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**TRIGGER WARNING--emotional abuse during pregnancy, child abuse.**

Part of the invalidating episode--well, argument--I experienced with my SO had to do with his family.  We are engaged, have been for 4 years, and have a 2 yr old together.  To say that his family does not accept me is the understatement of the century.  I understand that I brought my CPTSD to the table, but I also think anyone would be hurt by what I experience at their hands, and I think they are malicious in their intent, while my SO excuses it away as them being bumbling or else just innocently clueless, and me being oversensitive. 

So maybe I'm putting this here in hopes that I'll look back on it someday from a healed place where they can't get to me anymore. And maybe also it feels subversive to tell about it at all.  I usually keep this stuff to myself.  I'm trying to find some guts and empower myself.

An example of my SO's parents' behavior that makes me not trust them:  We lived with them a short while in the beginning of our relationship and for the first 5 months of my pregnancy.  I was being unsuccessfully medicated for hyperemesis gravidarum and had hemorrhaged--and I do mean hemorrhaged, not just a little typical pregnancy spotting--3 times by the 4th month.  I was already a high-risk pregnancy when this started happening.  Each time I hemorrhaged I was dizzy and weak and the doctors doubted I was still pregnant afterwards.  I was bedrested.   And somehow my little fighter held on.

For some reason, I also feel the need to explain that I didn't ask for any special treatment and kept quiet about my troubles.   I was not "high maintenance".   In fact I was taking care of SO's two kids from his prior marriage.  However, his parents were aware of my pregnancy problems because of overnight ER visits that required they watch the children, and we told them about the vomiting problem.

I was usually alone in the house with my future FFIL, who's retired, while my SO was at work and the kids at school.   One day FFIL cooked hamburger, which turned out to be the worst vomiting trigger I had ever encountered.    I was miserable with sickness and fear that I would miscarry.  I apologetically asked my SO that night to please ask his dad to hold off on making *just* hamburger until I got my vomiting under control (I did this because FFIL had already been needlessly hostile to me on many occasions and I was afraid to ask him directly). FFIL responded by putting hamburger in the crock pot the very next morning after my SO left for work.  In fact he did this for the next 5 days in a row. 

He had not cooked hamburger in the entire 4 months prior.

I went into freeze mode and instead of confronting him, hid in my room with a new air purifier we couldn't afford going full blast.  So FFIL suddenly had to open our door over and over.  And over and over and over.  And leave it open.

My SO not only ate the hamburger each night, but to this day still won't admit that it was mean and that I am justified in not trusting FFIL.  What SO actually said last night was, "It's not like he hit you with a hammer! It's not like he raped you!"  This only comes up because I still have to see and interact with his parents a couple of times a month to keep the peace in my relationship. 

It makes me feel like an utterly worthless human being.   I come from a background of severe childhood abuse and don't know how to act in the moment to defend myself.  When my stepmom ordered me into ice baths as a child, I just obediently got in and stayed submerged.   I can take ridiculous abuses without any reaction at all.  I don't want to be like this.  He could have killed my child in utero.

I apologize for the details.  I don't know how to tell the story without them.   

Thank you both for the replies.  They mean alot.  Becoming "visible" in any way is really hard for me, even online.  Thank you.

I've been reading Walker and becoming more aware.  However the problem I keep having is I can't tell if am I in an emotional flashback, or if I am experiencing genuine contempt from someone who's gaslighting me.  Does anyone else have this problem or know how to tell? 

Just spent the last hour or so being invalidated by my significant other.  Guess it's driving me to try here again, so I can see that that's good.  I have no support system otherwise and I'm really struggling.  So I'm  just going to set this marker as a starting point and try to leave it here.  If I can succeed at just that, it will be a big win for me. 

This swamp of self-loathing is so suffocating.  And silencing.  Thank you all for being here.

Thank you for this thread.  I feel in like company here.  I lurk alot and compose responses in my mind, but back away from posting nearly every time.  Guess that means that no, not getting better over here. 

Got a big extra hit of long distance invalidation from my Dad this morning, so I'm glad to have a place to "hang out" (i.e., lurk) where I can at least imagine that it's probably safe to do so, even if no one has any idea I'm here.  LOL yet another habit of mine that I need to break...staying invisible as possible. 

I hope everyone found at least a small spot of joy this Christmas.

I can really relate to this.  Thank you for sharing it.   Do you mind clarifying what you meant when you said that you now know your struggles with being miserable at jobs were due to having no coping skills?  Have you identified and/or learned any in particular that have helped? 

Wow thanks everybody for the kind responses.  Contessa, didn't mean to hijack your thread...I do understand where you're coming from.  You're the first person I've encountered besides myself who's raised this question.  This is an amazing community. 

Yep. Absolutely.  In fact I often lament privately that I used to be so much more patient and "nice".  I think I was better liked in general, though I'm not sure if this is true or just seems that way now.  I was really good at placating troublemakers.  Now I have been accused of being intolerant. I used to joke that I didn't have an anger "button".  Now I feel silent flashes of rage during which it's all I can do to not smash something (haven't done it yet lol). I seem to have lost some of my ability to fake I'm "ok" effectively. It goes way farther than this, but you get the idea. By way of backstory, I grew up in abusive homes but seemed to do alright, I could fake normal and even "happy" so well that people would comment on how envious they were of me, and I was always blown away by this because I'd been miserable with what I now know were cptsd symptoms for as long as I could remember.  Then, in my early 40s, an event which I refer to as the "Blitzkrieg" happened, during which I was taken down by two psychopaths in my family--I didn't know what psychopathy actually was until then--and lost nearly everything. I mean everything.  Home, job, reputation, marriage, multiple animals dead.  I went No Contact with both of them and by necessity most of my other family, and have not been the same since.  I am quick to anger (though I stuff it), I mistrust everybody, I lost confidence in every area of my life from my profession to my appearance to my hope for the future.  I am far, far more afraid and sometimes don't leave the house.  I catastrophize constantly.  It feels like my entire life prior to the blitzkrieg exists on the other side of a wide chasm. So, again, yep.  It's weird isn't it.  For me, It's like my memories of myself are of someone I used to know, and I'm not sure who I am now because it hasn't been long enough ( a few years).

On a brighter note, I'm trying to use this as an opportunity to create a truer, more honest life for myself and my chosen family.     Thanks for making it through this long post.