Topics

I am not listing this under the 'illegal' section, because I have a medical marijuana card in my state and I believe my experimentation with cannabis is honest and legit. Over the years, I've tried various anti-depressants and anti-anxiety meds.

It wasn't until a few months ago, my therapist recommended CBD. So I tried it and had good results. I proceeded to get my medical card and am now trying various strains of cannabis. Most notably, there is a strain called ACDC which is non-psychoactive (in that it does not produce the 'high' typically associated with high THC content (ACDC had 1 part THC to 20 parts CBD). 

In addition, I am trying to use another blend that helps with sleep.

I am only at the beginning of this experiment, but I wonder if anyone can talk to any of these issues:

1)  Feeling like I'm doing something 'wrong' even though I am a) Working with my therapist AND looking for honest feedback from my wife AND b) Honestly looking for what is supportive.
2)  Looking to balance ease and 'taking a break' with avoidance and checking out.
3)  I notice that some fear seems to turn off with cannabis and something primally social seems to wake up in me when I use.  It's like a part of me that got shut off from years of abuse gets reactivated in part. I seem to learn something that I can take with me when I am not using.

Any thoughts or honest advise on INTENTIONAL use of pot would be appreciated.  I am using a vaporizer and planning on making tinctures so I'm not actually 'smoking.' I just want to stay honest about the whole process but I'm struggling a bit to get over a sense that I shouldn't be feeling good or that I'm doing something wrong (maybe this is misguided...).
   

I have a lot of fog regarding my memories of certain periods of my life. And I know that's common for people with CPTSD.  This journey is fairly new to me since I only this year (I'm in my mid-forties) I discovered how I sugar-coated my past (my older brother looked at me in disbelief when I said something about our time at home and he proceeded to tell me things I didn't remember -- I had was the youngest and particularly targeted.

I just read in Pete Walker's "The Tao of Fully Feeling" that "Real forgiveness depends on the adult child clearly remembering the specifics of her parents' abuse and neglect. ...Unremembered and ungrieved traumas block the tender feelings that are the matrix for feeling forgiveness."

I'm still not sure what there is to remember. But I FEEL the resonance from living through years of shock and dissociation. My memory has always seemed worse than anyone else I know. What happens if you simply cannot remember? I do remember enough to know things were bad...unsafe, stressful. I remember the state of shock.

But how to proceed without being able to remember more?

I've read some other posts in this section about what to divulge to one's children. I am considering saying some things to my kids; here's why:

I never did before, because I built my life around denying it. Somehow, I managed to compartmentalize and ignore much of my pain and acknowledgment of abuse and neglect. I just thought I was an anxious, depressed, semi-crazy person who could keep it all sort of in check with a regimen of a lot of exercise, meditation, careful diet.... Only problem was, that if I let go of any part of that, I would find myself having suicidal ideations and bouts of anxiety and depression that just took all my energy.  So, only this year did I stumble on to having to face the past and the roots of all the anxiety.

I realized that I want to share some more with my daughters about what is 'going on with me.' But I really DO NOT want to use them to process or GET sympathy. It really is about them. But I am realizing that sometimes in the morning, I might have a few tears and I think they feel I'm hiding something -- not just natural. I talked to my wife about this and she thinks it would be good to say a bit more to them. So I want to be real and conscious with them. But I don't want to get triggered into saying things that are too much for them. So I want to have some guidelines for sharing authentically, but in a way that also respects their innocence.  I think the "keep it simple stupid" principle applies here and I can just say "even when a lot of time goes by, you might still feel sad about things that you never got the chance to be sad about before." 

Lastly, maybe in all of this I might share the gift of not holding "negative" emotions as taboo. Maybe that would be good for them. I know for me, it is hard to keep up the facade of always being up-beat. I may need to find some more space and time to grieve. As a busy parent, it's hard to do that on schedule ("I will grieve today after dropping my daughter off at gymnastics"). It doesn't work that way. It comes up when you're around people and get triggered and feel vulnerable... My wife left town for a week recently. I cried that morning. That felt embarrassing.  I used to not even miss her when she left, and now I cry the morning she leaves.  So much shame and I still feel selfish and small and defective for having to navigate so much emotion that's never been let out.

[feel]

I'm in my mid-forties and am only now really acknowledging how afraid I am of people.  I can feel these "negative beliefs." The problem is, I can understand conceptually that they are just beliefs. But emotionally and even physically -- the truth of the world seems to say that I am not one of THEM (people) and that I don't belong here. I don't FEEL like life is a good thing.  Its not the thoughts I think but the way things SEEM to be.

My progress lies in the fact that part of me is starting to see that these are just beliefs and distortions that come from a lot of pain and not the way things really are. But it feels like it will take so long to actually change the conviction of not belonging here.

So today, I decide to commit to patience.  I am engaged as a dad and enjoy being with my family. But I don't have any friends I see on a regular basis. I would like to change this, but I don't want to contrive and sometimes it seems like too much work anyway. I just don't feel like I have anything to say.

This is sounding so regressive. You would never know I would write this kind of thing if you worked with me.  But it is the emotional truth that I've only hidden in shame for too long...

I am working with a therapist a few times a week now. It just seems like there's too much to address as soon as I would like.

Peace all.

My c-ptsd just came to light about a month ago. I'll leave the details out here, but I have discovered that processing the abuse and neglect I suffered was a very strange elephant in the room/oversight.  I am now stunned by the pseudo-relationship I've provided my father and his wife for so many years. I left that home in 1989 at which time I was told I was living * to live with and wasn't welcome back. Our semi-estrangement ended and we held congenial phone calls a few times a year with no emotional content. My father has never been to my house and he has seen my two beautiful daughters (ages 12 and 14) only a few times at weddings we all attended and at one other picnic at a family members house (a few hours). I am realizing I've given them this comfort of never having to address anything -- it's like nothing happened. There was so much emotional abuse and a good amount of trauma (will leave it at that here). And I now see that this is typical of those who experienced abuse -- it just didn't seem like a big deal -- never thought to call it abuse. But if anyone told me about these things happening to them, I would cry for them. Or if anyone ever did this to my daughters, I would protect my daughters with my life from that kind of treatment. But a lot of the times it is still hard for me to think of it as abuse when it comes to me.

So now the question...I recently reached out to a few people (who also know my father and step-mother) trying to remember some things and really (at the time) validating what really happened. And I 'm pretty sure someone told my dad and his wife because, even after years of not calling me, now they are trying to call.  And my step-mother has posted a bunch of martyr-type memes on FB.  They could never tolerate anything that suggested they weren't just good parents -- my father just shuts down but his wife attacks and is a master at making people second-guess themselves and she accuses you of being selfish and unloving. I think my dad just can't process the guilt -- he cheated on my mom when she was dying with the church secretary. And then we moved into a family with this family with a lot of mental illness -- across the country -- my dad was remarried four months after my mom died and we never spoke my mothers name. So many bad things happened.  So I don't expect that we'll just be able to make sense to eachother--my father and me (and his wife).

So now, talking to them seems impossible. I just freeze. And I know I don't have to, but I also don't want to hurt them or do say things that they can't process. My step-mother has some mental illness issues and my father just has too much blood on his hands to be able to hear anything.

I don't know if I ever want to go back to the every 6-month 15 minute conversation to restore the illusion of relationship to give them that peace so they can tell their friends about their grand-kids. But I think what I fear most is that I will turn on myself because I don't feel strong enough to keep my frame of mind and not just believe I'm making things up. I'm working with a therapist, but that still happens -- I lose my ground when I think about them.

I wanted to just put this off, but I can't because I dream about and can't sleep. And thinking about it seems to slippery.  If I don't reach out, then I am already creating some issue that I don't feel ready to address. Because I believe they can only relate on their terms. But it feels too painful not to give myself enough weight in this world to not just pretend anymore. But also don't want to hurt people who have their own fragile peace in older age (I'm 46, mad dad is 79).

I want to buy myself some time, but the only way I could do that is to talk to them. Which makes me queasy now.

I don't know how to begin to navigate this just yet. Posting in case someone has suggestions...And yes, I am working with a therapist who I see multiple times per week.

[What do you do when you can't decide and trying to know for sure just makes you neurotic and makes you spin your wheels?]

This is my first post.

My therapist has told me I have been one of the clearest cases of Complex-PTSD she has ever seen.  I had thought I had pretty much processed things from my past, but I ended up in counseling after my wife had an affair (we're doing well now but still working on it).

I guess the affair flared things up and then my brothers recently told me that my step-mother was particularly cruel to me -- singled me out and 'poured her rage into me'. They told me "I don't think you realize how bad you had it."  That stirred some things up and I've already been pretty raw in working through the affair and working to renew my relationship with my wife. It has been more than strange to be in my mid-forties and to suddenly be a person who is less stable in terms of emotion and mood and even what I believe about my life. It's been a wild ride.  I do remember that there were some stereo-typically traumatic events that happened when I was a kid, but I don't remember some of the things my older brother said.

So I'm a bit disoriented because I'm starting to understand a lifetime of anxiety, depressive-ness, social issues... from a different angle. From the outside, I don't think people would know much because I've worked really hard to be pretty normal. But I flip back and forth between having a conviction that my long-standing 'symptoms' really can be explained because of emotional abuse and neglect and having a conviction that I really am embellishing or exaggerating so that I have an excuse or a story or to get attention.   I say 'conviction' because it sort of over-rides whatever facts may be available at the time. It doesn't help that I feel so different than I did not too long ago and it's confusing how everything could just emerge so strongly now. And a few hours or a day later, I don't even relate to what had been such a powerful conviction in a few hours or a day before.

I'm not looking for some reassurance that things really did happen or it really was 'bad' in a way that would warrant my symptoms, because no one reading this knows. But I want to ask if anyone can speak to this:

What do you do when you can't decide and trying to know for sure just makes you neurotic and makes you spin your wheels? I'm trying just to relax with not knowing for now, but then the question comes up... How important is it to KNOW that there was mistreatment or 'abuse'? It feels like the answer helps me know something about how to proceed. Or does it? Is the course the same either way?  My therapist says confidently that this isn't mental illness -- I've asked because it feels that way sometimes -- like I'm just a little crazy. But what if it's just some other anxiety or mood disorder and I buy into a story that just misses the mark?

What do you do when you can't know -- FOR YOURSELF -- if you're just exaggerating and embellishing or if you can really rest-assured and use the diagnosis to move forward with a new understanding. I want to be sure I'm not fooling myself and that I haven't fooled my therapist.

Can anyone say why it matters to know (if there was 'abuse and neglect') for sure and what to do if you can't stick with being sure?  Ideally, we are just present and feel what we feel without judgment. But interpretation seems to matter too.

I don't want someone to just tell me "Don't doubt yourself!" Because I do doubt myself (and am not consistent) and I just want to know how people handle really not knowing when knowing would really help (or am I asking the wrong question in trying to be sure.)

Many thanks. I tried to keep it short...