What to do when you do better alone?

[LucySnowe]

Part II

(I'm sorry for writing a lot, and I'll defer to the moderators; this is my first post and I guess I had a lot to share)

Sometimes I feel I've spent my whole life fighting people on the question of what I'm capable of, how I'm like everyone else—that it's a willful fantasy of mine that I'm limited—and how little I must be trying for my life to then be what it is. And every time someone suggests something like that, they think they're the first person who has.

And sometimes I feel other people should be able to get that, understand my experience and their own blind spots and limitations. Sometimes I feel that, as they have accused me of being, they are willfully ignorant, stubborn, antisocial, and making things difficult when they don't need to be 😆

But I'm finally beginning to build that understanding and care inside of myself, able to give it to myself—and that is huge. I'm  also lucky to have a couple of close friends, though not near me geographically, who understand and accept me quite well.

It's just that—I'm still lonely. And I think it's tricky. Because it's not just my disorder fooling me; it is true that people generally don't know how to care for my particular (and real) differences, even when I try to teach them. The same way people used to (and still do) unskillfully and sometimes forcefully engage with autistic people.

I do continue to find beauty, hope and faith in the world, in myself, and in others. If I often feel like an emotional Helen Keller, it's promising that I'm learning to be my own Anne Sullivan. And I hope this journey will make me more tolerant of others and bring me into closer contact with community; good enough, safe, imperfect, fruitful. I had a residential community experience once before that was a revelation and salvation. It gives me hope I can find that again, or elements of it.

Thank you so much for all your shares.

[Kizzie]

Hi Lucy and welcome to OOTS    thanks for sharing about yourself and what this topic means to/for you. 

I hope this journey will make me more tolerant of others and bring me into closer contact with community; good enough, safe, imperfect, fruitful.

I've been thinking a lot about what I would like in F2F group a lot over the last month or so (having had two recent experiences, that decidedly did not work), and I've had some similar thoughts as you; it needs to be "good enough, safe, imperfect, fruitful".   

Understandably my tolerance of imperfect relationships (which are the nature of relationships and that's difficult to accept)  is low so a safe group would mean somewhere I can grow my tolerance for good enough relationships.  That seems to be with others who have CPTSD (puts us all on the same page), are genuinely trying to do the same thing (learn about relationships and accept them as imperfect), and are willing to figure things out like me (fruitful).   

I've written about thinking of starting a F2F group and have been thinking a video group is a good place to start. I think it would provide more of a sense of connection but without the risk/threat of being F2F in a physical location right from the get go. It's also less complicated than trying to find a meeting space.  Part of the group might  entail meeting up occasionally to do activities together though; have lunch, go for a walk, do some art, visit a museum/art gallery, whatever. 

Guidelines for the group would be important - mainly how to ensure everyone does feel safe, heard, validated, supported and cared for.  Your post helps me to think about what might work, but also what might not work (i.e., nudging, pulling, stretching).   

Anyway, it's a work in progress but an important one imo because we do all seem to feel the loneliness but have difficulty finding safe places and people to learn about connecting. Again, tks for your share. 

[LucySnowe]

Thanks for your reply, Kizzie, and I'm so glad my mega-post was stimulating and somewhat helpful to someone. Thanks for sharing your thoughts back. Your F2F group sounds like it's going to be a good one, I'm glad and personally inspired to hear you planning it 

[Rainydaze]

I know this is an old thread but thank you so much for creating it, I relate to so much of it and it's comforting to see that so many others do too. For me, I think I need human connection but it needs to be the right kind. Currently I'm quite content with being alone much of the time with my dog and husband (though admittedly not much choice there anyway at the moment!) and perhaps engaging with forums or a tiny bit of the more pleasant aspects of social media if I need a bit more than that. That's really all I feel I want right now though, as my mind is always full of healing work or working my way through emotional flashbacks, which is intense but necessary I think. I'm finally coming out of survival mode, learning the very basics of boundaries and my sense of self and really I'm very ill prepared for the level of social contact that's considered normal for most people.

I must admit, though on the whole I agree with them I do get a bit frustrated when mental health professionals stress the importance of positive mirroring from other people in order to heal. I mean, where exactly do you find these caring, non judgmental people in day to day situations?! They make it sound so easy but I often find that there is little explanation beyond the vague "reach out to others" and very little advice given on how to negotiate positive relationships with other people when you have a lot of fear and reservations about trusting others. Given my poor sense of self and current lack of skill in making boundaries I actually think before I throw myself into social situations I need to calm my nervous system down further and learn better self care, otherwise by entering social situations that I don't have the skills to cope with I'm just going to continue to feel like a duck out of water and panic. I'm so prone to being taken advantage of too and unless I have a better understanding of boundaries and what I am and am not willing to tolerate in social relationships I think I'll justcontinue to attract people who aren't good for me.

For so long I've felt like I shouldn't trust my gut feeling about social situations I'm not comfortable with and have just assumed that there must be something terribly wrong with me, that I'm a bad person and useless for not being more social. I think this is because my feelings were never listened to or validated growing up and I was always called "silly"  or talked down to in the derogatory third person of "oh, she's just shy" when a social situation scared me. At the age of 3 my mum would dump me at playgroup thinking that leaving me there terrified and crying in a big room full of noisy children I didn't know would toughen me up (or some other flawed logic) but it never did and I hated it. I still feel like that 3 year old much of the time when faced with social situations and personally I think that if what feels socially normal and pleasant to other people doesn't work for us then we should perhaps look at what the inner child is telling us and try to reparent ourselves. I've ignored my feelings for so long thinking that the anxiety I feel is just "silly" but I'm starting to think that really it's my gut feeling telling me that I have unresolved trauma to process and need to work on myself a bit more before I can feel comfortable doing what comes naturally for others. And that's ok, most people haven't endured totalitarian parenting growing up and can't possibly understand the effect it has on a person. I think perhaps we need to have this distance from others to figure out what we should essentially have been lovingly taught from the beginning.

Many of us have been so focused outwardly to protect ourselves, to survive, we lose track of who we are and need time and space to focus internally, and to let our nervous systems heal.

I agree entirely Kizzie, I think we just need a bit of breathing space to work it out. When your amygdala hijacks your nervous system around other people then I think the priority needs to be calming down your entire nervous system so that panic doesn't overwhelm in the first instance. If you think about it, children from stable backgrounds with mentally healthy parents have the opportunity to practise all these new skills and develop a healthy sense of self in a safe-enough, protective environment, which is something we never had. I think withdrawing from other people is a boundary we might need while we're at our most vulnerable in order to develop a calm, non-judgmental environment with which to centre ourselves and reparent the inner child.