Messages

Thanks, guys! I've updated it some with additional personal work and coaching from my therapist: http://outofthefog.net/C-PTSD/forum/index.php?topic=1306.0

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

The EF symptoms are showing me I seem like im just living one giant EF. With sporadic days maybe 1 -4 every few months where I am not in an EF.

I've been there. IME, the severity of the perpetual EF decreases over time and the frequency and duration of "surfacing" experiences (when you're not in an EF) increase. The fact that you're having those moments at all means that you're on the right track. Keep going!!! 

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

Hi Milarepa, It's maddening isn't it?  I have found a way to quiet it:  I get it lying in bed trying to sleep - I realized that I tend to tense my muscles (curl up) and my breathing gets very shallow.  If I consciously relax my muscles and breathe more deeply it goes away.  Hope this helps you 

Thanks! I'll give that a try. :-)

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?

Curious about the "itchies" especially at night - an itch pops up and the second you scratch it another pops up somewhere else and so on... can go on for hours.  Perhaps I'm the only one - it's definitely an odd one - but it only happens to me in an EF.

This happens to me constantly. I basically always feel like I have bugs crawling on my skin.

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?

First I get really agitated and anxious. Then I have a lot of thoughts of violent and gruesome self-harm and feel the urge to destroy everything fragile I can get my hands on. Finally I freeze up and feel helpless and broken and disgusting and worthless. I rotate through these three experiences until it either resolves on its own (after weeks or months) or, more recently, until I realize I'm in a flashback and do the 13 steps.

Interesting to hear people talk about how good they feel after an EF. I feel like I've been wrung out like a wet rag. It's kind of a pleasant tiredness, but just total exhaustion.

I think maybe if you don't suffer with mental health problems, it's really difficult to know and show real empathy and therefore offer some meaningful support.  I'm not trying to make excuses for the kind of wounding nonsense those people spout because quite often, they don't want to learn or try and understand what it's really like.  And although it hurts to have someone flippantly dismiss the trauma I often find myself experiencing, occasionally, when my compassionate self is in the house, I like to remember how limited and small those people's worlds must be, that their minds are not open enough to listen to others stories and their imaginations are not wide enough to accommodate experiences they have never known.

When Robin Williams died, I saw so many people on Facebook asking how someone so wonderful and talented and funny could also be so "selfish." I wrote my own status update in response:

Who among you has been in enough pain that you longed for anything, even death, to make it stop? If you have not, then you are not qualified to comment on Robin Williams and I kindly invite you to shut the f*** up.

I got responses from friends who had survived cancer, were dying of cancer, had been burned over large portions of their bodies, had recovered from massive bacterial infections, or had broken multiple bones on the side of a mountain and waited hours for medical care to arrive. Interestingly, I didn't get a single post from anyone suffering from a mental illness.

So in a follow-up comment, I wrote:

It is interesting to note that everyone posting who has responded thus far has suffered a physical illness or injury, something other people could look at and say, "my, that must hurt quite a lot." Now imagine how you would have felt if, on top of all of the pain, you received very little support and understanding from friends, family, and the general public (or even stigma) because your injury was invisible. Now imagine that any support you do receive chafes like sandpaper on wounded skin.

That's when I started to get comments from normies who were kinda sorta getting it. They could imagine the physical agony because everyone has experienced physical pain. They could imagine the isolation because everyone has experiences of being excluded. When they put those things together and amplified them, it was possible to kind of extrapolate how awful it is to have a mental illness.

So, anyway, that's how I help normies "get it."

I know what it is to fake your way through your days, to fake your way through time with your family, to fake your way through sex, through whole relationships, through friendships, through all of it while either numb or in agony. It's like living in * and every day they turn the heat up a little higher.

I'm so grateful that I found the right cocktail of meds, and the right mental health team, and the right people to surround myself with. Without them, my recovery would not be possible. I hope you have similar luck, Gashfield. <3