Again, and again, I apologize for talking too much, only to be followed up by more of me talking too much. I can't fix it no matter how hard I try. I'm like an alcoholic promising to quit drinking today, every single day, but rather than alcohol, my addiction is to talking/writing too much. My wife and I share a kind-hearted joke that she tells out of love, which goes; "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The longest distance between two points is to ask my husband for directions."

My conundrum of the day is how I struggle with my own dysregulation. It mimics bi-polar behaviors, or maybe DID behaviors as I have been switching from mood to mood almost like I'm channel surfing with my conscious mind. I occasionally approach my therapist with the comment that I feel like I'm getting worse instead of better, to which he responds with resounding disagreement. He reminds me of what a mess I was when we began working one on one together in 2005. He reminds me of how I would blank out nearly completely during therapy and how my channel surfing was much slower, meaning I would go into anxiety for weeks at a time, and depression for weeks at a time. The fact that my mood swings are rapid now, by the hour, but not as debilitating is a sign that I'm actually gaining control, not losing it. It's just that it takes time to work this stuff out.  I guess it's like when a pendulum has a long arc, it swings slowly but far, far apart. As the balance begins to right itself, the arc shrinks but speeds up. HOPEFULLY, stopping in the center is still in my future.

I look back at my posts and I sometimes feel like someone else wrote some of them. My goal, as of today, is to stop posting when I'm in a fired-up mood. I am triggered by other people's pain. That's always been a problem for me. I guess that after having been raised by people who put their happiness on my shoulders, forced me to grow up feeling like every sad thing that's ever happened to anyone anywhere is my fault for not being smart enough or selfless enough to protect them. All of them. Every human on earth. I can't watch much news because I'm 1) so broken up about the cruelty people do to each other and 2) so terrified that things are only going to get worse and as hard as I try I can't stop it. I can't tell you how much it hurt every time my big, strong, manly father made me feel like all his misery was my fault. Mom did the same thing. "If you hadn't wanted [anything here] we wouldn't have [this problem] now."

They raised me by ignoring me when I had needs or when I was in pain or when I was embarrassing them by being a child who sometimes made mistakes. It was an act of aggression that, I suppose, could be considered passive-aggressive attacks??? Passive aggression is something I don't fully grasp the exact meaning of, but choosing to not look at a child until that child stops being a child seems like it might fit into the term. I don't know if that's why I talk too much now...the need to be heard has never left me. Being ignored feels like being attacked and my anxiety just soars into the stratosphere.

I don't know. I'm tired right now, of trying to diagnose absolutely everything about myself that embarrasses me about who I am or who I've always been.

I just know that today, April 16, is a day when I don't understand why the confusion and chaos in my consciousness won't calm down and let me be the same person from one day to the next.  Sometimes from one hour to the next.

[[TRIGGER WARNING: Childhood Sexual Abuse--body memories without cognitive memories]>>>]

Littel2Nothing,

I really got swept away by your comments that we were just meat to them. [TRIGGER WARNING: Childhood Sexual Abuse--body memories without cognitive memories]>>> As I read it, I felt it. I have very chopped up memories of my abuser. I was seven. He was an adult. My cognitive memories are so chopped up that I really can't place how it was that he got me alone to do what he did, nor do I have any idea how many times it happened. I woke up in the classroom in third grade a few times having no idea where I'd been for the past hour or two. Almost like alien abductions, I experienced complete 1 to2 hour time losses at school on more than one occasion. But what my body remembers is what he smelled like, his body heat, visions of the thick black body hair on his arms, and...as I read your comments, I suddenly remembered feeling a spiritual sense of him having no soul. Like he had absolutely NO compassion for me as a human being. I have always remembered feeling abandoned by God because I somehow recall having prayed so hard for God to make him to stop, but God ignored me and the man...just...wouldn't...stop. It literally felt like he was not human. Like he was a cold-blooded alligator enjoying a meal.

So, I REALLY, truly understand your anger. I feel anger for what you went through, which revives my personal anger that these men are soulless and completely incapable of feeling the pain they are inflicting. Sometimes I feel like I've grown past the anger. Like I've accepted that psychopaths exist with us and they "know not what they do" and that my forgiveness of them has brought me peace. But then, every now and then, I remember how horrific it is to be caught in their snares, and I realize I haven't made peace with it at all.

I think this trigger for me, from your sharing, is a gift that I can use as I explore the way my life goes in and out of acceptance. I've been feeling like I'm DID or Bi-Polar or something. Like...if I've forgiven these people, why am I still traumatized? 

I just read an internet article on the 18 things that identify a person who had a traumatic childhood, and I was able to connect with 17 of them. I shook my head and thought, but my childhood wasn't that bad, so HOW do I have 17 of the 18 traits? (the only one I didn't have was a sense of wanting to lash out aggressively).  I think you've provided a much-needed spark for me to stop hiding again from the horror of being with someone who has no soul. No connection to other human beings.

You shared a deep part of yourself today here which has blessed me with a revival of something I need to address in myself...my own anger and unmitigable frustration at how I was consumed like a meal by someone who had no right to do what he did.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for having the courage or compulsion to share it. Not addressing this anger in myself allows it to fester unnoticed. I really want to work through this for myself as you work through it in your own life.

Thanks for showing me that I'm not alone in this anger and for giving me a sense that the anger is real and its justified and it isn't going away just because I'm feeling calm every now and then. My anger for what was done to you, gives me permission to feel it for what was done to all of us, myself included.

Shlashy,

Two and a half years ago I had become so suicidal that I went out searching for anyone to talk to, and I found this OOTS forum. I was trying to live, not for myself, but for my wife, two sons (Now 36 and 39) and my two grandsons (Now 10 and 13). I didn't see any reason to stay alive except in honor of the love they had for me. 

I lost my little sister to suicide in 2008. She dealt with the same pain I deal with. Losing her in that way showed me how much pain a suicide can cause to the loved ones who were left behind. I've never recovered fully from her passing, and I couldn't do that to my loved ones. Unfortunately, the pull to end it all was so strong I felt I was losing my battle, so I reached out to find any possible place where I could find support from people who knew what it felt like to struggle with lifelong trauma disorders like mine.

So when I joined OOTS and needed to create a username for myself, I decided to use what they call me, Papa Coco. My wife's name is Coco and they knew her first, so when they met me, I was part of her, so they called us Coco and Papa Coco. They love us both and need us in their lives. So to remind myself each day why I need to stay in the world, I chose to put that as my username.

I wish I could have wanted to live for myself, but thankfully, they became my surrogate reason to live. Like your son, my little family has literally saved my life also.

So, yeah. Every word you speak above resonates with me. I love myself through their eyes. So, hereto and forevermore, I'm Papa Coco.

Your story about your son being your salvation is one of the things that connects me with you in this forum. I totally get it. And your comment that you have acted as a big brother to other fatherless kids touches my heart even more.

Kizzie

With respect to your post, you and I look to be cut from the same cloth. Narcs trigger my flight response with zero tolerance. The second any circular logic starts, I simply turn and walk away. Conversation done. They don't deserve for me to even say "excuse me." They don't deserve for me to even tell them off. I just turn and walk away.

They're not worth the effort. When I walk away, which is against my nature to do to people, I coach and calm myself with the words, "Live and let die." If they want to waste their lives living their lives out in the sweltering goo of hatred and lies, let them. I'm not an emotion-cop. If they can't behave, I have a very easy time making good friends somewhere else with good people.

Hugs to you. 

Slashy

I'm excited to hear how your first session on Wednesday goes.

Sincerely,
PC

Strawberrycat,

Welcome to the forum. This is a great place to just be with people who fully understand what it feels like to be where you are.

This forum has been a great help to me, and I hope it is for you as well.

I'm glad you joined.

Slashy,

I for one am very glad you are on the forum.

You don't have to ask any questions if you don't have any to ask. sometimes just sending someone who's in pain today a hug emoji is teh most helpful thing you can do.

For me, when I express my compassion to someone, I feel like I've gotten some healing myself. And when others send their compassion to me, even if by just sending a hug emoji, I feel it. For me, just being with people of like mind is where 99% of the healing is.

I'm glad you joined. I read everything you write.
PC.

  

I share in the frustration of suddenly seeing new memories that I can't place. Not knowing why I forgot something used to drive me crazy. Not knowing how to chronologically recall it used to be soooooo frustrating. For me, I was trying to prove to my cognitive brain that it was real and that it had a reason for happening.

The disorganized state of our scattered memories is probably pretty normal. Trauma does that to us. We are normal people who deal with abnormal situations.  According to the experts who write the books like The Body Keeps the Score, having this disorganized fragmentation of disconnected memories that come and go and hide and surprise us is very common. Somehow our brains file the memories by impact rather than chronology. And a lot of what we've been through was so catastrophically beyond our ability to comprehend while it was happening that the chronology is far less important than the impact. We remember the feelings more than the story line. Some trauma therapists teach that that's okay. Remembering how it felt and how it triggers us today is what's important.

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk teaches that story lines and chronology are not accurate in even the healthiest of brains. Police know that the more often they make a witness recall a recent event, the more inaccurate their stories become. Our brains really aren't tape recorders. We remember things based on how we experienced them. For example, to the fear that people are having memories planted in their minds by therapists, he says that when the body remembers the feelings, those memories are 100% real. When the brain remembers something based on its details, but the body doesn't feel it, those memories aren't as sure a thing.  For many of us, we recall trauma events because our bodies remember them before our brains do. We smell or feel or taste something.

My own personal memories about my CSA are filled with the aroma of the linen of a man's clothing, the pressure of his body weight, seeing the thick black hair all over his body and feeling the unusually high temperature of his body on mine. For some reason I know it was Holiday season and I was 7. On some days I recall words he said to me. Threats. Then the next day I don't remember any words spoken. those memories continue to flicker in and out for me. But not the body temp, thick hair or smell of his linen. I don't know the exact date. I don't know why I was in his control. I don't remember anything except feeling the abuse. I've come to accept that as okay. My brain memories aren't as important to me anymore now that I've accepted that it happened. I don't know for sure when or why or how he got me alone. But trusting that my body has kept that score for my brain has become okay with me. It took a while for me to accept this. The memories still haunt, but the anxiety of wishing I knew why, how and where it all happened have finally dropped away. I think that, for me, I was trying to put the story together so that I could believe it to be true and could talk about it without feeling like I was making it up.

Accepting that it just simply happened and that I deserve healing for it, is what's truly important to me now.

I guess my point is that healing is possible without recalling everything with cognitive accuracy. How it felt, how we reacted, and how it triggers us today is really where the healing is.

Would I like to know what really happened, and why? Yes. But only to satisfy my curiosity now. I want to know, but thanks to the books and to my therapist, I no longer feel like I need to know.

Edna,

I have deep desire to send you a big virtual hug. 

What you're going through right now is tugging at my heart strings and I just have to let you know that.

I used to think there was no power in these emojis, but when people send them to me I feel them. So I've learned that when I really feel like a hug would fix things, I send them.

In fact, what the heck? Here's a second one.

Slashy,

I can resonate with the fear you're feeling. When I was more curious than I should have been about my own past, my T said, "I'm a fan of the brain's ability to block things until we're ready to see them." I now have a deep appreciation for why he said that. I've had unpleasant memories appear before I was ready for them before. I empathize with your current state of mind.

It's great when they appear when we're ready, but it's scary when we're not ready for them.

It can be a real tug of war in our brains to want to know the truth and then when it threatens to open up, we get scared again. It was fear that blocked the memory in the first place. I hope you can calm that part of your brain down. Maybe go into a quiet moment and tell your brain it's okay if it wants to put the memories back on the shelf for just a little while longer until you feel ready to look at them.

Just a thought: If music triggered this, maybe music can fix it. Maybe you could surround yourself with music from a happier time in your life. Music has a lot of power. It really does act as a time warp.

You're in my thoughts.
PC