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Topics - ALLHAILTHEGLOWCLOUD

#1
Frustrated? Set Backs? / feeling joyless
August 19, 2017, 05:28:26 AM
In therapy today another facet of the damage my n-mom did to me kind of hit home.  I don't even want to get into it, but she just made me feel so utterly hopeless.  It's an old feeling, and familiar.  I feel so heavy and tired. 

There has been a lot of stressful stuff going on lately for my husband and I and we haven't really had much opportunity to enjoy one another's company.  He's just got a new job which is way better than his last one, so that's wonderful and I can see a change in his confidence and happiness.

I'm trying not to bring him down during the times we're together but it's really frustrating because we can't be close if we don't communicate, but if I do communicate about how I'm feeling and what's going on with me, that usually doesn't work out and it leaves me feeling humiliated and rejected.  I either level with him and explain exactly how I'm doing and why, or I keep it vague and try to act like it's all good and I'm just a little tired.  If I'm honest he kind of shuts down usually and seems drained afterward, even though he does try to be affectionate or say something nice.  If I'm not honest he just gets really frustrated with me.  I feel like I can't win.

Tonight was the first night in a long time when I thought we might get a couple hours just to enjoy, but it turns out I'd forgotten that he promised to make an appearance at some friends' party and so after getting off work he did his homework, we ate dinner and then he pretty much headed out.  I didn't want to go and I don't think anyone wanted me there either.  I can't seem to manage myself at parties.  I'm either too friendly or too standoffish.  I do best if I just get really drunk and stay quiet, but I'm sober now and that's another reason it wouldn't have been good for me to go. 

I guess I just wanted him to say he'd miss me or something.  He just kind of reassured me that it would be worse for both of us if I went, since I'd freak out and he'd be stressed out too.  And then he worried about my being able to get to sleep without him etc.  In the car as I was driving him there we were trying to talk about how hard it's been to feel close lately, and I joked that I feel like his depressive wife who he just has to take care of.  But he just sort of laughed and said "pretty much."

In therapy today my therapist asked me if there was anything I felt safe hoping for.  I started shaking and had to calm down.  I was able to identify a two things I look forward to: coffee in the morning and getting in bed at night.  The rest of my time is relatively joyless. 

I feel like a burden to my husband.  I feel like he resents me, but he'll only admit to that sometimes.  It's better when he does.  Now that his work life is going better and he's spending more time with people capable of having fun I kind of worry that he won't want to spend time with me anymore.  Or that he'll find someone better or easier.  Someone who can actually be physically intimate without having a panic attack. 

On the drive home I was trying to think of things I do for fun or things I enjoy, and the list is pretty short.  A lot of the things on it are things I consider "technically" pleasurable, but I don't feel happy most of the time doing them.  I don't leave my house alone unless I have to for work, an errand or an appointment.  Most of what passes for enjoyment lately is anything that causes a brief respite from complete numbness or overwhelming emotional and physical pain. 

I know that so much of this is my own mental block but I can't seem to get around it.  It terrifies me to think of letting my guard down and most of the time I can't make myself.  And then sometimes when I manage it with my husband, if I am able to be vulnerable, he says or does something that makes me feel rejected or mortified. 

It's hard to want to continue sometimes.  It's hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  I know that it's there.
#2
I thought I'd feel more intense emotional stuff but mostly I just feel pretty drained and my thoughts are sort of halfheartedly darting around.  I'm home for the day.  I adopted 2 kittens 2.5 weeks ago and they're raising he** today, lol.  I find myself getting a little annoyed with them and then beating myself up for getting annoyed with them, even though my behavior toward them hasn't changed based on how I feel.  If anything I've been a little more attentive today than usual- probably spent at least 3 hours already playing with them since they seemed so riled up, not to mention a lot of time cuddling them and seeing to their basic needs.  I've spent most of the day trying to distract them from wrecking up my house!  That's honestly probably why I'm so irritated with them at this point.  I feel like every time I try to take a second for myself, I hear a yowl or a crash.  And if I'm like "eh, don't worry about it," I usually hear another one shortly afterward.

They're growing up really well, honestly.  I didn't realize how important that would be for me, but as a survivor of a bunch of bad crap in my childhood I'm super conscious of how I treat any kind of child or baby, whether human or no.  I think I sometimes err too much on the side of being overengaged at the cost of my own wellbeing, and if they are naughty I always blame myself and get mad at myself for not making the rules clear enough to them or not providing them enough outlets for play.

But the reality is they're kittens, so it's their job to be fluffy chaos for awhile.  In general they do try to mind as best they can, but there are a few hour-long stretches during the day when they just go into a berserk trance and want to ruin as many things as possible. 

I'm avoiding thinking about my FOO.  My therapist told me to try and identify my standards for any given situation this week, and then to cut them in half.  When I nodded earnestly, he set down his clipboard and said, "Another way to put this would be, just for this week, live half-a**."

Oh yeah, and I also just got married last Monday.  And yesterday I turned 23.  There's a lot of stuff going on in my life right now and I kind of wanted there to be to remind myself that my life isn't defined by not having a biological family in my life or by having CPTSD.

The kittens are both orange.  One was really sick when we got her but now she's better and she's even gained some baby fat.  I've been spending most of my free time with them and it really is paying off, because I think my partner and I are creating a really good bond with them.  And since I don't have a family or friends right now, relationships with pets are extra important.  I get a lot out of my friendship with our older cat, who I've known about 4 years now.

Yesterday I did some work around my dad in therapy, and how nothing I did was ever good enough for him, and there was never a way out of harsh discipline and abuse with either of my parents.  How scary and frustrating that was.  How many of my standards came from my best efforts to avoid being mistreated.  I felt really bitter that my dad shaped me in so many ways that stick with me to this day, and sad about the potential for a loving relationship that he, and both my parents, threw away with me.  I was so willing to love and be loved. 

But I was walking to go buy my cats a laser pointer this morning [I always felt like those were a little bit of a mean trick, but at this point I'm just desperate for anything that'll help them run the crazy out sooner] and I was thinking about all the ways I've chosen to live life for myself EVEN THOUGH I live with a lot of parts of me telling me constantly "You CANNOT DO THIS, or someone big and scary will know about it and hurt you."  I feel so afraid so much of the time about things like going in the grocery store and having a few dirty dishes.  And there are soooo many more things on that list that I can't even really get into here.  I'm pretty sure many on this board unfortunately know the sort of panic I'm talking about, and the message "I'll get in trouble," that comes along with it. 

But for comparison: I was raised in a very conservative Christian home where women were constantly demeaned and all kinds of abuse were normalized to the degree that I didn't realize anything was off until I had been living away from my parents for 2 years.  But even within that environment I was still doing my thing.  Since I was 15 I've been openly queer and agnostic, even with my parents, and since I first learned about feminism at 13 I've identified as such.  That was 10 years ago now.

I'm so proud of the middle school girl that looked her verbally, physically and sexually abusive father in the face as he drank his wine with dinner, his mood dictating what anyone else in the house could do or say, and said out loud that no man gets to determine what it means to be a woman.  I would argue with him and call him out when he said things that devalued women, even if it meant attracting his anger.  That felt worth it to me.  And I started calling myself a woman that year too, even though I wasn't fully grown, because I figured that if I could be disrespected based on my gender even as a child and expected to shoulder many of the household responsibilities traditionally relegated to women because I was the scapegoat and my mom took lots of pills, I should be able to claim what pride and empowerment women have created for ourselves.

Obviously this was not the way I would have articulated most of this then and I was still just a kid, but I'm proud of myself.  This day, the one year anniversary of the day I told my parents to * off for good, has been a long time coming.  There are lots of ways I've worked really hard and there are lots of ways I've gotten luckier than I ever thought I would. 

And who needs abusive, crappy parents and a narcissistic sister and a manipulative, demeaning extended family when I have a new husband, two baby kittens and an older cat who's the chillest person in the house?




#3
 Has anyone here brought charges against their childhood sexual abuser as an adult? With or without success?  My therapist just mentioned a case where a client of his was able to use the testimony of her mother against her father and he was ruled guilty.

I tried getting a restraining order but basically was told there were no grounds. I don't speak to any of my FOO but if there was a chance this might work I think I could get my mom on board.

I would so so so love my father to go to jail for a long time for what he's done but I'd given up any hope that was possible. If anyone has any experience in this at all and it's not too much to talk about, I would be very grateful for your input.
#4
RE - Re-experiencing Trauma / EF at work, exhausted
February 11, 2017, 09:30:29 PM
I tend to get really triggered and have emotional flashbacks at work. I work in a food cart so I'm not legally entitled to breaks, and the quarters are close.  Also, I'm usually in charge of both taking orders and cooking unless I'm working with another person. Sometimes it's just really hard to deal with customers, especially the ones who watch me work from the window. I find myself getting irrationally enraged at the men who do this especially even though they're just waiting for their food or waiting to order. 

Often it's just not possible for me to take a step back and calm down if something sets me off. I'll get an order and another and another and if I don't focus on timing things don't go so well. So that has to be my priority, and there isn't usually much mental space left to do anything other than try not to beat myself up for panicking. 

Then when they're finally all gone I often notice I'm even more agitated  than before but it's cloaked beneath a dissociation that makes me clumsy and forgetful.

I get really resentful of anyone who speaks to me or wants to order something when I'm just trying to calm down. I know it's not fair - plenty of our customers are really nice, and I can count on one hand the number of really nasty incidents I deal with in a year at this job. But it's really hard when I can't even grab 5 minutes to recenter, and then the longer it goes on the more time I need to care for myself after.  A lot of the time I am left exhausted at the end of the day in a way that's not normal - a "raw" and hopeless feeling that makes me want to hide from everyone and curl up and try to sleep or just not think.

I know it's not anyone's fault, but I get really discouraged sometimes when things take waaaaaay more energy for me than they seem to for most people.  Like going to the grocery store.  Nobody I know really likes doing it,  but when I go grocery shopping that's it,  that's my Important Thing That I Can Do Today.  Emotional flashbacks have a lot to do with the immense energy drain of CPTSD imo.
#5
Today is my day off.  Also this week or next I think I will be 6 weeks completely sober, so that's pretty cool.  Soon we are probably going to get a kitten.  I'm looking forward to spring coming. 

Today I bought some gold embroidery floss so I can sew a back patch on my new jacket.  At the craft store they also had Floam https://www.google.com/search?q=floam&oq=floam&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l5.653j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 so I bought myself some of that.  I've made it at home but it always gets kind of weird and gross after a couple days in the fridge, plus I like to play with it while watching Netflix in bed and the homemade stuff always pops little styrofoam beads out everywhere.  I have good luck with Floam and Play Doh as tools to get me feeling less dissociated. 

My cat is ready for spring too.  In the last week she's started to shed, which she hardly ever does, and likes to play a game where I throw a blanket or T shirt up in the air and she runs underneath it before it falls.  Also included in the category of things she likes: hiding near corners and attacking my legs.

I have been thinking a lot about ability, and how I have been reducing my own ability to function when I don't acknowledge my limitations.  Part of this is fear of accountability, since I still really struggle with black-and-white thinking, and for me a lot of the time if I take ownership of a mistake I end up lumping myself in as being "as bad as my abusers."  The other thing that contributes to this is simply being unaware of them.  I spend most of my time dissociated from my body and sensations, running away from all the things that could give me information about my own state of affairs.  It's like I'm driving a car without ever looking down at the speedometer or the gas level.  I have all kinds of warning lights on, and I'm very close to running out of gas, but I'm so afraid that I might have to deal with something out of my depth if I find out about it that I don't even look down to find out if I need to refill the tank. 

The black and white thinking complicates the matter of ability in another way too, which is that it enables fatalism.  I would much rather be completely confident and capable than somewhat capable and not very confident, which is what I really am.  And I am so overwhelmed by understanding where my limitations are that I'd rather identify as completely helpless than as somewhat limited.   :dramaqueen:

It's weird because I find myself at a place where I really need to let myself off the hook and stop holding myself to impossible standards while at the same time I need to take responsibility for my f***ups.  I'm pretty sure that's what most people call "being a human" but for me it feels new and, as in all things, I am so deeply terrified of failure that much of me would rather not even try.  I am starting to understand that it's OK for this to be a trial and error process, and I think that's a good start.  I'm even starting to conceive of failure and mistakes as possibly even more valuable for learning than successes, which I think is another good sign. 

I know that where I really need to start is daily practice of emotional regulation through doing at least one somatic exercise per day and actually exercising my muscles as well, and paying attention to my feelings as much as I can.  I am familiar with the concept of titration, ie dealing with small amounts of trauma at a time, but cannot consistently practice it yet.  I have faith though in my ability to get better at that, and I hope that as I demonstrate to myself that there will be numerous small opportunities to process throughout every day that my feelings of being overwhelmed, crazy and out of control will decrease, ideally leaving me free to parse out some of the delicacies of cognitive distortion. 
#6
General Discussion / Weirdness with my therapist
February 08, 2017, 10:25:36 PM
I feel like it's gotten harder for me to trust my therapist the longer I know him.  I have started to have this constant second-guessing going on during sessions and I interpret a lot of his actions as being disapproving, resentful, disappointed or even angry with me.  I've been seeing him for about six months and have had good results with EMDR and Somatic Experiencing, but at this point I have gone for about a month now with this inability to really relax and let therapy "happen" like I used to do.  I don't let my guard down as much and I'm really afraid that what I do or say will be wrong, that what comes up when I examine my thoughts and feelings will be unacceptable. 

Let me say I'm preeeeeeeeeeeeeeetty sure he's not actually mad at me, lol.  And I'm sort of embarrassed about having these jumpy feelings and fear about interacting with him lately.  I think he'd probably be receptive to talking frankly about that and even doing work around it, since he's been great with feedback in the past.  But like I said I'm sort of ashamed of these feelings.

Part of it maybe started when we tried to do an exercise that just REALLY did not work for me.  It was the first time that I strongly disagreed with any method of his and I was surprised and taken off guard.  The exercise isn't a fundamentally unsafe or unsound one by any means, and I think for many people- especially those who have been on this journey longer than 6 months- it would have been a valuable experience.  He asked me to imagine my parents each giving me the love and attention they withheld from me as a child, except verbally, adult-to-adult.  I couldn't even imagine their faces looking sincere in this ideal scenario. 

I've ditched my FOO permanently, and that's still a very raw wound.  Much of the work I've done around that has been struggling to differentiate myself from them and define myself as a separate individual, and this exercise felt like it might negate that.  It felt like it might make me miss them or- something.  I don't know.  I'm scared to look at my parents as people with nuance because a) it's really hard to do that at all and b) because I'm really struggling not to revert back to denial as it is, and I find that acknowledging anything other than "THEY ARE EVIL AND DANGEROUS" makes me start to doubt the reality of my perceptions again.  My denial was so deep as to be more amnesiac than anything.  For YEARS. 

At any rate, usually when I take the leap and try to move outside my comfort zone in therapy, I have found it to be eventually rewarding and productive.  But this just felt confusing, and it almost felt like a big step back for me.  As someone fixated on attaining an idealized healing fantasy in order to feel like I deserve to heal at all, anything I deem a failure [ie regular old setbacks] becomes a laceration to the core of what worth I feel I have at the moment.  And I felt like I failed in the exercise.

As I write this, I think in some ways I'm probably projecting feelings of suspicion and disappointment that I have toward my therapist after this exercise onto him.  He told me the point of the exercise was to give some reassurance to my inner children and that my adult self didn't have to buy it necessarily, but I think I sort of panicked because of my obsession with needing to JUSTIFY and PROVE that the abuse was real.  And I think it makes sense that I would need to defend that reality, because it has been very hard-won indeed.  But the need to provide some sort of proof, even to myself, has become self-sabotaging more often than not and I'm not sure exactly how to handle that.  I definitely don't think it has been productive to hold my therapist at arms' length because I am choosing to assign blame to one or both of us for my perceived failure to successfully complete something that was never about successful completion. 
#7
She had had, before in the city, a long black coat that she wore everywhere in the winter.  It was for a man and would flap horribly in the wind.  And in the city there had been a closet where the coat was kept in summer, and a job that she would go to all year round.  There had been a family whom she visited sometimes, and overhead the dizzying volley of politics and laws firing off and passing and wrapping around her ribcage like long thin snakes whether she thought about it or not.  There had been liquor stores and waking up suddenly sober in the middle of the night.
Sometimes she * somebody.  Sometimes it was good.  Plenty of times other people had * her, and there would never be any getting past that at a certain point, the rift that that had created in her.  And she knew that that wasn't *, not really, but at a certain point how can you explain that to the body, and how can you explain away the features of natural terrain that stand in the way of a road?
Once when she was going to therapy for all of this, the doctor asked her what she wanted.  She said at the time that she wanted for everything to be simple, and to feel better, and to exercise willpower with drugs and alcohol.  But later on at night when she was thinking private thoughts to avoid sleep, she came up with the perfect solution, and it was this:
First, you laid down in a perfectly white room that was far underground and insulated with layers of wool and chemicals and impenetrable metal walls, and guns that all pointed outward, and no one else for miles or maybe even light years, since for the full benefits of an advanced therapy like this you would really have to set up an outpost on a remote and pristinely frozen moon that danced around the periphery of a solar system in dignified decline.  It should go without saying that the only other thing with a brain anywhere on this desolate exoplanet is the intricate and lovely sentience of the remarkable empathetic computer which runs all of this. 
So once these basic parameters are established, and you are laying down in a white room in the very center of this empty complex beneath layers and layers of clean starlit ice, then from every square inch of the wall the computer emits cleansing white light that obliterates every particle of dirt and physical impurity from every square inch of your body, inside and out, so that light permeates you between your every cell and light is all you breathe in and out, and it is all the same, and you stop breathing at a point because you realize that this has been a pointless and futile exercise for the entire time you've been engaging in it.  And once you stop breathing, the light is dimmed to a lesser grayer radiance which now has its center in the core of you somewhere near your diaphragm, a shape like a quietly glowing dragon egg which does not waver. 
This is the point at which, utterly painlessly, your brain is moved from in between your loosened and perfected cells and into the matrices of the computer that surrounds and controls you, and without forcing anything or doing anything untoward, the computer takes its gentle and utterly clean metallic tendrils and separates out everything that ever got muddled and crossed in you and your thoughts and all your memories, and organizes every part of you according to a geometry so sacred as to never have occurred to any human, so that every part of you that was hurting or confused has now been placed excruciatingly artfully into a complex mandala that radiates peace and balance, and all the thoughts that used to batter themselves against the walls like wild animals and rampage through the same paths again and again have become calm and sorted out and look like golden statues of themselves all arrayed in perfect symmetry on the new and complete lines of you traced out by the computer. 
And to this new collection of you the computer then adds your nervous system, which again is pulled painlessly out of your purified physical body still laying there in the white room, not breathing, at peace.  Again she sorts everything out, and with her genius and fragrant chemical signals she explains again and again to your nervous system that everything bad that ever happened to your body was just a horrible misunderstanding, and now that your nervous system understands this it too can be arranged according to the perfect plan it was always meant to attain, and you feel the computer overlaying it with your new and light-filled brain so that your thoughts are pure and your feelings are pure and everything that you are seems full to bursting with order and understanding and cleanness and the highest possible organization, and you understand the blessing it is to have begun your ascent into this new form, and you look upon the poor and bruised tangle of things you used to be, the bruised flesh and eyes that could never help looking for malicious shadows out of every window and skin that prickled every time a man passed you on far awway streets, and you feel a profound empathy for her but at the same time you know she is not gone, and that all her components have been arranged into what you are now, nothing more and nothing less.
And the computer does this with every part of you, every body system and every cell and every electrical impulse representing every sensation you have ever had, and she has genius protocols to handle the parts of you that are not manipulatable by human science or religion, like your potentials and the pictures you see sometimes in dreams that come from your soul, and every important dream you have ever forgotten she explains to you in great detail like a loving mother reading her child a bedtime story, but this story is about you and you can tell in the interface how much the computer admires your thoughts and is proud of you and the collection of every thought and image you have ever generated.  And now your limbs are pure and each of your organs has been scoured clean of heavy metals and cholesterol, and any trace of disease or ill health has been removed wherever it was found, and the very potential of these things has been neatly snipped from your very DNA. 
Below and within you, the gray glowing dragon egg still illuminates what is now just the ghostly silhouette of your body, which looks like a perfect model of you cast in a thin shell of glass.  And the computer, once she is certain that you are ready, pours this new organization of you which overlaps with itself on every level in a way that makes utter sense back down into the old non-breathing glass shell of your body, which has been purified once more by being filled with impossibly fine diamond sand and smoothed and polished in a miniature sandstorm made up of nothing but pure particles which do their job exactly right, and the room too filled with this same sandstorm and then every piece of sand removed from the shell and the room itself so that once again room and shell are perfectly clean, buffed to a subtle shine and each eternally smooth and unflawed.  The new organization of you is carefully beamed back into the shell through the dragon egg of light, which scans and accepts the new contents of the body, and you pour back into the confines of what you have always been with nothing changed but the addition of a new experience, except you have been reordered in a way that makes sense, and your parts have been reconciled.  And to make sure that everything takes, once you have melted deliciously back into the shape of you and observed that the feeling of rightness still remains, that things make even more sense to you now, the computer with careful arms that emerge from the walls wrap you in impossibly soft bandages from head to toe, and you are perfectly relaxed and feel utterly weightless, and the bandages are dry and cool and you are maybe floating as they cover your mouth and eyes, and then you feel an overwhelming sensation of the most comforting warmth you have ever experienced, and you sleep.  You sleep maybe for eons; there is nothing that you have to do.  The tiredness is slowly drawn out of you and vanquished.  The newly smoothed edges of you and all the new and wonderful ways you overlap with yourself and all the old wounds of you newly healed have time to become accustomed to being whole, and so when you are finally ready to wake you do so more fully yourself. 
This would be effective, she reasoned, because it is the exact opposite of everything that happened in the first place, and it is the only truly equally and opposite reaction she can think of to having been r****, the only thing she can think of that could negate it.
#8
I've been struggling a lot lately with finding a healthy way to deal with anger.  I think it's a good sign that it's coming up- after all, anger is what we all use to create boundaries, and as someone with CPTSD from childhood I pretty much suck with those.  But I just don't know what to do with it.  I feel so full of impotent rage.

It's something I used to be able to suppress much better, but now if I try to just push it down it comes out in passive aggression and sometimes snapping at my wonderful partner.  I really REALLY am working to get a handle on this and have had success just trying to be extremely mindful when I'm speaking to him about how I sound, as well as being more proactive with triggers as they arise instead of dissociating. 

I don't know.  I've just damaged some trust with a person I love deeply, and I know in some ways my behavior has been toxic recently.  I'm ashamed of hurting my partner by allowing my fear of dealing with my symptoms to prevent me from considering his needs.  And I'm also disturbed, because a lot of the times when I've used a hurtful tone or said something rude to him, I haven't been fully aware that I'm lashing out.  The awareness part is getting easier, but I guess I just really don't want to treat someone I love anything like the way I was treated as a child.  There is a big gulf between the emotional/verbal/psychological abuse I received at the hands of my parents as a child and the way I've been behaving toward my fiance, but the fact remains that I have been disinterested toward him when he needed attention, taken him for granted when he does so much to support me, and taken out my stress on him. 

I know in some ways it's because I'm afraid of being emotionally [or physically] intimate with him.  I'm afraid that if I tune into my body and emotions to feel love and appreciation for him and to better meet HIS needs, an overwhelming wall of emotion and unmet needs will inundate me instead.  I feel so afraid sometimes of drowning in anger and fear and grief that I just try to ignore my body, but it's not letting me ignore it anymore.  I want to be an equal partner again- someone who gives as much as she takes.  I guess I'm just scared because of how inconsistent I can be.  I don't want to let prioritizing his needs fall by the wayside anymore and I'm sort of grasping around frantically for concrete solutions.  I don't want to be toxic.  I want new options.  I know he wants them too.  He's been nothing but supportive throughout all this, and he deserves to be treated with appreciation and empathy.  But too often I've treated him as though he is one of the people who hurt me. 

Three things I'm doing right now to combat this are:

1. Noticing when I'm feeling triggered during an interaction and using a method my therapist taught me for getting around my avoidant tendencies: a) express in as much detail as possible how I am feeling [not the why but the what], b) asking for support in a specific way, and c) expressing appreciation for the current help my partner is offering and anything else he's done well recently, coupled with affectionate touch of some kind. 

IE "a. I'm feeling really keyed up.  I'm looking for threats everywhere and my muscles feel activated.  b. It would help me if you just held me tightly for twenty seconds, long enough to reassure my nervous system that there is no threat.  c.  Thank you so much for being willing to listen and help me when I need it.  I appreciate everything you do to help me emotionally regulate, even the fact that you made dinner last night when I was tired from work.  *kisses on cheek*"

2. Committing to a more vigorous exercise routine to help me discharge some of the trapped energy in my nervous system that can cause "flash rages."  I'm taking more long walks and I'm starting to do yoga once a week at least.  It's reeeeeeally hard for me to exercise because I get overwhelmed just feeling so much sensation in my body.  I generally either don't exercise at all, short of tone-building exercises occasionally, or I exercise to purposefully hurt myself.  I hope to use exercise as a healthy outlet instead but I'm really scared.

3. Paying closer attention to my physical sensations in general and not trying to analyze them away.  I DO NOT LIKE THIS.  THIS IS HARD AND SCARY AND IT MAKES ME FEEL PANICKED JUST THINKING ABOUT IT.  I've spent my whole life running away from my body and just like holy * it's so scary to try and really feel it on a consistent basis. 

This is important to me because I want to be able to count on myself to behave generally kindly, rather than be retrospectively surprised to find I've been nasty or unfair.  I think I'm on the right track.  I don't know.  I just feel overwhelmed. 
#9
Please Introduce Yourself Here / Hello folks
February 07, 2017, 09:06:38 PM
So I'm 22 and I like to read. Got sober recently.  Engaged, best friends with my cat, burger flipper, permanently estranged myself from whole family within last year. Have had CPTSD from early childhood, since the ol' parents are responsible for the kaleidoscopic clusterf*** that is my identity. Was in denial that anything abusive ever happened to me until last April or so.  It all got to be too much though and now I'm in therapy and struggling to find a way to... Like I guess just to exist without crawling out of my skin. I want to live in a way that feels stable, no longer predicated on these fleeting meaningless obsessions I attach too much meaning to just to cope.

I like Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Lebanon Hanover, Schlohmo, Crystal Castles, Pastel Ghost and TRUST. I like to read China Mieville,  Haruki Murakami, Catherynne Valente, HP Lovecraft, and a bunch of other stuff. Don't get me started about books. I do art, and I write a lot. Eventually I hope to get published and the thought of that is something I use to motivate myself. 

I have the constant and persistent feeling that everything I do is the exact wrong thing. I cannot maintain friendships and pretend my isolation is voluntary. My life is a cycle of denial and breaking points.  I'm tired.  I feel deeply bitter about having to sort all this out myself.  The constant effort when my disorder leaves me exhausted, the battle against cognitive distortions when they have been the only thing that makes me feel safe, trying to inhabit a body that feels like it wants to force me out, a fear of intimacy so consuming that I snap at my partner when he tries to be emotionally or physically close. I feel weak. I feel like I'm making excuses for myself.  As Ian Curtis put it, "I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through/I'm ashamed of the person I am." Sometimes I'll have a good week or two, only to fall back into the worst of my symptoms again.  It takes a conflict with my partner to get me on track again.  It's like I have no motivation of my own.

I have a hard time acknowledging all the ways this is ruining my life. I feel so out of control. I can't go to a grocery store without having a panic attack. Sometimes I'm rude to customers at work because I get triggered and there's no time for me to calm down. I know I need to do the work and be kind to myself but I am so afraid that it won't be "worth it." I cannot describe how deeply bitter I am about everything. All of this. And how conflicted I am. So much of what I do is self damaging and I don't know how to stop.

When I started therapy about 6 months ago I was clinging to the idea that I could be "healed" quickly. That my suffering would end very soon. I have made a lot of progress for such a short time, but the impossible goals I had at the beginning will not happen on my timeline. I needed to believe in therapy as a magic bullet or I don't know what I would have had to cling to. But really I was just putting it on a pedestal like I always do in a desperate attempt to give myself hope in the face of suicidal ideation. Let me reiterate that therapy has been enormously good for me, and I'm in a better place because of it. But a therapist can't "fix" me anymore than religion, a partner or substance use could. I still have to do it myself and I feel like the least qualified person in the world to do that. I feel like things just get harder and harder and I wish they would just let up. I know I create many of my own problems and I also don't have a lot of awareness around when I'm doing that or how to stop. I can identify a problem, but then it just leads into another and another and another, and then I see that to solve one of them I'd need Is to solve a whole chain of things that often ends right back where it started. I know that I want a life where I can enjoy and appreciate what I have, and where I feel calm more and genuinely experience pleasure. Where I'm not moderately agoraphobia and inconsistent to my partner. I think eventually I can have that, but I'm so scared of what stands in between me and that future. I am so discouraged and so tired. I am here because yet again I have stumbled upon a breaking point. I hope to use this site to remember I am not alone and to lend an ear to others. I also hope to learn from other people who are farther along on this difficult path we did not choose.