Topics

I was reading Bermuda's thread about the childhood self, and in it there was some discussion about the confusing feeling of "I want my mother" when the mother is/was one who hurts and doesn't nurture.  That resonated with me greatly, and reminded me of how even when I was a child with no understanding of what was happening to me I was confused by the feeling of "I want my mother," because I knew that what I wanted wasn't MY mother.  Even then I knew that I was wanting something that I needed that she wouldn't give me.  I used to cry that I wanted my Mommy and that nobody loved me, and it was the most confusing feeling in the world at the time because I wanted Mommy but I was scared of Mommy, and Mommy said she loved me but I never felt like she did.  I'm feeling an inner child in me right now that is hurting and crying for Mommy, feeling the helpless falling sensation of needing, needing, needing, and not having, and not being loved.  I think that's where the feeling of "Why didn't anybody love me?" that I've been experiencing lately comes from. 

I've been self-medicating with cannabis for my entire adult life and my relationship with it is uneasy.  It's a medication that has the power to be very helpful if used properly, but my problem is that I have a very hard time not using it compulsively, and when I use it compulsively it still helps but also comes with some really nasty side effects.  I can never figure out how much of a problem my cannabis use really is or isn't.  If I could use it responsibly and moderately, I don't think it would be a problem at all, but that's an ideal I've been chasing unsuccessfully for years.  Sometimes I manage it for some period of time, weeks, months.  But inevitably I backslide.  I am so tired of this being an issue for me!

The specific memory is that I had offered to help my mother clean up after a dinner party.  She sent me into the kitchen to non-specifically "do dishes".  I was quite young, maybe 10 or 11, and I never had any chores at my mother's house so I didn't know much about how to do that.  I guess I was probably afraid to ask my mother for further instruction?  So I must have looked around to see if I could figure out something to do, and seen the dessert cups.  They were round and made of amber glass.  My mother had made flan for dessert for the party in these cups, and I saw that the flan had left a thick sugar residue stuck quite solidly to the bottoms of the cups.  So I decided to clean those.  It was a pretty difficult job and it took me a while.  I thought my mother would be pleased that I had taken care of such a bothersome task.  I don't think I was ever acknowledged directly one way or another, but I remember hearing her complain to my stepfather that I had said I would help and all I had done was wash those glass cups.  I think I heard her say that she thought I would at least load the dishwasher or something.  I don't remember if she specifically said I was useless or something similarly derogatory, but certainly I remember feeling that way.  Maybe I didn't even succeed in getting the sugar residue out of the cups?  I don't know.  But it wasn't my fault that I wanted to do something nice for my mother, and not my fault that she expected me to know what to do without my ever having been guidance. 

I'm looking for thoughts and experiences regarding anger. 

I carry a great deal of anger in me or with me about all the things that make my present day life difficult and painful that resulted from the abuse and neglect I suffered as a child.  I spent most of my life completely unwilling to acknowledge my anger.  I judged my anger and feared it, and avoided it as much as I possibly could.  I only really started to recognise and work on understanding it a few years ago, and I know that is important, but it has begun to feel like an inescapable quagmire. 

My therapist's default to every negative mood I'm in is to suggest that I'm angry about this element or that of the situation, and most of the time she's not wrong, but I get very annoyed with the subject because these conversations do not lead me to anything actionable.  I denied and repressed my anger for most of my life and obviously that's not healthy, but now what?  I'm told that I need to let myself "be angry", let myself "feel" it.  But I'm also told that I must not "hold on" to anger, that I must "let it go".  I have no bleeping clue how to do any of that. 

I welcome anything anyone has to share about any aspect of this thorny topic.

There's a reason I had tantrums when I was a child.  I didn't do it on purpose, didn't do it to annoy you or punish you or make your life miserable.  I did it because your inability to touch me with love was so painful.  Because your physical rejection of me made me wish I did not exist, had never existed, could cease to exist.  At times (like almost every second of every day recently) the body programming I carry from that still does.

Dear Other,

I love you so much and I can't wait to see you, to soothe you and comfort you and make you feel special, but man I wish you would work a little harder to navigate your own CPTSD bull**** instead of always expecting me to be able to look after all that for both of us no matter what hard stuff is going on in my life, and slamming me with exile when I fail!

Love,
Me

Okay, so I medicate with marijuana. I accepted that about myself and got the card three years after decades of shame, of "trying to quit", "wanting to quit", "wishing I wasn't dependent". And indeed, a lot of the time, marijuana improves the overall quality of my life.  However, I have been using like a fiend ever since this whole buying house/selling house/moving drama started five months ago. My tolerance level is sky-high, and the amount I'm using is unacceptable just in pure financial terms, let alone issues of health and waste. I desperately need the dreaded TOLERANCE BREAK.

Not long before I moved, I got myself a dry flower vape device that works for me, and promised myself that I would not smoke inside the new house at all. Not smoking in the house has been easy, but not because I've been using the healthier, saner, less hard-hitting method provided by that device.  It's because it is so pleasant to smoke joints by the river. Too pleasant. Moderate helpful marijuana use is one thing, even daily, but smoking like a freaking chimney until I'm a goofy zombie just because it's fun is very much another. I must not allow myself to feel that I need to smoke a joint to enjoy the river.

I made this entire process feel safe enough to tolerate by neglecting my discipline with food and drugs. I'm not even going to burden myself with having to get right back to it perfectly right now. But oh I do need a day or two off.

I'm starting a new journal for the new year.  For the new rhythm that my life will soon have.  Such big changes are coming for me next year when I move after 24 years in a house I've loved, in a town that I've loved but which is changing.  I'm excited about the new town and the land and the water and the house, and about letting go of all the things that I'm not going to bring there with me.  There is also plenty of anxiety about the next several months, about the process of moving and of starting up a whole new situation, but I'm trying not to dwell on that because it is what it is and it is what it's going to be, and somehow I'm going to get through it even if I'm not sure quite how. 

I've started working little by little on getting rid of things.  It's very hard for me.  Both My Person and I have hoarding tendencies.  But I feel ready for it.  I feel really good about the stuff that I've gotten rid of so far, even though I keep expecting myself to second guess it.  I think I'm rather emotionally confused because I'm letting go of some things that I have felt for a very long time that it was important I keep around, and I don't understand why all of the sudden it seems okay and safe to let them go.  I've been acting out that confusion and anxiety a bit with food and cannabis for the past week or so, and I'm not very happy about that but objectively I'm holding up quite well.

I've been using a Fisher-Wallace Stimulator device for a few months and I think it helps.  I've also been doing somatic experiencing therapy in addition to my usual talk therapy for the past few months.  I think the somatic experiencing therapy has great promise for me but I'm worried about the cost, which I'm paying for out of my pocket because I could barely find any somatic therapists at all, much less ones who would take my insurance.  Lucky for me I'm a highly motivated patient with a great deal of knowledge about how to get as much as I possibly can out of my therapies. 

I'm really glad that the holiday season is finally almost over, and soon we'll be able to get on with life.  #1 issue is My Person needing a new job because the one he's had for the past two years that was supposed to run through the end of 2022 was eliminated at the end of November.  They paid him through Christmas, fortunately, and he's got some leads, but nobody does anything in our business during the last two weeks of the year.  My Person is highly employable in his field, but most of the work is contract rather than staff.  It's been such a luxury these past two years of his having a staff job.  It shouldn't be any problem at all for him to get more work, but there's always the question of what will it be, how much will it pay, how long will it last, will he have to work outside the home, etc.  I have NOT missed having to worry about that stuff.

In my journal post this morning, I wrote this:

The thing that confuses and distresses Middle B so much is that most of the things that bloody woman says are either partially true, or true but without context, or are wild misinterpretations of truth.  I could give examples of this but it would wind me up too much, and poor Middle B needs some rest.

Middle B wants examples because she wants to fully understand what I mean by this.  She wants me to write about it so that I can help her understand why she wasn’t such a bad kid, and to help me be able to defend her and the other B’s in case there are more letters to the therapist in the future.  I agree with Middle B that this is a good idea, especially because it will help her trust me with decisions about when to say what to TBW and let me do my job instead of getting us into trouble by freaking out.  She wants anyone reading this to know that most of these are her words but she doesn’t want to write this herself, and she doesn’t want me to put quotations marks all over this. 

She wasn’t sure whether any of this is okay.  I told her that it is.  She doesn’t really trust me.  I told her that’s okay, too.  So I’m going to post explanations for her in this thread, starting with an example of a wild misinterpretation of truth that I started to write about this morning before I realised I needed to let her settle.

During the first summer that I lived with my father, I was forbidden to be alone with my beloved step-cousin J, with whom I had previously enjoyed a close relationship on my visits to my father’s house.  J and I were around the same age, had known each other since the age of around 6 when my father married my stepmother, and had always been physically affectionate with each other in a purely innocent kid-ways.  One evening after a family gathering in which J had sat on my lap  because there weren’t enough chairs in the living room when my younger sister and her friend gave a “ballay show” in the living room, I was told that I was “overly familiar” with her, and that this was unacceptable.  I was deeply hurt and angry about this, especially because I didn’t see why my hugging J, or having her sitting on my lap (she sat on my lap because I was physically significantly larger than she was) was any different from my younger half-sister or baby half-brother doing that.  I was either told outright or came to believe that J had complained about me.  Many years later, as an adult, I discovered that my closeness with J had been discouraged and us being alone forbidden was because when I went to live with my father, TBW told my father that my best friend V and I had been having a sexual relationship, and so everyone was worried that I had sexual intent towards J.  After I found this out, I asked my mother what on earth had made her think that V and I had had a sexual relationship.  She said “You told me!  I asked you what you and V did when you were together and you said that you fool around.”  I said “Yes, so?”  and she said “Everyone knows that ‘fooling around’ really means having sex”.  I replied “Not to a 12 year old!”  V and I used to do arts and crafts, and play with Breyer horses.  Go roller skating.  Play board games.  And we were physically affectionate with each other too, again, in purely innocent kid-ways.  But TBW was obsessed with sex (she used to tell me about how good a lover my stepfather was, not in explicit detail, but still!), and so to her, physical affection must have meant sex.  So she pounced on my innocent kid-words that were intended to serve as a blanket description of a bunch of kid-stuff to confirm what her dirty mind came up with.  It hurt me and furthered my guilt, shame and isolation. 

J loved me.  I did not make her uncomfortable.  She never complained about me.  She told me so herself when I saw her about five years ago and we talked about why we hadn’t stayed in touch over the years.  If only I had known sooner!

I still associate smoking weed with love/freedom from abuse, because my initial experiences with weed were when I was quite young and smoking it with my best friend at her house, where I was loved and not abused.  I think V's house was probably the first place I ever felt truly accepted and wanted.  I suppose that's also why I so love staying at people's houses as a guest.

This resonated with me.

my brain and
heart divorced
a decade ago
over who was
to blame about
how big of a mess
I have become
eventually,
they couldn't be
in the same room
with each other
now my head and heart
share custody of me
I stay with my brain
during the week
and my heart
gets me on weekends
they never speak to one another
    - instead, they give me
the same note to pass
to each other every week
and their notes they
send to one another always
says the same thing:
"This is all your fault"
on Sundays
my heart complains
about how my
head has let me down
in the past
and on Wednesday
my head lists all
of the times my
heart has screwed
things up for me
in the future
they blame each
other for the
state of my life
there's been a lot
of yelling - and crying
so,
    lately, I've been
spending a lot of
time with my gut
who serves as my
unofficial therapist
most nights, I sneak out of the
window in my ribcage
and slide down my spine
and collapse on my
gut's plush leather chair
that's always open for me
~ and I just sit sit sit sit
until the sun comes up
last evening,
my gut asked me
if I was having a hard
time being caught
between my heart
and my head
I nodded
I said I didn't know
if I could live with
either of them anymore
"my heart is always sad about
something that happened yesterday
while my head is always worried
about something that may happen tomorrow,"
I lamented
my gut squeezed my hand
"I just can't live with
my mistakes of the past
or my anxiety about the future,"
I sighed
my gut smiled and said:
"in that case,
you should
go stay with your
lungs for a while,"
I was confused
  - the look on my face gave it away
"if you are exhausted about
your heart's obsession with
the fixed past and your mind's focus
on the uncertain future
your lungs are the perfect place for you
there is no yesterday in your lungs
there is no tomorrow there either
there is only now
there is only inhale
there is only exhale
there is only this moment
there is only breath
and in that breath
you can rest while your
heart and head work
their relationship out."
this morning,
while my brain
was busy reading
tea leaves
and while my
heart was staring
at old photographs
I packed a little
bag and walked
to the door of
my lungs
before I could even knock
she opened the door
with a smile and as
a gust of air embraced me
she said
"what took you so long?"
   ~ john roedel (johnroedel.com)

This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I have a fear of feeling good and being well. I've come to understand that when I was a kid the safest thing for me around the mother was to be a little sad and a little unwell. Not TOO unwell, because the mother would be annoyed when it turned out to be something normal for a child and not anything life-threatening, but definitely not healthy and happy because the mother would be even more annoyed by that. Either way, her annoyance would lead to rejection and berating, and now I'm not emotionally comfortable unless I'm a little sick or a little down.  If I was a little sick or a little down, I might get mild sympathy and maybe some ice cream or a small gift if she was in a benevolent mood, and would be left alone/ignored (i.e. not abused) if she wasn't. Feeling good or happy or well is TERRIFYING, because once in a great while that was okay, but it usually led me into trouble, and I never knew how or when or why I would get a bad reaction. I've been talking about it with my therapist, and tapping on it but so far it feels like it is only getting worse. Some of that might have to do with the time of year and with my birthday coming up. I hope so. This is all just too much.

I have been ill with a flare-up of chronic digestive problems, and in the course of dealing with it stumbled across a helpful way to relax my gut and bridge the gap between my conscious knowledge of the physical symptoms and areas of trouble caused by my traumas and the vast mostly-unknown which is, which traumas are stored where, and what needs to be done to soothe those parts.

I've been doing EFT tapping since last summer with the Tapping Solution app.  I've found it useful for certain meditations.  Although it's limited in that most of the language used in the guided meditations doesn't apply very well for me, I like the soothing voice and tapping resonates well with the acupuncture and acupressure treatments I've been receiving for many years.  For several months I was conscientiously taking time every day to spend at least a few minutes on the meditations, and while I felt that was helpful in small ways, I had not been able to develop a feel for how I could effectively use my own language for tapping.  I got to a point a couple of weeks ago when it was becoming very hard to keep doing because of the limitations.  Then, a few days ago, I decided to try one of the meditations that I haven't done in a while.  It didn't work brilliantly, but enough that I decided to try it again yesterday.  While I was doing it, I suddenly found myself tuning in to the needy baby part of me that lives in my stomach, understanding how that part of me feels and what it needs, using my own words to tap.  I knew that she was hungry so I envisioned breast-feeding her until she was all full of good nutrition,  cuddling her and feeling her baby warmth, nuzzling her fuzzy little baby head with my face.  I told her that it was safe to go to sleep and that I would take good care of her and chew my food very thoroughly so that it doesn't hurt her on its way through her home down there in my gut.  Then I envisioned that she was sleeping relaxed and soundly, like a baby has a right to sleep, and while she slept, her body was using all the good fuel to build her a nice strong digestive system.  I envisioned that she would wake up and be all fat and sassy and happy and full of gurgly smiles.  It was very powerful.  It was the first time I felt that I had any kind of grasp on how some of the IFS stuff can help beyond just being stories to tell myself that help me make some sense of my life.

This afternoon I did a similar but different meditation and tuned in to angry Middle B.  She doesn't want me to go into it right now but says she will tap with me again. 

Dear S,

I'm really angry at you for projecting your crazy onto me and not telling me about it for six months, then writing me a letter accusing me of being negative and demanding and of not appreciating my life.  What?  Like, I didn't even know that you were upset with me, that's how far out of left field it came.  My memory of our conversation six months ago is not so different from yours, in that I can remember saying the things that you attributed to me, but wow, have you ever heard of CONTEXT?  Where do you get off nitpicking my word choice and then laying on the martyr stuff about how you want to be my friend and encourage me but "it takes so much energy to encourage [me] because these negative feelings overwhelm all positive aspects of [my] life"?  Go ahead, cosmic void, call the kettle black.  And, well, of course, run off to C to be validated in your blaming me for everything and not examining your own words, thoughts, and actions.  And, of course, rub that in my face, you with your whole "I'm spending my time with positive influences" shtick!  Fine.  Go spend your time with positive influences who encourage you to blame others for your depression.  Go be the martyr you want to be.  I don't have time to be your scapegoat.

The thing that makes me saddest is that we did this once before, years ago, and I thought that both of us had learned from it, and that we had rebuilt a healthier friendship.  I thought we had come to a better understanding of each other.  That I could think of you as my friend who would be flawed and broken as I am, who would make mistakes as I do, who would sometimes miscommunicate as we broken people often cannot help, but who would give me the benefit of the doubt and bloody well TALK to me if I said something that bothered you.  As I do for you!  It really hurts that I was wrong.

It also really hurts that I miss you.  I wish emotions were tidy enough that I could say "I'm better off without you in my life", and that would be the end of it.  As it is, I don't know what to do with this feeling of rejection and injustice.  I sort of hate you right now, and want to yell at you and make you cry.  But I know that wouldn't fix this, because though it might soothe you to push my buttons, it sure doesn't soothe me to push yours.  You have hurt me so many times.  I have given you the benefit of the doubt over and over and over.  I've been a good friend to you, and while I know I'm not always the easier person in the world to deal with, it's not like you're a lovely sunny ultra-functional picnic yourself.  And yet, you address me as if I'm dangerous and toxic, nothing but a drain on you that you have suffered for mysterious unknowable reasons of your own.  As if I am not your equal.  As if my purpose is to prove to you that there is someone else who is even more dysfunctional than you. 

The worst part is that if you come back I probably will shrug all this off, resume our friendship, and forget again that I cannot trust you with anything real of mine.  I wish I could find a way to stop hurting about this.  You do not deserve to take up this much space in my mind.

I am very uncomfortable with anger. I know that I have a lot of things to be legitimately angry about and I need to let myself feel my anger and all that crap my therapist keeps going on about, but I find being angry to be exhausting and awful and I don't know how to express it appropriately or process it constructively or blah blah blah whatever I'm supposed to do or not do about it. I suppose I'm afraid that if I get too angry I will burn things down, figuratively, but possibly accidentally literally. I think there may have been an accidental fire incident with my mother in the kitchen when I was 4 or so.

But anyway. People talk about anger as a potentially positive motivating force, but to me it has never felt anything but destructive and scary. I  don't want to engage with it. My therapist seems to think it's very important to engage with it but she doesn't seem to know quite how to help me do it. That's very frustrating. I suppose that makes me angry. Oh, snap!

I'm not hostile to advice or guidance but  I'm not specifically looking for that, either. I would like very much if possible to hear about the thoughts, feelings and experiences of others regarding anger. If anyone has anything to say about this subject that I imagine presents challenges for all of us who suffer from trauma, please share.

  Hi, do anyone's kid parts want to hang out in here with me? I want to make up a good place for us where we can have fun stuff and a place to talk.

Happy flowers for a good place! https://imgur.com/a/PdFwqcR

1. Even if we do something "wrong" like forgetting the grocery list or missing the turn on the way to the airport, the person I am with is probably upset about the situation because it is inconvenient or stressful rather than angry at US because we made a forgivable human mistake.

This morning I had to go to a gynaecologist for symptoms I've been having that I was hoping would go away but instead have gotten worse.  It was unsettling to be out with the current situation, and doubly so to be going to a doctor's office in building full of doctor's offices.  That probably primed me emotionally for what happened when I was there.  I had to wait for a very long time for the doctor to come in and during that time for reasons that I might write about in my personal journal if I can stand to, I started to go into an emotional flashback of traumatic experiences I had with gynaecology as a young teenager.  I did all the coping things to fight it off, but as the time passed it was harder and harder to stay calm.  When the doctor finally came in to do the exam and I was brought fully back into the present by telling her about my current condition, I thought I would be okay, but then halfway through the exam I lost it and burst into howling, hyperventilating tears.  I have always struggled with pelvic examinations without really knowing why, and today it came back in full force.  On the one hand, I know it's a positive thing that I understood what was happening to me emotionally, and that I was able to cope well enough to finish the exam and then get myself home safely.  On the other, it feels absolutely horrible to have been smacked in the face not only with the distress but also with the reminder that I still have vast areas of trauma that I have barely even thought about, much less dealt with.  I have been completely useless today and I feel nothing but dread of tomorrow.  I have therapy tomorrow and I can't even stand the thought of that.  I just want to sleep and sleep and sleep. 
 

My mother's death is not necessarily imminent.  She's 81 and though she has physical manifestations of her own trauma, she doesn't have any serious medical issues and I could see on Thanksgiving that there's still a poisonous robustness to her.  She could live for years yet.

Sometimes when I think about my mother, a part of me wishes that she would just die already.  That's not even a spiteful wish on my part, just a desire to get something inevitable over with.  I don't feel guilty that part of me feels that way, and I have absolutely no fear that I will regret not trying to reconcile with her before her death.  As far as I'm concerned, I put that all that to rest when I went through my strange bout last year of wanting to have a relationship with her and then figuring out what a terrible idea that was.  So I'm not even sure what the ambivalence is.  I just know that I'm having increasingly frequent urges towards hoping for her death that I can't quite square with my fundamental humanity. 

I don't know if this has anything to do with C-PTSD or not, but I've been hoarding like crazy lately.  Mostly food and cannabis, but I've also been buying lots of things lately.  On Monday after my therapy session, I took a farcical trip to Target and careened around in there for a while because there's a mini-waffle maker that I've been thinking about buying for a while, and for some reason I thought I HAD to have some mini-waffles right away, and of course, to make mini-waffles you need a mini-waffle maker!  Except that by the time I managed to struggle out of there and go home I was so tired and confused and disorientated that I put the mini-waffle maker my room (along with the pretty shirts and the underarm deodorant that I also bought even though I've got plenty of both), and I haven't even looked at it since, much less used it.  I've also been shopping online and ordering things I see ads for on social media that look like a good idea, regardless of whether I actually need them or not.  Mostly not completely crazy or useless things, but things I don't need and shouldn't be spending money on.  Packages keeping showing up and I don't remember ordering them until I open them.  I haven't gotten anything yet that I totally don't remember ordering, but I'm kind of afraid that might be next.  It's really distressing!  Does anyone have any thoughts or insights about this?