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I can relate to what you're saying here.  Being present in my body is new for me and is often very unpleasant, but it still seems to make sense to me as the way forward to some day, eventually, finding some relief.  I hope you find some success along that path as well.  What if, indeed?   

Other has resurfaced. I haven't spoken to him yet, we've just texted a little. He invited me to come spend the night with him next Wednesday when he's in town. No acknowledgement of his 8-week absence, only the vaguest update about what he's been up to, no queries as my summer, just boom, he finally answered one of my casual texts and is treating the whole thing like we last spoke last week. I'm actually kind of okay with this, because honestly, I think I probably understand what happened eight weeks ago better than he does and, as much as I've hated it, I've done okay with it within myself. I was able to understand that it wasn't about me, and to give him the space he only knows how to ask for by trying to pick a fight. I was also able to be angry at him over his mistreatment of me without it producing the kind of anxiety from which foolish actions that increase suffering are born. That's pretty big, but I wish he could understand that it's okay to tell me when he's overwhelmed and needs me to back off before he gets to the point where he has to lash out and then exile me.

I'm anxious about seeing him, vicious-circling with the relief and excitement and hope that I can't help but feel because yep, here he is, back again.

It's such a relief to read this thread and know that I'm not the only one who has this problem.  I can never actually read a self-help book or do a workbook, all I can ever do is look at bits and pieces and feel guilty because I don't know how to make any of it help me.  I have reached a point where I feel that informing myself about why I have issues and thinking about how they pertain to my life and my behaviour just doesn't help anymore.  There's always a feeling of "Yeah, yeah, I know this stuff, now what am I supposed to DO about it?!?"  So lately I am really into exercises for toning the vagus nerve.  The vagus nerve governs the regulation of the physiological nervous system, and the exercises are small, simple physical actions that can be performed for the purpose of balancing nervous system responses.  Supposedly practicing these exercises over time will result in making the nervous system more flexible, less susceptible to being triggered, faster recovery from being triggered, lower levels of general anxiety, etc.  That's a long-term project, but it is what is currently giving me hope for some day not having to constantly experience the pain of the battle that has raged all my life between my body's hypervigilance and my brain's attempts to dissociate from it so that I can bear to keep living. 

Here is an Instagram account that offers simple actionable tips for balancing the nervous system at times of stress based on that theory:
https://instagram.com/annatheanxietycoach?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
Looking at that account can get overwhelming too, but I like the way that the nature of Instagram means it is presented in manageable bite-sized pieces.

Hi 

Could you please tell me how to find a discord server for people with CPTSD?  I'm on one for something else because someone invited me but I don't really know how to use discord aside from that. 

I have a Buddhist practice too, I chant.  It's hard for me to do consistently but it's so good for me when I do.  It is good to have something like that to turn to, isn't it?

   

My Person left for a 10-day business trip yesterday.  I'm not used to this.  He hasn't been away for this long in many years, and this is the first time I've been alone in the new house for longer than half a day.  I was hoping that I would cope with this better than I am so far.  I don't want to spend the next week-plus doing drugs and overeating and lying on the couch feeling hopeless.  I had thoughts and plans about what I was going to do to keep busy and keep my spirits up but so far, nope.

san, I can relate all too well to how much it hurts trying to deal with a psychiatrist who doesn't get it.  I think it's very brave of you to deal with a psychiatrist at all. 

Love and hugs  I hope your day gets better

I loved this video!  The bit at the end when the cat realises he's being watched is priceless.  I shared it with My Person and we both had a good laugh.  Thank you for posting it 

Safe hugs and deep gratitude for all the replies. I'm glad that my writing about it is helpful to others. That helps the struggle to put it into words be a tiny bit less shattering.

Still, though, I'm afraid. I'm filled with formless terror. Every little thing is a tiny panic attack, barely visible and mostly controlled but filling the back of my mind with catastrophic scenarios. My Person feels a little bit unwell and some part of my mind immediately starts trying to figure out what will happen to me if I wake up in the morning and he's dead. I'm afraid to go to sleep. Not because there's any even slight reason to think he's about to keel over and die but just because that's how my mind works. That's how it has always worked. I'm so much better now than I used to be at guiding myself gently away from disaster thinking, so much better at being able to perceive what the objective situation is vs what is the paralysing bafflement and confusion of a little girl who was never able to feel safe, but right now I am weak. So, so weak. I need to do some breathing, some tapping, some something. It is terrifying even to do that. Need to tell myself that I can do it, need to remember that although there will be resistance initially, I don't have to fight it, if I just leave it be and keep going, relaxation will creep in if I let it, and I will feel so much better when I feel better.

thatsnotmyname, thank you for sharing this.  Welcome to the forum  This is a good place. 

I’m also a prolific swearer, but I feel that it has actually been good for me to have to be a little more carefully descriptive with my feelings here.

Just want to express empathy on the subject of the lack of acceptance that bisexuals face from pretty much everyone other than bisexuals.  I've been dealing with that for the past forty years.  Best of luck to you.  I think interviewing a therapist to find the right fit is a great idea. 

And because you love her,    to you for tackling this difficult stuff and advocating for yourself.  Plus,  , but only if it's good for you 

rainy, san, Cactus, phil 

Okay, so here’s the thing that I learned fully from my brother and nephew’s experiences during their ill-advised stay with my mother:  My mother is a psychopath.  Literally a psychopath.  Not figurative literally, and not hyperbolic literally, but a simple, cold, factual use of the word.  Psychopath.  My mother is a psychopath.  She’s not just a bad parent, a crappy person, or a mere narcissist.  She’s an actual true-colours dyed-in-the-wool literal no-exaggeration hardcore psychopath. 

She is EVIL.  I’ve never wanted to say that.  I’ve always wanted to give her some tiny benefit of the doubt.  I’ve always wanted to think that she didn’t really mean to hurt us, she was just too bleeped up by her own crazy mother to understand.  But the passive-aggressive and mostly plausibly deniable disregard she showed for the basic needs of my brother and nephew while they were staying with her even after they called her out on it proves to me that the way I remember it really is the way it was.  I think I need to detail in writing the things she did which demonstrated that to me, but I can’t yet.  I did manage to say it all to my therapist during my session yesterday, that was really hard and included a lot of stuttering and gulps and frequent loss of volume control, but it was good.  It helped me define a crucial understanding of the difference between a bad parent and a psychopathic one:

Not taking care of her son and grandson = Regular crappy parent stuff
Covert passive-aggressive obstruction of her son’s efforts to take care of himself and his son and overtly insisting on continuing to do the things that were hurting her son and her grandson despite explicit dialogue = psychopath stuff.

I feel a little sick now, and like I might hurt myself.  I won’t.  I will ride out that feeling, but I’ve got to hit Post now before I chicken out.

So much going on.  So hard to write about anything.  My brother brought my nephew over from Australia to visit, and made the ill-considered choice to stay with our mother for two weeks.  I knew that wasn’t a good idea, and he pretty much knew it, too, but allowed himself to think it would be okay.  It was not okay.  It taught my brother once and for all that, yes, it really was that bad for us as children growing up with her, and it temporarily traumatised my nephew.  I say temporarily because my nephew is imperfectly but very lovingly parented, and he’ll have loving adults with whom to talk about it and work through it.  My Person and I did our part by having them to our house to rest and recuperate for a day and a half after they left the house of horrors, and I feel very good about being able to support them that way, but it was incredibly hard on me.  I visited with them at my mother’s house a few times while they were here, and I did a good job of protecting myself from her in the direct contact during those occasions, but hearing about my brother and nephew’s experiences staying there after I picked them up on Sunday late morning, and it being a recurring conversation until they left today at 6:30am has left me with a toxic dose.  I’m dealing with it incredibly well, all things considered, so there’s good news there, but ugh.  Sick, sick sick.  I hope that soon I will be able to write about what they told me and how it all fits together with my current life and my past experience because the information and insights are potentially very useful, but it’s too much right now.

Sweet friends, thank you for your replies to my last post.  Still no word from Other, no answer to sporadic texts, phone call, email, which doesn’t help, but at the moment is truly the least of my problems.  I know he’s alive because I can see that he’s been on Telegram regularly, and he’s done this before, so I can only assume that eventually he’ll be back and table any further attempts to communicate with him until such time as I can be properly ****** to care enough to risk being ignored yet again.

Oh, gosh, I remember that from the three different times I was prescribed Zoloft back in the 90s.  The first time I took it was in winter and at the time, an interesting effect it had on me was that it made me very tolerant to cold.  It was one of the few things about taking Zoloft that I liked, because I had always been very sensitive to cold.  But then warmer weather came, and I was never very heat tolerant to begin with.  Zoloft made that worse, and I still have the increased sensitivity 25 years later. 

I've been struggling with this question for a long time.  I always think that I would feel more like an adult if I could do "normal" things like keep my house tidy and organised, and work without my job being piggybacked onto my husband's and supervised by him.  My husband taught me his trade and this is the only way I have been able to work for the past many years.  I cannot even get work independently, and although he gets work for me whenever he possibly can, he is a freelancer and cannot always find jobs that have room for me.  This adds to my difficulty perceiving myself as an adult, because it feels a lot like being a child going to work with Daddy and being given tasks that may be legitimately helpful but aren't a "real job".  It doesn't really help that I have legitimate talent and skills for this trade, even though perhaps it should.  And I don't even know whether being able to do those things would make me feel like an adult or not, because I've never been able to keep my house tidy and organised, and I haven't been able to work in any kind of traditional job situation since 1996. 

I am mindful of the fact that I have been quite self-reliant whilst I was a child, and that inside my head at that age, I probably felt quite grown-up – as if I was a mini-adult then.  So essentially it's not really a difference for me now – I'm just someone with an older body, bigger now than I was then, and I'm still feeling pretty much the same.

I feel this way, too.  During my recent experiences with buying a house, selling a house, and moving, I had some moments when I felt very competent, and even at least a little bit like an "adult".  Indeed, for various reasons that have to do with its layout, decor and location, my new house seems a lot more inherently like a house an "adult" would live in than my old house did.  My old house felt more like a house that would be shared by college students.  Even though I was reminding myself from very early on that I must not expect a new and different house to make me feel like a new or different Bach, I think some part of me did believe that the process would get me further along the path of adulthood.  There were a lot of things about the way I was living in my old house that weren't particularly comfortable, but they were discomforts that were familiar and in a weird way they were comfortable.  Certainly much easier to live with than to try to change.  So I thought that in a new house, a completely different house that would require different paradigms, I could start over, "do things differently".  I haven't entirely given up on that idea but it's a lot harder than it sounds, and now I feel even more hopelessly like a child than ever.