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I went to my first appointment with the new T today. I like her even more in person than on the phone. It's a good fit. I felt comfortable right off. I asked her plenty of questions which I found on the sidran.org website about seeking a therapist.

I had to create a timeline for my life. Now that was triggering for me. I made some major connections on that timeline. Going to the appointment was triggering too. I had severe anxiety attacks for over twenty-four hours, bad enough that I couldn't eat normally for a whole day prior to the appointment. I think the number one reason for that was all of the women Ts who violated me in various ways. And here this T was a woman. As we ended the first appointment, I told her the reason for my anxiety. She told me that was understandable considering all of the violations of authority I had with these Ts.

I think I'll find other reasons for my anxiety as I go along in therapy. I've got some heavy duty issues to work through and I know it.

Our first therapeutic appointment is in two weeks.

Well, now that's changed again.

Talk about weird.

This is weird.

That therapist with 25 plus years of experience with PTSD and ritual abuse survivors just called me and apologized for not getting back to me sooner. I still like her. We're laughing with each other on the phone.

Anyway, the receptionist at their office suddenly left and that's why there was a long time before she got back to me. That meant that phone calls were going on unanswered, etc. They got that squared away. Phew!

Now the hurdle is the cost. It's more than I can afford. The therapist is determined to make this happen for me and will get back to me again with hopefully a new cost. If not, I might have to ask my husband and/or son to help me with the cost. I've always paid for my appointments with the money I get from SSDI. It's not much but it always covered my appointments and then some.

*TW*

I thought I found a great therapist while searching for one. She has loads of experience, more than 20 years, with ritual abuse. That's what happened to me. Then suddenly she disappears from the counseling group. I was stunned and greatly disappointed. No return calls. No contact even from the manager of that counseling group. I just don't get that kind of attitude.

So I decided to return to my former therapist. He's not a trauma specialist. Though I think if he can't deal with what I'm working on he might ask to refer me to someone else in his group. The best part is he knows my history. And secondly it's a man. I do better with men than women. He confirmed to me that I was indeed a ritual abuse survivor. That shocked me. I hadn't expected him to know that. I had only two therapists before him tell me this. Still I disbelieved it because it didn't involve satanism. And it didn't make sense that seeing serial murders could have anything to do with ritual abuse.

I too was scapegoat and blamed for everything....

I was the emotional/mental scapegoat in my family. A brother was the physical scapegoat. We both got blamed for everything that went wrong.

Everyone was fooled by the facade in our extended family

Same here. We looked as if we were the perfect family.

My mother had more than one PD. Her other fed into the NPD and was OCPD (perfectionism). From the outside looking in our family looked perfectly normal. It was far from that on the inside.

While giving my brother everything because he was the fair haired boy golden child.

My oldest and youngest brothers were the Golden children. They received whatever they needed in the way of praise, support, breaks in life, the benefit of the doubt, and never any ridiculing or bullying. My oldest brother become a weapon of my mother, attacking me and also my friends. 

...was told so as well that nothing was happening like I said.

Was always told I had a great imagination. Later told that she was telling me I was a liar rather that I was creative. A load of BS. She was calling me a liar. When I confronted my older brother about CSA my whole family protected him especially her. After all he was the top Golden Child. 

I had to relocate to another city to get away from the abuse.

Yes I had to do the same thing and then cut off all FOO ties except the brother who was scapegoated. I recently let that relationship go as well because it was nothing. He only emailed me twice a year, birthday and New Year's Day to milk me for information for the rest of the FOO. I had enough of the games.

I tried to say there were good times but some drama always erased any tiny morsel of good.

I can relate to that so much. The good times were punctuated with stabs from my GC and possibly N older brother and my N mother.

Coming out of denial about my father

That changed my whole life back in 2005. The moment I accepted I had a different father than my brothers I started integrating my DID. My father was/is a psychopath/narcissist.

I will be 50 soon and I feel so empty at times.

Wow can I relate to this. I turned 64 this year and spent almost half of my life in therapy of some sort.  I still feel empty at times too.

Thanks
12nice

Glad to see you here, 12nice. It's hard writing about this stuff and it helps.


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I also answered based on my present situation. I scored 45; self care and blame vs accountability in green; abuse awareness, detachment, and anger awareness yellow; support network and realistic view of family red.

Thank you Blueberry! And thank you for the hugs.

I don't expect to get anything from her because I don't think she cares. Besides I don't really want to continue with her charades about the relationship.

Yes, Bailey was my best friend for the last almost nine years. He was also a therapy dog though not registered. Bailey knew exactly what to do to calm me when anger started to roil up within me. He'd come behind me in the kitchen and press his body against my legs. Bailey was a big boy, 32 inches at the shoulders, so him leaning into me like that felt sooooo goood. I miss my big boy. He had a big heart too. Loved everybody he met and they loved him and on him. So much for dogs not wanting and liking to be hugged; Bailey loved hugs of all kinds especially those who got down on the floor with him.

I ended a relationship, my only friendship in the last 12 years, because she had Histrionic PD, Borderline PD, and bipolar disorder. I failed to see that the relationship was based on her lies and needing to be the center of my attention from the very beginning. It took a while before she shared about her diagnoses. In addition she was stealing from stores and telling me about it. That confused and angered me especially when she did those things while talking on her cellphone with me.

Part of the dynamics of our relationship was sharing with each other about our childhood abuse. As time went on though she told me she could no longer listen to my abuse. I could definitely understand that. I shared about my father's criminal acts and what I discovered about him. I think the most annoying thing about the sharing was her trying to get me to prove what happened to me. I never once asked her to prove anything that happened to her. So I stopped telling her about my childhood. I only talked about present day situations. However, she then stepped up her sharing about her own childhood abuse. We'd often have conversations where she shared non-stop for three-quarters of the time. I confronted her about that and told her that wasn't fair and I didn't agree with it. That didn't go well because as someone with Histrionic PD she needed to be the center of my attention.

One time she ripped me off for a design job I did for her. She never paid me for it even though I asked for the money. She was super stingy with her money.

The last straw for me was when my dog was dying of osteosarcoma. She called me up one day and told me the reason she hadn't been calling me: She didn't want to hear about his death. After that conversation which was mostly about her woes and worries, I decided it was time to end the relationship. She had again defined the parameters for sharing and they only included what she was wanting to hear and to talk about her troubles, her physical ailments, and past abuse.

I thought of writing to her (snail mail) about why I cut off the relationship. What do you think? Let it lie as is or send a letter?

I didn't remember most of my childhood until summer of 1988 when I got triggered by a puddle of water in the bottom of a boat. Then memories flooded through. I had a second flooding of memories after my mother died in 2010. Those were even more revealing than the first memories.

I am alone now, no family, no friends and feeling fragile.

***TW***

I can so relate. I'm an older woman. Cut off ties with my FOO in 1988. I recently decided to end a relationship with a narc friend who had bipolar and borderline PD. That leaves me friendless. And my dog died. He was a wonderful buddy.

If it wasn't for my hubby and his support I'd be completely alone. We will have been married for 32 years in September.

Right now I'm feeling as if I'm slip sliding away from everything. I plan to go back to therapy sooner than later. It's been a 25 year slog before knowing about C-PTSD, which explains much of what I'm feeling. As a friend on another forum said to me, "You're going to need to see someone who's very experienced in trauma and PTSD." So far I've only found one such person close to me.

I answered based on my past not present situation and got 80, red across all of the categories. I know I'm doing better now.

I had DID poly-fragmented, with three layers of alters and fragments. I am now integrated. I still dissociate though and use that more as a tool for different abilities I have.

I originally self-diagnosed after a woman noticed me switching during an ACDF (anonymous) meeting. She suggested a book to me which was about someone's experience with DID. Back then it was called MPD. The woman was in school studying to be a psychologist and had DID herself. I read the book and recognized myself in it immediately. I was officially diagnosed about six months later by a therapist.

There are many different forms of DID. Some people only have alters and no fragments. Some people only have fragments. Some people have fragmented emotions. And there's many more forms beyond that.

Hello again, Hope and Spirals!

My very vivid "school dreams" are back with a vengeance. I recall them in vivid detail upon waking. It's like my chronic nightmare is a reliving of just one of the traumatic aspects of my life. I've had such a variety of traumas over the years (many much worse than teaching), but my sleeping mind seems fixated on this one.

My therapist suggested that my childhood traumatic experiences left me constantly feeling observed and judged by others and feeling that I was never good enough. So, it makes sense that my chronic nightmare consists of being observed and judged inadequate in my role as a teacher- even though I am no longer a teacher.

I know this is an old topic which no one has replied to in a while.

Bring em all in,
I can so much relate to this post. I've got a code system down for my nightmares. If I have a nightmare about going to either nursery school or nursing school or both of them combined it's a definite clue that it's a memory. Of course there are other nightmares where I know they are memories. The reason for me on nursing school themes is that during the time I attended I traveled to an area of the country where my abuse took place. Though at the time I had no idea it occurred there. I got triggered on the trip and had anxiety/panic attacks the entire time. When I returned to nursing school I was totally messed up. I had my first breakdown.

Nursery school nightmares are similar in that my Nmother lied about me going to nursery school with my brother. I never went to school with him. Instead she was forced to drop me off with my psychopathic Nfather. I didn't know he was my father back them. I nicknamed him The Crazy Man because I witnessed him doing crazy things to people.

I write down all of my nightmares which fall within my guidelines as memories.

Hi asyouwish,
Yes, I've got the nightmares. I had one this morning triggered by my birthday. With this one I had a racing heart and breathlessness.

What I do is look for signs that would tell me this is a memory nightmare rather than a nightmare. I've learned the differences after many years of experience. Everybody is different when it comes to deciphering the difference between them. Then I write the nightmares down in my journal and that makes things make sense. It also gets it out of my mind and frees it, somewhat.

Old Hag Syndrome? Sleep paralysis?

I must've been my Nmother's worst nightmare. I had a highly developed inner life because I was poly-fragmented DID which started at age three. I also playacted out the abuse by my APD/Nfather. Playacting was internal and with dolls/toys. And on top of that I was/am an introvert. She had a definite hatred toward me because I wasn't there for her.

When I first started to remember what happened in my childhood loads of rage surfaced. At the time we had a basement and I'd go down there and scream and bash and throw things. We changed out a toilet and I got to destroy it with a sledgehammer.

It took me years, and I mean years to make sense of my life, the thoughts in my head and my uncontrollable feelings. And I'm still figuring it out. I learned about complex PTSD two days ago and I was relieved.

My first awakening was when I finally figured out my father was a textbook narcissist and psychopath.

This is a second awakening, finally understanding the depth of the damage and identifying how it affects me on a day to day basis. Learning that it isn't normal to think, after every human interaction, how stupid I sound and how worthless I am... it's overwhelming.

It's also terrifying because I've defined myself with that voice.

Wow! I've been through the same type of thing.

My father was/is also a textbook psychopath which automatically makes him a narcissist. He was a serial killer and my main perpetrator. I didn't find this all out until 2012 when memories flooded after my mother's death.

One thing my last therapist had me do was write a piece of work in my father's voice. I'm a writer. Once I did that, I no longer identified myself with my father's voice. His voice was no longer in my head. I had transferred him out of me and onto paper with words. I finally saw that I'm not my father.