I don't know what's wrong with me (long text)

[Bimsy]

(Possible trigger warning)

Hello everyone!

This is the moment of truth for me, i guess.
I have been a part of a forum for children of narcissistic/neglecting/abusive parents for many years but sadly that forum does not exist any more.
While being there I learned a lot about symptoms that can occur when a person has been abused by one or both parents.
And I realised a lot of things about myself too but I still feel it was just the tip of the ice berg.

So I have known about PTSD and CPTSD but never really thought of myself as a person with CPTSD since I do not have the common symptoms that usually is described, I felt it wasn't "bad enough".
Now I'd really like for you to give me some input on what you think my problem is, and if it "counts" as bad enough to be dealt with or if it's not serious enough.

I'll give you a little background about myself to give you an idea of what it's been like:

When I was born my parents where members of a right wing, Christian cult here in Sweden.
My father committed suicide when I was 2,5yo and 6 months later my mother remarried with a man she had been trying to start a company with.

We moved to a new house and from what I can see in the photo albums there is no mentioning of the death of my father, no pictures of a casket in church or anything like it usually is when someone dies.
My mothers new husband is referred to as "daddy X" in the albums, as a sort of claim that he is now a father to me though we still call him by his name.
I never agreed to calling him my father though my mother insisted that he, at least, is a father figure to me.
But he was not, definitely not.

Now during this period my mother had begin to fall out with her church, the new husband was not that interested in religion and all of a sudden no more people came to our house for afternoon tea as they used to.
My mothers old friends from the church was not to be heard from any more.

Time passed, and I have more memories of this period than that before since I was too young to remember.
I remember sitting alone in my room, crying for mother, feeling alone, I had to wait a lot until she came in quickly to ask what I wanted but she never really kept me company.
The new "father" was beginning to show his true self, he was usually always so nice and gentle but he is actually just a grown child who would become very, very angry with me if I were angry with him or did something he would perceive as rude.

I don't remember when the corporal punishment had begun but for some time I got hit every day for any minor misbehaviour.
I was soon to understand that the punishments always depended on their mood that day, if they were already angry and stressed out they were more likely to hit me.
But sometimes they just ignored my mistakes and let it slip.

So my sense of conscience became twisted since I never had any consistency of my punishments and was almost never given any explanation of exactly what I did wrong.   
And as you can imagine I had a hard time fitting in and other adults often became angry with how rude I was when in my mind all I tried to do was to lighten the mood.

Enter: the shaming.
One of my mothers usual comments when she punished me was: "I can't believe how you always make me feel ashamed of you"! (something like that, but in Swedish).
She would always make me feel really, really bad about myself.
I almost couldn't stand the heavy feeling it brought me and how sad I was that I had made her feel upset with me.

I used to try and be very, very good always but my mothers demands were always too high and would give little or no praise and attention.
Her ideal children were the "Von Trapp" children from "The sound of music", she would dress me like a princess and when I met other adults I knew I had to courtesy because she wanted to show how well behaved I was.
I remember being confused when the other adults felt surprised by my behaviour and told me that I didn't have to act like that since we were living in the 90's (i was born 86 btw).

After some time I became less well behaved though, it was never good enough for her anyway.
I think it was around that time, when my two sisters were born, that she started to feel more and more depressed and let go of her tight grip on me.
The perfectionism was always there but she wasn't watching my every move like she used to since she had become more tired and withdrawn.

At first she said that she wanted five children but I am happy that she only made it to three since she lost interest in us and the concept of being a mother.
We grew up knowing that our mother thought of us as demanding and annoying, her relationship with my stepfather had also become worse since he would not help her in parenting or sharing the responsibility of taking care of us.

They divorced when I was 7 and my mum, who was the one controlling everything, told my stepfather that I should live with him along with my siblings every other week.
She needed to be "child free" and he was a push-over so he agreed, I guess he felt guilty if he didn't take me in.

I felt like she had dumped him on me since I had do teach him how to take care of us, I felt like I was left in charge and I hated it.
The hardest part was when he became violent and I had to learn how to calm him down, the thing that had the most effect on him was to make him feel ashamed of his childish behaviour.
I had to become cold and condescending and point out that he was very immature, it was the only thing that kept him at bay.

This behaviour worked on both him and mother since it made them insecure and more compliant.
I never understood why I acted like that but now I know they forced me to it, if I was "too happy" my mother would often bring me down and make me feel bad.

They both come from abusive backgrounds so I guess I had to become "the parent" in some way in order to make them feel a certain way.
But only in some cases, they usually never listened and respected me.

My only escape was the fantasy world within me and the never ending quest for love (from boys my age).
I have had a lot of trouble with my yearning for love since I have never really felt satisfied anyway.
I used to dream of that perfect movie- love that is too surreal to work in real life.

School was a torture chamber, I was bullied most of the time and was a nervous, jumpy child with a lot of "tics".
Most of the time I had a small group of friends but they never really liked me, i can see why now, we weren't on the same level.

It took me many years to build a social life, I was often ashamed of how I acted and did things "wrong" with people.
I hurt many of my friends when I became angry because I had a terrible temper where I would almost black out.
I soon learned how to repress those feelings, if I feel too angry now I feel really scared and the fear represses the anger immediately.
I think it's because all of those years when my step father and I fought like equals, but he was so much bigger and stronger so he would always win.

A few years ago I experienced his shame-anger once more, it made me feel sick.
He didn't do anything, he just yelled at me but it was enough.
To see his eyes like that is the worst feeling, it's like he gives up all control of himself.

Sometimes when I'm stressed out or if I were in an abusive situation I would go into a strange state of mind which I have been calling "dissociation" even though some therapists disagree.
I don't disappear completely, but I zoom out.
I can hear everything clearly at the time but I almost never remember anything afterwords except for how it made me feel.

When my mother used to berate me and I couldn't escape I would stare down into a corner and not answer or move.
She thought I was stubborn as I could be "stuck like that for hours" she said.

My life is much better now as I have no contact with almost all of my family since a few yeas back.
Though some symptoms still remain.

I can easily open up to strangers on the internet but not to my closest friends since I am more afraid that they will judge me.
I don't want them to know all of me and see my flaws and how immature I am sometimes.

I can get stuck in thoughts that people are saying bad things behind my back and that they don't really like me.
If it's people I don't care about then I usually don't care and this has led me to stop caring about people so that I can relax. (you follow me?)

Caring about someone is hard, I am afraid that I will do wrong so that they won't like me any more.

If I am in a trusting relationship with someone I can still get very suspicious sometimes and fear that they have been lying to me this whole time and that I have been played for a fool.

My personality is kind of childish and I like to joke a lot but I am very careful of how much of myself I show people since I presume that most people won't like me.
As I am writing this it becomes more clear to me that I am ruled by thoughts of not being liked for who I am or because of any mistake I made.

Sometimes when I am really tired or hungry I can get mad or sad and think about the past.
Sometimes I make up fantasies of arguments that have never occurred, just so that I can feel angry.

Sometimes if I am in a stressful period in my life I can experience bouts of shame that I know stems from things that happened way back in time.
At times it makes me cringe and I mumble some swearwords to myself and hope that no one heard me.

Also fear: Let's say I am lying in bed and suddenly a fantasy comes up where I see a train come rushing at me and just as it is about to hit me I physically cringe together as if I actually believed that I was going to get hit.
Like when you see something coming closer and you almost start closing our eyes and raising your arms to prepare for the impact.

At times when normal people might feel scared I usually feel disconnected, instead of feeling scared I obsess about death and how I might die.
But in a morbid kind of way, like I almost enjoy the spectacular and dramatic ways I could possibly die.
I think I do this to make myself feel the fear that I am repressing but I'm not sure.
I'll not describe my morbid fantasies, they are worse than some horror movies I'll tell you that!

If I get scared (like when we had a storm here that tore buildings to pieces) I can get a real panic attack.

Usually my anxiety is internal and almost never show, it took me a lot of years to understand that this feeling is anxiety.
I almost never show symptoms like breathing fast with a racing heart, it's more like I live in a blur and the feelings rage inside of me while my face shows nothing.
After that it is usually hard to remember things, I have a really hard time remembering things in general.

The only thing you can notice from my anxiety is when I try to escape the situation.
This makes people angry and feel like I am running away from a conflict, in their eyes I am not anxious- just childish and immature.
They want to debate things further and I just want to run away.

Later, when everything is normal I think nothing of my behaviour, it is not strange to me and I don't really remember the details.
I feel normal and can not really connect with the feelings I had back then, though I find it hard to explain myself and my behaviour.
If I remember things it is usually about how I felt but not what was said.

I am very sensitive to how adults treat their children, in my mind most parents are abusive in some way.

Once, not too long ago, I called the police on a man who was abusing his woman, it sent me into a real panic attack and made me feel horrible for a few days after that.
I never saw her get hit but I heard them as I was in the same building, I was so terrified and couldn't wait for the cops to get there fast enough!

I could write more but I think I'll stop for now, hopefully you made it this far
I'd be glad to know what you think, is this CPTSD?

[arpy1]

Hi Bimsy, i just scanned your post and i will read it properly and reply more thoroughly today but i wanted to just let you know you are being heard, and more importantly, listened to. i think it must have taken a lot of courage to write so honestly so i thought i'd just say that so you don't feel alone with it for a moment longer than you need! 

there aren't really any 'experts' here but there certainly are lots of us who can relate to the kinds of things you express.  there's a lot of information to be found here so do look around and see what you can find. 

anyway, speak later, hang in there, Bimsy, you're not alone!   

[Bimsy]

Thank you very much arpy1 I understand it was a lot to read but it means a lot that you posted anyway!

I feel like I can relate to a lot on this forum, though I don't really know if it is bad enough to be called CPTSD for me or if I have lived in a sort of denial to keep me going.
I am going to talk to a therapist soon, which I have mixed feelings about, but we'll see if it can do anything for my progress or not.

[Dutch Uncle]

Hi Bimsy 

You don't have to pass some sort of CPTSD exam here in order to join in conversations that you relate to. 
Feel free to share what you relate to and feel free to post 'stuff' you think others might relate to, or otherwise want to share/get of your chest. "Letters of Recovery" or "Recovery Journals" are suitable sections for the latter in the Recovery from CPTSD section of the board.

For what it's worth: I don't have a formal cPTSD-diagnosis either.

Welcome, and good luck for the talk with your T.


Dutch Uncle.

[arpy1]

i'm back! all clean and showered and dressed and even a bit awake!  sorry it took so long, mornings are very difficult for me 

right, dear Bimsy, i have read your post properly and, wow, what a painful story. unfortunately i can relate to much of it, and i know that so many here will be able to as well.  you have survived some horrible abuse. Survived it, and you have obviously come out of it with deep insight into yourself.  but life is tough for you and you are in pain, that i can well understand   

i would never feel qualified to tell you what your problem is.  what i will say is that i was like you for years, in that i didn't think that what i had experienced was 'bad enough' to qualify - well - for anything really. i just thought i was bad, or weak, or stupid or anything that made it my fault.  it was a hard and painful thing to have to recognise (and i don't think i am fully there,still) that i was not to blame for any of it, because in admitting that, i had to face the enormity of what other people, whom i was supposed to be loved by/committed to/belong with,  had done to me.  that was and remains a constant source of shock to me.  that feeling of 'how could they? how could they have done that to me?'. what grief!

that realisation and the pain of it are better though, because they are the truth. and the truth, for me, no matter how unpalatable, has got to be a better starting point than untruth. from the truth there is possibility for change, growth, even, dare i say it, recovery? that's my feeling, anyway.

i'm still very much at the beginning of this journey but i have found a huge amount of help, knowledge and reassurance from doing a whole lot of research once i had realised how closely the cptsd model resonated with me and my lived experience.  i would really recommend that you have a close look at the Resources section on this site.  there are a lot of very good articles. (i would put a link in for you to some but i don't know how to do that yet! i am not terribly good at tech! )  one that really helped me a huge amount though, was the Bessel van der Kolk book The Body Keeps The Score and his YouTube lectures. just put his name into YouTube and lots will come up to choose from.  his are the clearest explanations of the physiological effects of trauma on the body and the neurology of the brain that i have found. 

also, you won't be on this site long without coming across Pete Walker's book Complex Trauma From Surviving to Thriving and his website pete-walker.com. he knows what he's talking about, this guy, becos he is a fellow sufferer.  worth checking out. 

anyway, there's loads of stuff here and i hope you can do some research. loads of us, as Dutch Uncle says, don't have 'official diagnoses'... the current stage of development of the mental health community is not far enough on for cptsd to be really mainstream yet.  for those of us living with it, that becomes academic except in the search for a therapist with the training and experience we need for them to be able to help us.

hope this helps a bit, be assured of our support and that you are very welcome among us - and keep posting. we want to hear you. 

[Bimsy]

Hi Dutch Uncle and thanks for answering!

Hehe, i thought you would be ok if I didn't have an official diagnosis but it would feel better if this is the answer to why I am the way I am.
I've been looking for answers all my life and have now looked up some clinics near my home where they treat PTSD, maybe there is hope for a deep cleansing recovery?

I might be chasing dreams but it would feel nice to unchain my personality from all of these illogical flaws.
I've scanned through the forum and will definitely look at some of the recovery stuff when my brain is clear enough to take it all in

[Bimsy]

Thank you so much for your kind words arpy1! 
(And no need to apologize I take my time in the mornings as well!)

I guess it would be hard for anyone to know just like that if it counts as actual CPTSD, I think that I am eager to know since it would help me understand more about myself.
It is hard to look for information when I do not fully comprehend what my problem is, there are so many things that have happened during all of those years.

Usually I have felt like I might be just a weird person that has been damaged from way back and that there is no real help to be found.
But if I could just say "I suffer from CPTSD" to a therapist so that they would have a clue about what I am talking about then life would probably feel a bit easier.

I still feel like there is a lot of buried stuff inside me, I am curious of what secrets I hold inside of me but if I get too close I get overwhelmed and have to stay away.
It is all so blurry and mixed together, not like a clear memory or a known event but more like a lot of emotions and situations that has been cutting small wounds into a bigger damage.
(But I guess that is what counts as complex PTSD and not "just" PTSD)

Also I fear that I have to feel these emotions again during recovery, I have been so sick of them that I just shut off.
Have you felt the same way?

It's like now when I am free of them- why should I go back to feeling those emotions again?
It will probably do me no good, I tried in therapy once and it was traumatic every time so eventually I had to stop seeing that therapist.
She wanted me to reconnect with my anger and didn't notice when I was starting to shut off from all of the stress so she kept pressuring me.
I am afraid it will be like that again if I bring this up in therapy.

[arpy1]

what really helped me to identify what was going on was when i happened upon Pete Walker's website and realised that a lot of what i was getting overwhelmed by was what he called 'emotional flashbacks' i.e. flashbacks to traumatic emotional states without any particular visual component (unlike with 'regular' ptsd.)

from there on i began to suspect that what i was experiencing in my life was cptsd, so i trawled around the internet looking for definitions of what it was, what symptoms would have been in this latest DSM if only they had listened to the latest research by the likes of van der Kolk, Christine Courtois, and others, and even some older stuff by Judith Herman. again, i think it might help you to do what i did and trawl around the internet looking up these names and others and seeing what they have to say.  there are also lots of places that give symptom lists for cptsd if you check out 'cptsd - symptoms'. sounds like you probably already have. 
 
increasing numbers of therapists are gradually informing themselves.  it is still a bit 'hit and miss' finding a therapist who is cptsd-savvy.  and there is always the danger of getting one who thinks they are but who aren't, in which case we can easily get re-traumatised because the style of therapy they are trying to fit us into triggers us into intense emotional flashback and meltdown.  sounds like that has happened to you already, and it most certainly has to me. that one told me i was 'resistant', which was a way of putting the blame on me rather than looking at her style and the model she was trying to fit me into.  i used to come out of those sessions so traumatised it took days to re-stabilise and i felt such a loser, a failure. and of course now 'resistant' on top. took a while to get over her!

i guess, in the absence of anyone to guide us (like a trained qualified therapist  ) many of us have just had to decide for ourselves. since i started reading up on this, and especially using the Pete Walker book, i've felt a bit more hope that i can heal myself, even if i don't feel like that every day.  in the end having a working, workable model is what is most helpful, that's where the self-education and the new strategies come in.  and yes, i certainly experience now all those horrible emotions that i have spent years suppressing! i have to believe that it is a necessary and positive step even when it feels so unbearable.  but in a therapeutic situation, i think it is so important that it happens with someone who understands, is gentle and empathic and doesn't push you faster or further than you can manage at any one time.  that way you learn to stay grounded and manage the emotions over time.  and not get re-traumatised and end up in meltdown.  it's a long, long road, isn't it? thank god we have each other! 

[Bimsy]

Thank God indeed, arpy1!

I am sorry to hear that you also had that experience with a therapist!
Just now as I am writing I realised that "therapist" becomes "the rapist", It's as if to symbolize that there is a fine line between helping and damaging.

I wish we both had therapists that, at least, could admit that they didn't know enough to help us. Then I think it would be easier to not blame oneself and feel like a failure.
I'll definitely look up those books and websites that have been mentioned here maybe there is a lot one can do alone without the risk of being exposed to more trauma!