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Messages - schrödinger's cat

#871
AD - Emotional Dysregulation / Re: Phantom Fear
September 09, 2014, 07:49:57 PM
Hi Sasha, I found your post fascinating, and I profited from reading it. Something similar occurred to me this week. The thing is, I haven't had any memories of my childhood day-to-day life. I knew the facts, but I had only a scant handful of actual memories. (Ironically, I have quite a few memories of when I was very little.)

I had an emotional flashback today, and it scared me. Then I thought: "Wait - this is what it was like. This is what I felt like back then. Finally, some information on what life was like." Looking at it like this brought the distress down. It made it feel less like "ARGH LIFE IS HORRIBLE AND SO AM I" and more like "this is what I'm grieving about." It still felt like real, actual grief - as if somebody had died. But it was doable. Perhaps the mere shift into seeing this as accurate information about the past and not the present helped.
#872
RE - Re-experiencing Trauma / Re: Emotional Flashbacks
September 09, 2014, 07:41:42 PM
Same here about doctors. I actually thought about that topic today, when I thought about the Freeze Response. Doctors demand a freeze response of you as a matter of course - they're doing something to you, and they take it for granted that you keep still and obey them. It's not the most untriggering situation you can be in, I think. I profit hugely ifa doctor explains things (even very briefly will do) before she does them. "I am safe" wouldn't work for me either. But simply just remembering that I now have several options to keep me safe, that helps. Absolute safety is impossible, but choices and fallback options and "plan B"s, those are things that happen now, and that alone has made a huge difference: that I'm able to tell myself, "listen, just give it a shot - if the worst happens and it's really bad, we can always leave". After all, the worst about the situation that got me traumatized was this absence of choices, escapes, and alternatives.
#873
Frustrated? Set Backs? / Re: Does it scare you?
September 09, 2014, 07:28:33 PM
I do. I've made a lot of progress, but it's taken me many, many years. (Without therapy though.) It's been slow going, and there are plateaus where nothing seems to happen at all... but every now and then things happen that just move things forwards all at once. Those times are great. It's like learning a new language, or any new skill. You do the put in the hours and it's tedious and discouraging, but over time you notice that there was progress after all.
#874
Depression / Re: Not motivated
September 09, 2014, 07:09:57 PM
Can you clone your therapist? She sounds really nice.

What you wrote has been the story of my life for the past dozen years or more. I'm jobless, too, and there's this part of me that thinks this means my place should be extra clean and super tidy. That thought triggers emotional flashbacks. I only realized this just now. I was depressed as a child (undiagnosed, of course), and I got a lot of emotional abuse for the symptoms. So nowadays when I get sleepy or sad, a part of me panics and wants to go into overdrive to prove my worth. Only, that never works, because emotional flashbacks puts on the handbrake on everything. No wonder I don't get anything done.

Maybe we shouldn't compare ourselves to people without CPTSD when it comes to how much we get done. If you've lost a leg, you'd expect things to be slower, messier, and less efficient than before. Isn't CPTSD like that? The nicest thing I ever read on the topic of "mothers and housework" is: "nobody ever had to go into therapy because their mother didn't hoover enough."
#875
Emotional Abuse / Re: Emotional incest and enmeshment
September 09, 2014, 06:28:54 PM
I hardly know what to say... Your stories sound harrowing, and I'm hoping things will get better as soon as possible.

Does someone have a good definition of Enmeshment? It's to do with unclear or wonky boundaries, right? If it is, I might have experienced it with my mother. I think she's come to project onto me all the worry and concern that she doesn't let herself feel for herself. We've had entire phone conversations that consisted of her worrying about my own, personal concerns. She worries, I reassure her, she doubts, I explain, she has strong reservations, i get defensive, she gravely tells me that one must not underestimate the danger, I start arguing, she recommends that I learn to take things easy.

...It almost sounds funny if I write it down like that. It isn't funny while it's happening. I feel as if I'm suffocating under some huge duvet and someone keeps pushing it at me so I can't even move.

I still feel silly for posting this. It's not in the same league as parentalization. But it undermined my trust in myself completely. I've learned to never admit to a single problem that I haven't yet fixed. I never let myself show anyone even a moment's uncertainty or vulnerability. Which is a great thing to do if one is suffering from PTSD or CPTSD, yes? It's like being ill with the flu and then having to tapdance and beam at the camera. ... The fact that I kept finding social interactions tiring makes more and more sense.
#876
Please Introduce Yourself Here / Re: Hello
September 07, 2014, 07:51:24 AM
Thanks, Kizzie. It's already getting a bit easier. No one's killed me yet, which I take to be an encouraging sign, so the urge to go hide under the sofa is receding.
#877
Please Introduce Yourself Here / Re: Hi, I'm Mark
September 07, 2014, 07:49:02 AM
Hi Mark, and welcome. I'm new here too, and no expert at all whatsoever. Kizzie (I think it was her?) posted a link to a website recently. It's by a therapist who specializes in CPTSD. One section in particular was a real eye-opener for me, and given what you wrote here, you might find it interesting, too. http://www.pete-walker.com/fAQsComplexPTSD.html - scroll down to the question: "How did I get Complex PTSD?" He says that his experiences have told him that emotional neglect on its own is enough to cause CPTSD. His website is full of information and helpful resources.
#878
Please Introduce Yourself Here / Re: Hopeless
September 07, 2014, 07:41:42 AM
Hi and welcome. Your post sounded like a summary of my own feelings. I never thought anyone else could be feeling like this. Reading what you wrote made me realize how sane it actually is. It's a normal response to finding oneself in an abnormal situation. Pulling away from others and being overly defended - you'll have plenty of reasons for doing that, given that you have CPTSD. And then feeling isolated and wanting affection - isn't that a real and actual sign that you're a sane, normal person with sane, normal feelings?

And if that's true for you, then maybe it's true for me, too? Ah-ha!

My kid asked me what I'm doing, and when I said I'm posting something to someone who was having a very difficult time (she can't read English), she wanted to send you a smiley-face. Here it is:

  :)
#879
Frustrated? Set Backs? / Re: Hardest part to recovering
September 06, 2014, 04:20:20 PM
Hi Kizzie, thanks for the welcome. I posted something in the intro forum. It's probably too long, but if I start editing it, I'll never post it - I'm a little afraid of the internet because I was triggered there once. So, my apologies in advance.

Glad you liked the text I linked. I like that it's short and to the point, but still precise enough.

About the original point of this thread: I remembered something I read about PTSD once. About primary symptoms and secondary symptoms, and that the one thing that makes a huge difference in how you cope is, do people listen to you? They didn't to me. It's a sour comfort, knowing that it's not just me feeling that this was difficult to deal with. Still, a sour comfort is better than none.
#880
Please Introduce Yourself Here / Hello
September 06, 2014, 04:09:11 PM
Hi, I'm schrödingerskatze. I'm new here. A few years ago, I was triggered on an internet forum, and I haven't posted anything anywhere since. This is my second post since then. I'm already feeling a liiittle bit panicky, so if I end up posting not very much, that's probably why.

My story is this. When I was a toddler, our family situation suddenly worsened (someone got critically ill in a way that changed their personality - not a mental illness though). Everyone was under stress for the next twenty years. I was emotionally abused and emotionally neglected at home, got depressed, which in turn got me emotionally abused and bullied at school, which over time got me my CTPSD. No one cared much: everyone was busy with their own lives, and with my family member who was sick.

The worst was, I had no idea what was wrong with me. I was always tired, I could never really concentrate, I sleepwalked through my day, I was always late, always too slow, always clumsy. I had great difficulties making decisions for myself. I dithered, I was constantly second-guessing myself, I had very few opinions and was always trying to please others enough so they'd simply ignore me and leave me be.

Things got better in my twenties. Then, in my thirties, I was retraumatized. At that time, I was jobless and in a foreign country, which was bad, but it left me with plenty of time to research, which was good. As soon as I returned home, I got therapy. Only a little; it wasn't helpful at all. I constantly felt that my therapist had her methods custom-tailored for "real", proper traumas: the kind that happens ONCE, so you have one single, clear-cut situation with a series of identifiable triggers - triggers like a specific scent or a clearly identifiable social situation, not triggers like "social groups" or "every single institution ever, even hairdressers to some extent if I'm having a bad day" or "authority figures" or "people who seem cooler or more self-assured than I am, which, on a bad day, is pretty much everybody". I was left feeling that I had to get better before I could face therapy again.

So I've done things on my own. What's been helpful so far:

The concept of the "inner team". I'm doing a technique where I freewrite dialogues between parts of myself. It grew from a writing exercize where you relax, then ask your inner critic a question (on paper), and see if he'll answer. I scoffed at the very idea. It couldn't work, I just knew it. I gave it a shot anyway, and it was BRILLIANT. Awesome. Might have saved me years of severe distress - or severer distress than I had anyway.

Related to that: some things I read about egostate therapy. Never did the therapy, but the basic concept of it rang true. I love egostates. It explains why I get into (difficult or triggering) situations and suddenly I feel twelve.  That's because this happens to everybody. Certain situations activate certain egostates. We're one kind of person at work, another kind of person with our family of origin, a third kind of person with our friends, and so on. Fascinating stuff.

Then, articles on cracked.com on the effects it has if you've grown up poor or in a messed-up family. A humour site seems a wonky source of research. But on the other hand, humourists are really good at bringing things to the point, and they use a conversational tone, not cold and clinical psychologese.

A book called "Reinventing Your Life" by J.E. Young and J.S. Klosko, both Ph.D.s. The underlying concept is: we each of us repeat behavioral patterns we've learned in childhood. If your family constantly criticized you, you might end up feeling fundamentally flawed. They call that the "Defectiveness Lifetrap". The authors explain how such lifetraps come to exist, what they look like, and what you can do to escape them.

One technique from that book is for when you're cut off from how you really feel and what you really need. I forget what Lifetrap that's for (I've got several), but I read somewhere that it's a symptom of CPTSD, so maybe this is helpful for someone else? They recommend you write down how you feel three times a day. It's been interesting. I never realized before how many things make me anxious and stressed out.

I'll post this before my courage runs out. My apologies if this is too long. But I'm glad to have found this place, and I hope everyone is having as un-* a day as they can. The foreign country I lived in had a good word for this: "how's your day?" someone will ask, and they'll make a so-so face and sigh and say: "normal".
#881
Frustrated? Set Backs? / Re: Hardest part to recovering
September 05, 2014, 09:35:19 AM
Hi Anniegirl,

"dwelling in the past", that tag that got pinned on me, too. (Sorry if my English is weird. I'm a foreigner.) I've always assumed that I'd be fine if only I could "snap out of it" and "live in the present" and "move on". I know it's nonsense. Say someone got into a traffic accident, and now their leg's still hurting and they can't walk. Say the whole problem they have IS that there's so much pain and they just can't walk too far: sooner or later, their leg just seizes up. Would anyone seriously tell them to simply "move on" and "not focus on their leg so much"? Of course they're focussing on their leg. They're doing it because they want to move on. And I know this. But it's still something that keeps on popping up in my head.

I keep on getting this mental image of a drama queen doing it to get attention. That isn't a helpful mental image to have, if you've got PTSD. It's pretty toxic, in fact. So I keep on trying to come up with better mental images.

Say your house has wooden support struts, and at one time in the past, someone's taken a hacksaw to them. What's worse, now there are termites, too. And some visitor tells you: "Oh, honey, if only you'd stop thinking about those weird chewing noises coming from the walls, you'd be just fine."

Here's a link I found helpful: http://www.counselingcenter.illinois.edu/self-help-brochures/relationship-problems/emotional-abuse/. The thing is, I've been emotionally abused especially when I had problems. So now, whenever I'm having problems, I'm giving myself knee-jerk "advice", I'm minimizing, I'm trivializing...

[Edited because it was way too long. Sorry.]