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Even though I'm an adult, I still feel that thing deep within me as the true real me, even after all these years, that it's my essential true character.

That's your power, Eric.  It's mine, too. I don't remember what it felt like, but I do vividly remember one particular photograph my father took of me, from a distance and among other children, at a kids' Christmas party.  We were watching a Punch and Judy -- and how anyone could have hated that little girl as my mother already did is beyond me.  I haven't seen that photo for many years and it's probably been tossed out, but I remember every detail of my expression and clothing, as well as my sister's beside me.

I now believe my enthusiasm and sparkle was a threat to Mother, that she had no idea how to handle my strength of character so instead sought to crush it out of me.  From my teenage years to now it has mostly looked as though she succeeded.  But that little girl, and that little girl's spirit, has never really left me.  Forgotten, yes, many times, when I've been so overburdened I've felt as though I couldn't take another step.  But gone?  No.  Definitely not.

Thank you for the reminder.  I'm going to end today's OOTS session now, on a high note.   

Thank you for joining us, Laurel! 

Can't keep a job for very long, can't go back to school, can't make friends other than my boyfriend, can't remember my day-to-day life very well.

That's how it is now.  With the right help, all that can change into a much happier and more satisfying life.

We have at least one other member who has "pieces which are nearly separate personalities".  His thread is here: http://outofthefog.net/C-PTSD/forum/index.php?topic=7376 ETA: AphoticAtramentos has just linked to the same one!

I'm making a commitment to not give up hope again.

Attagirl!   You're going to make plenty of friends here.

[C]

I was definitely wary of medication before the head injury, but since then, I'm terrified to interrupt whatever healing remains, and I can't bring myself to trust doctors.

Indeed, sister!  For years I took various anti-depressants on a short-term basis, dropping them cold turkey because I perceived no positive result, and feeling better (as you say, more empowered) off them than on.  For the past year I've been homeless but not on the street, my meagre personal belongings in storage, and in a fraught domestic situation.  In that time I've taken four or five prescribed drugs, the first ones ADs that served only to make matters worse, more recently two Z-pills that failed to knock me out in safe doses, plus an over-the-counter antihistamine that usually flattens me and that the psychiatrist said was harmful to the brain .  That one I still take when I'm desperate, because as you will appreciate, weeks of getting at best five hours -- and often none -- makes literally everything fall apart. The AH prevents lying awake in anguish over lying awake, but it's a dreamless black hole that leaves me reeling in the mornings and well under par mentally until I face the issue of bedtime again.

I believe the fastest way out of my current acute insomnia would be a couple of weeks in a luxury health resort with good food, congenial company, gentle exercise, sumptuous massages and a comfortable bed in a well-ventilated room.  Dream on, Candid!  I had a week in such a place three years ago (a close friend paid for us both) and it was fantastic while it lasted -- but obviously you need a decent environment to go to afterwards.

when I experience anxiety and/or depression I often feel like my brain just needs rest and quiet. The thought of flooding it with chemicals, when it feels like I need a break from overstimulation, is pretty unappealing.

I agree.  I recently did a Living With Brain Injury course and it was repeatedly made clear to us that sleep was vital to healing from stroke or traumatic brain injury.  They told us -- none of whom was working -- to take a nap every afternoon.  As it happens, today is the second anniversary of coming off my pushbike while careering downhill, and landing on the right side of my head.  Two years ago I was in hospital, and had still to face the decision for surgical reconstruction that could have blinded my right eye but didn't, soon to be followed by psychosis that put me in hospital for three months. During that time, not only was I filled with inappropriate  drugs; I was woken several times through the night by Suicide Watch, which would continue during the day if I went back to bed.  Most of the other inmates slept through it, but hypervigilance ensures no one can ever catch me asleep no matter what I've taken.  For example, I was writing in bed by torchlight almost immediately after surgery under anaesthetic.

I'm still planning to meet with a psychiatrist at an integrative facility, and hopefully they will be able to prescribe treatment (either conventional or alternative) that suits my needs.

That sounds wonderful .  And expensive  .

It's comforting and empowering, however, to know that I have the option to refuse treatment if it doesn't feel right, and I don't have to accept diagnoses from doctors who don't take my concerns seriously.

I have that too, and I'm running through the options rather quickly.  The latest assessment (by a psychologist I liked straight away) said that while I had been through a long list of major traumas, I showed no symptoms of PTSD and was being discharged from the Trauma Service in which I'd been waiting for help since February.  The woman knew about CPTSD and agreed I had it, but in her written report to my GP she didn't use the C once, and made only a blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference to ACE.  I don't know what will happen next, but I strongly suspect... nothing. 

Both she and a female GP (I see a different one each time I go to the same NHS surgery) expressed great concern when they saw my haggard face and heard me say I was 'sleeping' with my eyes open and while walking around, including crossing busy roads.  The psychologist was nearly two weeks ago and the GP some time before that.  Since then I've done the first of eight weeks as an intern, which may or may not lead to paid work that would eventually get me somewhere to live, and I'll be on the job again tomorrow. 

Possibly I'm still too coherent for anyone to believe that the past several weeks have been like one very long day with occasional brief naps.  I've emailed the neuroscience department of the nearest university, outlining my situation and offering myself for whatever research they might be doing on cerebral activity.  That was 10 days ago, and no reply.

I think it would be a shame, to put it mildly, if I segued straight from this into early-onset dementia in a nursing home  -- but with no solution in sight I can't rule that out.

My self-talk includes: Hold on, little soldier.  Never give up.  You'll get out of this by your own efforts alone, and the triumph will be all the sweeter for that.

[Children know when they're loved]

I guess it's possible to not mess children up, at least for some people.

Of course it is!  Children know when they're loved, and that's 'all' you have to do.  Everything else follows on from it.  Until Mother became overt 26 years ago, I knew she didn't love me and assumed it was my fault -- because by that stage I was getting the message from all directions.  I was in no position even to consider becoming a mother myself.  For me, such a huge commitment would have required an inner security I have yet to experience.

A former colleague once informed me: "You hate children" and I was aghast.  To be sure, I was Put Out when she visited me with her four-under-seven and sat on my couch flipping through a magazine while they ran riot in my small, neat home, hanging off the plastic door of my tape deck and doing unspeakable things with my toothbrush, but hate children? I'd never said that, have never felt it. 

She said that day: "Now you know what it's like."  I already knew what her children were like, because it was usually I who visited her home, where it was impossible to get two sentences out without interruption, at which she unfailingly  jumped up to give every small visitor whatever they asked for.  To my credit I stuck with this friend, but she completed what mother started. Mother was a merciless attacker for whom I could get nothing right; this was a laissez-faire mother whose children could do no wrong until she got triggered and started either weeping or shouting abuse.  IMO both are equally catastrophic, but I'm fully aware there's middle ground. I've met far too many caring parents, whose children show the results of mindful correction at the right times and for the right reasons, to believe it can't be done.   

Everything you've written on this thread shows you are responsible now and would still be so if you chose to be a mother -- and your partner sounds like a Great Catch who loves you.  He loves you!  And he knows the baby issue ought to be the woman's decision every time, no exceptions, even though I've heard so many say: "I didn't really want children, but he wanted them so much..."  Women in the lucky first world have control over reproduction, and we know that with the best will in the world it will be we who do the bulk of the work.  I'm sure there are career girls who carry on as normal while providing financially for a househusband/chief carer and offspring; I just haven't met any.

So I dips me lid to your partner for refusing to tell you what to do.  IMO, first pregnancy is the biggest decision a woman can ever make, and I'm appalled at the many who appear to 'let it happen' to them while immature, broke, underprotected and/or homeless themselves. Don't get me started on overpopulation and the effects of a welfare system that makes teenage single motherhood a career choice.

Re. adoption, my gay brother has fostered a number of children from kiddie to teenage, and as far as I know has always found the experience rewarding.  In fostering cases the biological parents have been deemed incompetent or abusive, so these children come with ready-made problems.  It's much harder to adopt; for obvious reasons there simply aren't that many healthy babies needing homes, and of course prospective adopters are scrupulously vetted.

I believe your natural empathy would ensure you weren't inadvertently neglectful or abusive.  As ACE survivors we're unlikely to make the mistake of expecting a child to have the understanding of an adult. The 'only' danger lies in the difficulty many of us have regulating our own emotions.  A toddler tantrum can be massively triggering.

Also the world sometimes feels so terrifying that I worry even if I never did anything abusive to them then someone else surely would.

This is the effect of the 'news', where horror stories make headlines and good parenting features nowhere.  We all know there are people whose children die young, whether by accident, illness or stranger danger.  I don't know how these parents live the rest of their lives, but I do know that the vast majority of babies born in the first world stay alive long enough to become parents themselves.  I don't suppose that's very helpful to someone who fears violence against the children she hasn't yet decided to have!

Doesn't she have a life of her own?

Apparently not.  Sorry for the threadjack, Andy.

Charming.

Come to think of it, mother gave mixed messages to me and my sister when we were teenagers:
Giving birth was the best four days of my life.
Just wait till you're a mother yourself!
If you get pregnant, we'll throw you out.

Couple of decades later she wistfully told my sister that all her siblings were grandparents now.  Sis observed wryly: "She forgot to say 'when'."

Waiting on the porch for you, San, with a goodly supply of slippery watermelon seeds.   

Big step, TR.    I hope you and I can get the trauma-informed T we both need!

Frederica, I'm the middle of three childless sisters born to a covertly abusive mother.  I always knew I didn't want children.  ElderSis was never sure -- didn't want one now but was afraid she might in the future -- until the decision made itself; she and I are both in our 60s.  YoungerSis aborted a mistake when she was 19 and was pitifully upset about it afterwards, but she didn't try again.

My concept of mothering is based on films and on seeing friends' relationships with their children.  I grew up with so much emotional neglect/abuse that I have no clue how it's done 24/7/365.  I just don't have that to give.

I'm sorry you're struggling with this.  I do believe a lot of women are able to reparent themselves as they parent their children.  I still believe I would have been abusive -- not my reason for abstaining, but I'm so glad I did.

Your post makes great sense to me, Wanda.  Of all the doctors, counsellors etc. I've consulted, psychiatrists have been the most dismissive and the most likely to misdiagnose.  Obviously the one I saw involuntarily was the worst, but generally speaking they don't want to listen to the inner experience but focus entirely on judging outward appearance, speech and mannerisms. Since psyche means soul, I find their attitude hard to comprehend as well as very hard to take.

I think you're on the right track with exercise , diet, supplements and anxiety-reduction strategies, and I get what you're saying about the sense of being in control. I have a great horror of being the kind of woman who needs fistfuls of pills to get through the day.  I'm another one with a head injury, although mine was two years ago.  It can take a very long time to recover from that. I understand how the knowledge that "it could have been worse" blasts confidence, because I was just going about my normal routine when I tackled the tarmac with my head.  I could easily have died that day, and that's robbed me of a lot of my nerve,

There is something that seems kind of disempowering to me about taking psychiatric meds.

That's exactly how I feel.  And while I realise all drugs (and all foods) circulate regularly through the brain, psychiatric meds strike me as particularly scary because they are intended to change brain chemistry.  The long lead-in times and the necessity to wean off afterwards makes it a major commitment, and you want to be certain it's going to help... or at least not make things worse.

Seems to me difficult decision-making means the options are equally bad or equally good.  Often I wrestle with one so long that it makes itself, because other options have time limits.  When there's no rush to decide, I've noticed it's far better to wait and gather information than it is to go off half-cocked.

Usually context gives it away, but have we distinguished between Inner Child and Inner Critic?

I blame myself and wonder, how could I let this happen?

This is a universal reaction in PTSD-simple and CPTSD.  Something so horrifying, we go over and over how we might have contributed to it, because if we can make it our fault there's a chance we can prevent it ever happening again.  It's a healthy learning mechanism that goes haywire when it wasn't our fault, we were innocent, and there was nothing we could have done to prevent it.

Also. it's all too easy years down the track to think, I've understand now, I can see exactly what happened -- how could I have been so blind?  The answer is, we're always doing the best we know at the time.  When we know better, we do better.

The challenge now is to stop blaming yourself for what you couldn't control and didn't understand.  That's a colossal waste of energy that could be used to heal yourself.  You don't want more to regret in the future.

Welcome to our forum, Eric.  We're all helping each other along.

If I were to express anything, I would just scream and scream.

That's my issue now, Blueberry.  I'm so full of grief and rage that it's literally kept me sleepless for weeks. Seeing my own haggard face is a punishment, and I hate it when people take photos of me.  Yesterday, walking through town, I had to seek a blind alley I could go into and scream with rage without anyone on the busy high street noticing.  Can't say I felt any better for it, just that it was something I suddenly felt moved to do.

This leaves me feeling terrified of the trauma therapy I'm still waiting for.  Who's going to contain the fall-out between sessions?  I'm snappy enough with H as it is; I'm dangerously sleep-deprived now. 

Thank you (and Andy) for saying you would listen to me.  Yes, I believe you have 'got' the guts of my story.

The grief is for all the people I've loved and lost, in which I include myself.  The rage is for Mother, who offered a fauxpology in our final phone conversation 18 years ago but has done absolutely nothing about all the smear campaigns she set in motion, thus depriving me of all relatives on her side of the family.  It was a paternal cousin who told me she was in a nursing home, but I have no further information. 

Secondary rage is for the sister who cyberstalks me.  She hasn't had a good word to say about me for 35 years, but she made it clear a couple of months ago -- and indirectly -- that she had found me here on OOTS.  In the absence of a T this is my only outlet, and it has been compromised.

Seems to me that a long time taking history is a good thing.  First we get the facts out there, gaining trust that the T gets it, then we start to tackle the feelings.  That's when things get rough.

Our stories are all widely different, but the feelings are the same.  That's why we understand each other so readily.

Andy, Blueberry and San. 

I went through a stage of drawing, and I drew lots of faces.  Most of them were sad, a few had big fake grins that looked hostile.  That was followed by a brief but happy period of making tiny pixies and fairies in clay.  Most were around 2cm tall. 

Mostly I write.  I can express the feelings of trauma without going anywhere near my own facts -- and to me, the feelings in CPTSD are more significant than the facts.  Three of my trauma stories have been published, and I didn't know I was writing trauma fiction at the time.  All of them show alienation, being misunderstood/misjudged, being unsupported and unacknowledged by the people around the protagonists. In one case the narrator was a cat!

A felt a lot of relief through writing these stories.  The longest of them was placed 3rd in a literary competition before being printed as a novella, but was criticised because it got nowhere -- ie. there was no resolution for the anti-heroine, who I left fighting SI.  It was the way I felt at the time, and I was so thrilled that the judges and publisher 'got' it. 

The non-English speaking refugee found a friend; the cat left home, had some nasty adventures, and returned to its owners with a new sense of self.

I've never (until now) thought of the performing arts -- dance and theatre -- as possible means of expression.  When obliged to dance, I can't get the steps right.  The harder I try the worse it gets, which upsets me when everyone else can do it.   I'm no actor, either... or rather, most of my waking life is an act, so when H tried to film me I 'froze'.  He was saying: "Just do what you're doing" and the results were so awful I made him delete them.

Any of the arts could work as therapy.  I would say pick whichever appeals to you and just feel your way into it.

Like wading through treacle.  Keep wading, san!  Priorities, letting other things slide, one little step forward at a time...

Here we are with you