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Messages - coda

#1
General Discussion / Re: Inner World?
November 12, 2015, 03:36:18 PM
Seems to me that when real life feels both intolerable and inescapable, retreating into a world of your own making starts as a survival mechanism and becomes a habit. It's like dissociation in that it's a necessary escape, and (especially when things remains difficult) can easily become automatic. But it's also different, because there's a strong element of control & self determination. This is a safe and private way to dream, imagine, hope. I think most people do this to some extent - it's where ideas & plans come from.

But when trauma is deeply ingrained even fantasy suffers. You have to first really believe that happiness is attainable, and that you deserve it.
#2
General Discussion / Re: Getting Dressed in the Morning
October 27, 2015, 05:39:15 PM
Quote from: AgandFe on October 27, 2015, 05:12:21 AMI'm hyper-aware of having to look good enough, but not "too" good, or I have the feeling something terrible will happen, just a sense of free-floating doom that makes me nervous all day.

Oh what a great point, AgandFe, and one I'd almost forgotten. The flip side of not lookiing "right" somehow was looking "too" good, which meant being a show off, being vain, shallow or attention seeking. There was no winning when you're raised by, or living with, people whose whole objective was to find fault; who saw both your failures and your successes as personal affronts to their supremacy. Jealousy, insecurity, even a natural sadism all played a part, but trying to please them or rationalize their abuse just perpetuated it. That lingering sense of doom you mention is something I know so well...that little ghost, a pale remnant of the fears that were once second nature.
#3
General Discussion / Re: Feeling empty and fed up
October 27, 2015, 02:56:21 PM
Quote from: Golden Tapestry on October 27, 2015, 11:51:11 AM
...we are taught not to feel compassion for ourselves because it's selfish.  For "normal" people, I guess growing up, they didn't need to teach themselves compassion because it is given by caregivers.  When we are deprived of that, we don't know that we are allowed to have a self let alone nurturing the self. 

I only felt alive and whole when I was in the service of others, as taught by a mother who defined my goodness (in fact my reason for existing) as being good to/for her. Then whether it was family, friends, coworkers or bosses, becoming indispensable became the only way around the emptiness. I can almost remember when I gave up trying for myself, when her almost constant external carping about being selfish, silly, weak or mean became my own inner voice. It just replicated itself in a thousand ways. Wanting, needing, trying, failing, having -- all turned radioactive. The stuff of life is incremental, but we didn't get to experience that.

Sometimes I felt...and can still feel...that I was simply her creation, and what little of me was left intact was in frozen, still waiting to be born. Realizing this is hard and depressing work, and it takes a lot out of us.
#4
Quote from: Trace on October 19, 2015, 11:56:28 PM
I think there are more opportunities for kids to get help through school and other adults now. When I was younger you didn't talk about such things as abuse.
I agree it's getting better, thank god. The sad fact was growing up I never once thought of it as abuse. it never occurred to me, no matter what went on. It was a totally closed system, partly because my mother was obsessed with family "privacy" and expert at triangulation and false fronts, but also because everything was couched and reinforced as a form of love. She did it, ignored it, demanded it, diminished it, interfered with it, laughed at it, insisted, lied, judged, condemned and petted...because she loved us. Nothing enraged her, or pushed her into wounded hysteria like not "appreciating" her form of devotion. What she loathed in me, or approved about me, or dismissed as unimportant wasn't negotiable. I was her project when she felt passionate about some aspect of me, then put aside when she stopped caring: I simply ceased to exist.

Fear, bordering on terror, was a constant at home and at school. What I wouldn't give for one hidden video of those dark days of my childhood. I used to wonder how even without a social life but in a large, extended family or at grade school when I sat there frozen, wearing the makeup my mother applied to cover the welts on my face, not one person interceded, or even said or asked anything. But truthfully, I probably would have protected her, or gone mute. As bad as it felt, as much as I suspected not everyone's life was like this, as desperate as I was for relief, I had absolutely no way -no information, no societal resources or interal capacity - to make the leap to being abused. It was unthinkable. That is still the genius of convincing a child they can only trust their abuser.

I think your topic goes to an essential aspect of how our trauma still plays out, and one I'd barely considered. I'm sensitive to everyone, but unkindness from women can crush me in a way that feels primal. A nasty salesman might infuriate me, but my reaction to a nasty saleswomen goes deeper and lasts longer. A cheating boyfriend could cause grief and anger...but it had a shelf life. If a trusted girlfriend turned cold or manipulative, it felt like an assault on my being, something I could never work out without turning inward and reawakening all the ancient emotions of rage, failure, fear and self-loathing. Men hit me, sexually abused me, condemned me but never got inside my head.  My attachment to women, my desire for their approval and my urgent concerns about helping, pleasing, failing or hurting them are about...her.
#5
General Discussion / Re: Numbing with TV
October 19, 2015, 07:40:26 PM
For me, it's company and comfort, almost like a fireplace going in the background. Not so different  than vegging out in front of a computer, but more familiar. Daytime it's usually an all news channel, maybe the old movie station. It definitely makes me feel less alone, and more engaged with the world. I really don't like "entertainment" until after dark, maybe because of old associations. I  used to leave the radio on all the time, now it's TV. And with PBS, streaming movies, and smart, dense shows that rival film, TV is not the wasteland it once was.

I used to be self-conscious about it for the same reasons- and also because admitting it seemed like admitting I didn't have much of a life. But you know what? I need it now, it helps me, and it doesn't hurt me. It keeps the jitters at bay (especially when I can't sleep or my mind is racing), and I even learn things and occasionally get inspired. I know that whenever I feel stronger, calmer and more engaged I don't need, or even want, it on.
#6

This is one of the hardest things - very sudden, very intense emotions that overpower our better instincts. And even as it's happening and we're flooded with anger or panic, there's that small secret part of us watching, judging, waiting to add shame to an already terrible/terrifying cascade of feelings. We don't want any of this. We want to be fair, strong, unflappable, appropriate (like the parents or siblings or partners we needed but never had). No lashing out, no slips, no drama, nothing to apologize for. 

No matter how far we've come, we all carry around deep sense memories of anger, resentment, grief, fear. How could it be otherwise? If your past was anything like mine, those emotions were once as constant as they were forbidden, and unforgivable. They're our battle scars, and life's constant tribulations rub up against them. When they arise, as they always have, sometimes we ride them out and sometimes we can't. 

But the self-recriminations that follow are punishing, and can easily overshadow the real work of trying to see what actually happened or why. It's that automatic switchover to guilt and confusion that short circuits progress. We're wired to perpetuate the instant invalidation we were weaned on. Our anger was unjustified and cruel. Our fears were ridiculous. Why couldn't we just be what they wanted and stop embarrassing ourselves? No, not modify our reactions -- just don't have them. It is far harder to see (let alone overcome) that mortification for what it is than any actual external triggers. It was such an effective way to stymie us, and it still is.
#7
Dating; Marriage/Divorce; In-Laws / Re: Dating
October 08, 2015, 05:26:10 PM
I don't think dating is ever easy, even for people who seem to have everything going for them. It's all a dance and a process -- 2 different personalities with their own histories and expectations hopefully finding common ground, maybe more. By nature, it's full of challenges. That's why the self-help section of any bookstore is bulging with advice, tips, tricks and manuals trying to make it easier. It's just not. It can be fun, occasionally wonderful and sometimes humiliating, but it's never simple.

But you (when you're ready to try) already have a huge advantage. So many people--most I think-- lack true self-awareness. When you begin to know yourself, you're better able to see what's really important in any relationship. You understand your own needs and are better equipped to detect and decipher what's going on. This isn't about "sharing" too much. It's about your relationship with yourself, which it where all health begins. I say this as someone who dated blindly for many years, never understanding where all my confusion and pain was coming from, hiding my fears and insecurities as if my life depended on it, because that's exactly how I was raised and that's exactly  how it felt. Pretending is no way to live, let alone date. This condition makes us no less lovable, and I think it even makes us much more loving.
#8
Seems to me that if you've been subjected to sustained abuse, you have an ocean of anger inside. Anger at the perpetrators, anger at yourself for taking it (even if escape was once impossible or unimaginable), anger over what you never had, for all you lost, at the sheer unfairness of it. Once you experience the powerlessness, confusion and self-conscious behaviors that come with cptsd, shrugging off life's little injustices and everyday friction becomes ever harder.

And when people disappoint, as they inevitably do, the pain of it reawakens that resentment, and fuels it. Sometimes I feel I'm fighting the same old battle, over and over. I can literally feel an injury morph into anger as I process it. Maybe it's defensive, or maybe it's healthier than thinking I actually deserve bad or insensitive treatment. But I also know it's usually not helpful, and reminds me of the instant, indescribably viscous rages my parents flew into, when there was no chance for reason or appeal. I don't want to recreate that for myself or anyone else.
#9
Quote from: Boatsetsailrose on September 25, 2015, 09:15:29 PM
Being a hsp feels like being an electrical wire without any plastic covering ---

Am learning to deal with the guilt - ie guilt of not being fully there for someone -
For example I've just spent time with a friend who talks - and talks and - talks and ....
Learning to butt in / change the subject / not fully listen are all things I am learning -
Also to 'be myself ' plain and simple.
The stripped wire is a perfect analogy, I've often felt I lacked the natural insulation other people seemed to have...the ability to ignore (maybe not even see) or brush off things that would have triggered me, sent me reeling with embarrassment, shame or anger. Or guilt - oh, to have no lingering sense that you've failed someone and you must atone. I usually admire that reflexive self confidence in people. Struggling to feel less, sense less of what you're capable is strange, it can feel so superficial to not act on what's apparent. I think you're right: the trick is learning how to be there for ourselves first and foremost, even in small ways.
#10
Quote from: Butterfly on September 20, 2015, 02:00:27 PM

For me being empath was, and still is, rooted in survival.  As a child having my mother enter a room and be able to pick up on her emotions without a word or so much as a look in my direction was critical to my survival.
...
It was because there was no boundary between where she ended and I began, there was no "me" and there was no "her" - we were we. I was her emotional storage place. It was my job to take all her emptiness and make it better. Take her bad emotions as my own and give her all my good emotions. This is her expectation to this day. Therefore with everyone else in the world I met I didn't know where they end and I begin.

An empath cannot turn it off, cannot stop. The emotions and energy transfer and become part of you. Friends and family walk away feeling better but I was left feeling physically drained and in bed for sometimes days. It takes effort and training to know when to let others emotions in, how much to let in, how to process that emotion as someone else's and not your own. It is difficult, very difficult.

Wow, Butterfly, I don't think I've ever read a better description of how it was, and still is. And that goes to the heart of a question that's always haunted me. Might I have become less compulsively, exhaustively sensitive to others if my very existence hadn't depended on accurately reading, and endlessly serving, the needs of my mother? I applied the same principles to the rest of my family, to schoolmates, teachers, really anyone I came in contact with. I never quite understood why that annoyed her so much, since that was the "right" way to be. I do now of course: she owned me, and didn't like sharing my attention or devotion.

But there was no way to stop it. Not then, not ever. Not for her and not for me. I saw and sensed and felt constantly, like a dog sniffing the air and picking up a thousand more scents than those around me. What did they think, need, want, care about? How were they reacting to me? Was that approval or was it something else? Anything less than appreciation was instantly unbearable, and humiliating. That is one terrible way to live.

So while my innate empathy is a gift and talent, it is also a vestige of the twisted way I was raised. My mother was socially isolated and insulated by her family. She was hypersensitive to all criticism and "disloyalty" (meaning any disagreement or opposition). Her antennae and fragility seemed astute and sensitive to me, but it was the polar opposites of empathy - she was not aware of anyone else. As a kid, I knew that pleasing her was the only permissible way to be seen, or loved. Every child, indeed every adult, needs to be acknowledged, recognized, respected. Being understood, praised and loved are fundamental desires. But even when that doesn't happen, I think they can survive intact if their own internal mechanisms aren't interfered with, recalibrated to put others' feelings before their own.

Can one "know" how to help without acting? Without the guilt and draining sense responsibility? I think so. But like you, I don't want to turn cold hearted or oblivious, insensitive to those around me. As insensitive as they usually seem to be. Withdrawing has always been my default, because I've never quite learned how to temper the automatic desire to be of service, to treat their problems as my own. My solution - shutting down, shutting out - is no solution at all. The relief from people became a way of life, and left me as isolated, bereft and resentful as the histrionic woman who engendered it. That elusive middle ground of treading lightly seems farther and farther away. I miss people, I miss activities, the life I once knew. But that life took too much out of me, and left me with too little, exhausted and spent and, yes, not a little wounded. It's that self-pity I hate most, because I know it's of my own making. I keep wondering if the gift of perception can't be turned into something healthier, stronger, more productive.
#11
Thank you woodsgnome, for this incredibly generous, perceptive reply. Being heard is a good thing. Being truly understood is beyond measure.

Do you think it's solely hyper-vigilance? Might there be an iteration that takes those qualities and marries them to something more than mere service and servitude? It gets so hard to tease apart what's valuable from what's unhealthy. And when I can no longer be that person I feel I ought to be, and want to be, I just freeze, retreat, protect myself from the world and the world from me. And then, the poison cherry on top of the poison cake of self recrimination: coward.

I often wonder what it would be like to live without self-consciousness, to stop looking in the fun house mirrors where every bad thing appears bigger than it is. But neither do I want the kind of oblivious, uncharitable permafrost that so many 'well adjusted' people inhabit. For survivors like us, there has to be another way, to turn what nearly destroyed us into something that will save us. Lately though, I'll be dammed if I know what.
#12
General Discussion / Seeing yourself through other's eyes
September 12, 2015, 12:53:05 PM
How do you turn it off? How do you stop the flood of negativity, the drumbeat of other people's perceptions that drown out your own?

I've always done this, and I understand why. From my earliest moments, I was indoctrinated with the belief that what others thought of me mattered more than what I did. That what my family said was more true than what they actually did. Add a naturally sensitive, empathetic nature, sprinkle in the ability for keen observation and self-imposed vigilance, and you have the ingredients for a life of seeing patterns and assuming intent, a life of discounting your own best interests (of barely being able to discern them), a life of anxiety and despair. A life of believing other people held the key to me.

I used to think of my capacity to read and understand others as an enormous gift, one of the best things about me, a kind of rare depth perception most people lacked. And in some ways I still value it, because it fed my creativity and humanity. But it's become overwhelming, and no mantra of selfhood turns down the volume. I notice too much, read into what I notice too much. It's gotten easier to just withdraw, isolate. I think the instant default to shame is one of CPTSD's cruelest, most intractable legacies. Does anyone know what I mean?
#13
Quote from: stillhere on September 10, 2015, 02:34:34 PM
For me, participating in other people's family life has been a source of both solace and sadness.  I have felt welcomed and comfortable.  Years ago, when parents of friends were younger and healthier, I could occasionally seek a little surrogate parenting.  I have happy memories.

But nothing ever truly compensates for what wasn't -- or for what was instead. 
Wow, that's so beautifully put and very true for me. From childhood into adulthood, I once thrilled at being included -- at seeing how a healthy family life functioned when I had zero experience or knowledge. Meals, plans, traditions, the joys & tribulations of "ordinary" everyday life. I even imagined I was a part of it, but I never truly was. There are always limits, and eventually, always the searing, at times almost unbearable feeling of being outside, pressing my nose against the windowpane.
#14
General Discussion / Re: Accepting the battle
September 03, 2015, 04:28:51 PM
There was a time, way back when i finally accepted the reality of my past and fought to overcome its wreckage, when I saw that incredibly hard-won recognition as a bright diving line. I assumed (or rather hoped) there would be a Before and After. Once I let go of the worst of it, when the confusion, guilt, anger and incredulity began to lift a little, I would return -- if you can even call it that when it barely ever existed -- to my whole and true self. A life like others, full of possibility and promise, but with the secret knowledge of a past one.

Some days, yes, it feels possible. All that work made it so. The thick scars don't throb, don't show, don't require treatment or the attention of an indifferent world. But oh man, sometimes...the shooting pains and the despair kick back in. We know we'll survive it, lord knows we've had enough practice, but a certain acid bitterness creeps in too, a weariness...this again? This wasn't the After I imagined.

I guess it's the one I got. For all the pain, I would not, not ever, trade it for Before. That ignorance was unbearable, indescribable, lonely and twisted in a way that almost drove me mad. At least now we know there are causes behind our own personal storms, we're not praying to rain gods, wondering how we offended them. Plus there are others now, here. Knowing that this condition, or affliction, or injury or whatever we call it is lifelong can seem like a sentence, but is it? Might it just be life as so many know it, bitter and sweet?

An idol, Dr. Oliver Sacks (who passed away just a few days ago) spent his life attending to and chronicling some of the most bizarre, most debilitating, cruelest neurological oddities imaginable (and unimaginable). He never judged, and his fascination with all the variations of human adaptation and courage never wavered. He himself had suffered as a child, and knew it had shaped him into someone who had problems with (as he put) "the 3Bs -- belonging, bonding, and believing." And yet, and yet...

We soldier on, Laynelove. But not alone, and not always in pain.


#15
Grace.
Relief.
How utterly beautiful, Lifecrafting. Something golden and true and hopeful that goes beyond words. You don't have to believe in religion to belive in those fleeting moments of recognition and revelation. They're empowering.

To become Subject and not Object -- this actually startled me. Never saw it so plainly. And plainly, the work of my lifetime. To be my own protagonist, inside and out.

Quote from: arpy1 on September 01, 2015, 12:06:21 PM
i actually have it bookmarked so i can reassure myself from time to time that it wasn't all my fault. i recognised my dad's behaviours, my ex's, the cult leader's, my brother's... such a relief.
I bookmarked it too - illuminating and reassuring. It makes perfect sense that people raised to accept/model/survive controlling behaviors will accept, maybe overlook, maybe even unconsciously be drawn to, what those with a secure center will reject. He also makes a good point about how people can become vulnerable, as natural born seekers of something that seems to offer more intensity, deeper meaning. I think an awful lot of interpersonal abuse starts that way.

I think I also agree with his premise that narcissistic abusers are themselves the product of psychic trauma, and are unaware of what they do. Does that absolve them? There's no doubt they're dangerous, no doubt of the damage they do, no doubt we mustn't subject ourselves...but how do we "blame" someone without real self-awareness? I guess we "simply" avoid them, and then work through the guilt and pain on our own.