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So, a while ago I joined a support group.  All in all, it's been good.  I've made friends there -- good ones -- and have been building a support system through them.  But I've run into a bit of a snag.  One of them has BPD, and it seems like nothing I do/say around him is the right thing -- I feel like I have to walk on eggshells around him, and every time I don't... He winds up getting upset and throwing some sort of fit about how awful I am to him (I swear I'm not -- I'm one of those people who is overly quick to apologize, even if I'm not sure I've done something wrong).  This is, understandably, pretty triggering for me and it makes me not really want to be around him or be involved with him any more than I have to be.   

Unfortunately, he is, of course, at the center of the group who are all friendly with one another outside the group, and not interacting with him means not interacting with the other people I've come to care a great deal for (and who've come to care a great deal for me as well).  He's also, of course, in a facilitator position for the support group.  So the only way to get away from this cycle of behavior is to abandon my newly formed, and much needed, support system.  And I'm not willing to do that.  There's part of me that feels like doing that is "letting him win", and I don't want to do that.  And there's part of me that recognizes that there has got to be some other option, or way to deal with things, than giving up and disappearing when I need to have friends and a support group to go to. 

Confronting him isn't an option because none of what he's doing is rational, and thus can't be reasoned with.  Avoiding him isn't really an option either, unless I get petty about "if he's going on X outing, then I'm not".  So I'm not really sure what to do.  I feel kind of stuck.  None of the options I've been able to come up with seem like good ones.  But I can't really go on being triggered and walking on eggshells either.  I have to do something.

So, have any of you been in a similar situation?  How did you handle it?  Are there any resources anyone can point me to for help with this? 

Emotophobia is something that SpartanLifeCoach has referenced a time or two, that has really resonated with me.  I have been, over the course of my life, afraid of feeling (or causing anyone else to feel) bad feelings.  I'm working on that, and have been making progress with the assistance of anti-anxiety medication.  However, I thought it might be cool to get a bit of a discussion going here about it, to see what other people's experiences have been.

For me, anger/rage have been my biggest sticking points.  There are very few instances in which I have, historically, been able to really feel my anger (let alone express it) -- and those times are when all my other defenses have been ineffective.  I.E., only when my typical freeze/fawn didn't work, and I was unable to flee. 

My issues around being incapable of becoming angry in most circumstances are three fold -- first, it's not as culturally acceptable for women to express anger, right?  It's "okay" for women/girls to cry, to be anxious, to be scared, etc., but anger isn't generally "allowed" unless it's to protect, say, their children -- and it's definitely not "allowed" when protecting themselves. 

The second part for me is that I was not permitted to express anger (or, indeed, any "negative" emotion) as a child.  Doing so would incite abusive responses (including abandonment, because, well, that's abuse too) from my mother. 

The third part is that the only real model I had for how to express anger was from that same abusive mother.  My dad wasn't around much, and when he was, he didn't get angry very often -- mostly only mildly irate.  I saw her fight with my father and abuse him both verbally and attempts at physically (sometimes with sharp implements), and the cops wound up being called on more than one occasion.  And of course there was how my mother would treat me when she was angry, which, well, Bad Things happened. 

I've had such a huge issue with being afraid to feel and/or express anger that I've been unable to follow through with anger expression exercises in a group therapy that I was part of once.  We were supposed to write down our feelings on a plate with a marker, and then take all of those feelings and funnel them into hurling this plate and breaking it.  I couldn't.  I simply couldn't.  The idea of using any sort of violence (at an inanimate object or otherwise) to express anger was triggering in and of itself, and there was just no way for me to follow through with the exercise. 

So, as I said, I'm working on the emotophobia with the help of anti-anxiety medication.  It's lessening the fear and the catastrophizing that comes along with feeling anger, and so it's becoming easier to feel it.  But I don't know if that effect will go away when I stop taking it (can't take Benzos forever, nor would I want to), and I thought maybe other people might have some advice, or share their experiences with being emotophobic, and how they're working on overcoming it (if they are).

[back]

This may be disjointed, and bounce around a lot -- my brain makes connections in odd ways sometimes, and they don't always translate to neurotypical people.  So I apologize for that in advance.

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When I was first diagnosed with PTSD (and it was just PTSD, because it was before anyone really identified CPTSD as being different), at the age of 25, my therapist at the time kept talking about getting me back to a place where I could feel safe.  "Try to remember back to a time where you felt safe, and visualize that time," she would tell me, as a way to try and manage my panic episodes.  I was perplexed that I couldn't do this thing she was asking of me.  There must be something wrong with me, I thought, that I couldn't remember ever feeling safe.  The whole concept of safety was something with which I just couldn't identify.  And when I tried to express this to my therapist, she was also perplexed.  She was stymied.  She reacted as if there was something wrong with me for not being able to remember or understand the concept of "safe" on a fundamental level. 

After that the treatment switched to trying to deal with my anxiety as if it was unfounded.  As if it were irrational.  But this didn't make sense to me either.  Bad Things had happened to me.  Bad Things happened to people I knew.  Bad Things happened every day around the world.  It was a completely reasonable assumption to make that Bad Things could, and would, happen again in the future.  Finally, in a fit of frustration and most probably an emotional flashback triggered by having my feelings denied and belittled by someone I was supposed to trust, who was supposed to provide me with support and understanding, I yelled at her.  I yelled "Why am I the crazy one for being afraid?  BAD THINGS happen all the time!  Bad Things happen every second of every day!  Why isn't everyone scared of all those things? Why does me being afraid mean that I need treatment, that I'm broken, that I need to be FIXED?  Fix the Bad Things!  Fix the people who do them!  They're the ones that are broken, NOT ME!"  That was my last therapy session for over a decade.  I went off medication not very much longer after that.  I had no treatment since, beyond the work I did on myself through reading and internet searches, until just recently.

I didn't know it at the time, I wasn't aware enough, but that was the first and biggest breakthrough in taking steps towards loving and accepting myself -- towards recognizing that I was having completely normal reactions to a very long string of extremely abnormal situations.   It's still something that I remind myself of, when my inner critic is going wild and accusing me of being "nuts" or "crazy" or "broken".  It's something that I'm reminding myself of now, while writing this.  Because writing these things for random strangers (no offense) to read, publishing it out there on the internet where it could possibly exist forever, or be found by the people who've hurt me... It's a hard thing.  It's an incredibly vulnerable thing, letting people see the "broken" pieces of myself. 

I wasn't allowed to do that, as a child -- let people see the bruised and hurt bits of myself.  At best, I was ignored.  At worst... Well, at worst those bruised and hurt bits were used against me to cause me more pain.  My mother, I'm pretty darned sure, is Cluster B in some way or another.  Narcissistic definitely.  Possibly Borderline and/or Histrionic.  Of course she's never been diagnosed.  She thinks too highly of herself to consult a therapist or psychiatrist for herself.  Everything is always everyone else's fault, somehow.  No one can ever do anything right, because the only right way is not just her way, but to actually be her. 

Where was I going with this?  Oh.  Right.  I wasn't comforted as a child.  At least, I can't remember being comforted.  I'm not even sure I'd have recognized what being comforted looked like if it weren't for seeing it on television.  The idea that someone would hold you as you cried, reassure you, validate you, and tell you that everything would be alright... It's something that was so alien to me.  It's still alien to me.  And yet, it's something that I feel like I need, desperately.  No matter how much I try to give it to myself, it's not the same.   

But I've been able to get back on medication recently, and in taking the anti-anxiety medication I've realized that I have been afraid of my own emotions.  Not just of feeling them, but of what might happen because of them.  Because having feelings meant Bad Things would happen.  Because having feelings would cause other people to have feelings and that meant that Bad Things would happen.  Being freed of that fear, by the medication, even just a little bit, has finally allowed me to get close enough to my own emotions to identify what they are.  It's allowed me to acknowledge and feel my anger.  It's allowed me to finally start grieving for myself.  And that's not something I've really been able to do, before.  So it's a HUGE step forward.

Just throwing this out here to see if anyone else can identify:

My main tool to manage panic, right now while I'm not on meds, is to dissociate.  It's not perfect, but drowning my thoughts/feelings in a TV show is the best medicine I've got at the moment.  I have an appointment with a Psychiatrist in a few days to get on medication, but until then I've been surviving on Netflix and Hulu to calm myself down and allow me to be relatively functional (since I can leave the TV on, and listen to it, while I do chores around the house, work on my art, cook dinner, etc.). 

Today, however, I ran into some technical difficulties with my streaming device, and shows/movies wouldn't load.  Normally that wouldn't bother me too much.  I'm tech savvy, I can usually fix any technical problem.  But, because I was already in a state of high anxiety from a triggering situation earlier, I found myself fumbling, and panicking because I couldn't get it fixed -- and thus, didn't have my dissociative "crutch" to handle the panic, which caused it to sort of spiral out of control. 

Is this sort of thing something any of you have encountered with your "go to" dissociative activities?  I found it so totally disconcerting that not being able to put on a TV show for a half an hour or so could cause me to dissolve into such a panicky meltdown... That alone caused fear -- the idea that I'm dependent on a television screen to be able to function is... Well, the whole Inner Critic thing goes into overdrive over that. 

I know that I'm doing the best I can, with what I have available to me.  I know that I'm working SO HARD on getting better, and healing, and being functional.  My T tells me every time I see her how well I'm doing, how proud she is that I'm doing as much as I am.  But damn.  Not being able to dissociate, not having that distraction from my thoughts and feelings, scared the living daylights out of me for a little bit -- at least, until I found a work-around and got a TV show going. 

I'm still a little... Shook up?  Disturbed?  Upset?  I'm not sure of which emotion, exactly, I'm feeling other than fear, over it.  There's probably some shame mixed in, because ICr won't shut up... I do know I'm shocked over my reaction.  I knew I depended on TV to help manage my emotions, I just hadn't realized to what extent until today. 

My PCP has prescribed me Prazosin to treat the nightmare/sleep part of my CPTSD.  Has anyone else ever taken it for that?  Any experiences with it?

She warned me that it can cause low blood pressure (from what I've read, it's primary use is as a blood pressure medication), but that it's shown really good results in trials at helping with nightmares and overall PTSD symptoms of anxiety and hyperarousal/hypervigilance, without all the addictive properties of a benzo. 

I pick up my prescription today, and I'll post back with updates about it in case the information is useful to people.  In the mean time, I'm curious if it's helped anyone else, or if there are any strange side effects that aren't listed in the standard pamphlet that I might wanna be aware of -- for example, Topamax gave me partial tongue paralysis and my doc was stumped and had to go searching through the actual clinical trial data to find out that it was a side effect that had indeed been reported before but was just so rare that it was left out of the patient/prescriber information. 

I was wondering if anyone had any experience with keeping an accomplishment journal, and how well it worked out, if it had any impact?

I know that, for me, one of the things I struggle with is being aware of the good things I do, daily. I easily get caught up with critical thoughts about how little I've accomplished, what I'm not doing that I should be, or how much there is left to do on a "to do" list, and forget about all the little victories I've had.

So I was thinking: what if I started keeping a journal of everything I accomplish each day? Like a "to do" list, except that it's all things that are done, that I can throw in the face of that critical thought process? Something to remind me of all the things I can be proud of myself for?

I know some people who keep "happy jars" where they write down things that made them happy over the course of a year, and go back and read everything at the end, and that seemed like an interesting idea too, but on a longer term sort of basis.

What do you guys think?

I've been struggling with how to put this question into words for a while now.  I don't want to trigger anyone, obviously, and trying to ask about this without talking about the abuses I've suffered is difficult.  I'll try to be vague, and hope that gives enough background without setting anyone else off.

...

For the past several months, I have noticed that doing things for myself, by myself, has been setting off panic attacks.  Sometimes they're small and I can talk myself down from them.  Sometimes, however, they're full blown meltdowns.  I thought, at first, that it was me adjusting to my partner not being around (and now, us being separated -- that happened over the holidays), but I'm realizing that there's a lot more to it than that.

As a child, I suffered from extreme emotional and physical neglect from both parents, in addition to verbal and physical abuse from my mom (who I wholeheartedly believe is NPD, but of course there's no official diagnosis on that because everything is always everyone else's fault and she's blameless <eyeroll>).  I was the care-giver for my younger siblings.  I made sure chores were done, mouths had food in them, homework got taken care of, baths were had, cuts were bandaged, tears were hugged and kissed away.  Physical and emotional needs were things that other people got met by me, not the other way around, and if I wanted mine met, I had to do that myself too.

So now, going back to being the only one who is caring for me, it's bringing all that back up.  It's hard, because everything I read, everything I've been taught about how to manage my mental and physical health, all the advice I get from anyone (even my therapist) says "make sure to practice self care".  But what do I do when self care itself is triggering?  What do I do when even self-soothing can be triggering??

It's not just loneliness.  I'm not actually lonely.  I don't, by and large, want to be around other people.  And it's not just a "wanting other people to care for me" thing.  Because I'm sick to death of being reliant on other people.  I want to do it myself.  But doing it myself?  It's causing EF's and panic attacks.

I walked to the corner store two days ago, to run an errand, and on the way back, I wound up in a flashback to a situation of what CPS would have termed "child abandonment" had they been called, and then when I tried to self soothe myself out of it I ended up in a full blown panic attack -- tight chest, hyperventilating, heart pounding -- because self soothing just reminded me of the "having to do it all myself" that the EF was about and intensified it instead of lessening it... I ended up having to just keep walking until it passed on it's own, hoping I didn't run into anyone on the sidewalk.   

Ugh.  Has anyone else ever had any experiences with self care being triggering?  Or have any advice about what to do about it?

[on occasion]

This is something I plan on discussing with my therapist, but I thought I would talk about it here to see if anyone else had any similar experiences, advice, or thoughts on the subject too.

Recently, my partner has been complaining that I am too dependent on him.  And, if I'm honest with myself, he's right.  I used to be fairly self sufficient, and now I'm very much not.  Part of my lack of self sufficiency is illness related -- I have physical illnesses that impact my mobility and ability to carry out certain basic tasks -- but the level to which I have become dependent upon him is out of proportion to that, to the degree that I have been struggling with feelings of being completely helpless to do most things for myself.  Even things that I really can do, and always have been able to do.  It's not fair to him, nor is it healthy for me to continue on that way, so I've been trying to figure out what on earth is going on so that I can own my part, and hopefully break the cycle. 

It seems to start with a valid need for help.  For example, if I'm sick, or having a flare up of my physical illness, and actually can't do something myself (or it's unduly difficult or painful for me to do myself).  Since "needing help" is something that is a trigger for me, I often do not ask for assistance.  Instead, I complain about how hard X or Y is, or how I "can't" do such and such (hello inner critic, when the "I can't" starts coming out, I know you're the one talking).  I recognize this as unhealthy behavior, and it's something I've been working on for years.

However, my partner's response to me complaining has historically been to jump in and just take care of the things I'm complaining about.  Even if I've told him that I don't need help, or that he can't help.  This, I'm realizing, is also unhealthy behavior -- not just for him, but for me too, as it shifts the responsibility for my needs being met away from me and onto him instead. 

If it were a one time sort of thing, it wouldn't be problematic.  We all deserve to have nice things done for us without us having to ask for them on occasion.  But once he's jumped in and done something for me in a singular instance, he just kind of keeps on doing it forever.  Which is really unhealthy for both of us, because it prevents me from learning how to overcome or get around the obstacles in taking care of myself, and uses up resources he should be using to take care of himself. 

Not only that, but it reinforces my feelings of being helpless -- because if it's something he thinks I could do for myself, why wouldn't he expect me to do it?  He must think I'm helpless too, so my feeling helpless must be "true" and not just something my inner critic is lying to me about. 

In addition, I am not forced to learn how to differentiate between the things I actually need help with, and the things I can do myself but are just hard.  And, I'm not forced to learn when, and how, to ask for help.  Both of which are really important skills that I need to have.  In fact, it's encouraged me to "forget" a lot of the progress that I had made in that arena prior to my relationship with him. 

Now, after being together 10 years, he's finally realizing how dependent I've become, has been very angry about it, and is blaming me for it.  Which, is hard to accept, when he's not outwardly admitting his own role.  Because I never set out to be this dependent upon him.  I feel like it's something he's encouraged me to do, through his own behavior. 

The thing about it all is... I'm having difficulty differentiating between what my inner critic says and what reality is.  My inner critic is telling me that it is my fault, and all my fault, because I didn't put my foot down and insist that he not help me no matter how upset he got about it. And it sounds reasonable, what it's saying.  Almost.  The "all" part is the part that doesn't seem reasonable.

But is denying the "all" part just me trying to shirk accountability?  Or is that "you're just trying to shirk responsibility" part just more of my inner critic?  Is assigning fault just pointless all around?  Maybe I just need to focus on how to break the cycle, rather than who's responsible for it? 

Hi.

I'm Tess.

I thought, for a long time, that I had my illness managed and that I was doing well at healing.  But this year has been a wreck of a year, and I'm realizing that I'm not as "better" as I thought I was.  There has been a lot of loss, for me, recently.  And it's triggered all my abandonment and trust issues.  I've been in near constant flashback states for the past few months, without being entirely aware of it, and it's caused me to lash out at my partner of 10 years in ways that are now breaking our relationship.  I'm realizing that I have been dependent upon him to give me all the things I did without as a child, provide all the emotional support, safety, and stability that I needed, instead of working on learning how to provide those things for myself.  And I have been horrible to him when he finally just couldn't provide them anymore. The decline of that relationship -- the first relationship where my needs ever came close to being met -- has just intensified the abandonment issues, and I'm having a really hard time staying functional.

I've been seeking help, since realizing.  I've started therapy again, and I'm seeking medication support as well.  I even joined an in-person support group.  And I found this place, too.  So there's that, right?