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What do I know?

I know what it is like to be thrown against a wall. I know what it is like when the darkness eclipses your field of vision as your mind scatters in different directions and your limp body bounces off the wall back into his hands to be thrown again, and again, and once again.

I know family is supposed to build you up, hold you up, and keep you up on your feet when the pain of existence threatens to knock you down – well, at least that's what I know that I have heard. I know what it is like when "family" kicks your legs out from underneath you, spouting epithets of trust and love, then mocks you, berates you, and ignores you as you lay on the floor, curled up in on yourself, crying.

I know how childhood traumas create self-perpetuating cycles, repeating the traumas over and over, in different forms, throughout one's life, and I know of the relentless insomnia and nightmares that follow each rendition closely. I know that such traumas change the way the world looks and how you see your place in it – it is to feel small and threatened, all of the time, by everything and everyone.

I know that I replace the pronoun "I" with "you" in an attempt to transform the abstract signifiers on this page into some sort of meaningful understanding between us, because I know how chronic loneliness fractures a heart.

I know the physical and psychological pain of isolation, like a garrison wall designed for war and fortified with socially paralyzing anxiety and distrust, constructed upon the paradox of self-preservation. I know of a loneliness that peers through the fissures in that wall into a world of acceptance, belonging, and love that it knows it can never be a part of, but yet obstinately clings to a hope of someday residing there.

I know of a hope that slips through your fingers, accumulates at your feet, and buries you deeper with each year. It is a hope that threatens to stick to the inside of your lungs like wet sand and suffocate you in self-delusion. I know what it is like to cling to that self-destructive hope because that hope is the only thing that gets you out of bed every day.

I know of the vultures who circle around the corps(e) de l'amour et l'espoir, agitated, aroused, and eager to pick the flesh off of the vulnerable in order to satiate their own appetites. I know the insignificance of being nothing but a body, to be used until broken or outdated, then discarded and forgotten.

I know the fear of being precariously and perilously teetering on the edge of falling but having no safety net, no net constructed of family and friends, to catch you if you fall. I know what it feels like to know that if you fell and disappeared into the void, the world would be as if you never existed.

I know of a sadness that reverberates throughout every nerve with each heartbeat, locking your entire body in a pain that ruptures poorly glued together pieces of your heart. I know the cruelty of having that pain mocked and disregarded as being selfish, childish, imaginary, attention-getting, weak or insignificant. I know cruelty, no matter how unintentional or ignorant, is no less cruel.

I know what objectifying and patronizing pity is – when you become nothing but a thing to be fixed, when your voice is lost to a despotic, bleeding heart, do-gooder who presumes to know exactly what is wrong with you and what you need but who refuses to hear who you are. I know the cruelty of callous indifference to the voice that screams out and begs to be recognized and acknowledged for all of its pain, complexity, and longing but instead is met only with rejection and dismissal.

I know rejection. I know the longing for belonging, for a smile from a friendly face. How your hand reaches into the world seeking a friend to pull you out of the void, to be met with a  hand mockingly extended then pulled back leaving you grasping at the nothingness of empty space. I know how your rejected psyche internalizes the anger and shame, turning the violence against itself. I know how your body seeks to comfort itself in its own embrace, rocking back and forth repeating over and over again the same thought: "there is something intrinsically wrong with me that makes me entirely unlikable, I am a mistake, a freak of nature, and there is nothing I can do about it, it will never get better."

I know that they do not know you because they never wanted to know you. They projected their privileged life experiences and prejudices about who you ought to be unto you, all conveniently wrapped up in the "mentally ill" labels they have affixed to you, to categorize you neatly into their psycho-social pre-packaged for the masses worldview.

Above all, I know that people are nothing but consistent in harming you. I know how year after year the walls close in. What I don't know is what happens when hope finally buries you.

Another bout of insomnia and I wonder, did you ever feel loved? I've become obsessed with this question. Did anyone ever protect you? Hitting me like he hit you ... the same fists and names he hurled at you. The unspoken Golden Rule of trauma: Do onto others what has been done onto you. What happened to you? Please reach through and disrupt the linear finality of time and tell me. I need to know, because I fear... I am so afraid. A cocktail of middle of the night phone calls, slurred speech, and tears – a vague apology, a command to be left alone, and a hazy recollection of you weakly saying my name as I fell asleep 800 miles away. I am so sorry I left you alone. I still dream of you. Just the other night, exhaustion won out, and I dreamt about you. Your face turned down and away from me ... your back toward me ... arms pulled back ... hands cuffed ... something invisible leading you away from me ... you never looked back. I woke up longing for breath, for life ... for what I never had but deeply feel has been irretrievably lost. I really want a mom, but it feels too much like a betrayal to look for you in someone else. Too much of a betrayal of the pain that bore me, the suffering that raised me, and the death that destroyed me. I wear your genes – the hurt hangs off of my emaciated psyche like it hung off of your anorexic body. I am so afraid the future will be a B-movie reenactment of the past. Movie memories and stereo screams continuously replay in my head behind closed eyes. I beg you, please tell me, what happened to you? If I only knew, then maybe, just maybe, I could perhaps save myself.

Hello. I found this website through a psych blog post that discussed complex PTSD. After reading some of the information about OOTS and several posts, I though I would reach out to everyone. I've been lonely my entire life. I've never met anyone like me. I really want to have caring relationships with people, but it's extremely difficult for me to build and maintain relationships. My past trauma has deeply affected the way I experience the world, and people just don't understand that I literally see, hear, and feel the world very differently from the way they do.

When I've tried to explain to people what my past was like and what my world is like today, I get range of inappropriate responses. I am patronized a lot, treated like I'm a child stuck in an inferior stage of psychological development. I've been called selfish and told to stop playing the victim role. I've been told that I'm just overly sensitive - that I just need to let it go. I've been told that I just need to take anti-depressants. I've had people not believe me or minimize my experiences. I've been treated like I'm the problem. In short, people judge me based on what they know and experience of the world - and they just can't comprehend what it's like to have the experiences I've had.

They just don't comprehend that child abuse and domestic violence do not occur in isolated incidents - they don't understand the constancy and normalcy of child abuse and domestic violence - how everyday you are either being abused or you are afraid of being abused, year after year. How you develop coping mechanisms like disassociating from the pain and constantly assessing every interaction with every person, analyzing their voice tone and body language, scanning for threats. How when you realize that the things happening to you are not normal, how angry you get and how much you learn to hate yourself. How it feels like it is you alone against the world because no one's ever protected you and no one's ever had your back. How much it hurts to see people with happy, supportive, and loving family relationships - relationships you've never had and will never have but relationships you very much want and need. How you can't handle people touching you or loud noises - your body tenses up and you get anxious. How much you bury the hurt because if you don't you literally won't be able to function - you'll just lay in bed and cry. How the anger and pain come out in triggering or stressful situations as a constant reminder that you're not okay - that it's never going to be okay.

I have complex PTSD, depression, and anxiety due to decades of psychological, physical, and sexual trauma perpetrated by my parents, my step parents, my sibling, my sibling's spouse, my uncles, my grandmother, my aunt, family associates, a neighbor, kids at school, and my spouse. Today, I'm alone. I have no support system - no friends or family that I can turn to. I spend holidays and my birthdays alone. I have no close relationships with anyone. People have hurt me, a lot. I really don't understand why so many people have hurt me. Logically, I know that hurt people hurt other people - that I've just been very unfortunate to have encountered so many hurt people. But, as I think about why this has all happened, the only thing that makes sense to me is because I deserve it - that there is something fundamentally wrong with me - that I am such a horrible and unattractive person that no one has ever and could ever care about me.

I really want to be cared for by someone who I care for. I imagine it must be an incredibly warm and comforting feeling to feel cared for by someone you care for. I want that - so much. But, I can't have it and that compounds the hurt - adds another layer on top of the trauma. So, that's why I'm here. I'm hoping to meet people like me - who understand what decades of abuse does to a person - who treat me with respect - who believe me.