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No need to feel silly.  We are here to help!

I agree with arpy's advice to definitely take things one at a time.  Feeling like you have to get all of those things done at once can definitely feel overwhelming.   I also find what helps me is to think about which of those tasks seems most overwhelming and causes me the most stress to think about.  Sometimes, I find, if I get that most stress-inducing thing done first, the other things won't seem so bad in comparison after that.  On the other hand, if you are having one of those days where you just can't (and we all have those!), start with some of the simple things like the laundry.  While you fold, can do something nice for yourself like listening to music or watching something fun on TV, and then when you see the big stack of folded clothes at the end, it can feel extra special because you have visible proof of what you accomplished.  And I know for me, sometimes, that feeling of accomplishment can get me on a roll to tackle the next thing on the list.

But also be kind to yourself if it's all too stressful and you need to put these tasks off for a day or two.  Just the same as it would be okay to put off some tasks for a few days if you had a cold or the flu, if you are having a bad time emotionally, it's okay to take the time off from getting stuff done for a few days if you need to gather your mental forces.  Give yourself permission to do that.  Sometimes just giving yourself that permission can help diffuse the stress.   

Sending you lots of positive energy.

October 5, 2015

Dear Dad -

On today, my birthday, I am giving myself the gift of setting myself free from family relationships that serve no good purpose for me.  This past August, I was diagnosed with complex post traumatic stress disorder. (CPTSD)  This is a type of PTSD suffered by people who survived abusive childhoods.  I've actually suffered from CPTSD for over 30 years, but it's only in the past few months that I've finally had a name to put to what is wrong with me and why taking antidepressants and such has never really helped much except in a temporary, cursory way.

We can debate endlessly whether or not I was beaten or merely "spanked" or "disciplined" as a child.  The physical abuse I suffered was really a small part of what has damaged my psyche.  Far greater was the emotional abuse - at 7 and 8 years old, being made to sit for days, sometimes weeks on end on a chair in the middle of my room to contemplate how I could be a better person, usually for some minor infraction like forgetting to change the empty toilet roll in the bathroom or forgetting a fork at a place setting when setting the table.  Being passed to my mom and then my grandmother like some hot potato, a horrible burden no one wants.  Being told that it was wished that I could be sent away to a foster home.   Being convinced by the behavior and words of the adults who were supposed to care for me and love me that I was a terrible person not worthy of care or love.  So much of my life, I've struggled with self-esteem, not believing that I deserve nice things or that I deserve people to treat me with respect or kindness.  It's affected so much of my life - I've put up with bad bosses, bad relationships because I never learned that I deserve better.  No more.

Since becoming a young adult, I've maintained a limited relationship of fake normalcy with you.  We hug awkwardly when we see each other in person.  We say, "I love you," at the end of phone calls, but I don't really mean it.  I suspect you don't either.  I just say it on rote because those are the words one is supposed to say.  As a young adult, I think I agreed to this because I held onto the fantasy that someday I would be accepted, some day I would get the unconditional love that was missing when I was a child, and somehow getting that love would make me a whole person again.  And as I've grown older and realized that no amount of pretend love from the outside will ever heal me.  For me, healing is just going to come from hard work that I will need to do myself.  Now, I just continue with the fake relationships because it's what one does.  It didn't occur to me, until my therapist pointed it out to me, that I have a choice.  A choice not to have a relationship with people who have hurt me grievously and with whom continuing contact causes me ongoing stress.  Because it does.  Every time birthdays and holidays roll around, I am seized with dread and anxiety at what should be a happy time because I know I'll be expected to speak to all the people who hurt me so much when I was young, and pretend like I don't remember all of that or like it doesn't matter now.  Except that it does.

So, with this letter, I am letting you know I want no further contact with you.  No visits, no calls, no voicemails, no emails, no letters or cards or gifts.  Anything that is sent will not be read or listened to.   I want to move on and be free of the ties that bind me to that emotionally malnourished past.   

Sincerely,
G

It's not really good to ask about "how therapy went" people can be shocked when you tell them that you spent time discussing them and how emotionally distant they are.

This is true.  I definitely give my husband the "abridged" version of my therapy sessions.  When I told him I was seeking out therapy, his first response was to sigh and say, only half-jokingly, that he supposed the therapist was going to tell me to dump him.  I have to spend a lot of energy boosting his confidence that the therapy is about healing me and giving me more tools to deal with the ongoing ramifications of what happened to me when I was young.  It's not about disparaging him. 

When he says he wants to fix you, I interpret as I want you to stay the same but be happy

Definitely this.  He thinks "staying the same" is good because from his perspective, things have been good.  He doesn't know how many feeling I've been hiding from him to avoid judgment, avoid a fight, avoid crying, etc.  He only sees the surface and thinks the surface "ain't broke, so why mess with it?"  I've been trying to get through to him that asking me to say the same means asking me to stay in a lot of internal pain, that I'm still feeling that pain, even if I try to hide it on the outside.  We're making progress on this in baby steps, but it's hard.   

Thanks for your feedback, steamy.  You make some very astute points.

Mourningdove - I don't think you are crazy.  I've had a somewhat similar experience.  (Possible triggers follow.)

I suffered CSA at the hands of my step-grandfather between the ages of 11 and 13 that I, unfortunately, have always remembered all too vividly.  But, when I was in my early 20's, and trying to get help for depression related to that CSA and related to physical and emotional abuse inflicted by my father between the ages of 3-9, I started remembering additional CSA inflicted by my father when I was a toddler, 3-4 years old.  At the time I recalled it quite vividly and was able to describe it in detail to the therapist I was seeing at the time.  In a misguided attempt to get some kind of admission/explanation/apology from my father, I confronted him with my memories.  He denied any wrong-doing and questioned my sanity.  So then, of course, the self-doubt started creeping in - was I making this up?  And because I needed to get on with my life, I think I just kind of packed it all away again and sub-consciously willed myself to re-forget it.  And now, I'm in 40's, and about a year ago, I had to go back to the house where my second round of CSA occurred (a place I hadn't been for several years) and it triggered me in a major way to where all of this stuff is coming back up again. And some of the stuff that's coming back up is the stuff with my dad from when I was a toddler.  It's hazy now - the kind of memories that float around the edge of your consciousness, but slip away if you try to focus too hard on the details, but it's coming back again and it feels familiar, so I think it is really real.

(End triggers) 

Anyway, not to make this about me, but just to say, having had a similar experience, I don't think you are crazy at all and you have my deepest empathy as someone whose been there.   And I'm so sorry that your M is not able to give you the love and support you need.  I know the pain of that all too well, too.  ((Hugs))

Thanks for all of your kind and reassuring words, Dutch Uncle. 

Could you at some time when you are not really in need of a hug ask him for one? If he then can't, it won't be bad, but if he can (and at some point he undoubtedly will) he'll experience that hugging you when you ask for it is actually very pleasant  , and that there is indeed nothing going on that he needs to 'fix'.

For the record, he's very happy to give me a hug any other time I ask for one, even if it's just because.  It just seems to be specifically when I'm crying that he doesn't want to.   I think he is really worried that a hug while I'm crying is somehow rewarding or encouraging unproductive behavior.  I've got to figure out a way to communicate to him that comforting me when I'm sad is not encouraging me to be more sad.  I don't like being sad either.  Rather, I see it as reassuring me that others still love me and I still have value and I'm not alone, even if I'm sad.  I mean, yes, it's true that in the absence of anything else, I am enough, but it's still not bad to know that someone else cares.

Thanks for the virtual hug.

the use of that word 'indulgence' with regard to emotion and showing emotional pain made me think.
i just wondered what his growing up situation was like, becos i know in families there's often taboos on certain emotions that colour the way people regard them. which may in turn colour the way he feels able (or unable) to cope with your emotional pain. (sort of like the old 'big boys don't cry' thing). underneath, he might be quite freaked out by it when it happens to you.

That's actual interesting to think about.  My husband grew up with an alcoholic mother and a completely co-dependent father.  I don't know if it was as bad when he was growing up, but from what I've witnessed over the past 20 years, when his mother is drinking (which nowadays is really almost always), by the time she's several drinks in, she will end up weepy and bemoaning how mistreated she is and how unfair everything in the world is to her and so on and so forth.  She's a narcissist and extremely unkind to pretty much everyone around her (e.g. she once had the nerve to tell me that she could see why nobody in my family wanted me when I was a child), so it's a bit hard to have empathy for her when she's crying, especially since so many of her problems trace back to her drinking, which she refuses to address.  So now, in thinking about it, it might actually be the case that my husband's reaction to "weeping female" is to think of his mother. And then there's his dad, who just keeps enabling his mom's drinking even though she clearly needs help and he's clearly miserable and has told us as much. We've encouraged him to seek counseling for himself, even if she won't go, but he refuses and he also refuses to divorce her.   I think my husband sees his dad as very weak and not much of a man for enabling his mom to the extent he does.  So that may be why he thinks it's a bad thing to "indulge" me in my crying, even though my tears aren't coming from the bottom of a wine bottle.   Wow!  This is a big revelation - I can't believe I've never put this together before.  I don't know quite what to do with this, but it's an interesting set of thoughts.

Arpy1, you are so astute!

Thanks for your words, Jdog.  It was especially good to read this:

I am glad that I stuck it out as our relationship is better than ever now (and I continue working on myself) but those were rough times.

My mind has been swirling with fear that I'm going to lose my relationship - either because I walk out because I feel like I need more support or because he decides he can't take it anymore.  It's good to hear that couples can survive this.

Thanks, fairyslipper.  It's reassuring to read the words of someone who has been there and get it.

I had a really upsetting confrontation with my husband on Friday. I had my appointment with my therapist right after work.  In my therapy session, we dug pretty deep into some pretty painful stuff and the thoughts were still churning around when I got home.  My husband asked how my session was and I gave him the brief recap, which was fine.  We ate dinner and then he went to the kitchen to do the dishes and some tears from the painful stuff that was stirred up earlier in my therapy session started flowing.  Pretty soon I was sobbing quite heavily.  My husband came out and didn't even acknowledge my tears.  He just asked if our pet rabbit had had his medicine.   And when I shook my head no, he just went about getting the medicine, completely ignoring my emotional state.

I went upstairs to the bedroom, sobbing harder and harder.  And sitting there on my bed, I realized that I was shifting from tears of grieving about the stuff I had discussed with my T earlier in the day to an EF of how it felt when my grandmother (whose house I lived at from ages 9 to 17) used to ignore my pain and suffering, first when she knew I was being molested by her husband and did nothing to help stop it, and all through my high school years, when I now realize I was already starting to manifest symptoms of CPTSD and spent a lot of time crying, raging, wanting to hurt myself, and begging to be taken to therapy and she just shrugged and said she didn't know what I was talking about.  So, armed with this new self-awareness that part of what was making me so sad was feeling that my emotional needs weren't being met right now, in the present, in a very big step for me, I went back downstairs.  I asked my husband why he was ignoring the fact that I was obviously in a lot of pain.  I told him it hurt me that he didn't even ask what was wrong or if he could help or if I could use a hug. 

He got very defensive (crossed arms, keeping his laptop between me and him at all times) and pointed out that the previous week I had told him he can't just fix my problem. (This had been in response to my telling him I was feeling very isolated and lonely, but then telling him I felt bullied when his response to that was to march me in front of the computer and watch while I signed up for a class I had been considering taking, his rationale being that you can't sit there and feel sorry for yourself for being lonely if you aren't actively trying to do something about it.)  And so, I told him that yes, in the sense that there's no magic wand he can wave and instantly make my sadness go away forever, that's true, but that doesn't mean I don't need any emotional support when I'm going through this process of coming to terms with my CPTSD.  He says he finds it too frustrating that he's not allowed to try to "fix" me in the way that he knows how, but instead is just supposed to indulge me in letting me cry and feel bad.  He doesn't want to be part of the latter.  And he even asked me if I should stop going to therapy since, in his eyes, it just seems to be making me more upset.  I did get him to agree that next time I'm crying like that, he'll at least ask if I need a hug or if I need to just be left alone to cry it out.  But his tone seemed very grudging and condescending to me.  And he didn't give me a hug that evening, which was all I wanted.

I know it's hard to live with a person who is often sad and crying a lot, especially if you've never experienced depression or anything similar to have a point of reference.  And I know he didn't sign up for this, but I didn't either.  And I'd like to think I'd be more supportive if our roles were reversed.  Is it too much to ask?

Lately, though, I've been thinking about how much better my recovery might have been, years ago, if CPTSD had been better recognized.  For example, when I went NC with my uNPD mother, now more than twenty-five years ago, the label didn't yet exist.  Prevailing clinical wisdom to "avoid cutoff," so by going NC, I was going against the advice of my T at the time.

This really resonates for me.  Twenty years ago, when I was first trying to get help, even though I lived in a major metropolitan area, it was really hard to find anyone willing to help me with my type of trauma, and no one in the "free/sliding-scale" arena, which I needed at the time as a grad student.  And I unfortunately succumbed to the conventional wisdom of avoiding cut-off
(you might regret it later, what if you have kids and they want to know their grandparents, blah, blah, blah). So while I have geographically distanced myself from my FOO, I've had 20 years of going into panic mode every time I see one of their names on the caller ID or a letter in the mail.  I'm so wishing I had gone NC back in the day and now grappling with how to tell people  with whom I've had a fake and terribly uncomfortable relationship for 20 years that I don't want to do it any more.

Thanks for your feedback.  It's always good to know I'm not alone in my feelings.

Recently though I have been confronted with several big losses, and it has made me apathetic as far as self-care is concerned.
I'm still looking for a T, and am pondering if I should take one who 'advertises' herself as being part of a research study on complex grief/mourning. It's the one with the closest description to cPTSD in my area.

So sorry to hear about your losses.  Sending you healing thoughts for dealing with those.

Regarding the therapist, it can't hurt to check her out.  It sounds like she might have the right skills.   And if you don't get the feeling that she's a good fit after an initial session or two, you can always move on and keep looking. 

my current next little (huge,for me) step is to learn that it is ok to care for myself and protect myself from abuse. sounds daft, i know, but i never knew before.

Not daft in the least!  That I can stand up for myself and protect myself is a very recent revelation for me, too.  I had never realized the extent to which I had internalized my family's view that I was worthless, a burden to be passed from family member to family member like some hot potato that no one wanted.  I always believed, well into adulthood, that if other people were bullying me they must be right and I must have done something to deserve it. It really takes an adjustment of world view to say "Enough!"  So, good on you.

And thanks for the good reminder to just focus on the next step or two.  When I feel so miserable, I can't help but want to get out of this rough patch as soon as possible, but baby steps. 

Thanks for your words arpy.  And you aren't ranting at all.  You said some very wise and comforting things. 

Grieving my stolen past is hard.  I don't have any other experience with grief.  When various abusive grandparents have passed away, I've felt nothing but relief and have not had to shed any tears.  So, I really have zero idea how to do this or what to expect.  But I know that people carry on after losing people close to them, so I imagine I'll pass through this period, too.  It's just seemed to be getting worse rather than better over the past few months, which scares me a little.  Until the past few weeks I've been able to maintain my "everything's just fine" public persona, but it's starting to crack.  I've had a few bouts of tears at work that, thank god, have gone unnoticed by coworkers.  And I totally lost my cool and almost came to blows with a recalcitrant printer the other day, which is normally not my style at all.

Living in the present is hard for me when the present just seems like a gaping abyss of misery and dreariness threatening to swallow me up.  The only thing that has kept me going my whole life so far is having something to look forward to.  "Eyes on the prize" has always been my mantra. Get to university, get a job, get a house . . .   When my therapist tells me that it will get better, we just don't know what "better" looks like for me yet, it makes me despair.   It's so hard not to have some concrete picture in my mind of what I am working toward and to know what the steps are to get there.  I feel like I'm flopping around like a fish out of water.

How do others of you deal with feelings of frustration about feeling like half your life (or more) has been wasted not being a complete, well person?  One of the things that frustrates me the most about my cPTSD is that I now at 43, only have half a life left, give or take.  I've wasted a full half of a life being broken, not living up to my potential, hindered by things that were beyond my control, but because I didn't get help sooner, so much time is gone.  At this point I'll never be a rock star or a professional dancer or a famous artist. I'll never even get the chance to try in a meaningful way.   I'll never have kids.  I'm stuck in a dead end job I hate because I didn't have the courage to try for something more; I didn't believe I was worth more.   I've wasted half my life and so many doors of opportunity are forever closed.  And I hate those Pollyanna types who tell you it's never too late.  I know people who say things like that mean well and are trying to put a positive spin on things, but really, there are things it is truly too late for, and pretending otherwise is a bit delusional.  I can't go back to school to pursue a different career now, unless I want to incur $60,000+  in debt that I'll likely never be able to pay off.  I can't be young and beautiful and have the world at my feet again.  I can't go back in a time machine and make different choices about friendships and relationships that have impacted my life for the worse over the years and have a do-over so that I can maybe put myself on a better path.  I can only pick up the tattered remains of what is left of my life and try to cobble something decent together out of it.  And I can put on my fake smile and tell myself the lie that these leftover bits of life are satisfying, are good enough.  But it will never be as good as a whole life lived fully, secure in love, fearless, confident - all those things I never got to be.   I just can't make these thoughts sit right in my head and my therapist hasn't really said anything useful in this regard except the generic platitude "things will get better."

Welcome.

At times anxiety disorders have more in common with diabetes then psychological disorders, true understanding and what it means is beyond anyone not suffering with one... and pills just mute emotions needed to be processed to repair damage.. its barbaric.

This really resonates with me.  I was misdiagnosed for years as having depression and bipolar disorder and was told I had to take this pill, that pill, a higher dosage of a zillion different pills if I wanted to get better.  And the pills just made me feel worse and the psychiatrist just kept tut-tutting and insisting we just had to keep trying to find the magic formula of pills to take to make everything all better.  And no one wanted to just talk to me about what I'd been through so that I can re-process it a healthier way.  In some ways, it's like being re-vicitimized all over again in a way and I felt like a failure at getting better because I couldn't make all the pills work for me.   

I look forward to seeing what other insights you have to share.