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Messages - schrödinger's cat

#31
Family / Re: Holidays are Hard
April 06, 2015, 06:57:16 PM
Does it also count if holidays make me have flashbacks? My mother always prepared the holidays "properly", so by the time the actual day came, she was absolutely exhausted. That made for very bleak holidays indeed. There was a certain grim determination about her on those days. A certain air of "I'll celebrate Easter even if it kills me, so help me god". Did you ever see a Western movie where a guy has to cross a desert and then he decides to stay behind so his comrades can have his water? A bit like that. I am not kidding, sadly. So whenever a holiday dawns, a part of me says: "Oh great, this means it'll be a bleak day full of emotional abuse." It's surprisingly hard to fix. Christmas is easier. But Easter? Not so much.
#32
A compassionate place full of cats and coffee, from what I've seen here so far.  :hug:
#33
Ideas/Tools for Recovery / Re: Trust resources?
April 06, 2015, 12:12:21 PM
Great thread, and so many helpful points made!  :yourock:  I'm busy taking notes here, since I've got massive trust issues myself. When I'm feeling particularly down, it's even starting to affect my sense of object constancy. (So I can't cross any bridge without being certain that it'll collapse under me, I can't step on balconies because I'm sure they'd break, that kind of thing.)
#34
Hi no_more_guilt! Widdiful said it best, and I've little to add to her words. But I wanted to let you know that I understand this feeling - this emotional numbness, and the only real feeling you get is anger, and even just waking up feels terrible because you're instantly aware of all the shittiness in your life. It does get better. Hang in there. Anger isn't a good feeling, but I'd second what Widdiful said - sometimes it's the right time for it.
#35
Don't worry, Indigo. It's not like you're asking me to fix you. But it's perfectly valid to ask someone else questions about what things are like for them. I've always done that when I was learning new stuff. You ask around, and then you have several people's points of view and their experiences and things that worked for them - and it just helps in making one's own decisions. At the very least, no idea is so bad that it can't serve as a warning of what not to do.

QuoteIm not sure what will get me out of this funk.  Perhaps this is something i could be working on but i have no idea where to start, as when it comes to my mum and my own childhood...apart from anger, i feel nothing else.

Hm... there are a few things that have helped me personally. In case you want to have a look at these, here they are.

http://www.pete-walker.com/pdf/GrievingAndComplexPTSD.pdf  -- a text from therapist Pete Walker (who specializes in CPTSD). It explains how grieving can help us in our recovery, and it says that angering is actually a part of this grieving process.

Last summer, I started looking for ways to fix my emotional numbness, so I researched ways to fix Alexithymia. Not that I have it, but emotional numbness is a part of Alexithymia, so any treatment or self-help idea that addresses this particular part of Alexithymia could be interesting for people like us, too. They recommend journaling. So one thing you could do is keep a Feelings Journal. The idea is simple - three times a day, write down precisely what you feel. It's slow going at first, but with me personally, things started moving after a few days and weeks, and it really did help me feel more emotions.

Another thing that helps with Alexithymia (and maybe also with general numbness?) is doing something creative. Music or dancing or art or acting. So much of that is about emotions - recognizing emotions, expressing emotions, or (with music and acting in particular) experiencing emotions that are called up by a certain song or a script. They also say it can be helpful to read novels and other texts that call up emotions within you.

So as you can see, the basic idea behind these methods is that feeling emotions is a skill that can be re-learned - or a muscle that can atrophy and then strengthened again if you just use it (gently) over and over again until it's back in working order. I found that encouraging. It would be really disheartening if emotions were something you switch off and then you can't switch them back on again.

I guess it's another matter if your numbness and the grey, stodgy feeling is a part of a depression. I'm less sure how to fix that, sadly. I'm struggling too, sometimes. In my case, it makes things better if I do all those general run-of-the-mill depression-busting things. You know, things like drinking enough water, eating sensible food, exercizing, journalling, using CBT methods to find unhelpful/depressing patterns of thought and teach myself how to think more realistically.

Or the stodginess can be simply just exhaustion - another part of the grieving process. If I've been through turmoil, then I'm sometimes simply just emotionally drained afterwards. My batteries are empty, and it's harder for me to see the joy and fun in life. The best thing then is to be tolerant towards myself, and to see it as a kind of emotional head cold: not pleasant, but it'll pass one day.

Another idea is from a book I read. Can't remember which. It's this: if you've been stressed out or traumatized for so long, sometimes this somatizes your feelings. So instead of properly "feeling emotions", you feel physical sensations instead. So the author said that this is also a way you can use to reconnect to your true emotions: observe your body, and try to see if you get certain reactions after certain stressors. I haven't tried that out yet, but it looked promising.

QuoteWhat book was it that you read that was from the narcissistic family?

It's this one: http://www.amazon.com/Narcissistic-Family-Diagnosis-Treatment/dp/0787908703/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1428320291&sr=8-1&keywords=the+narcissistic+family   Like I said, it's written for therapists, so there's little in there how to fix all those injuries. But the descriptions of what a narcissistic family is like, those are good. Also, I found it really helpful that they think in terms of "narcissistic family systems". Like you, I'm not at all sure that either of my parents are or were narcissists. But our family was definitely narcissistic. My father was gravely ill for most of my life, and his needs came first. Obviously. My brother and I felt we had to make sure our parents would be fine, and we learned to cope with most problems on our own instead of "bothering" our parents. So we learned to never expect closeness or support. We learned to watch our mother's moods closely, and we learned to stay the * out of her way if she was under too much pressure with her impossible workload and my father's care. He died when I was in my early twenties, and it was only after his death that I realized what it had all been like. His illness had taken up so much room, there'd been very little space in my own life for myself.

If you find that book in your library or buy it - the thing is, the description of what it's like to live in a narcissistic family were so spot-on, I found reading all that really really taxing. So it might be a good idea to brace yourself for a shock, and to read the book in small bites and nibbles instead of just swooshing through it all at once.

QuoteTo me...if my own mum deserves empathy and understanding etc...and I'm just like her as ive discovered, then it would make sense for me to open a new box for myself, as not treating myself with compassion will not help to break the cycle. I just cant do it as yet. I realised from reading what you wrote that my box is very empty...empty of the qualities i have separate from my mum. I don't even know hers.

Yes, same here. It's better now, but at first, it was like I didn't have all that much of an identity of my own. I'd focussed so much on simply just coping. But that lack of things to put in your box - that could be the first thing you can put in your box?  ;D  I'm not even just kidding - it's a perfectly valid box item, this sense that we've kind of merged with our mothers, that we've focussed on their needs and their troubles so much that we're not yet able to see our own point of view. -- But generally, I've often found it a good idea to file ideas for later. There's no pressure. Quite often, there's this gut feeling that "this is too early" for one thing and "now would be a good time" for another. You can always do it later. CPTSD recovery is so complex, it's impossible anyway to do everything at once.
#36
General Discussion / Re: The issue?
April 06, 2015, 11:10:23 AM
Quote from: Trace on April 06, 2015, 04:21:38 AM
Do you ever really have past issues under control? I mean you can deal with them and put them away and feel like you dealt with them in a healthy way...then they pop back up again. Does this mean they were not dealt with like I thought they were?

It sometimes looks to me like we're spiralling our way up into the light. It's not a straight line, and you keep on revisiting the same bloody issues over and over again, which can be disheartening. And sometimes things get worse, or you forget something you thought you'd learned. But generally, things move upwards. Slooooowly. But they move.

Sometimes I only notice that things have begun to move when I read my journal entries from five or so years ago.
#37
General Discussion / Re: Learned Behavior
April 05, 2015, 11:55:41 AM
Quote from: keepfighting on April 05, 2015, 09:44:36 AM
You are right in saying that kids are pretty tough in dealing with whatever life throws at them - but in a situation like your f's death which must have been pretty upsetting for everyone - kids are also  easy to be overlooked (unwittingly) by adults who are too preoccupied with themselves and their own efforts to deal with an overwhelming situation to recognize and respond appropriately to their kids' needs.

I second that. Watching someone die a sudden death is extremely hard on anyone, even on adults - and adults have a support network already in place. They know better how to fix things. Maybe not perfectly, and maybe all an adult has is the internet and the thought that "if this gets any worse I'll look for a therapist", but it's something. A child has nothing to help catch him. If the grown-ups around him don't show him how to cope and if they don't support him, he's sunk.
#38
Hi Friend10, it's brilliant that you're doing all this for your friend.

I can only judge from myself (and everyone's different) - but for me personally, something that's very helpful is validation and a lack of pressure. So it didn't surprise me at all that your friend said her first words to you, not to her therapists. They mean well. But CPTSD is caused by being trapped in a situation where we're essentially over-controlled and hurt. Our choices were taken away from us, we were the opposite of validated, and there was huge pressure to conform to our abusers' wishes or opinions. So in a way, CPTSD is caused by insupportable pressure. Then why on earth should it be fixable by more pressure? Okay, maybe those therapists know what they're doing. But even then, it's so good to know that your friend has you to counter-balance all this --- that you validate her and let her find her own pace.  :applause:

It still surprises me how healing some very basic things can be. Like being treated with kindness, courtesy, and simple common respect. Or when someone trusts you to be competent, and when they honour your own boundaries and your sense of pacing. So you're already doing a lot of things right, it sounds like.
#39
I can see both sides of the coin, like the two of you. Labels are hurtful. But the thing is, if we've grown up with EFs, then we've probably always been labelled for them. "Weak" or "lazy" or "weird" or "dysfunctional". So moving from those toxic labels to a label called "EF" is actually a step up.
#40
I've been jobless for the past fifteen years. First I lived abroad where I didn't speak the language and so couldn't find a job, then I was retraumatized and my CPTSD flared up big time, then I had kids, then it was too late. I just had no energy at all left for job-hunting. So if I have one thing, it's time. Also, I live in my head too much and I find those topics interesting. Retaining what I read is difficult, so I mostly just do excerpts on the points I want to memorize. Something that I've written down usually stays in my head. VERY time-consuming to do, but I'm nerdy enough to find excerpting a nice and relaxing activity. That might come from being a stay-at-home mother - if you spend your days listening to little people tell you aaaaall about Star Wars or My Little Pony, you're gasping for something brainy to do sooner or later.
#41
Hi Indigochild! Sorry, I kind of missed this for the past few days and only discovered it again now. I didn't want to leave you hanging.

It sounds like you're in the middle of gaining clarity about your past, and like that's at once helpful and confusing or even painful. A whirlwind of emotions: everything's stirred up and whizzes about. I hope you're okay, and that you're finding a way to interact (or NOT interact) with your parents that gives you enough room and safety so you can regain your inner balance after all that upheaval.

I can relate to wanting to keep some distance from your parents. I've recently come to see a bit more clearly what my mother's choices have meant for me, and I can't face just chatting to her. I'll be able to, sooner or later, but right now? Not so much. I just need some distance.

Quote from: Indigochild on April 02, 2015, 02:30:45 PM
Can i ask what you mean when you say that the alternative to not grieving is worse?

In my case, the alternative was pushing everything into denial. That numbed me to the point where I had almost no feelings at all - just fear, irritability, frustration, panic, worry, nervousness, anxiety - and even those I felt during flashbacks, rarely outside of them. It's the PITS. There are studies on people whose feelings have been "switched off" by brain injuries, and they show that a lack of emotion doesn't make you Spock, it makes you unmotivated. You have no joy in life. Good things don't feel good. Nothing feels rewarding. Nothing is fun. It's like the whole world has turned into grey, stodgy porridge.

QuoteI read this book called *Running on empty* ... it talked about the *fatal flaw*- feeling fatally at the most fundamental level flawed inside. ... Do you relate to this?

Hah, and how. I used to feel like everything about me had this wrongness attached to it. I didn't feel like I had a problem - I felt like I was the problem.

Thanks for the book recommendations, I've put them on my amazon wishlist.

QuoteIt helped me understand my mum....i did this backwards i think ....I looked at my mum for one....so i felt guilty for looking at my childhood and hating my mum....as i understood it wasnt her fault and i am just like her so I'm at a dead end...its not her fault.

Oh, I read something about that recently. It's from The Narcissistic Family. The book is written by therapists for therapists, so it doesn't have any self-help advice, but the way the narcissistic family system is described has been hugely eye-opening for me, so I can still recommend it. The authors say that children from narcissistic family systems often feel such guilt as you've described it. I know I feel it. They tell their clients to imagine two boxes. So for us, we'd have Mum's box and our box. In my Mum's box, I'd go pack everything I know about her life. Born to a poor family, her overcontrolling father, the fact that she was parentalized at a startlingly young age, the things she achieved, her gumption, her sense of humour, her integrity, the way she suffered when my father fell ill, her health troubles. All goes in my Mum's box. And I can open that box and look at it and go: "yes, that's my mother. That's my mother's life." And I can see that it's not her fault - she simply passed on to me what she'd received herself.

But I have a box, too. And all that concerns me goes in my box. And I can open my own box, look at my own life, and validate my own suffering. There's a time and a place for that. We don't abandon or betray our mothers if we validate the truth of how their choices have impacted on us. So in my box, there's abandonment by my mother, my mother's overcontrolling ways, her violations of my boundaries, her angry rants, my CPTSD, the fact that I was bullied at school and she pretty much dismissed the problem out of hand, down to the fact that for the past thirty years she's been again and again pressuring me to drink her favourite kind of herbal tea (a kind I hate, have always hated, will always hate). My box has my coping strategies, my resilience, my creativity, all the things I taught myself and did for myself without my mother's help. It's my box. It's okay for those things to be in there.

QuoteI went back to my dads after a break up (were back together now), but i realised that my dad who i had put on a pedestal as he will cuddle etc when my mum didnt, but it was traumatising going back home and seeing this in him for the first time... i hope you don't think that sounds too dramatic- i felt so alone and was going through a really hard time...and i felt so unsafe being there the entire time with him...i couldn't count on him or express myself at all and i felt so trapped. I felt like he didnt care...he is messed up also.

I had a similar experienced with my mother. Things are fine if I'm fine. But if I'm in trouble, the gaps in our relationship REALLY show.

QuoteHow do you mean when you ask if it would help if i associated my free floating anger with the actual traumatic situation that caused it?
The anger comes up at many things- not just one particular subject in my life if that makes sense?
I don't think it was just one thing that happened back then that makes me angry in the now.
I do think it would help - I'm just having real trouble figuring out where the anger etc. comes from.

Sorry, I might have judged from myself to others there. I never acknowledged to myself how my mother's actions traumatized me. I was trying so hard to be supportive to her that I somehow took on her point of view and neglected my own. So I never allowed myself to feel rejected, or angry, or hurt when she did something weird. All the anger and hurt was still there, but kind of cut off from the things that had caused it. So I got angry at the weirdest things - for example cyclists that use the sidewalk. Or I felt fear of heights - I couldn't cross a bridge without feeling certain it would collapse. Now that I've started to sift through my childhood and teenage years, I'm a lot better able to tell what I felt then. And I can feel those feelings now, too. Grief, or healthy and appropriate anger, or sadness, or shock. And as a nice side-effect of that, the free-floating feelings don't earth themselves in silly things quite as often.

I hope I didn't make it all sound easy. Whenever I sum up my own experiences, it's safe to assume that it was all after much trial and error. MUCH error. In my country, we have this children's birthday party game called pot-hitting: you hide a few sweets under an upturned pot, and one child gets blindfolded and then crawls about the room with a wooden spoon, hitting at things until they finally hit the pot. That's mostly what it feels like: creeping about in the semi-dark hitting at things until something finally, blessedly goes CLONK. It's slow going, but things move.
#42
Hm, I can't spot any wrong foot, so I think everything's okay.  :hug: 

About EFs - I'm finding it difficult sometimes to differentiate between mild EFs and normal reactions. EFs can be huge and debilitating. They can last for a long time, or they can be short and mild. There seems to be such an enormous variety. So I've been trying to find some criteria that would tell me that this is an EF.

Right now, my working theory is this. If it makes me feel the same way I felt back then, when I was a child, it's most probably an EF. So if I'm feeling helpless/small/overwhelmed in that same old way, it could be an EF. Or if I feel self-conscious and bad about myself in the way I felt then. Or if the same feelings and beliefs about the world overwhelm me.

And if we use those criteria, then your experience could well have been an EF. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you were overwhelmed and swallowed up by feelings of total inadequacy, and by a fear that everyone would nit-pick your text or criticize it or reject you for it. You showed some somatic symptoms - blurred vision, lack of co-ordination, shallow breathing. You felt fear, almost panic. You instinctively wanted to escape into a Freeze type response. So it's not at all unreasonable to just go on the working theory that this might in fact have been a flashback.

I sometimes feel self-conscious about calling my milder flashbacks "flashbacks". But then I thought it's rather like going to the dentist, or giving birth. You get dentist horror stories, and you get the times when it's uncomfortable but not too bad. But dentist is dentist. If it's a person in a white coat holding up horrifying implements and smelling weird, it's a dentist. A harmless dentist story doesn't automatically damage the stories of all those people who suffered. There's a bandwidth of possible dentist experiences. Why shouldn't the same hold true for flashbacks? If something is caused by our past, and if it lets us feel the same way we felt then - why not call it a flashback for now? Flashbacks come in all kinds of forms. There are tsunami flashbacks and paddling-pool flashbacks and mid-size flashbacks. There are flashbacks that sloooowly drift in like horror-movie fog, and flashbacks that pop up as suddenly as a rat in a toilet. There are flashbacks that make you react visibly and clearly, with panic attacks or attempts to escape, and there are flashbacks where you're still able to function and be all stoic about it while silently suffering inside where no one can see. What I'm trying to say is, the word "flashback" doesn't talk about anything like size or duration: it simply describes something that literally propels you back into your traumatic past. So if your experience has done just that, then IMO it's a flashback.

And also, I'm sorry to hear that your family has somehow made you feel so self-conscious and ashamed. If you want to talk about that, we're here.   :hug:
#43
RE - Re-experiencing Trauma / Re: Im having one now
April 05, 2015, 08:50:55 AM
Seasaw_, it's so sweet-natured and good of you to worry about your partner. You seem very aware of what it's like for them. Given how many of us here have grown up with narcissists, I've begun to see that particular kind of empathy as a sign of goodness and robust mental health. So kudos to you for that.  :applause:  Also, you seem so committed to protecting them. You want to be kind and fair. That's nothing to be taken for granted.

Quote from: seasaw_ on April 03, 2015, 06:39:26 PM
I am totly perplexed in terms of how to honor my own feelings, ask for what I need, speak up for my own boundaries when they're crossed, and be fair and say 'look I know this isn't all your fault' at the same time.

Those are high standards. I'm not sure that most non-CPTSD people could do all that. Learning how to do that takes much practice, or at least that's the impression I have. Usually, people get this modelled by their parents and caregivers. Which, given that we're all from homes that got us saddled with CPTSD, probably means that you and I and most people on OOTS have to learn this from books. And that just takes time. It's sad, because the lack of this skill keeps on hurting us and it's also hurting others. But if you fail to flawlessly do all that while you're in the middle of a flashback, don't beat yourself up. Start small. Probably easy to say and hard to do, sorry.

Hm. Do you think you could do those things at separate times? Honouring your feelings: I don't know much about that, just that keeping a "feelings journal" helps. It's this simple idea - you write down three times a day how you're feeling. That's it. It's helped me loads. There are probably many other things we can do to reconnect to our feelings, and to honour them. My point is, maybe if you do that as ONE single step, just that, without piling other goals on top, then it's a bit less daunting?

Asking for what you need - it's ideal if we can do this when we need something. But to begin with, maybe it's an easier step to talk about things later. Too late for your particular need, but maybe it'll help you practice? Or you can talk about what you generally need if you're flashing back (or if you're stressed, if you're sick, if you're sad...). That way, your partner has a kind of general idea about Seasaw_ care and maintenance. It'll make them feel less disoriented.

When your boundaries are crossed... is there something small and easy and non-daunting you could do to signal to your partner that something's off? Something you could talk about beforehand, so your partner will know what you mean? Something like... physically backing away from them, or holding up your hands, or making the "time out" sign, or saying "ugh, I'm feeling uncomfortable with this", or "uh-oh", or "honey, you really really remind me of my mother right now"...? Maybe that's just me, but it's a LOT easier to talk about my boundaries during a quiet, peaceful hour when I'm not being triggered. That lays some kind of groundwork. So while I'm having my boundaries overstepped, I don't actually have to explain everything from scratch, I can just remind my husband of the things we talked about. A LOT easier to do.

Sorry for that advice-dump. Ignore it if it's not helpful. Like I said, you sound so sincerely committed to recovering and to protecting your partner, I'm sure you'll come up with something sooner or later. All the best to you.  :hug:
#44
Hi no_more_guilt, it sounds like you're starting to gain clarity on what's triggering you. That's actually impressive. Flashbacks are so debilitating and paralyzing - and then to think about their causes while in the middle of one, and to come up with answers? Wow.  :waveline:

It sounds like you've grown up with a very predatory, cruel woman. I'm glad you made it out of there alive. This is probably just the tip of the iceberg of what she's done to you. You never deserved any of this.  :hug: 

I'm a Freeze type too, though I didn't dissociate too extremely. It was the one thing I could do. If a fox is trapped and can't get out any other way, it'll gnaw off its foot. Being three-footed is bad, but being dead is worse. In the same way, who knows what our Freezing cushioned us from. Who can tell what would have happened to our psyche if we hadn't come up with this way of protecting ourselves. Granted, Freezing isn't healthy adaptive behaviour, and it damages us. But what choice was there?
#45
General Discussion / Re: Learned Behavior
April 05, 2015, 07:12:06 AM
I wish I knew. Do you have a gut feeling about this? If you remember that time at all, maybe there's a change in how you saw the world, or how the world felt like to you. Or a change in how you acted and felt. A before/after.

My father became gravely ill when I was two. The feeling I had when I was a teen was that it destabilized me, but I would have been okay if people around me had counteracted this. For example, if everything had been stable and dependable, so the world would have felt like a safe place where such sudden illnesses are the absolute exception. Or if I'd had support, maybe even the chance to talk about it. Instead, other things happened in my early teens that hit the precise same sore spot that was caused by my father's illness, and wham, CPTSD. Without that, I probably would have escaped with 'merely' a depression and some social anxiety issues. I was an outgoing, chatty child before, and became quiet and withdrawn after.