Papa Coco's Recovery Journal

[SteveM]

PC,
Thank you for continuing to risk and share your truth. I believe everything you have written here. Non CPTSD humans can not comprehend at all levels of what it's like to have survived the trauma we all went through. Learned people can read and may get it intellectually, that said, as survivors we bond because we get it at a cellular level, the fear , the terror, the confusion and on and on it goes.

So good for you in taking time to be scared and keep that little one safe and actually quite quickly bring the adult onboard to keep the little one safe. Hopefully you will keep us up to date about when you are going back to your beach house, you will need our collective power to help you through.

[dollyvee]

Hi PC,

I'm glad you are feeling a little bit more grounded  I think you hit the nail on the head too when you said being invalidated while we were being gaslit did a great deal of damage. I'm just unearthing this in John Bradshaw's book on toxic shame where he talks about the way toxic shame was then reinforced in us through schooling, peer groups, and religious shaming. I feel like it made me just go more and more inward.

I'm glad too that you felt you were heard 
dolly

[Papa Coco]

Thank you Everyone!

Your comments have really helped.

I'm feeling better about my sister (Who I will call R) living a few hundred meters from my home at the beach.

I'm no longer wanting to sell the house, and I'm actually feeling more like going back to the plan of selling the city house and moving full time to the beach, even though R is there.

All indications are pointing to R being a shut-in. One friend did have a sighting of R in the town's only grocery store a year ago. At the time, my friend thought it was just someone who looked like R, because we all believed R had left the state with the money she'd stolen from our father. The friend said 74-year-old R looked like she was declining in mental health. She appeared unstable, and paranoid and in a hurry to get back to her car.

I know that R's son hated her guts. I am wondering now if her daughter finally pushed her out of her life also. R was cruel to everyone. Everyone. She may have burned all her bridges and ended up at the beach because she can't afford to live in the city anymore and no one in any family is willing to give her free stuff anymore.

In the end, I now feel very little fear of her. CBT therapists have never helped me, but CBT has a place in society. It's not good for trauma therapy, but it still has a place.  My DBT therapist, who is not a CBT, has given me one good CBT suggestion to practice what I'll say if R or any of her former friends ever approach me in the grocery store and decide to give me a piece of their mind. He said for me to practice, practice, practice saying "I'm on a tight schedule right now" then turning and quickly walking off. Those are words that handle any approach, and they are not aggressive nor are they the words that would be said by frightened prey. They're confident, boundary-setting words of someone who has better places to be than listening to a scolding from an angry relative. Practicing this will make it automatically fall out of my mouth if anyone ever does try to create a public scene by scolding me for not being nice to my narcissistic sister R. Nobody can argue with those words. If I'm on a tight schedule, it's just a fact, not an accusation or a defense.

I've also recently been told that happiness isn't possible in someone who is hiding. It's like my blinders were taken off and I can see that by me spending the last several decades believing I could hide from my family and church and school and bullies that I could finally be happy. I did the right thing by putting distance between myself and my abusers, but I did it with the sense that I was hiding, which was working against my feeling of safety. But now I can see that hiding and finding happiness makes no sense. Putting distance between us is the right thing to do. But a person who is "hiding" is a person who feels they are still in danger. That's the opposite of happiness.

As I began to pray for happiness earlier this year, I suddenly became furious at "god" when I discovered my nemesis was living in MY safe place. Then, after having my EF and my weeks of utter disbelief that "god" would do that to me, I began to recognize that I will never find true happiness if I continue to believe that I have to hide from my evil family. Putting distance between us and going no contact is the right thing to do, but "hiding" sends the wrong message throughout my internal parts. My body and brain and soul need to feel like I'm free from them, but not hiding. I'm just in another location where they can't reach me because they annoy me.

A class I took recently said that happiness is dependent on becoming my authentic self. To me, authenticity is not found in hiding. It's found in being who I am, no matter what others think of that. It's found in not selling my dream home because my sister moved in next door. It's found in being me. ME. Truly, authentically, unapologetically ME!

Okay: Now that I've said it, it's time to begin the slow movement toward embodying it. As an example of how far I still have to go: My wife gave me a well-tailored, very nice kilt for my birthday last month. She said that a man who she works with suggested it to her because he wears them when he works in the yard so as to have freer movement to get up and down in the soil. Pants and long cargo shorts bind and keep me from freedom of movement. I wear that beautiful garment now ONLY when no one can see me but her. I'm terrified of being laughed at if I wear it in public, even though I see men in kilts fairly often in my city. To me, this is a sign that I'm not there yet. I'm not yet willing to stand up and be my authentic self if I worry someone might laugh at me.

So I've got a direction to go now as I move my prayer to "Help me find happiness and help me find the courage to be unapologetically who I was born to be" whoever that is.

You people are amazing. I love all of you. Thank you for all the support. This ordeal with R could have been the end of me. But the support I got from you, and from my wife and therapist have gotten me through it for now.

[natureluvr]

Papa Coco, this is beautiful.  I learned some things from what you shared here.  I like your analysis of how hiding can prevent us from happiness, and being our authentic selves.  I also really like your idea for setting a boundary by saying "I'm on a tight schedule", and walking away.  I'm going to remember this.  Years ago, I mistakenly thought boundary setting meant confronting the person, and being honest about how they hurt me, etc, but that just isn't so.  I'm really glad to hear that you are at peace in spite of R living close by to you. 

Isn't it vindicating when we see that our narc abusers are the ones who end up falling apart?  Mine had me believing I was the mentally ill one, but now from what I hear, they are the ones falling apart, and I'm recovering and getting better.  Their karma catches up with them, sonner or later. 

Sounds like you are doing fantastic!    

[NarcKiddo]

It sounds like you have made great strides, Papa C. 

As for the kilt, it is a very practical garment. My husband is a Scot so I am no stranger to men in kilts, though I would be surprised to see someone round here wearing one other than to attend a formal function. I would certainly not laugh at him, though. Men look very good in kilts, in my opinion, and the garment actually suits a huge variety of body shapes. I can understand why you might feel a bit self-conscious initially, and there is nothing wrong in that. I'm sure you will gradually feel more confident. If it would help, feel free to get your wife to take a photo of you and maybe show it to some of us here? Just a thought. Sometimes the hardest thing is to put something in front of another person for the first time.

[dollyvee]

Hi PC,

I'm glad you've found something that helps you feel comfortable setting a boundary with R. It's really important to have something that gives you that space even if you hopefully never have to use it. 

I hope too, that you're able to wear your kilt in public and not have to deal with, or feel any shame for doing so.

Sending you support,
dolly

[Papa Coco]

Journal Entry for Wednesday, September 6, 2023

The devil I know
This morning I awoke about an hour earlier than usual and let myself lay in bed resting for another hour. My imagination wanted me to come inside and live for a while in my pretend world. This happens to me during times of stress or distress. If I were a turtle, my imagination would be my shell to retreat into. My brain invites me to come back into my dissociative, imaginative world where I have all the control to make the story of my life go any direction I want it to go. Naturally, most of my imaginary stories take me back to childhood. And sadly, most of my imaginary stories bring back that old familiar feeling of abandonment, belittling, unfairness. It's not a happy way to live, but it's familiar. It's my childhood wanting me to come visit it.

It's hard to deal with this, but when I need comfort, I tend to want to relive my feelings of being disrespected and in need of rescue.  It seems like when a person is in need of comfort they should go to their happy place. I tend to go to my sad place. It's sad, but it's familiar. It's like going home to hide after a beating out in the world. The problem is that my emotional home is not so happy. But it's where I'm drawn to. When I should be wanting to return to my mother's arms, I feel like I want to return to my mother's judgements and mind games. It's not happy, but it's home. 

The upside to these emotional visits to my unsavory childhood are that they tend to usually lead me to living through the imaginary moment when, as a child, I SHOULD have run away from home. Or I should have gotten angry instead of ashamed and I should have moved out on my 18th birthday and not given a forwarding address. Maybe, whenever I wake up and want to go back to my years of abuse and gaslighting, maybe that's my inner child wanting me to rescue him finally. I hate remembering how it felt to be the shameful accident taking up space in mom's house, but I LOVE imagining myself flipping them all off and walking away from them forever.

A downside to this is that it sometimes makes me sort of yearn for someone to treat me poorly again so I can walk away from them forever and satisfy my need to become free from them.

It happens every year. As this school year begins, and the Holiday Season begins with the end-of-summer county fairs, which will move to pumpkins and Halloween, then to Thanksgiving and then Christmas, my sad inner child comes out to live with me. And he came out this morning. He wanted me to spend an hour reliving the pain and loneliness of being the outcast in my own family and church and school. He wanted me to pretend to stand up and walk out on them and never return. Then to become famous or rich or a hero of some kind so they could read about me in the news and regret the wrongful ways they'd treated me when they thought I was a worthless little wimp and had me in their control.

I know that one of the things that drives gaslight victims crazy is waiting for an apology. We wait and wait and wait and we keep thinking, someday they're going to see what they did and they're going to be filled with regret and remorse.  But that seldom ever happens. Our galsighters don't tend to ever regret how they treated us. In fact, once we're gone, they forget we ever existed. MAYBE that's why my inner child comes and drags me back into my imaginary world of being their victim again. Maybe my inner child is still waiting for the apologies that are never coming. 

All speculation aside: What I do know for certain is that I find comfort in remembering how it felt to be abused. One positive outcome of this is that remaining so attached to the pain, keeps me empathetically alert to seeing that pain in others so I can help wherever I can. In order to do any present day good in this world, I need to remember from where I came. I cherish the fact that my abuse led me to become a helper, whereas some of my siblings took their abuse and used it to become abusers themselves.

The feeling of immersing myself back into the pain from childhood feels oddly comforting. It feels like I'm being true to that little boy still living in my subconscious mind, still waiting for an adult to do right by him.

Also, as nice as it would be to finally be free from the feelings of sadness and loneliness, somehow, I feel like I'll betray my inner child if I let go of his memory. Somehow, I'm honoring him by allowing myself to go back into those feelings via my imaginary world.

In summary: Life is confusing. So many moving parts. Even the sad times are valuable to me. Unfortunately I'm better at remembering the sad times than I am the fun times. I've had many, many fun times in life. I just struggle to remember them. But for the sad times, they draw me in to relive as if by magnet. And in some deep, complex, twisted way, remembering the pain is comforting.

[dollyvee]

It's sad, but it's familiar. It's like going home to hide after a beating out in the world. The problem is that my emotional home is not so happy. But it's where I'm drawn to. When I should be wanting to return to my mother's arms, I feel like I want to return to my mother's judgements and mind games. It's not happy, but it's home. 

My t tells me that we are hard wired to want this. It's an innate wiring that children and people need. We needed that attachment to our mother for survival, it's a part of all of us and is a part of being alive. I don't think there's anything wrong with you for needing that. I think I cut mine off for a long time, or being in therapy has been the process of rewiring it. I couldn't stop that attachment or need, and it persisted long after I consciously knew I would never receive something even close to the nuturing that I needed from my mother. Of course, it doesn't help that we're often transported subconsciously to these places.

The upside to these emotional visits to my unsavory childhood are that they tend to usually lead me to living through the imaginary moment when, as a child, I SHOULD have run away from home. Or I should have gotten angry instead of ashamed and I should have moved out on my 18th birthday and not given a forwarding address. Maybe, whenever I wake up and want to go back to my years of abuse and gaslighting, maybe that's my inner child wanting me to rescue him finally. I hate remembering how it felt to be the shameful accident taking up space in mom's house, but I LOVE imagining myself flipping them all off and walking away from them forever.

I'm reading more about shame, and t has been mentioning this as well, but one of the aspects of shame is then self attack, or shaming ourselves in a way ie I should have done this, why didn't I do this (at the time etc). It's very much a process in what happens in response to shame. I guess this is why it's called a shame spiral (?), that it triggers these things to come up.

All speculation aside: What I do know for certain is that I find comfort in remembering how it felt to be abused.

The feeling of immersing myself back into the pain from childhood feels oddly comforting. It feels like I'm being true to that little boy still living in my subconscious mind, still waiting for an adult to do right by him.

What Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche has said, and these are my spiritual beliefs so please disregard as/when not applicable, is that people are very attached to their pain bodies, but pain is just an identity. It is not who we are.

Also, as nice as it would be to finally be free from the feelings of sadness and loneliness, somehow, I feel like I'll betray my inner child if I let go of his memory. Somehow, I'm honoring him by allowing myself to go back into those feelings via my imaginary world.

Of course, this is very much a part of the things you went through. There is an exile, or a part of you whatever you call it, that went through these things and is holding onto these feelings and that is very much a vital part of you. I hope you're able to find some space for all these things coming up. Sending you a hug for that that time of year feeling 

dolly

[Papa Coco]

Thank you, Dolly for the hugs and the comments. They mean a lot. And the comments you left are good for me to know, in that, what I'm dealing with is not unique, but others feel them too.

I'm having good days right now. I hope you are too. It's always nice to get a few days or weeks of rest between triggered trauma responses.

PC.

[dollyvee]

 

[Larry]

Hi PC,  nice to hear you are having some good days, 

[Papa Coco]

Thank you Larry and Dolly,

It feels good to be having more good days lately. I'm seeing a hypnotherapist again. I saw her last Spring and she made a difference. So, after living with what I'd learned for a few months, I felt it was a good time to see her again for four more visits, and add to my learning. I'm feeling quite a bit better than I have probably ever felt. She's encouraging me to get out of the house more, and I'm finding it to be nice to get out and socialize again. My wife and I have gone to the Marina for walks every day since Friday. Coco dragged me out the first time, but now, I'm starting to enjoy the walks enough to be the one to suggest another one each day. My knees give me trouble, but we've slowed our pace and, so far so good.

Healing from CPTSD is a long, arduous journey of having to challenge a million bad messages that wired my neural pathways decades ago. Changing that wiring has to happen one wire at a time. As I work through the issues, worst-first, I'm finally starting to see some noticeable--and possibly permanent--improvements in how my reactions to life are starting to bypass my trauma brain, and go straight to rational, realistic reactions. I still have trauma triggers, but, somehow, I'm getting faster at recognizing them as trauma triggers, and, at least for the past few weeks, I've been successfully getting past them. How long will this last? I don't know. I hope the improvements are permanent, but if not, well...make hay while the sun shines, right? For now, I'm enjoying my current state of having a bit more emotional control than I've experienced in 6 decades.

Some really great tools are 1) Five-to-ten-minute mindfulness meditations, (using short YouTube Mindfulness meditations if I can't quiet my mind enough to do them without assistance). And 2) realizing that everyone on earth is having a hard time now. CPTSD is my reason for having a struggle, but I don't really think there are too many people thinking of the earth as the happiest place in the universe at this time in our history. So, knowing that life is a struggle for everyone, helps me feel not so singled out and "broken". That really helps me get past my triggers more quickly.

Also, I'm getting some serious movement in my attitudes through two books my hypnotherapist recommended: The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron, and The Seat of the Soul, by Gary Zukav. These two books are making solid sense to me now, and I'm benefitting from what they teach.

So far so good. Thank you to all my friends on the forum for the encouragement to keep seeking forward motion on my long walk of recovery.

I love this forum!  I love all of you!

[Hope67]

Hi Papa Coco,
Wow, there are so many really good things in your journal entry.  I am happy that you are seeing the hypnotherapist and that the outcomes are going so well.  That is great. 

I have read the book 'The Artist's Way' - it was so good.  I remember it well.  I will look at the other one you mentioned.

Sending you a hug   

Hope 

[dollyvee]

Hi PC,

Like Hope said, there are some great things in your journal entry and it's great you're able to start identifying your triggers for what they are!

Going back over your previous previous post, I read some more of John Bradshaw's, The Shame That Binds Us after I responded to you and he says that these shame wounds are really at the very core of who we are. It makes sense that it's 1) normal to return to them again and again 2) normal to find it difficult to heal them/move past them etc.

Sending you support 
dolly

[Papa Coco]

Dolly,

That's an interesting post about Bradshaw. I agree that we return to shame and that it is difficult to get past it. I also believe our overall shame comes from centuries back, and we are living our own lives mired in massive generational shame. I believe shame is a huge issue, and it drives most of our human struggles. I believe that shame is what stops us from connecting fully with our spiritual source. And that our lives here on earth are the workshop where we are working out our shame so we can reconnect with God.

Anyway, I just posted a response to you in the private folders, from my private folder to yours. I got your messages but didn't know it until you pointed me to them. I will now start to check my private folders every day to see if you've responded.