A Safe Place To Be Visible

[Bach]

Well look at me! I finally found a title for this journal that didn't make me feel exposed and panicky! 

It's the little things.

[Kizzie]

 

[Tee]

I like it!

[woodsgnome]

While some may take it for granted, feeling safe is one of the more precious things we could ever hope for. It may take lots and lots of learning and effort, un-learning and re-learning, but finally when that sun  breaks through, back of the storm, no words can adequately describe what that's like. But wait -- I think you've found one so simple but also eloquent and forever life-changing -- SAFETY!

[Three Roses]

I love the title! 

[Bach]

The subject of this post is the biggest and scariest thing I've learned since discovering the concept of C-PTSD earlier this month.  Everything triggers me.

I've been a detective for the past 20 years, gathering information and clues from my available sources and tirelessly (or, rather, quite tiringly!) analysing the evidence to try to determine what happened to me in childhood.  I have wanted to know, so that I could figure out if there was a way to try to "fix" it.  I know I can't FIX it, but my life's goal is to become happier, to not have to suffer so much of the time, to not inflict one tiny little bit more of my pain on others than I absolutely have to, and to make it all the way to the end of my natural life to die without pain or fear.  After a brutal twisted childhood in which the trauma was nearly constant but very little about what traumatised me was perceivable to the outside world, I have been lucky enough for the past 20+ years to be in a sufficiently protective and nurturing environment to have the resources and opportunity to do that work, and I would be dishonouring everything that means anything to me if I didn't do it.  I won't save the world, but I won't make it worse either, and I'll never hurt anyone the way that I have been hurt.  This is how I will justify my existence and make bearable my lifelong suffering.

WHERE IT STARTED:  Before birth.  My mother's pregnancy with me was supposed to have the same miraculous effect on my father's regard for her that the advent of my older sibling had had a few years before.  It didn't, and somehow that was my fault.

I hope to write more.  It is REALLY hard.

[Bach]

PS:  I read in another thread where someone said something about perfectionism and having to re-edit a post a few times because they can't bear to leave in a typo or a grammatical error.  I have that, too.  It's a giant pain in the whatsis.  So that was reassuring!

[Tee]

Hugs, support, your life is important!

[Three Roses]

So many of us grew up in homes where you did not talk about your pain, and your abuse was minimalized. It is wrong to keep us silent, you're breaking away from that oppression and that's brave.

[Bach]

I woke up angry this morning.  Usually, I wake up depressed, and anger is supposedly "better" than depression, but I wish some day I could wake up calm and refreshed.  I suppose that does happen once in a great while, but really almost never.  I almost always wake up with negative feelings of one kind or another, almost always wish I could just keep sleeping a while longer.  Sometimes the negative feelings recede enough to only be a mundane and familiar nuisance once I get up and go about my day, but other times, they just hang around and deepen as I try to operate with the all the underlying mental and physical pain that has characterised my entire life. 

I have a deep fear of anger.  Displays of anger give me a fight-or-flight response that really messes me up.  All anger, even from strangers in public arguing 50 feet away who have nothing to do with me.  Even on television.  Even my own.  Maybe especially my own.  If I feel anger, one of my primal defences is to turn it into sadness and depression.   I never feel any kind of empowerment from anger, only fear, churning stomach, and amplification of the death-wishing voice.  I hate my sadness and depression, but I guess they're less scary.  I WANT to somehow access my anger and use that energy in a positive way, because heaven knows there's enough of it in there to burn cities, but I haven't found a way to do that yet.

[Three Roses]

I really relate to this post. I'm just screwing the lid off of my own bottled up anger. For years - decades - I bought into the "don't think about it and it won't bother you" philosophy, only to find that anger is like a tiger you put in your basement, growing louder and hungrier with time.

[Bach]

I really relate to this post. I'm just screwing the lid off of my own bottled up anger. For years - decades - I bought into the "don't think about it and it won't bother you" philosophy, only to find that anger is like a tiger you put in your basement, growing louder and hungrier with time.

That's an evocative and very eloquent way to put it.  After years of buying into the similar but slightly different "Sure, there's plenty I could be angry about, but being angry makes me feel bad and doesn't change anything, so why should I bother with it?" mentality, I had to start confronting my anger last year when the therapist that I saw twice a week for 17 years retired.  That therapist was really great for me for a long time, and helped me loads, but in the later years of our work together as without my really noticing it much she got very old indeed, and a bit sentimental, our relationship became a little chummier than it really should have, and the way she handled me with regard to the retirement was very clumsy.  That was highly traumatic because she had become rather a mother figure for me and this of course triggered all kinds of crap from blah blah blah etc you know.  Fortunately, before she left, she helped me find a new therapist I felt comfortable with, but who had not become too sensitive to my pain to be able to properly challenge my notion that anger was a harmful waste of my energy.  The new therapist refused me the luxury of denying my anger towards my former therapist.  I was able to successfully navigate processing that anger, and that emboldened me a tiny bit to start on the rest of it.  But only a tiny bit, and only to start, because, well, at the end of the day my former therapist is a lovely and compassionate woman who is only human, who gave me exactly what I needed for my healing process for many years and ultimately did right by me even if the end was rocky, and even the most damaged ME that lives in here can't continue to believe she abandoned me because she didn't care.  So processing that anger was only very slightly risky, whereas the rest of it...Oy.

[Bach]

I'm trying to venture out of my own threads a little bit and try to engage with others on the forum, but I'm scared.  I fear that whatever I say will be the wrong thing, or will be taken the wrong way, or will be perceived as insincere, so I say little or nothing.  I'm not sure how to deal with that.  It's probably what ultimately wrecked my interactions with the last Internet group I was part of, in an overcorrection from years ago when I just barrelled in and said whatever I wanted to say without knowing any of the unspoken rules.

Relating to other humans is so, so difficult when pretty much everything in the world triggers some kind of trauma reaction.

[Tee]

It's ok to comment and be supportive. And share your thoughts. Just remember we are here to encourage not berate.  So if you have a thought or perspective that might help somehow put it out there.  You never know it might be just what that person needs to hear at that moment.

[Bach]

It's ok to comment and be supportive. And share your thoughts. Just remember we are here to encourage not berate.  So if you have a thought or perspective that might help somehow put it out there.  You never know it might be just what that person needs to hear at that moment.

Thank you, Tee. That is really so kind and helpful. I will work on feeling safe to do that.