Living As All of Me

HannahOne · April 20, 2026, 12:34:46 PM

"an organization of how I had come to understand the world growing up. And that control is a part that wants to stop an exile/feeling from coming up."

Dollyvee, I think you're right.
I am going to sit with this.

It may be preverbal, an unconscious agreement. A defense. An exile. "I'm not fleeing from feelings....." LOL. Ok, my love, HannahOne, ok.

Maybe I'm not consciously driving myself this way to flee from feelings. Yet the effect is a blunting and evasion of feeling, replacing some feelings with others, replacing grief and rage with "exhaustion" and "I can't feel my arms," replacing despair and a feeling of aloneness with fear about not doing enough, worry about my "mental health" or workout routine, or anger at myself for not achieving X goal.

The dissociation is clearly a protection from feeling, "I can't feel my arms." And I've been having these grieving crying jags, which I think are much needed, I feel regulated after, it's old grief, it's old stuff. The crying jags feel regressive, I wail like an infant. And I have to do it in my car, LOL. Nowhere else alone, or while driving, to keep some other driving part online, I suppose lest I give into it completely? A fear of falling completely in. So I drive myself hither and yon, while crying from the inside out.

I'm going to notice more, both the protection and the exile. How I adapted to a way of being, as you say.

Thank you for your honesty and sharing your experience.
I am deeply grateful and profoundly moved at how other survivors get it. After so many years of therapy where the therapist just so often couldn't get it. I have never shared with anyone but a therapist. So finding you all here is just a whole new world for me. It is a new experience to feel included in a world of people. And amazing that other people have similar experiences to me. And can understand.

I never find that others have a similar experience, my experience was always so alien. Others talking about jobs and clothes and I mumble along, while my experience is a hall of distorted mirrors, ambitions about jobs and clothes while not feeling my arms, nodding and trying to block out internal wailing, yes yes the HOA, taxes, and the cost of gas....Not so here, where I can have an actual conversation about the real me, All of Me, and it connects to the All of others who can converse back about their experiences of the reality they know of being themselves.

sanmagic7 · April 20, 2026, 02:01:00 PM

hannah1, i think it's remarkable how our minds/brains have come up with ways for us to be protected, including from feelings. staying busy could certainly be one of those; worrying, anxiety, OCD, doing too much, too little, tv, phones, gaming, eating too much or too little or unhealthy, and on and on. i think the key is balance. i think the first step is realization, which it sounds like you might be close to. i think the hardest part is actually recognizing, then feeling those feelings, get them behind us. very rough stuff, indeed. i've had a really difficult time w/ this last part. and the realizations have knocked me down as well at times.

while it's not always possible to find balance, depending on what's going on in our lives - for example, the very poor don't have very many choices to propagate balance - we can do what we can and know we did that much. it takes time, it takes work, it has its ups and downs, but when we keep chipping away, whether it be over days or years, the results come. sending you love and a hug filled w/ a series of chippers, each a different size, for when you might be ready to utilize them.

HannahOne · April 20, 2026, 10:38:25 PM

SanMagic, it's pretty wild to me to say, I am in the process of owning my feelings. After so much therapy?!? But apparently that is the case. These are my feelings. I can know where they are coming from, what they relate to in the past, and own them as mine in the present.

It really does knock me down. And again, after decades of therapy...how can that be.

I can only surmise that as I grow, I grow in capacity to take delivery of it all. So there is more to do. The losses compound, loss of experience of being loved, loss of experience of being able to love safely without betrayal. Loss of experience of safety. Loss of rupture and repair practice. Loss of shared knowing. Loss of developmental steps. Loss of me. Of parts of me. Of who I might have been.

I am thinking about grief, and complicated grief. I scraped this off the Internet for complicated grief:
"Persistent Intense Grief: Unrelenting, deep sadness and yearning for the deceased that does not lessen over time.
Preoccupation with the Loss: Constant thoughts of the deceased or the circumstances surrounding the death.
Inability to Accept the Death: Feeling like the death did not happen or that life is meaningless without them.
Excessive Avoidance: Actively avoiding people, places, or reminders of the loved one.
Emotional Numbness or Anger: Feeling detached from others, experiencing anger, bitterness, or feeling like part of yourself has died.
Reduced Quality of Life: Significant impairment in daily life, work, or relationships."

Our grief is ambiguous, it doesn't end in a way as the lost people/relationships may be alive, or if dead, are unresolved. It's a grief that re-arises at each developmental phase of adulthood, I guess. The internal wailing/yearning doesn't seem to go away. Difficulty accepting the loss. Emotional numbness. Feeling like part of me is dead/missing.

And as I age, I become the age my F and M were when they abused me this way, that way, when I left them and didn't look back, when I reapproached and they turned away from acknowledging, I become the age they were when they turned in on themselves, the age when I realized they would never change or grow....

Complicated grief also has no container, there's no funeral for a dead childhood, no community rituals to acknowledge and help me re-form around something other than loss, and no ongoing container---except this forum!

Here we are. I found it.... So I must keep chipping! Thank you for the virtual chippers!! And the hug. Sometimes feels lonely, me and my feelings I have to own. I am not licensed to own this many feelings, LOL.

Marcine · April 20, 2026, 11:59:26 PM

HannahOne · April 21, 2026, 12:21:39 AM

Claimed!!!

heehee!
Thank you for reading, Marcine!

NarcKiddo · April 21, 2026, 10:27:22 AM

Quote from: HannahOne on April 20, 2026, 10:38:25 PMthere's no funeral for a dead childhood,

Perhaps there should be. I just went away and listened to Elton John's 'Funeral for a Friend' and held a mini funeral in my head while doing so. I'm not quite sure who it was for (I think it was for dead childhoods in general) because I just wanted to see if the music worked. It does for me and I will probably do it again.

Those crying jags are quite amazing in their intensity when they hit, aren't they? I can see why you might fear being taken over entirely. I'm glad you feel regulated afterwards. They are clearly needed.

sanmagic7 · April 21, 2026, 11:29:28 AM

hannah1, i agree w/ NK - we can make our own funerals for our dead childhoods. they deserve to be put to rest while we grieve what we never had, or that we got and we shouldn't have. and onward we go, newly forming adults, making our decisions for ourselves instead of having them made for us. sounds like freedom to me. and power and boundaries and all we didn't have as kids. love and hugs

TheBigBlue · April 21, 2026, 02:01:30 PM

Hannah, I'm not in a good place to answer, but I wanted you to know that I'm reading and feeling what you write.

HannahOne · April 22, 2026, 08:01:57 PM

NK, I send virtual flowers, I am so sorry for your losses. I checked out that song, the organ really makes it!
sanmagic7 and TheBigBlue, thank you for being here, reading, commenting.

It's amazing to be together in this.

HannahOne · April 22, 2026, 08:42:10 PM

So with a little help from my friends, Dollyvee, sanmagic7, NarcKiddo, Marcine, SenseOrgan, TheBigBlue, Dalloway, and others, I am feeling my feelings.

I feel silly. I'm middle aged and working on feeling my feelings. After thirty years of therapy I've decided to feel my feelings. It's embarrassing. Oh well!

For the first half of my life, I was in work and survive mode. When I had a feeling, I turned away from it. Sometimes I tried to solve it in the outside world. Change the job. Change location, move states. Change my name. Change my religion. Change therapists. Change therapies. Change hobbies. All of these are a form of "geographic cure." They don't "work," because wherever you go, there you are, and a rose by any other name is still a rose. It worked for what it worked for, in the sense that I got to a safe relationship, a safe home, mostly financially stable, I acquired many skills, experience, friends, stuff, connections.... all of that is not nothing. I come from nothing and I know that all of that is very much NOT nothing. So it worked in that sense.

But all of that is not feeling my feelings. Here I am in a perfectly fine life, and miserable. Because of all these feelings.

I don't really know how to communicate about this but I want to try. Maybe I'll get an Amen, maybe not, either way I want to try. I'm sure it will turn out to be just part of CPTSD or part of the human condition and not anything rare about HannahOne!

The best way I can describe it is that I seem to have specific feeling states that come up. You could call them emotional flashbacks. I just never quite understood what that meant before, emotional flashback. I never had this kind of distance or perspective on my own emotions. I can see lately that some of these very common repetitive feeling states really DONT have anything to do with the present. They are MY feelings. I own them. Nothing on the outside can fix or change them. In the past I only had two options: ignore the feeling or give into it completely. Ignore it and keep going, or stop and fix/change my situation to try to fix/change the feeling. That created some chaos here and there.

Now I have another option. I don't know where this option came from! But lately I can notice, observe, and I just know in my gut what that feeling is about, what it's from. I feel very connected to my feelings. Maybe that's the difference. I'm more connected to myself. I can connect to a much younger me who had those feelings. Somehow that is making a big difference. To tell myself, "Ok, these are MY feelings. They are inside me. I own them. I don't have to solve it right now." And try to be with myself. Let myself know. That feeling is the feeling of standing in front of an empty fridge when you can barely open the fridge door to see it's empty, a feeling of helpless hopelessness. That feeling is the feeling of knowing you're in an empty house, in an empty room, in an empty crib with an empty bottle, a feeling of longing that cannot be allowed to be felt. That feeling is the feeling of knowing what is happening is VERY VERY WRONG and there is nothing, nothing you can do about it, a scary light feeling of flying apart. That feeling is the feeling of wanting to become someone else because this is too painful, a feeling of shutdown. That feeling is the feeling of watching things go very wrong, watching myself become a thing because the other person can't see me as a person, a heavy feeling like I'm a brick. These are actual situations, where I was having these exact feeling states. Knowing that makes a big difference. It's less confusing. It's more clear. I can be more calm-headed because it's not happening now, it's old. I can spare some compassion because I'm old now and not in that situation.

I would describe them a bit like Janina Fisher does, in terms of survival responses.

I have a submit/hopeless/helpless state. It comes up in a relationship where there's a misattunement. It feels very heavy. generally ignore it, talk myself out of it. A lot of times that's good. I would torture my partner if I was hopeless every time they didn't bring home the right takeout food or toothpaste. Sometimes it's not good to override that. I have gotten into some bad relationships and situations when I was younger because I ignored the miscommunication or intentional gaslighting and ended up "going along with" or submitting to things that were unhealthy or dangerous.

I have a depersonalization/dissociation state. I guess that's a form of flight. It comes up when the misattunement is more serious? If there's something like betrayal with gaslighting. If my partner brings home the wrong toothpaste and I say so and they respond with denial or excuses, like if they say I never said what kind of toothpaste. I start to doubt my sanity, my reality. I might not feel my arms, or might not be able to hear. Again a major overreaction to toothpaste...so I've coped with this by avoiding asking people for things. Doing it all myself. As much as possible. Needing nothing from anything ever. And avoiding deep sharing as much as possible. Not letting myself be known. And in a way, not even knowing myself. Not knowing All of Me, or not knowing it all at the same time.

I have a state of longing sadness. I think Fisher would call it "attachment cry." But my attachment cry doesn't seem to lead to or even see the possibility of connection or presence. It is a profound despair and hopelessness that's paralyzing and I don't "cry" or cry out, I just feel in my chest a pressure or hollow or feeling of lightness that shouldn't be there. This comes up randomly it seems. Just driving around. Or sitting around. There's a hopelessness to it and also some frantic energy on the edges. I have coped with this by ignoring it, yelling at myself to "stop it," some SIB in the past, or reading, doing screen time, escaping into something that will make me numb.

I have a state of rage, but it's been hard to recognize because it's so internal. On the outside I "keep sweet" as the religion told me. On the inside it feels like blinding tension. I can't see. And everything locks up. Sometimes some SIB. My "fight" state is a bit jammed up. I often end up very sleepy. Dissociating, I guess. But I notice a rage feeling first, a fight feeling, sometimes. I felt trapped in a store the other day and couldn't find my way out very well and I started to feel it. Or when a boundary is crossed, like someone yelling at me. Or at the blood lab when they wouldn't honor my appointment. I just turned and left, so I went to flight. But I couldn't see and walked into two doors on my way out, so that's fight. Fight was very risky growing up and never really worked for me.

Noticing these states as my feelings, as mine, as belonging to me and not happening to me, as generated by me and not imposed on me by someone. Noticing these states and knowing right away who inside it belongs most to, what younger me experienced that first led to this state or that cemented it or that makes it so familiar. Noticing the state and not immediately going to fix it or to avoidance. Noticing the feeling and letting myself think and feel my way through it and cry or say out loud to no one all kinds of unacceptable or impermissible things. Say what happened. Say who did it. Say what didn't happen and should have. Say what I want. Say what I wish would have happened. Say what I think I deserved. Say how wrong it was. Own my right to feel this way right now in this moment. That's the least I can do for all of me. Allow myself to feel what I feel.

The more I am noticing, and feeling, the more choices I have. The more free I am. To go and do or not to go and do, to live big today or small today, both are ok but I want to have the choice. Growing up, so few good choices. Every choice such a high cost. Now, many choices. The more I feel my feelings and own them as mine from the past, as the feelings of parts of me, the more freedom I may have in the here and now, the more choices will actually be possible for me here and now.