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Messages - snailspace

#31
Poetry & Creative Writing / Re: Maybe Tomorrow
April 16, 2016, 09:22:12 AM
Thank you Talisien, I loved your piece and found it wonderfully evocative because as I read I recognised this is currently my neck of the woods also. I live a bit more inland but there's still a chill breeze.  I hope you make it to the beer garden today, I laughed at the London pride spilling...
The world seems alright at the moment as the swallows have returned and they nest every year in the old stone stables outside. The only year they didn't come was in 2002 when measures to kill a swarm of locusts in North Africa by spraying insecticide also decimated the swallows.  It felt like a miracle when they flew in the following year!   Keep up the writing, I for one enjoyed reading. 
#32
Phew that was quite a read Dutch Uncle.  Many thanks for posting this interesting article and the section you highlighted for me was indeed extremely validating!  I don't think my mother knew what a therapist's code of ethics meant regarding her own family.  My best wishes to you.
#33
Sorry to hear tesscaline and I like vanilla.  Same happened with me with an incompetent therapist/mindfulness teacher.  Because I couldn't come up with feelings on demand the mindful way I was subjected to similar comments - blaming me for not being "open and "willing" etc.  It seems as if throwing mindfulness as the new cure-all into the mix assumes the recipe will work.  I do practice meditation now and again at home, for 10 - 20 mins but alone which is what I can manage.  I'm too hypervigilant to sit in a group with my eyes shut.  I'm glad you have a therapist who respects your needs I like vanilla.  I think that is truly mindful rather than imposing a prescription onto you in a mindless one size fits all approach. 
#34
Many thanks Jdog and I wish you the same.
#35
http://www.whycantimeditate.com/  This book by Nigel Wellings is helping me understand why I find it so hard especially to befriend myself and do the Loving Kindness.  He explains why it can sometimes feel unnerving to show compassion towards yourself when it was never shown to you.  But I'm sticking with it!
#36
Research / Re: TMS
February 03, 2016, 10:57:44 PM
I have found the work of John Sarno helpful in dealing with "psychosomatic" pains as it used to be called.  This was before I figured out I have cptsd symptoms and discovered this site and the work of Pete Walker.  For me it's been important to understand the somatic symptoms I believe I have suffered all my life.    Sarno's point is that some chronic conditions which cannot be treated by conventional medicine may have a deeper underlying cause which needs to be addressed.  The physical pain acts as a distraction (which makes sense to the brain) which masks the deeper underlying emotional pain.   This understanding has been really useful for me as I am of the freeze/fawn type and was never allowed to show any feelings.  I didn't know they existed!  But it came out in my body and was often dismissed as "growing pains".  Sarno's work was mostly concerned with patients who suffered with long term back problems, but he later expanded into other areas.  His followers eg Monte Fuelte have looked at RSI.  In UK there is Georgie Oldfield an NHS trained physiotherapist.  She is starting to look at the effects of childhood and how it impacts on later chronic conditions.  I hope there will be more research into this, the mindbody connection.
#37
Yes I have been bothered all day!   Thank you for putting my gut feelings into words.  Alice Miller's behaviour sounds extreme,  yet some aspects sound so familiar.
#38
Therapy / Re: Therapist with/without traumacompetence
January 23, 2016, 07:58:58 PM
I hope you find a suitable therapist Convalescent.  For me now it would be essential to find one versed in cptsd trauma having been retraumatised by my previous one - someone who could recognise the difficulties I was facing rather than just dismiss me as not "open or willing", "challenging" and "resistant" during sessions.  I thought finding one who understood narcissism was crucial - well it is but who also knows about cptsd.   I wouldn't want anyone to go through what I did.  Good luck with your search.
#39
Interesting Dutch Uncle.  I hadn't really considered how the roles might coincide between therapist/mother although it took me a lot of courage even to consider visiting one due to my history - my GP suggested it.  I became aware immediately in session how the terminology triggered me.  This is where my mother had blurred the boundaries with me constantly using inappropriate therapy-lingo in everyday usage, and taking the pseudo professional approach with me.  She didn't just know what was wrong with me - she knew it as a therapist - and my problem was I had been abused by my father doncha know.  She used Jung's theories of The Shadow to explain my father, when in reality she was talking about her projected split self.
I think I carried this deference over to my therapist who took on the expert role similar to my mother and I resorted to the invisible role that I had been conditioned into from birth.  It's complicated!
I managed to move away when things got bad with my mother but my dear GC sister was completely enmeshed in my mother's own theraping and she treats everyone now as a potential therapist.                                                                                       I read an article by Andrew Vachs where he says "The most damaging mistake an emotional abuse victim can make is to invest in the "rehabilitation" of the abuser.  Too often this becomes still another wish that didn't come true - and emotionally abused children will conclude that they deserve no better result"  We were both involved in my mother's personal journey and looked on bewildered as she talked non stop about her father's abuses of her, when it most likely was her own mother, the person she refused to mention, who had abused her.  There was no space to let mother know how she had treated us because we could see the "pain" caused by her own suffering.  Grrr it's mindblowing but good to talk and making sense of what happened.
#40
It's a very good  term and thank you for letting me borrow it.  I'm sorry that you had one also.  I find it has confused me along the way and many of mother's invalidations were pop psychology clichés used out of context which even now still make me cringe.   For example "let it go" sounds reasonable enough but meant "Shut up and don't bring anything up from the past about me"
#41
Thank you both very much for your welcome.

Kizzie - My mother died 2 years ago and no she didn't realise what she had done unfortunately.  She kept up the lies about my father until the end and blamed him entirely him for the ills of the FOO.  Over the years she had promoted herself to leader of a therapy type cult where "all men are abusers" and women are victims.  Not nice.  I cannot verify anything about her views on Alice Miller but the author was greatly revered by TherapistMom and her acolytes, along with the authors of "A Courage to Heal"  One thing she did admit on her deathbed was that her own mother (my grandmother) had treated her very badly and this was the first time I had heard this (I was not there but heard later).  Deep down I had guessed this but had never been able to ask her about her own mother.

From my reading of the information on this site I believe I have suffered from cptsd from birth.  It came to my notice starkly though when I was retraumatised during therapy 18 months ago.  A friend pointed me in the direction of Pete Walker and I found myself described, the therapist also, in his book, which was rather a shock.  So I have worked backwards really!  It took me a good year to recover from the horrible experience with the therapist.  I hope I have not triggered anyone here.  This site is a wonderful resource for me, and maybe others who fear therapists.

Dutch Uncle - many apologies for making you feel uncomfortable, it was silly of me, I read your comments on the post about Alice Miller and TherapistMom as a term just jumped out and nicely summed up my mother.  I did not mean to make you feel awkward.  It is unnerving but also a relief to find there are others out there.



#42
I hope it's ok to quote Dutch Uncle for this introduction.  I have been lurking here for a while and was previously on OoTF forum having discovered what my mother was about - I strongly suspect she was narcissistic.  The recent post about  Alice Miller's son Martin has taken me back in time to 25 years ago when completely out of the blue my siblings falsely accused my father of terrible lifelong abuse.  These were fabricated memories coerced  during therapy sessions otherwise known as False Memory Syndrome.  Alice Miller's books were an inspiration to my newly trained TherapistMom because she too had recently recovered memories during therapy of her father having abused her.  Apparently Alice Miller was a proponent of this sort of therapy.

I have spent the last few years working out what happened 25 years ago - how my mother, a latent N, became very jealous of the bond between my enabling dad and the "golden children" siblings and at all costs had to take them away from him by orchestrating a huge hate campaign against him involving  therapists (and their particular type of therapy at that time).  Training to be a therapist at the time she was orchestrating it all behind the scenes.

I thought I had worked this all out but there might be more....opinions most welcome.  Thank you.
#43
"Another TherapistMom."  Poor chap.  It's his time to speak out.  I wonder if he would ever have been believed whilst his mother was still alive.  My late N mother was a great fan of Alice Miller's work and 25 years ago I recall seeing her books around the FOO home.  If I remember what appealed to mum was that Alice Miller had joined the "recovered memory" movement (others may know this as False Memory Syndrome) and along with thousands of other women at the time accused her father of lifelong abuse.  Obviously I have no idea if this was true but I became very cynical - I had read 1 or 2 of her books and found them fascinating but failed to recognise myself or mother in them.  The best was yet to come as my TherapistMom falsely accused her husband (my dad) et al of abuse and destroyed my FOO.  One day I'll get round to writing more about this but it takes me back.  Does anyone know anymore about this?  I hope Martin finds peace in his life.