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Dear Dad,

Whenever we talk about my childhood, I invariably try to prove my truth to you as if I were presenting a case in court. I lay out my evidence, telling you story after story of the things that hurt me. But individual stories are not the issue, it is their accumulation over time that did the damage. Each story I tell you reverberates with the intensity of many half-remembered incidents that made me feel the same way. Each time I share any of my painful memories with you, I re-experience the sheer volume of misery they collectively represent and am left nearly incoherent with grief.

I get the sense that you find these trips down memory lane confusing. It is as if I were pointing to a lit candle with the intensity normally reserved for forest fires; and you, seeing only the candle, were becoming increasingly confused as to what all the fuss was about.

It is very easy to dismiss someone as hysterical or overdramatic when she weeps and screams over what you see as a candle but she sees as a forest fire, and so this exercise rapidly becomes disempowering for me and unproductive for both of us.

The future of our relationship depends on my experiences and feelings being evidence enough that something has been seriously amiss with us for many years. So in this attempt to explain gravity of my injuries, I won't be presenting any more stories-as-evidence. Instead, I'll try to give you a broader view of the whole forest fire, how it burned me, and what it left in its wake.

You've made it abundantly clear that you want, and feel entitled to, weekly contact with me. Whether or not this becomes possible for me is entirely up to you. I will allow you to be in my life only to the extent that you respect the validity of my feelings, experiences, and boundaries, and adjust your expectations of our relationship to reflect my needs as well as yours.

I am uncertain of your willingness to look at the impact of your choices with enough curiosity and compassion to make any kind of real relationship between us possible. I would prefer that you opt to do the work, but I am prepared to accept that you may not be up to it.

It's your choice. If you wish to continue, I will get to the heart of the matter.

You have said that your job as a father is to encourage your kids to live up to the potential you see in them, and that their emotional well-being is the exclusive domain of their respective mothers. Under the most uncomplicated and ideal of circumstances, your approach might result in reasonably healthy children; but life is very rarely ideal and free of complication and our family was no exception. For the majority of my childhood, you and my mother shared neither a home nor a loving relationship. Two people who were as disconnected as you and she could not possibly have successfully struck, let alone executed well on such a bargain.

Anachronistic gender roles and joint custody complications aside, your approach had at least two other major flaws, both related to our specific situation and the people involved:

The first was my mother. You were married to her. You knew how unstable, angry, mean, and bitter she can be. I have a hard time believing that a man of your intelligence would think that such a person was capable of holding up her end of that division of parenting labor.

The second was me. I possessed tremendous intellectual and artistic gifts, it's true, but I was also an extremely sensitive and intense child. Those personality traits are the well-documented downsides of what we call "giftedness." Under ideal circumstances, the parents of so-called "gifted" children help them to develop the skills they need in order to cope with these downsides, but as I've said our circumstances were far from ideal.

I suspect that you didn't factor the downsides of my "giftedness" into the potential you were cheering for me to live up to; and we both know that you weren't willing to support my emotional needs. You seemed to me to be far more interested in cheering for a fake daughter who was doing well and shining brightly than caring for the excruciating suffering of the child you actually had; and that made me feel profoundly abandoned.

You also seemed far more interested in creating your new family and making me fit into it than in  attending to or understanding anything that was going on with me. This made me feel relegated to second class status in favor of your new and ostensibly better life. I still feel this way almost every time I interact with you, or any other member of your second family; and it hurts me greatly.

My feelings of abandonment and being second class on their own would have been bad enough, but I also found myself feeling manipulated, criticized, and occasionally physically forced into attending to your emotional needs at the expense of my own. It was as if your need for me to be a certain way trumped my need for even the most basic physical and emotional boundaries.

The lack of unconditional and total acceptance and belonging, the constant permeability of my boundaries, and the role reversal of being made responsible for an adult's emotional well-being at the expense of my own, hurt me further.

I know that you and my mother made an honest attempt to help me by sending me to [Therapist]; but I was a young child, and not developmentally prepared to process complex and difficult emotions on my own with the help of a therapist for only one hour each week. The fact that she was willing to treat me at all under those circumstances leaves me skeptical about her competence as a mental health professional.

The psychologist Pete Walker writes that the core wound at the heart of all adverse childhood experiences is the emotional abandonment of the child by their primary caregivers. Children are evolutionarily hard-wired, as a matter of survival, to seek their parents' approval. When unconditional witnessing and holding of a child's whole self is not present during during the vulnerable and developmentally sensitive years preceding adolescence, "children feel worthless, unlovable, and excruciatingly empty. It is so injurious that it changes the structure of the child's brain...Eventually, any inclination toward authentic or vulnerable self-expression activates neural networks of self-loathing...The ability to support himself or take his own side in any way is decimated."

Walker notes that this happens even without a child having been abused "noticeably and dramatically" through physical or sexual violence. In other words, a child need not have been starved, beaten, or raped to develop a severe case of PTSD.

Since you had given me the distinct impression that my tremendous suffering was totally unacceptable to you, I concluded that I would only be good enough for you if my pain ceased to exist. I followed your lead in abandoning the parts of myself that were sensitive, afraid, or suffering in an effort to please you. I strove for perfection and invulnerability in all areas of my life.

At times, I strove to please you by pretending that all was well in our relationship, all the while continuing to suffer; sometimes quietly, sometimes with great vehemence when circumstances brought my buried pain close to the surface. I have given up on these futile efforts at perfection and appeasement by fits and starts; seeking balance, relapsing into unhealthy patterns, and collapsing under the weight of my own exhaustion and self-loathing before restarting the cycle.

For as long as I can remember, I have too often felt that I am a worthless, pathetic mistake, and that I was never supposed to be here. I have felt that I am not worthy of love, belonging, or support. I have felt that any sign of weakness or expression of need will result in my immediate abandonment and total obliteration. In those moments, suicide seems to be the most self-compassionate course of action because I feel too broken to continue living.

To paraphrase Walker, that sensation is the neurological echo of my childhood, and it is built into the very structure of my brain. It can be evoked at a moment's notice by a seemingly minor violation of my boundaries, a voice raised in anger, or the sense that someone I love, or even a total stranger, is displeased with me.

If something truly awful, destabilizing, or scary happens; that sensation is amplified exponentially and reverberates so powerfully through me that I forget there ever was, or ever will be, any other emotion. I collapse and must work to rebuild myself piece by piece.

That reality is difficult enough to live with, but if such a trigger comes from you or my mother, and I am not in the best of all possible places emotionally, the interaction will leave me feeling particularly suicidal. This is why I sometimes react to your bids for my attention with such fear. I am quite literally afraid for my life.

The world is a minefield of such triggers. I never know what seemingly minor experience will cause the bottom to drop out of my reality and send me reeling. As a result, my life is in a constant state of tension between the enormous possibilities my gifts create for me and the viciously unpredictable limitations imposed upon me by the sensitive temperament I never fully learned to manage and the reactivity of my traumatized brain.

If a child is well met by her parents, she is set up to claim for herself a life which brings her contentment most of the time and joy often enough. Perhaps those people do owe some measure of contact to the parents who saw them for who they were and met them fully when they were young.

This is not the case here. For me, the search for a life of contentment and joy is a constant, painstaking fight to reprogram my own brain. I am winning that fight day by day, but too often, being around you re-activates the old, dysfunctional mental circuitry that I am working to re-wire. Quite bluntly, our relationship as it has been, is not safe for me.

If our dynamic had changed, my response to your requests might be different; but to me, it seems as if you are still operating from the same set of expectations and assumptions that got us to this point. I still feel pushed by you to prioritize your needs over my own. I still feel that my suffering, my experiences, and my perspective carry little to no weight or validity for you. I still feel that, whenever I engage with you or your second family, I carry the burden of my suffering alone while the rest of you carry on with your lives. Worst of all, I feel judged by you for being angry about all of this, and for not cleaning up the the mess that you made of my developing brain fast enough to suit you.

I understand that all of this is probably painful and shame-inducing for you to look at. Facing it may even bring up some of your unresolved feelings from your own childhood. I understand why you'd rather I just send you a nice one-line e-mail once a week. It would be so much easier for you. But for my well-being and recovery, I cannot participate in perpetuating the lie that we are okay while coping alone with the painful legacy I have described here.

Writing this letter has been an excruciating task for me. As I've said before, revisiting these truths about my past often leaves me breathless with sadness and anger. But by taking the time and emotional energy to lay things out in this way, I have made a tremendous effort at truth and reconciliation. My aim is to transform our relationship into one that is generative, authentic, and mutually sustaining.

I invite you to join me in this effort. Here are some suggestions for how to do that:

• Respect the magnitude and gravity of the damage I sustained as a child.
• Accept accountability and acknowledge to me and to your second family that you are responsible for a large portion of this damage.
• Acknowledge to me and to your second family that my continued struggles, my long absences, and my anger with you are not due to any personal or moral failing on my part; but have been the natural relational consequence of your choices.
• Get curious, rather than defensive or shame-stricken, about the long-term consequences of your actions and the work I am doing to recover.
• If I cannot see you at any point, respect my answer of "no" as self-protective. When I say "no," or withdraw my "yes," wait for me patiently and know that I will come back when I can.
• Recognize that if you engage in any behavior towards me that feels to me like badgering, berating, shaming, guilt tripping, bullying, or manipulation - even if that is not your intention - I will have to pull away further.

And so we come back to our options. Closeness or coldness. The choice is yours.

If you can be an active, consistent, and respectful participant in my recovery by implementing these suggestions, I am willing to explore the possibility of more frequent contact with you. If not, I will need to have minimal contact with you for my own well-being.

No matter what you decide, please stop worrying about me. I have, through my own agency and initiative, surrounded myself with a loving, healthy, functional family. I will rewire my brain and find the contentment that is the inalienable right of each precious human being. I will continue that effort, with great skill and courage, no matter what happens with us.

Love,
Teresa

Dear Father,

We have three options for how to go forward, and the choice is up to you.

The first option is to have no further contact between us. I would prefer that you opt for one of the alternatives, but I am fully prepared to accept it if this is what you want.

The second option is a distant, cool relationship; seeing one another a few times a year, making perfunctory small talk, and going our separate ways without fuss.

The third option, which I hope you will consider, is to have as authentic and loving a relationship as possible. This scenario would require you to do a fair amount of work you probably won't want to do and make some changes you probably won't want to make; but I will want to be around you only to the extent that you do the work.

It's your choice.

The fact that you are here in the first place means that you are at least open to the notion of true reconciliation, or at least to the authentic, loving relationship that would result from it. But I am unsure of your willingness to look at yourself, your life, and your choices in the way that you would need to in order to make it work.

And so I will pause now and hold space for you to consider. If you opt for either of the first two alternatives, then there is no need to continue.

If you are still here, then you have chosen the third option and I am glad of it.This is going to be hard and it is going to suck, but I believe that you are smart and strong and brave enough.

Whenever we talk about my childhood, I invariably end up telling you many stories about individual times when you did something that hurt me. I think I do this because, for me, each story reverberates with many half-remembered incidents that made me feel the same way. It is as if I were describing a candle to you with the intensity normally reserved for forest fires, and you, hearing only about the candle, were becoming increasingly confused as to what all the fuss was about.

I cannot continue to do that. Not only does it not work the way I want it to, it actively disempowers me. I become so distressed that I cannot possibly advocate for myself in an adult way. So I won't be telling you any stories in this letter. Instead, I'll try to help you see the big picture, how it got us to where we are today, and what I need you to do now.

You say that your job as a father is to cheer your kids on as they live up to the potential that you see in them. You say that it is their mothers' job to tend to their emotional well-being.

Under the most uncomplicated of circumstances, your approach might result in reasonably healthy children; but life is very rarely free of complication, and our family was no exception. For the majority of my childhood, you and my mother shared neither a home nor a loving relationship. Two people who are as disconnected as you and she could not possibly have successfully struck, let alone executed well on such a bargain.

Gendered anachronisms and joint custody complications aside, your approach had at least two other major flaws, both related to our specific situation and the people involved:

The first was my mother. You were married to her. You knew how unstable, angry, mean, and bitter she could be. I have a hard time believing that a man of your intelligence would think that such a person was capable holding up her end of that bargain.

The second was me. You knew that I was an extremely sensitive and emotionally intense child, but you failed to notice the interplay between intellect and temperament that is typical of "gifted" children. Therefore, when you made your assessment of the potential you thought I ought to be living up to, you did not account for that interplay, nor compensate for it in your approach to cheering me on. That explains why I constantly felt pushed by you to engage with the world in ways that overwhelmed me and left me paralyzed with fear.

You were cheering for someone who didn't exist.

You and my mother told me that you were divorcing in June of 1991. In July of 1995, you and my stepmother welcomed my half-brother into the world. Four years might have been enough transition time for an easygoing kid with high self-esteem. It was not enough time for a sensitive, intense child who was being bullied at school, terrorized by her mother, and constantly shuttling between houses; all while still grieving the loss of her family.

With half-siblings came a set of assumptions about my obligations as your daughter; assumptions which I never agreed to. Chief among these was your expectation that I would fit naturally into your new family; an expectation that I could only disappoint because I was never able to find an approach that would satisfy you.

If I played with my half-siblings, I was making them too hyper. If I ignored them in favor of something that served my needs, I was uncaring. If I stayed at the library doing homework instead of coming home for dinner, you made sure that I felt guilty about not being with them, and by extension, you.

I literally could not win, but children are hard-wired to seek their parents' approval, and so I set out to be a perfect achiever and a perfect daughter. I have given up on that futile effort only by fits and starts before relapsing into old unhealthy patterns, only to collapse again under the burden of my own exhaustion and self-loathing.

According to Judith Herman, Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) is a psychological injury sustained through accumulated, ongoing traumatic events that occur during a developmentally vulnerable time in the sufferer's life, over which the sufferer had little or no control, and from which there was no real or perceived hope of escape.

I grew up with a father who put me in an impossible double bind, a mother who often exploded with anger when I took up space or made an inconvenient mistake, and a school full of bullies who loved to make me cry. If that didn't engender CPTSD, I don't know what would.

Pete Walker, the psychologist who is leading the field in the study of CPTSD, writes that "[unrelenting criticism and] emotional neglect make children feel worthless, unloveable, and excruciatingly empty. [They are] so injurious that [they] change the structure of the child's brain...Eventually, any inclination toward authentic or vulnerable self-expression activates internal neural networks of self-loathing...The ability to support himself or take his own side in any way is decimated."

For as long as I can remember, in my darkest moments, I have felt that I am a worthless, pathetic mistake, and that I was never supposed to be here. That sensation is the neurological echo of what my childhood felt like, and it can be evoked at a moment's notice. A seemingly minor violation of my boundaries, a voice even slightly raised in anger, or the sense that someone I love is displeased with me can all send me into a tizzy of frenetic activity or fawning attempts to secure favor and dispel the perceived threat. The day-to-day world is a minefield of such triggers, and I must brave it every day.

And if something truly awful, destabilizing, or scary happens; that sensation is amplified exponentially and reverberates so powerfully through me that I forget there ever was, or ever will be, any other emotion. I collapse, and must work to rebuild myself piece by piece.

If a child is well met by their parents, they are set up to claim for themselves a life which brings them contentment most of the time and joy often enough. Perhaps those people do owe some measure of contact to the parents who saw them for who they were and met them fully when they were young.

This is not the case here. For me, the search for a life of contentment and joy is a constant fight with my own brain. I am winning that fight day by day, little by little. You could not meet my emotional needs, and so I am learning, through painstaking work, how to get them met elsewhere.

Put another way, you raised me not to need you, so I don't need you. More importantly, I don't want you, because being around you re-activates the old, dysfunctional brain circuitry that I am working so hard to re-wire. You are, quite bluntly, bad for me.

If I thought you had changed, my approach to you might be different; but you're still operating from the same set of expectations and assumptions you always have. You are still pushing on me to prioritize your needs over my own well-being. You are still judging me for how fast I am cleaning up the mess that you made of my developing brain.

And so we come back to our three options:

One, no contact.

Two, a distant, chilly relationship.

Three, an authentic, loving relationship.

For us to get to a place where the third option is possible by any measure, you must respect the magnitude and gravity of the damage I sustained as a child. You must accept that, through your choices, you have waived any right you may have had to expect a relationship with me. You must respect the process I am going through to get and stay healthy.

If I cannot see you at any point, my answer of "no" must be respected as self-protective and sacrosanct. Your response to my "no" can never again be to badger, berate, shame, guilt trip, or otherwise bully or manipulate me into giving you what you want.

If I have to take a break from you, please wait patiently. I will return when I am able.

If "no" is not an acceptable option, a genuine "yes" will never be possible. Respect my "no." Get curious about the consequences of your actions. Accept that you blew it with me and start making real, proper amends.

If you can do that, maybe we can have that authentic, loving relationship we both want someday.

Love,
Mila

Totally worth reading: http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/05/franz-kafka-letter-father/?mc_cid=ba07e5d069&mc_eid=bf5000ffde

I had a reasonably good first family therapy session with my father today. No major breakthroughs or tearful apologies, but he really was able to hear that I am genuinely afraid of his anger and that I don't feel safe with him. He said that he doesn't understand why I feel that way (skull like a Neanderthal, that one), or that sometimes I am emotionally fragile, but he'll try to remember that I feel that way when he interacts with me.

He's a long way from accepting accountability for the impact that he had on me as a child, but at least he didn't discount or invalidate it.

I have no idea what's going to happen from here, but it's a start.

Thought some of y'all might get a kick out of this: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/watch-fred-rogers-heart-warming-final-message-grownup-fans/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=pbsofficial&utm_campaign=newshour

I had a really awful EF last Saturday that was triggered by a conversation my husband and I were having about money. The acute phase lasted about 18 hours, and I was coming out of it pretty well by Sunday night. Then Monday morning, the teacher whose classroom I volunteer in had a full-on psychotic break (or maybe a manic episode?) I was at ground zero the whole time trying to manage him, keep him away from kids, and generally doing the job of the school administration since several of them had their heads up their asses the whole time. It was pretty traumatizing and I think it took a lot out of me and set me back on my recovery.

It seems to me that the long tail of an EF can sometimes last a long time past the acute phase when the world feels totally distorted and awful, and that events that happen during the "long tail" phase (like my experience this week) can really impact the outcome. The distortions of reality in the "long tail" phase are much subtler, but you find yourself falling back into really unhealthy patterns of behavior (mine: fawn response, constant flight energy) and it takes awhile to recognize that you're doing that.

I feel that, over the course of many years, I've been slowly "surfacing" from the depths of a warped alternate reality where the rules were designed to break me down. Just when I think I've reached the surface and orient to what reality feels like now, I realize that I'm still swimming upward. It's like waking up from a dream within a dream within a dream. Recovering from an EF feels like that, too; except intensified.

Does anyone else experience this? How long does the "acute" phase of an EF last for you? What about the "long tail?" When do you know you're fully back in the boat? How can you tell you're still out of the boat?

Just started doing yoga therapy as a supplement to traditional talk therapy. Yoga has always been really helpful for me emotionally, and I'm hoping that this will help me further bring my recovery and my practice together. Does anyone else have experiences with this kind of work?

Has anyone else here had experience with Sensory Processing Disorder and / or giftedness as it relates to trauma?

I recently started learning about Sensory Processing Disorder after a child in my life was diagnosed with it. It often co-occurs with autism spectrum disorders, but sometimes it happens on its own as well. As I read about it, I immediately recognized some of the issues in myself. As a child, I always walked on my tip toes to avoid having contact with the ground because the soles of my feet were way too sensitive to pressure, pebbles in my shoes, the seams of my socks, dirt, dust, grit, or anything else that might make contact with them. I am also very sensitive to too much light and a lot of objects moving in front of me like when there is lots of traffic or a bug is buzzing around.

It seems to me that kids who have untreated SPD may be more prone to C-PTSD because the world doesn't make sense and can seem like an unpredictable and scary place when you react to certain stimuli so much more intensely than others do. If you're already in a precarious situation because your FOO isn't taking care of your needs, having an undiagnosed case of SPD could make things a lot worse.

Another aspect that I've been thinking about a lot lately is giftedness. I recently read this article (http://calgaryherald.com/life/swerve/gifted-children-are-frequently-misunderstood) about how gifted kids are often rewarded for intellectual achievements but their emotional needs are not easily understood. Apparently, Sensory Processing Disorder and giftedness often go hand-in-hand:

"Giftedness is a tragic gift, and not a precursor to success," says Janneke Frank, principal of Westmount Charter School and a local guru of gifted education. "The gifted don't just think differently, they feel differently. And emotions can ricochet out of control sometimes." To speak of giftedness as a disability seems counterintuitive. Part of the problem is simply semantic; the word "gifted" suggests an advantage and does not conjure up the intense challenges these children can face.

Intelligence test results also fail to tell the whole story. Quantitatively, giftedness is rather easy to define. A child is considered gifted with an IQ at or around 130—about 30 points higher than those of us with average brains. But IQ scores alone don't reflect the range of psychological issues that trouble many gifted students. Gifted children might express heightened physical sensitivities to light, touch and textures. Parents of some gifted children have to cut the tags out of their kids' clothing, for example, or buy specially-designed socks with no seams. More serious, though, are the emotional challenges. Gifted children are more prone to depression, self-harm, overexcitability, and learning deficits. A gifted student might be so paralyzed by her own perfectionism, say, that she refuses to hand in any assignments. The same 10-year-old who can set up the school's computer system with the proficiency of a college-educated tech might also throw a tantrum like a toddler if she's not invited to a birthday party. Another child might be so affected by a piece of music that he won't be able to focus on anything else the rest of the day. For these "twice exceptional" children, emotional intensity is the evil twin of high intelligence.

I was put into a gifted program from a young age that did not support the emotional development of the students. It ended up being a great educational experience, but socially it was a disaster; think Harvard meets Lord of the Flies. My parents were so thrilled by my intellectual and creative gifts, and so proud to tell people that I went to a school for gifted kids that they didn't really care how slaughtered I was emotionally by the whole experience.

I'm in the midst of a pretty bad episode with my uNPD F. Long story short, he's threatening to disown me if I don't apologize to him for prioritizing my boundaries and self-care over his sense of entitlement to be in my life as much as he wants.

I am not caving to the pressure, and thankfully, my stepmother and my half-siblings see his * and think he's being an *; so I'm not getting any additional pressure from that side of the family to change my stance. He's perfectly capable of writing people off no matter what anyone else says or thinks, though. He didn't speak to his younger brother for ten years, and they only reconciled (when my Uncle was on his death bed) after both of their wives cajoled them into it.

At this point, regardless of whether or not he actually goes through with writing me off entirely, I can't help but game out the next couple of years. My H and I are planning to start a family in the not-too-distant future. I have made a commitment to never leaving my child alone with either of my parents (my M is also uNPD of the covert, "secretly mean" type; so she'll be a very nice grandma as long as there are other people around), but I'm starting to think that it may be better to keep my F completely out of the picture. I can't expose a child to his controlling nature and unpredictable temper tantrums, nor can I stand to be around them myself.

I know that I'm worrying about a future that isn't here yet, so all of this is entirely hypothetical; but it makes me feel a little better to think about how my family will look in a few years and who will be in and out of the picture.

What do you guys think?

I thought I'd link this to a previous thread (http://outofthefog.net/C-PTSD/forum/index.php?topic=592.0) about dealing with my uNPD F's most recent spate of bad behavior. I'm looking for good self-care tactics to help me keep my own internal equilibrium while I'm in the midst of dealing with his *.

What do you do when your PD FOO members rear their heads and send you into EFs? How do you recognize that you're "out of the boat" and what do you do to get back in it? How do you calm all of the stirred up inner children and get them into their carseats where they belong so that the adult you can drive the car?

Hey All,

Just a quick note to say that I've done this program twice now and recommend it highly for intensive trauma processing. It's pricey, but you definitely get more than what you pay for here. Sometimes they have scholarships.

http://www.cottonwooddetucson.com/innerpath.html

Totally worth looking into.

Mila

I read an article in the most recent issue of Bust (http://bust.com/magazine/on-newsstands-now-dec/jan-2015.html) about ibogaine, a hallucinogen that is being used in many parts of the world to treat opiate addiction and also has some promising indications for PTSD (https://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=98976).

Has anyone heard of ibogaine or tried it? Any thoughts?

[Dad:]

So, Thanksgiving was messy...

My dad, who is a sloppy narcissist with borderline tendencies, once again got in my face about not being dutiful enough. This is the dynamic we've had since I was six years old, when he (TW) would grab me and plant sloppy kisses all over my face without my consent and then get butthurt when I'd wipe his drool off my face. This interaction is completely emblematic of our entire way of interacting: he barges through my boundaries, I object, and then he gets hurt / offended.

This time around, his snit fit was set off by a text exchange we had a month ago, which was preceded by me needing to cancel a lunch with him because I was too depressed to feel safe being around him:

Dad: I am missing you. I am glad to see you under all circumstances, even if you are blue. We have no  date to get together in November. Since I am gone all of December, my early birthday request is to see you at least twice in November, once for a daddy-daughter lunch and then you and Noah or you alone at Thanksgiving.
Me: Hey Dad, I'm going to be out of town for the first week of November, but I think I could do something the week of the 10th. As for Thanksgiving; I'm not sure what our plans are yet. Last I'd heard, [Husband] was talking to his dad about us maybe going to [Husband's Hometown] for Thanksgiving this year. If we're not around, maybe we could grab lunch the three of us before we leave town?

Then he didn't reply to me for a month. I ended up doing some last-minute organizing with my stepmother to find some time with his side of the family over the long weekend. And, as was revealed around the dinner table when my husband and I got there, my text response was not satisfactory in some regard (I'm still not sure how) and he decided to withdraw to punish me, and then got mad when I didn't come chasing after him to find out what happened.

I told him that he had every right to withdraw if he wanted, but asked him how I was to know if he was hurt by my response (still not clear as to why) if he didn't tell me so. He hemmed and hawed, and then demanded that I call him once a week, which I did not want to agree to. Then he accused me of having no empathy for his deep, deep pain that I'm not in touch more; to which I said, "that's your point of view," and he said, "no, that's The Truth."

Would you want to be in touch more with someone who behaved this way? I know I don't. This dynamic seriously hasn't changed in 25 years and I'm so exhausted that I don't know what to do. I've been trying to coach him on appropriate ways to engage with me, but nothing has worked and I'm kind of at my wits' end. I'm glad he's leaving town for a month because it will give me time to strategize and think a bit.

At this point, I'm considering cutting him out of my life permanently. Our relationship has been reduced to awkward lunches once a month and the occasional family dinner with him, my stepmom, and my half-siblings wherein we struggle to find safe things to talk about and I can practically smell his anxiety. It's like being on a date with someone who has been using you as a human pacifier, knows you're going to dump them, and desperately needs you to soothe whatever tumult is going on inside of them.

If it weren't for my half-siblings and my stepmom (whom I really adore), and the fact that he has a lot of money, I would probably have given up on the relationship a long time ago. My therapist thinks I can find a way to have a relationship with him that lets us actually enjoy one another and will preserve my relationships with that side of the family (not to mention my inheritance) without giving up one smidgen of my well-being, but I'm very skeptical. Whatever strategy we employ, it will need to involve no requirement of change on his part; since I'm not sure he's capable of it.

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. Would love any perspective you're willing to provide.

Happy Holidays,
Mila

[didn't]

**This whole post promises to be potentially triggery for CSA survivors, particularly those who don't have any specific memories of the events.**

I'm super preoccupied with some of this stuff today and trying to make sense of it.

When I was two years old, I started bleeding rectally for no discernable reason. My parents took me to doctors who (for a lot of complicated reasons I won't go into here) I now feel were incompetent and may have missed signs of CSA. They diagnosed it as a milk allergy.

I also have a lot of memories of weird, creepy, invasive behaviors from my father. He used to grab me and kiss on me, even when I didn't want it and actively squirmed away. I still feel nauseated when I remember wiping his disgusting spit off of my face; an act that he took with great offense.

I remember looking at his spit on the lip of his beer bottle and feeling similar revulsion. To this day, the sight of a bottle with just a little bit of water left in it, or obvious spittle on the rim makes me feel triggered.

He also felt perfectly entitled to barge into my room without knocking, even if I was changing, masturbating (I did / do a lot of that, and it didn't stop between childhood and adolescence), or sleeping.

Furthermore, I remember feeling that it was my responsibility to give my dad some kinds of physical pleasure. I used to play with his hair while we watched television in a way that now (as an adult) I recognize is the way that lovers play with one another's hair. It was all very weird. 

There were also clear emotionally incesctuous boundary violations too numerous and complex to detail.

I am frequently triggered during sex with my husband (less so with my boyfriend*). My husband has just a touch of Asperger's and sometimes does things that are insensitive when we're in bed together without thinking and it really makes me feel objectified and triggered. My boyfriend is also kind of Aspie (I like nerds), but he's been married for a long time and has a young daughter, so I think he's done a lot more emotional work on himself and is more attuned to me.

Still, I have a hard time believing that my father is a child molester. My much younger half-sister (in her teens) shows absolutely no evidence of having been sexually traumatized in any way. Neither does my half-brother (also a teen).

I just don't know what to make of all of the confusing memories and bits of feeling. My therapist thinks that I, in my abused child's attunement to his moods, probably picked up on his unconscious sexual desires for me, and that nothing physical happened, but that leaves me with a quandary about what it means in terms of his accountability vs. what he didn't do out of some decency.

Sorry this post is so rambly, I don't have a lot of clarity around this stuff. 

* We're poly. All of the non-monogamy is consensual, on the up-and-up, and approved by all parties involved.

Dear Contempt,

Thank you.

When I was little, you were an adaptation. You were my little self's first attempt at believing I had control.

"Just stop being inconvenient and difficult, and she'll stop screaming," you said.
"Just stop disappointing him, and he'll stop criticizing."
"Just be normal and you'll have friends," you said.
"Just be perfect and they'll love you."

You told me that I could make it stop, and I believed you.

You told me that it was within my power to change things; and I lapped it up because I was trapped and powerless with parents and teachers and peers who weren't anywhere near safe enough. That truth was much worse than the relatively comfortable fiction you provided me.

You and I got through all the years of torment together and then some. You gave me the illusion of control and I gave you my unwavering attention.

I had no power then, but I do now.

It's hard to be at a point where you've outlived your useful purpose. I can imagine that you're clinging to the way things have been because change is scary. But we've moved on, Contempt. You helped me survive, and now we've moved on.

I don't want you to go away altogether. Nobody sees my * quite like you do, and it's useful to have a good inner * detector. But the way things are now - where you drown out every other thought with dismissal and cynicism if I show even an ounce of compassion for myself - is not good for me. You're responding to obsolete programming, old friend. The reign of terror is over. What you're doing isn't protecting me anymore.

I know that you got the way you did out of love for me. It was the only thing we knew how to do to survive when I was very small. Now you have an opportunity to do something else for me, out of love: Just get a little bit smaller today. Let me be nice to myself just a little bit.

You can still call * when you see it; but do it with just a little bit less volume please.

Your old pal,
Milarepa

::No graphic language is used in this post. Nevertheless, those who might be triggered by discussions of personality disorders, gaslighting, victim blaming, and sexual violence might way to proceed with caution.::

I've been reading Judith Herman's book "Trauma and Recovery" and thinking a great deal about the way that so-called "personality disorders" are used to further the stigmatization of trauma survival; particularly among women.

Herman points out in her introduction to the book that people who survive traumatic events that are an "act of God," such as a natural disaster, are not stigmatized; but those who witness atrocities on any scale and are changed by the witnessing are stigmatized.

Herman goes on to argue that the kinds of experiences we most frequently and persistently connect to PTSD are those that take place in the political or military spheres, which are traditionally male-dominated. Nobody says, "I don't believe you" to stories told by the combat veteran or the political prisoner when he comes home. So while male trauma survivors are stigmatized, they are believed.

By contrast, the kinds of traumas that women most frequently experience are in domestic or sexual life: domestic violence, rape or sexual assault, and molestation as children; and when survivors of these traumas come forward with their experiences, they are frequently not believed.

The severe "personality disorders" that are most commonly diagnosed in women (Borderline & Histrionic) live at that intersection of stigma and disbelief. The behavior and symptoms that result from trauma are therefore chalked up to who she is instead of what was done to her. Hence a disorder of personality rather than an injury.

I know that these are pretty half-finished thoughts; but I'm curious for a sanity check. What do you guys think?

[There's nothing wrong with me, there's something wrong with what happened to me.]

Hi Everyone,

I'm a multi-ethnic cis woman in my early thirties. I live in a large, liberal West Coast city. I'm newly married, but not ready to have kids until I get myself to a more stable place emotionally. My husband and I are non-monogamous and have long-term significant secondary partners. Our relationships are stable and loving; though a recent flare up of my condition has made things difficult for us. I am concerned deeply for my husband's well-being in the midst of all of this trauma and I want to make sure that I'm not leaning too hard on him and that he's getting the help and support that he needs.

As for me: I used to be really terrified that I had Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and that this somehow made me irredeemable. There have been points in my life where I fit many of the criteria for BPD; but some aspects of the diagnosis never seemed to fit. In my years in the mental health system, I've been diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) + Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Bipolar II, and Personality Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (PDNOS); but it wasn't until about a year ago when I first heard the term Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (ironically, from the therapist who diagnosed me with PDNOS) that I found a cluster of symptoms that felt like it really fit me.

There's nothing wrong with me, there's something wrong with what happened to me.

What happened to me, in brief was a hellish triangle of emotional abuse that went on my entire childhood. My mom engaged in an unstable pattern of explosive anger and overprotective hovering. My dad remarried after my parents' divorce and tried to shoehorn me into his shiny new (and totally white) family. He was always so angry at me for being difficult and not fitting in. He also never respected my boundaries, including my physical boundaries. There was a lot of unwanted physical contact, though none of it was expressly sexual. He also had a habit of barging into my room when I was naked and sleeping because he wanted me to wake up and play with my much younger half siblings. At school, I was the target of bullies who never faced consequences for their behavior. It was a school for "gifted" children and my parents took a big ego boost from that, so they didn't pull me out no matter how bad things got. They nurtured my gifts while stealing my joy by making my performance all about their own egos. They slaughtered my soul; they skinned it alive and left it for dead.

My parents' family histories are littered with abuse. Dad's father was a functioning drunk and a bully. His mom was a pushover and super clingy. Mom's mom beat her and her siblings with the buckle end of the belt every day. Her dad left when she was 5. Her stepfather raped my auntie, tried to kill my uncle, and threw all three kids into a bathtub filled with bleach on the regular to "wash the spic off of them." They were beaten if they ever spoke Spanish at home and they soon all forgot how to speak it at all.

I recently went through a trauma that triggered all of my childhood *; mom, dad, bullies, boundaries, explosive tempers, all of it. The people who put me through this are members of the same tightly knit community of freaks and weirdos that my husband and I are; so in many ways, there is no escape from this situation either.

I am struggling so desperately to keep my head above water, to not alienate my friends with how unstable I'm feeling right now, and to get the help I need so that this story can have a happier ending than the last one.

It's nice to know that I'm not alone out here.

In Solidarity,
Milarepa