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For the past few months, I've been complaining to my therapist that I feel like I'm not really present.  I'd heard of "depersonalization" and "derealization," but it was today that "derealization" started to make sense to me.

I've been noticing that I feel like I'm not really there, like I'm in a "life" simulator (by analogy with flight simulator), and one that isn't all that good.  I can sort of see where I am and steer myself through life, but it feels like I've just got this screen, like a computer monitor, to see what's going on outside, and some controls that don't have the greatest feedback to affect things.  I keep thinking of an experience I had a long time ago: there was this arcade-game like driving simulator, which had a booth like a photo booth, a steering wheel, and maybe an accelerator and brake pedal, and this small screen, maybe 12 x 24 inches.   I put my coins in, but what showed on the screen was so indistinct, I couldn't tell where I was in the simulation nor see how what I did with the steering wheel had any effect.  I'm pretty sure that at some point I wrecked the virtual car, but I couldn't really tell because I couldn't tell much of anything.  That's what it feels like sometimes, and it's a bit scary -- part of me worries that I'll wander in front of a truck because I can't really tell where I am, even though it's never happened (protected by my hypervigilance.)

This sounds an awful lot like the description of "derealization" in Wikipedia.

I wondered why I'm not conscious of this more often, but I think it's because most of my life is spent inside my own head -- like maybe I'm always in the simulator, but usually not paying attention to the screen because I'm busy thinking of something else (or obsessed with something else?)  Most of my work before retirement was software development, so at work I spent most of my time with my mind in the software, and only barely aware of the physical world or even my body.  So being in the state was normal and functional.  I kind of feel like I don't have any idea what it's like to be really "present."  (I tried yoga for a while, but whenever I'd start to feel rather than focusing on what I had to do, I would feel these intense bursts of anger which would destroy any sense of being in my body.)

And when I start thinking about this, I start getting this feeling that I must be really screwed up, like being screwed up and broken is who I am.  And that turns into despair (despair -- another life-long "friend.")

One of my gripes with my family-of-origin is that being with them is like being with a bunch of animatronic robots, which I assume is because of how our growing up was, but I  think maybe I got turned into a robot, too.

[I'm not sure whether this goes in this section (as a kind of dissociation) or in the Affect Regulation section, since it's kind of like depersonalization.]

I've noticed recently that I seem to be able to tell about my traumatic experiences, and I think I know most of them, at least in outline.  But there's no feeling attached to them.  It's as if I'm talking about what happened to someone else.  It's not a freeze reaction, because I can get angry about what they did to me, but it's the sort of anger I feel when I read about someone else being abused.  I can even remember that back during my worst years,, I was overwhelmed with dread, etc., but I can't feel it now.  It's like I split myself into two people: the abused, miserable child, which is still sealed up in the crypt inside me, and the rational adult who can talk and relate to the outside world.  But the child feels like she's someone else, not me.  I remember that at the time, whenever I wasn't being forced to deal with the outside world, I would put my mind somewhere far, far away, either by reading books (I regularly got in trouble for reading in class) or by daydreaming about something that had nothing to do with me (or at least the me in the world I was physically in.)  Like what it's like to be an ant or a bee.

One time rather recently, my therapist tried to do some EMDR with me and asked me to try to remember back to those "* years" and try to remember what it felt like.   At first, I felt sort of like I was suffocating, like being in a chamber where the air was getting unbearably hot.  And then my conscious mind simply disappeared.  I was talking, but couldn't remember what I was saying.  I'd get to the end of a sentence and not know how it started.  When I remember the experience, I was aware of my surroundings and even responding to the therapist, but at the time, I wasn't consciously aware of much of anything.  When I came out of it, the memory was pretty dreadful, but at the time, I wasn't capable of feeling much of anything.  My therapist's conclusion was that the experience was still too painful to bear and my mind was kind of tripping its circuit breakers.

Lately, since I've retired, it feels like my subconscious is very busy doing -- something.  I feel the "power drain" all the time.  But I also notice that I feel this need to  keep my conscious mind busy with more or less mindless stuff, and I have the impression that my mind is trying very hard not to see/hear something.  It's kind of sticking its fingers in its ears and saying "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!"  And I sometimes imagine that maybe my subconscious is deliberately obscuring stuff from my conscious mind.  Like it's saying to my conscious mind, "just run along and play, dear, and don't worry your pretty little head," so my conscious mind will stay out of its hair while it's dealing with hard stuff I'm better off not knowing about.

I also suspect that there's nothing for me to do about it but just keep plodding along, one foot in front of the other -- like I've done for most of my life.  And hope that I'm somehow getting somewhere better and more whole than now.

... I am nurturing the relationships I do have with my chosen family, those who give back to me as I also give to them.

"Chosen family."   I've been looking for opportunities to create a "chosen family," but it's been hard.  One of the ways my parents gaslit me was that if I was myself with people outside the family, most of the time my parents would wait until the outsiders were gone and then instruct me that I had horribly offended them and ruined whatever chance I had to be friends or otherwise have a good relationship with them.  There was no one else I could go to who I could trust to tell me what was really going on, so I was stuck with my parents'  judgements.

I've learned that they were wrong -- intellectually.  But those rules and the message that I'm this awful person who no one in their right mind would want to associate with still have their death-grip on me, so whenever I try to relate to someone as me, rather than as the rule-bound construct that my parents told me I had to be, my anxiety goes through the roof, and I start imagining all kinds of stuff, and after a while, I can't tell the reality from my paranoid imaginings.  The only way I've found to calm myself is to isolate myself completely for a few days.

You will find the answers you need if you just keep listening to that inner voice telling you what's best for you.

Well, I do have what I call my "inner oracle," which is that hidden part of me which seems to steer my life (and is a heck of a lot smarter than me) and occasionally does speak to me when I'm at a major crossroads in my life, but it doesn't seem to be helping much in this situation.  Probably because when the hurricane winds get wild enough, I can't hear anything but the wind.  Besides, it doesn't seem to involve itself with my daily life.

My FOO consists of me, one sister, and three brothers (my parents are dead.)   One of the brothers used to terrorize me when I was growing up -- telling me what to do and threatening to "murder" me if I didn't do what he said.   It was no secret -- my parents knew about it, but they said I should just hit him back.  Looking back on it, the main thing for him seemed to be being able to control me.  As long as I did what he said, he could sometimes be kind of nice to me.

Anyway, that stopped after he went away to college, and as the years went by, I thought he'd gotten past that.

However, when I would talk about things with him, it would sometimes turn weird.  Basically, when I would state something, he would come up with all sorts of reasons why I was looking at it wrong.  This was especially weird when it was something I  knew about intimately and he knew nothing about, like when I was talking about the problems I was having with my wife which were leading me file for divorce, and he kept saying stuff like, maybe she's doing this because you're  [something.]  But in the context of the weirdness of my FOO (there's a reason I have C-PTSD), it didn't seem all that unusual.

More recently, he started sending me and my kids books; some were okay, just not stuff I found interesting, but some of them were books representing the "conservative" point of view.  By this time, I think everyone in my FOO knows that I lean what is called "progressive," so it came across as trying to convert me.   I mostly ignored them and simply got rid of them.

However, in the run up to the recent USA presidential election, I posted to the family E-mail mailing list my fears about the election.  I am trans, and I was explaining that I felt unsafe, like I was "in the crosshairs", due to the blatant transphobia and homophobia of the administration and most of the Republican party, and was seriously considering moving out of the USA if they stayed in office.  I specifically mentioned fearing the (now ex) vice president Pence, because I believe he  wants to eliminate us, because when  he was governor, he spearheaded a number of laws making life difficult for LGBT people.

This brother's response was to send me a book by one of Pence's children about the "wisdom" of Michael Pence.  You don't have to agree with my political views, but I think I was pretty clear as to how I felt about him.   When I contacted him to ask what he thought he was doing, since sending that book seemed at best pretty hostile, he insisted that I must be mistaken about Pence, since he'd heard one speech by Pence and he didn't hear anything transphobic or homophobic in it.  He also talked about how my fear that Trump might try to overturn the election was simply a case of Google leading me to misleading sources such as "Democrat extremists."  Basically, I was looking at everything wrong.

This sort of trying to make me distrust my own judgement was so familiar from my childhood: basically, anytime I thought something different from what my parents thought, they would try to convince me that I didn't know anything and I should just listen to my betters, and I would get no peace until I at least seemed to agree with them.  So this was kind of triggering.  It didn't actually make me doubt my own judgement, since over the years since I left my FOO I have learned that my judgement is actually pretty good, and better than my family's, but it brought up the impotent rage I felt throughout my childhood, when I would be judged wanting by my parents and other adults in my life and expected to agree with them.

This experience made me adjust my reading of him: I now think that he has never stopped trying to dominate me, but he can't threaten me, and I don't see or talk to him more than once a year, if that often, so he has to do it in subtle ways.   And over the years, I've tried to create a real relationship with various members of my FOO, but have never managed more than superficial conversation.  It alway feels like talking to some on-line AI bot.

In the week or so after I got his E-mail, I was very, very upset and went back and forth over what I wanted to do.  Part of me wanted to tell him in detail why he was full of it, but I realized it would do no good, he'd just come up with new "arguments" as to why I was wrong.  I kind of want to go NC, but we have so little contact as it is, I'm not sure it would be a change.  In the past, I'd see him every few years when I'd drive down to the town I grew up in to visit with some of my siblings, but I'd already decided I didn't want to do that any more because the visits were so empty.  They were kind of like trying to visit with a YouTube video.

I'd also see him at our family reunion, which has been happening every few years, and being there for a week with him there would be difficult.  But then I asked: what do I get out of those reunions?    All they do is sit around and talk about superficial things, on the level of cocktail party chit-chat.  One year, my ex came down for a few days, and despite how difficult my ex can be, it was such a relief to talk with someone who is more than a cardboard cut-out.  My nieces and cousins are a lot better, but they don't attend any more (they've got lives of their own.)  So I think I won't go any more and I'll try to find other ways to keep up with the people I can relate to.

It feels like I'm giving up on my whole FOO.  But maybe it's that I'm giving up the fantasy (or trying to) that there's something I can do, some magic words or spell-casting or something, that will give me a Real Family, one that I can have real connections with.  A "home" --- you know, "home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."  People who you can rely on.  But my parents weren't people any of us could rely on, so how would any of us know how to be relied upon?   It just makes me feel really, really alone in the world.

But maybe I'll feel better after a while.  When my parents died, I realized I felt relief, rather than grief, because I no longer had to wonder if there was something I could do to turn them into Real Parents.

Asche: I'm sorry to hear about everything you've been going through, and the suffering you have endured. It must be really hard for you to manage all this. I feel for you, and hope you can find peace and healing for your fractured sense of self.

I can't say that I'm aware of suffering at the moment.  But one of my coping mechanisms seems to be to stop feeling.  I think if I were suffering it would be at least a sign of progress.

I assume that a lot of what I feel is stuff left over from the pain of my childhood, but I mostly can't remember what happened, except a vague narrative.    The times I have tried to remember how it felt, I start to feel bad, like I'm suffocating or something, and then within a second or two, it's like my mind kicks me out.

I've had the sense that something inside me knows what way I have to go; I call that my "inner oracle."  I often feel lost in a dark wood (cf: the beginning of Dante's Inferno), but when I look back on my life, I see a path that goes pretty consistently towards wherever I am at the moment.  There don't seem to have been much in the way of blind alleys.

So since I can't figure out any other way to deal with my life, I just go blindly in what seems like a random direction and try to have faith that wherever I end up going is where I need to go.  I like to think it's my inner oracle leading me.   I think it's my substitute for hope.

I just want to tell you, that you're not an "alien".

Remember when the supermarket tabloids would have headlines like, "I had a space alien's baby"?

After I'd been away from home for a few years, I started saying, "I was a space alien's baby."  Maybe the reason I've never been able to relate to anyone in my FOO is that they're space aliens and I'm not.  But the way of relating I was exposed to simply doesn't work with humans.

One of my obsessions is the Hunger Games trilogy.  I identify a little with Katniss, who IMHO rather obviously suffers from severe PTSD, due to having been in fear for her life ever since early childhood.  Anyway, there's a passage that really resonates with me, at the very end of the epilogue to Mockingjay, where she writes:

I'll tell them [my children] that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I'm afraid it could be taken away.

Her next sentence is:

That's when I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I've seen someone do.

But I'm not far enough along for that yet.

* * * *

She mentions nightmares; I almost wish I had them.  Instead, I frequently wake up with the words "I wish I were dead" going through my mind, over and over again.  It's like I am the nightmare.  I sometimes dream of being pursued by vampires (and the people I run to for rescue handing me over to the vampires), but I don't wake up screaming; instead, when I finally wake up, I feel "undead."  Like my soul has been taken away.

One of the symptoms I see mentioned in the lists of symptoms of C-PTSD is "Loss of systems of meanings,"  but I don't see a separate sub-forum for that, which is why I'm posting this here.  One of the symptom lists says

Systems of meaning refer to your religion or beliefs about the world. For example, you might lose faith in some long-held beliefs you had or develop a strong sense of despair or hopelessness about the world.

I've lived with a sense of despair most of the time my whole life.  I tend to be convinced in my heart of hearts that the worst possible outcomes will come to pass.

I don't hope.   I just keep putting one foot in front of the other, mostly because I don't know how to stop.  It's what keeps me going a lot of the time -- when it's something I need to do, it's good, but when it's something I really should abandon, it's a problem.   The rational part of me can plan for the future, but the emotional part -- my soul -- does its best to not even think of the future.  Until it actually happens, I assume nothing will ever change for the better.  And even when something does change for the better, I withhold my joy, anticipating that if I allow myself to believe in it and rely on it, it will all be taken away.

These past few years (the "Age of Trump") a lot of the spaces I spend time in go on a lot about how we all need hope, as if you'd dry up and blow away if you didn't have it, and it reinforces my sense that I'm some kind of extra-terrestrial alien.  I feel like the skunk at the garden party when I say how I see it: that you can get by without hope.  What I feel but don't say: hope is dangerous, if you commit to hope, then it can kill you when it gets dashed, as it inevitably will.

The past four years I have lived in dread because I am trans, a member of a group that the people running the US government have explicitly targetted, and I kept expecting that at some point I would need to flee the country (USA).  When people would tell me it won't ever get that far, I would feel like they are deluded or are deliberately lulling me into a false complacency, so that when the blow comes, I won't be prepared.  The past few months, and especially the past few days, have sent my anxiety through the roof, since it looked like the first of many attempts to overthrow by force the system of laws which are the only protection I have.

Semi-related:

I have the sense that the conscious part of me isn't the real me.  It's a construct that I created in childhood to deal with the way everyone around me demanded that I be someone who I wasn't and couldn't really be.  It's like it's a mask or a Potemkin village.  The problem is that it's the only "me" that I know.

At the same time, I have this image of my "true self" as a child, maybe 10 or 11 years old (the age of my "* years" which kind of broke me), who was put into a concrete vault which was buried under the basement floor (I think of Arsenic and Old Lace.)   Whenever I'm quiet enough and try to get in touch with myself, I think I can feel the suffering of that child, who has never grown.  Or maybe that child is dead, and I'm just remembering the suffering from five decades ago.

I also have what I call my "inner oracle,"  which occasionally guides me when I don't know where to go in life, sometimes by speaking to me (no, not auditory hallucinations), or sometimes by simply giving me a sense that a particular direction is right.  Most of the time, I feel lost, like I'm wandering in the woods on a dark moonless night with no trail (I've actually hiked in the dark, but there was always a trail I could find with my feet), but when I look back on my life, it looks like I've (mostly) gone the "right" way, or at least a way that seems right in retrospect.  I often feel that the Inner Oracle is a lot smarter than I am, so I should do what it says, when it says something.  I also think maybe it is really the totality of my self, of which the "mask" is only a part.  Like there's a whole me, but I constructed a sort of alter that is my conscious self to protect my "real self" or my "full self."

DID "lite," maybe?

The significance of age 10 or 11:  that was when I was moved to a private boys' school, where I was constantly berated and punished for forgetting things and for saying what I felt and reading in class (so I wouldn't have to be aware I was), and where they tried to make me into a properly masculine boy (which failed utterly.)   I spent most of those two years thinking constantly about suicide, when I wasn't escaping by "daydreaming" (= dissociating.)  So I was getting emotionally beaten up at home and at school, and there was no relief anywhere.

Another thing that happened which might be related was that my sister was born when I was 9.  The parents had been pretty obvious that they'd been hoping for a girl when each of us boys (other than the oldest) was born, and I think my mother started cathecting her instead of me once she got old enough to seem like a person.  But that's just a theory.

I don't have any feeling for what I was like before I was 10, but I suspect I wasn't so uniformly miserable back then.   Anyway, it seems like most of what I am now dates back to when I was 10, and the * of that time broke most of whatever I was before then.  I feel like I'm a bundle of poorly knitted broken bones, and the bones were broken during those two years.  At some point, my brother talked to me and somehow got me to see that I had the option of asking to be transferred to the local public school (USAan term), so when I was 12, I was no longer in That Awful School.  The public school was too busy with worse kids than me, so they didn't devote anywhere near as much effort making me miserable as That Awful School, so things eased up.   At some point, I resolved to never expect help or support or mercy from anyone but myself, and as I learned to live that way, things got better.  I learned to stop seeing my parents as parents and started seeing them as just obstacles to be worked around, and put them (actually, most adults) on an "information diet," letting them only see the most innocuous things in my life, and that helped, too.

And then at age 18 I could finally get out of the house and out of the (USAan) South and start to learn to live my life, pretty much from scratch.

One good thing: I know I can survive most anything that happens to me, since nothing that can happen to me can be as bad as what I've already gone through.

Is there a possibility of seeing a neurologist? Perhaps even to rule out or ease fears of a deteriorating condition?

Actually, I am seeing a neurologist (just had first consult), but about different issues (motor control issues, lack of balance, etc.)

I have discussed this with my therapist.

I've been noticing a lot of times when I feel like a part of my "self" just goes to sleep for some period of time, which I mostly notice later, when I realize I've spent an evening or a day utterly out of touch with whatever I was supposed to be doing or had intended to do.  It's not like I can't remember that time, but it's like I was drugged or something suppressed who I am and was just running on automatic pilot, following my impulses.  For instance, reading, usually mindless stuff, books I've reread so often I can practically recite them from memory.  Sometimes I'm not aware of it until it's over, but more often it feels like a compulsion to not think about anything and to immerse myself in whatever it is I'm distracting myself with.

I've also noticed myself getting distracted while driving.  I find myself looking at something other than the road and the traffic while at the same time realizing at some level that I'm not paying attention to the road and that that is dangerous, but it takes a real effort of will to pull myself back, and a few minutes or a few seconds later, I'm back to staring at, say, a tree or the sign on a building.

I think it's always been an issue with me, but back when I was working, the fear that I wouldn't get my work done and would get in trouble (fired, yelled at by my boss, etc.) would yank me back onto task.  However, I retired a few months ago and there's so much less that I have to do that nothing terrible happens if I'm out of it for a whole day or so.  It's like some unconscious self in me wants me to stay spaced out as much as possible.

I remember this happened a lot when I was a kid.  Basically, any time I didn't have to be aware of what was going on, my mind was off somewhere where I wasn't conscious of even existing.  They called it "daydreaming," and it was usually some fantasy about insects or trains or something.  I now think it was a way of escaping from the hellish reality in which I was always in trouble and could never seem to be this utterly different person that everyone around me told me I had to be, and where I had no control over my life.  And where I didn't feel safe.  Van der Kolk mentions something about how trauma patients who never had anyone they felt safe with growing up have a particularly hard time recovering, and I definitely did not have anyone I felt safe with.  I only felt safe when I was alone and could hope I'd be left alone.

(That was my greatest wish until I was like 16 or so -- to be just left alone.   I even deliberately gave wrong answers on one of those standardized tests in the hope that they would stop calling me "so smart" and insisting that I could do better if I would only just try.  Even today, being called "smart" is kind of triggering for me.)

I also have these episodes when it's like a wave flows over my mind, taking with it all awareness of what I was doing or saying.  It's particularly distressing when it happens in the middle of a sentence, or when I'm playing the piano (and have to figure out where I am on the page of the music and even where my hands are on the keyboard.)

Sometimes I wonder if this is some sort of partial DID, like there are alters which kind of take over my executive functioning (or disable it) and lead me to do stuff I would never do.  But I don't have spans of time which I can't account for.  And it doesn't feel like whatever it is is a full-blown personality.

Lately I've been kind of worried that, with all this dissociation and increasing inability to actually make plans and carry them out, my personality is falling apart.  Or, worse, that some other part of my mind is going to take over and erase my current personality, so that it will be as if it had never existed.

And then I sometimes wonder if I have some progressive neurological deterioration -- I'm getting clumsier and stumbling and dropping stuff even more than before.  I have one friend who says he can't bike because he has no balance due to Parkinson's disease  (I notice my balance is gone, too), and another who got brain cancer last spring (she had a tumor which was removed in an emergency surgery -- just as COVID-19 was overwhelming the health care system), and I think that's what has me thinking of neurological disorders.

.... just wanted to let you know about our sister site Out of the Fog which has lots of great info about personality disorders and a support forum like ours here - https://outofthefog.website/

I know about that website.  My impression was that Out Of The Storm was particularly for people with Complex PTSD, which I pretty clearly have, and Out Of The Fog was for anyone dealing with people with personality disorders.  But I've looked at both, trying to glean whatever might help me get clearer about who and what I am.

A lot of what I am struggling with is actually believing that my problems arise from how I was treated, and that that treatment really was that bad -- that I'm not just being a crybaby or just "trying to get attention" or making a mountain out of a molehill.   Everything seemed so superficially okay, and people outside the family always said how wonderful my parents were and if they ever mentioned my obvious problems, it was to imply that they were because I was doing it wrong.  I've been mostly holding onto the fact that I can clearly remember (and always have remembered) that I was thinking of suicide and how I might go about it on a daily basis and wishing I had the nerve to go through with it, because even I can see that children don't do that unless it's pretty bad.  (I still struggle with suicidal ideation, half a century later.)

My therapist and I don't spend a lot of time talking about C-PTSD as such, because our time is focussed on dealing with the issues, not trying to come up with DSM-V categories.  But I've looked at a number of web pages that list the symptoms of C-PTSD, and I clearly have most of them, and I can't say I don't have the others, because of the distortions in my thinking that still remain.

Therapy has been pretty slow and discouraging because I developed a lot of work-arounds to cover up the problems.  Also, I don't recall ever having had a person or place where I felt really safe.  (Van der Kolk mentions that people who as children never had anyone they felt safe with have a particularly hard time undoing the damage.)

Fortunately, I interact very little with my FOO, partly because I have organized my life far away from them and partly because my siblings don't seem to have much interest in interacting anyway.   My parents are dead, but even before they died, they avoided dealing with me to the  extent they could while maintaining the pretense of being a happy loving family.  I suspect that they would have been more willing to interact with me (e.g., let me know when they were passing through, or when relatives died, etc.) if I had made more of an effort to keep up the pretense that they were loving parents.   Since they died, I have the impression that things have eased a smidgen with my siblings, but it's hard to know because everything with my FOO has always been so murky and ambiguous and just plain strange.

Thanks for the pointer to the article.   I think I tick off most of the bullet points, and the others are still "maybe"s.

I've been reading (and re-reading)  Trauma and Recovery  and The Body Keeps the Score, but neither one explicitly discusses Narcissistic parenting.   My therapist thinks my mother had NPD (based on my descriptions -- my mother died about 11 years ago.)  I've never felt like either emotional abuse or emotional neglect really described what I suffered, but this seems to be it.

Decades ago, I summed my mother up as "she sees everything that happens to her as a morality play put on for her benefit/edification."  I think she saw every interaction with anyone as a judgement of her goodness/badness as a person.  Other people weren't real to her, they were only extensions of herself and her needs.  So when things happened that she saw as indicating that she was a bad person, she would get angry (I remember her losing her temper all the time when I was young, and she would regularly hit us with a fly swatter or forsythia branch) or come up with some reason as to why it wasn't her responsibility, or simply pretend it wasn't happening.  Yeah, there was -- and still is -- a lot of gaslighting in my family.

I had a number of problems with school and with my brothers when I was younger, and she basically would tell me that it was my fault and I should just handle it myself.  My life was * until I eventually trained myself not to care and not to feel and to tell my parents as little as possible about my life.  My teen years were spent just trying to stay sane until I could move out.

When I was young, I had piano lessons, but I hated to practice mostly because my mother would come in and comment on it whenever I did.  I got the feeling that she wanted to somehow appropriate my music for herself.  And one time I played a Beethoven sonata (because the music was right there on the piano), and afterwards she told me, "your father used to play that piece, but he won't ever again now that he's heard you play it."

And there was one really weird experience I had with her, years later, when I was in grad school.  I was talking to her, saying how what I believed was ultimately my responsibility; even if I decided to uncritically accept someone else's judgements and beliefs, it was still something I had chosen.  She told me I was "so arrogant" and then acted like I had really wounded her.  At the time, her reaction confused me -- to me, it felt like what I said was obvious, like saying "water is wet."  But now I think it was because I was asserting that I was a separate person from her, rather than an extension of herself.

Three Roses: I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time relating the quotes to my own experience.

Fear, shame, helplessness, etc., are pretty much a constant in my life, as far back as I can remember.  It's just that at around age 12-15, I learned to block them out and bury them and ignore their crying and force myself to do what needs to be done (Raw Bits, anyone?  ), or distract myself.  I can't see them as "episodes,"  they're just my life.

What seems to have changed since I started transitioning is that the worst of my childhood misery is no longer split off into the inner 11-year-old; I seem to have integrated him/her because I no longer feel her/him as a separate person, suffering and crying and feeling abandoned inside me.

These episodes distinguish themselves from the "just my life" stuff in that they are so, so forceful.  The pain feels unbearable, and even when I don't feel it, my body reacts as if I were feeling the worst acute pain I have ever felt.  (Kidney stones anyone?)

** TW ** Mention of suicidal ideation. **

I've been having episodes that I've been calling "Emotional Flashbacks," but they don't seem much like what the threads on "what do youre EFs feel like?" thread.  Would these be called EFs, or something else?

Right now, I have two kinds:

* I suddenly feel like I'm in a lot of pain, but not localized, and it's not like a physical pain.  Sometimes I think, I wish someone would kill me so I wouldn't have to feel this.  I'd cry if I could.
* I don't feel anything emotionally, but I find myself clenching my fists or wringing my hands and my face and shoulders and neck tense up as if I were in a lot of pain or something, but I don't feel any pain.  I keep thinking I should be able to relax, but somehow I just don't.  Eventually, slowly, I relax.

These episodes last typically a few minutes, not for hours or days like some report.  I generally can't point to a trigger, though occasionally  just before one starts, I remember that I was thinking of something I had done "wrong", or at least something that could have been considered "wrong" when I was growing up, and starting to feel like I was just the most awful, horrible entity in the universe.

Up until a number of years ago, before my transition (I'm a trans woman), the episodes consisted of feeling like I was awful, etc., and wishing I could kill myself.  To the extent I can remember, they started in childhood.  (Back when i was a child, I really did want to kill myself, but the idea of dying scared me too much for me to actually do it.  Now they're just intrusive thoughts.)