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One of the big issues I am being forced to deal with now (and I do mean forced -- I hate dealing with emotions -- but it's affecting my sleep now) is emotionally trusting/connecting with others. Basically, trusting/believing on an emotional level that other people care about me.

I can trust people in other ways. I can trust them to be my friends, to generally treat me well, to listen, etc. I can open up and tell safe people about my childhood issues, for instance. But that's because I view it intellectually: I am sharing data about myself with people that are willing to receive that data in a good way. I can understand on an intellectual, abstract level that my close friends and family do love me.

But when it comes to putting my emotions on the line -- believing on an emotional level that someone truly cares about me -- I can't. Even thinking about it sets off lots of alarm bells and I end up in a rage or panic. My therapist has told me to work on calming my body down, figuring out what is tense and consciously telling it to relax, but this hasn't gotten me very far yet. I can relax, but as soon as I start to think about emotional trust I get panicked again.

I know it's because of my childhood with my borderline mother. My mother was, depending on her mood, smothering, verbally abusive and critical, dependent on me to comfort her, infantilizing me and wanting me to be dependent on her, etc. The only way I had to protect myself was to shut off my emotions and my emotional attachments to whatever extent I could. I even remember making a conscious decision as a young child to not be emotionally attached to any of my toys. My therapist has asked if I remember what my relationship with my mom was like before I did that, but I can't remember. I suspect I shut down as soon as I possibly could.

Has anyone else had a similar issue and made any progress with it?

I joined this site when it first started as an offshoot of Out of the Fog. My life got pretty hectic after that, but I'm now in a second round of dealing with my CPTSD issues.

In a nutshell, I was the only child of a borderline PD mother (who I believe had CPTSD as well from her own childhood) and a benign but enabling father. There was no physical or sexual abuse, or physical neglect, but a lot of emotional problems, including enmeshment, isolation, insults, etc.

I'm entering the world of medication today -- took my first (generic) Effexor.  My mom was on it for a long time so my dr. and I are trying that first. 

This comes just in time to help me deal with DD (age 10) being diagnosed with depression and her T recommending that she start meds as well.  DD has been displaying more BPD traits lately, saying things that sound eerily similar to what my mom used to say ("I don't understand why anyone would like ___", "I feel like staying inside and not seeing anyone again").  The T says these things are due to her personality/genetics and that I'm a good mom, so I'm holding onto that thought and hoping medication will help her.  She had a rocky session and the T said she gets overwhelmed with negative feelings to where she can't pull herself out of that mindset (thinking everyone hates her).  She's been having a lot of drama at school -- telling the class she doesn't have any friends, crying because she thinks people are laughing at her when they're not -- and I worry she will end up driving away the friends she does have (she has 3-4 friends at least, but she gets herself convinced that no one likes her).

On top of that, DD is finishing up intensive physical therapy (her legs are rotated inwards and the way she walks has started causing her pain) and has to do a lot of daily exercises for the foreseeable future, and it's hard to get her to get her homework done, do all her exercises and take her shower, etc. so she can get to bed on time.  Trying to get her to do anything she doesn't want to do is like herding cats.  And she's starting cheerleading, and I'm not sure how we're going to fit everything in.  She was on the volleyball team but had to stop when she started PT, and volleyball was time-consuming but seemed to be really good for her in terms of getting exercise and building relationships.

So yeah, I guess I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed.  I want DD to be happy and well-adjusted and to have enough free time, but also to learn whatever skills (sports, art, music) will benefit her later in life, but it seems like it can't all work.  Mainly I am concerned about DD being depressed and looking more and more like she's on the BPD spectrum.  Her T says she has made improvements and that her starting T early is really good (she has been going to this T since she was 7, and this is the same T who worked with me and my parents when we did family therapy).  I keep telling myself that she is my child, not my parent and that I know I don't have to be responsible for her emotions.  But it reminds me of the suffocating despair of growing up with my BPD mom and feeling responsible for her, and then I just want to retreat and avoid everything.

Today I had a fuller reaction to the memory of my BPDm coming in my room to be emotionally abusive (either criticizing me or wanting me to comfort her).  She used to say, "Knock, knock, knock!" in this cutesy "I'm just pretending to knock because we're so close we don't have boundaries" voice or say my name with this annoying "I need you to do something for me" inflection to it -- it still makes me cringe to think of it.  Even though I spent a lot of time alone, I couldn't truly get away from her.  I had the physical ability to lock my door but I knew that I had to let her in any time she wanted to talk to me.  And it's like I can't ever be alone enough or be far enough away from her.

Being alone is the only time I feel safe to be myself.  I spend a lot of time alone and rarely feel lonely; I think I suppress feelings of loneliness so that it's hard to recognize.  When I'm around other people, my mind tends to go blank and I semi-freeze.  (I don't think I'm hypervigilant, but maybe this is my version of dissociating rather than being vigilant?  Does anyone else do this?) If I'm talking with someone (especially party/large group conversations or on the phone) I tend to wait for them to dismiss me when they're done talking to me, as if they're BPDm.

As a result of T today, I had a mild panic attack around the idea of being with other people and letting my emotions show, sharing my opinions, etc.  I have made some small progress in this area (e.g. I am more comfortable with posting opinions that may be controversial online) but the thought of being more open IRL still freaks me out.  And yet I don't have what I consider to be true social anxiety, by which I mean I don't get anxious at the thought of being around others or unduly anxious about new situations, meeting new people, etc.  I dislike almost all social situations and make myself go to them rather than wanting to go to them, but I'm not scared or panicky about them, if that makes sense.  I only get anxious in the middle of the night following the social occasion, when I wake up and am convinced that I said/did something wrong and everyone thinks I'm an idiot.

So I was thinking that maybe what keeps me from having full-on social anxiety is that I am always medium chill.  I invented MC on my own as a child and I am MC with everyone most of the time.  This lets me be around people without doing the things that scare me like expressing my opinion.  If there's more than one other person around, I'm mostly silent, and even if it's one-on-one usually the other person does the majority of the talking.

My T suggested that I do an exercise called "morning pages" from The Artist's Way (I will have to tell Sandpiper at OOTF, she's always recommending that book) in hopes that it will help me to be more expressive, emotionally and in general.  The idea (I think) is that you have to write 3 full pages every morning, on anything, without editing or crossing things out, just stream-of-consciousness.

I've talked about this before at OOTF -- I feel like recovery, for me at least, is like a spiral.  I revisit what seems like the same places, but usually as I revisit something I can feel it more emotionally or address it on a deeper level.  In other words, while it seems like I'm going through the same things over and over, I'm actually making progress.

It's still frustrating, though.  Today was my first real session with my new T (my old T retired).  One of the things she had me work on is figuring out why I hold onto my self-hatred.  Pretty soon after I got home, I figured out that it had something to do with defending my mother and being loyal to her.  And then I worked out that if I hate myself, it means her criticism and treatment of me was justified and I can continue to believe the family dogma that "Mom loves me, she's just trying to help me improve by critiquing me, and her bad behavior is the result of emotional problems that she can't control."  If I don't hate myself, because I don't deserve to treat myself or be treated that way, that means her treatment of me was wrong, and the whole house of cards collapses.

I realized most of this intellectually a couple of years ago.  But somehow, today I'm starting to realize it on a more emotional level, and it's like being shocked all over again, like someone has just picked up the earth and used it like a salt shaker.  In general the past couple weeks I've been having more emotional responses to my childhood, feeling some of the pain I've repressed all these years.  From 2011 on I've been realizing intellectually that my childhood was "that bad" and I was emotionally/verbally abused, but now I'm actually feeling some of the pain of not being allowed to exist as I really was.

Who here has experienced emotional incest (a parent relying on you for emotional support or fulfillment) and/or enmeshment?

Fully detaching from BPDm and getting rid of all the emotional programming is an ongoing task for me.  For anyone else struggling with this, I recommend The Emotional Incest Syndrome by Patricia Love.  The author is a therapist and experienced emotional incest during her own childhood with an alcoholic mother.