OSCEN,
Thank you for your insights.
I’ve been trying to write a reply for more than a week but each time I come back to it, I’ve changed, things have changed, so I ended up revising it over and over. After a week of revisions and suffering the pain of stirred up memories, I finally got this to a short form reply.
My big 3 temporary, situational events are over and I have recovered 90% from the bad emotional and physical state I was in. I am no longer frozen in place by those events and I find my thinking about everything else changing by the minute. I am once again able to sleep and my “constructive” dreams are coming back with the same two scenarios, builds and people, but different in content from what they had been.
Right now, I’m unsure of the next steps I need to take but I seem to be getting away from the need to tell everyone every detail of my life, a complex, leftover trait of the fawn typology, I think. It’s a one day at a time process for me right now so I am moving, acting slowly based on being in the moment and going forward.
I am painfully aware of what happened to me, when very young, why it happened and each day I end up feeling differently about that and myself. I started this topic by asking what’s love and, yes, we are not born with that feeling. It has to be given to us, instilled by loving parents.
Each day more becomes clear and while my parents provided everything I needed physically, I was not given anything to help me develop emotionally and after 5 or 6 years, I was conditioned to be seen and not heard, to do whatever to make other like me and any feeling I got along the way was verbally beaten into submission. I was and have been emotionally numb for over 60 years. I don’t love, hate, fear or feel happiness. In bad times, I get angry, feel anxiety which physically turns me into a wreck, and generally know the reason, the cause, but that’s it. And, I am sad most of the time.
So, not only do I have many regrets about living my entire life with cPTSD, but also have to live with disappointment (the opportunities I recognize as missed), disgust (over my past actions or words spoken) and defeat (I’m mentally exhausted). I lost my life, who I could have been, what I could have done, to cPTSD and it’s really too late to do anything but grow up – I think I’m about 5 or 6 now, I was 3 when I began this recovery process.
Yes, you were right woodsgnome, a child is not born with love so must receive it from loving parents in their early years. There was no love in my FOO. My parents were so involved with their interpersonal issues and verbal fighting that there was neither time for me nor love for me. They were not equipped, not able to raise an emotionally healthy child. And, when I was 4, my parents had another child which gets into abandonment issues for me. My mother had a rough childhood and as I knew her, thinking about it now and had narcissistic tendencies. My father came home from WW-II with PTSD. I was born into a marriage that should never have happened. I don’t know if they ever loved me or were even capable of loving me.
Oh, I’m human and there are times in a some TV show episodes, some I remember well, or movies during which tears well up vicariously for a few minutes and then it’s back to un-normal numb. I really think those vicarious feelings are the result of my seeing, in a scripted performance, that which I never had but have been innately looking for, needed and deep down felt was missing from my life. That doesn’t happen often but each time it does, it’s always the same scenario that tears me up. Even being emotionally numb to everything, it seems my damaged inner child can still miss what it doesn’t have, never had. Other than vicarious tears, I haven’t cried about anything in over 40 years and there have been many events that would have warranted a good cry. I don’t get into verbal or physical fights with people. I catch flies and release them outside, feel bad over the death of a pet but I can’t cry at a funeral.
So, what’s love? I won’t ever know because I am living with, have to deal with the effects of cPTSD. I also understand the failure to develop into a well adjusted, balanced human being is to this day preventing me from getting close to anyone, for a whole host of reasons including the lack of all feelings and learned traits of a fawn, taught to please. I don’t know how to let anyone into my world, I’m afraid to let anyone into my world for fear of being hurt, and until I can and do, love is locked out of my life. I can feel love when I see it vicariously, but I am not wired to be it, to have it, to have it come from within. I can see it in others but am unable to have it in my life, my stolen life, my numbed out life. All my life I’ve been a human doing getting others to like me, not a human being living my own true life, the life that was stolen at an early age. Sad, isn’t it?
As for my thoughts of going back and apologizing to people, it would be to those people I liked back then, to apologize for the way I was back then, strange or weird. I can still picture the expressions on their faces when saying or doing something strange but I didn’t know why. It wouldn’t have been to anyone I lost since I never had anyone in my life to lose. I knew a lot of people and all of them must have looked at me as strange for the way I acted and what I said. I was always the square peg in a round hole person and I seemed to know it, felt it. I did not make any friends so had no friends to lose in my entire life. After discovering I had cPTSD, then realizing who I was and what I was like back then, I felt a need to contact those who are still alive to apologize to them, explain to those I really liked, for being strange, being a jerk and telling them I really didn’t know any better back then and why. To tell them that I really liked them and am now deeply disappointed that we did not become lifelong friends. But, over the past few weeks, my thinking on apologizing and explaining has changed. I now realize the desire to apologize was being fed by my fawn typology, doing something to make others like me now after all these years. There is no going back, there is no need or reason to apologize to anyone, what’s done is done, and no need to explain my life to them. Those desires apparently coming out of my fawn typology are weakening and will hopefully fade away.
I was raised by my mother (my father was always distant) to think we, our family, was better than anyone and everyone else, to critically look down at them, when in fact, we were the odd ball family in the town. I would really like to know what my high school class mates and their parents thought and said about my FOO but that will never happen. Knowing that would be a validation of what I think happened while I was growing up a cPTSD fawn. I was raised, trained to be seen and not heard and to do whatever it took to get others to like me regardless of what I wanted or felt so I didn’t question my mother’s statement about others, just accepted them as true.
It’s really quite sad to realize that after my parents stopped their intense, verbal fighting, when I was about 10 or 12, they discovered they had a child who they did not know how to love and were not getting love from the child. They only knew how to provide food, shelter and gifts in hopes of getting their child to love them. It didn’t work. Love from a child raised to be emotionally numb and devoid of love cannot be bought. Knowing what I do now about cPTSD and my life makes that an even more sad commentary on their lives, as well as my own. They also must have been quite torn and tormented within their own lives. I am the product of their lives and it’s sad to now know how my life was stolen.
So, “what’s love” will be an unanswered question for me. The big question is how deeply do I want to dig into my past. Do I really want to stir up emotions and feelings without having a solid basis on which to handle, judge or deal with them? Being numb is nice in one way, ignorance is bliss, but being on that island is lonely life.
