Bermuda's Memories - Overflow Journal 1

[Bermuda]

Thanks Armee. Sorry about my comment, if it came across as putting you on the spot. What I meant was that until I read your comment that it was triggering me I hadn't even made that mental leap. It's kind of the story of CPTSD for me. After I read your comment I went on a Google quest to find answers to hearing voices of your abusers play in your head repeatedly. It was actually one of the last things I muttered to my mother under my breath. "You don't understand, I hear your words when you are not there." I said that as she called me names, knowing she didn't hear me, just a couple seconds before she told me she never wanted to see me ever again.

After researching and taking time to evaluate what I wrote and what I am feelings and experiencing, my conclusion is that people who dissociate are especially prone to hearing the voice of their abuser criticise their every thought and movement. In a way, it's as if the child who was never allowed to speak can finally respond to my mother, and I know exactly what she would say in return because she was extremely predictable.

So, because I disappeared physically and mentally, I am now battling my mother every day. I just didn't notice it as a symptom until now.

[Armee]

It was funny a little bit in a sad way because you pretty much said directly in your post that you were (avoiding) being triggered. I have a friend who often appreciates me pointing out something only for me to tell her I'm only repeating what she just told me, that I have no special insight. 💛

It is common to hear that voice or adopt it as your own even. I think of it as we have these sections of our brain that hold memories and when something triggers that section of the brain all that information gets activated. So if I start thinking things like I'm disgusting and need to die I know what section of my brain has been triggered and what else is in there more or less. Other times I'm bad and wrong and someone's going to die and that's another section of my brain. Another set of memories. I am not aware that I am remembering things or am triggered but I've learned what these thoughts are connected to by observing over time. 

[Bermuda]

Well, for me it was actually very insightful! It is funny, but sad. We take so much for granted as normal for us. I hadn't really realised I had been avoiding things until I sat down to post, and I hadn't realised I was already triggered. I guess it's just another one of those things I was talking about fairly recently where I have difficulty knowing what is going on with me. Obviously, once I hear someone else say it I realise it for myself. Yes, I was already triggered and already dealing with a symptom I had yet named. Well, I haven't named it yet, but I suppose it's a form of flashback or re-experiencing. I have so many break through moments on this forum. Hah. I want to say, "What is wrong with me?!" But obviously I know the answer to that.

Kind of like you said, her voice has been apart of my consciousness for as long as I can remember. The way she spoke was just so often repeated and rehearsed, it just made it so easy for my brain to imprint her reactions. I think it was probably quite the driving factor for me early on, to be nothing like her. I know her every thought and move, and I will win, and I am nothing like her. That's what I hear in the words that I wrote, even though I don't have this drive anymore. It's still in me somewhere just like her voice.

I also have that voice of self-harm. Not often at all, but not too long ago it showed up for a couple days out of no where. It was so strange, like a little whisper that turned into an instant snowball. Even in the moment I was able to identify it, and know that it was not my voice, but those intrusive thoughts can be so persistent, and then two days later they just left. It was like they just took a holiday in my head. I don't know what that is about. It is like our brain can have a little blip and transport us to a different time and place. Sometimes the place is dark and our brain tells us that there is only one way out, even if you are no longer fighting that battle at all.

I'm no longer fighting to survive. I am no longer building a wall between the voice of my mother and my sense of self. Yet, here we are!

[Bermuda]

I am triggered. I feel so panicky. I went out last night to see the Barbie movie with three others. The act of dressing up was triggering, the movie was triggering, I was honked at and cat called, on the way home I was followed for a bit by two men. That was extremely triggering. The conversations I had last night were triggering. It's so hard to talk when people are genuinely interested and want to bond with me. The friends I was with apologised for asking me so many questions about my childhood and my experience with Barbie and everything else. They found it fascinating. The truth is, I want to be able to join in the conversation. I want to talk about me too, but I can never just be because it will always be dark and sad. I can't relate to people. I woke up at 5am feeling like I'm running an invisible marathon. I've been feeling quite nauseous. I hid in the shower a bit while my husband got the kids ready for school. I've come a long way. I don't know if it's a good thing that I can swallow my panic and look somewhat functioning.

(Trigger warning - Blood, not graphic)

Playing with dolls was frowned upon, and I gave away all my toys at a very young age because I was a responsible young woman. I had written previously about a brother injuring himself badly, and hiding it out of fear of punishment. I had a memory of having the exact same behaviour resurface last night. I didn't have Barbies, but I had a secondhand Barbie car. I always wanted a Barbie convertible. I snuck into the kitchen and grabbed a steak knife, hid with the car in my parent's room where I was forbidden from going (because at this time I slept on the floor in the familyroom) and did the only reasonable thing for a five year old to do. I hacked the roof of that Barbie car off with a steak knife. I also cut myself. Other five year olds might have cried, but I knew that I was breaking several rules and no one was going to comfort me. I got up and wrapped my hand in toilet paper, hid all the evidence, and hid until the bleeding stopped. No one noticed.

-I see so much of me, of my character and personality in that memory. It is precisely the loop that my mind is still stuck in. I am still the engineering little kid who is hiding their interests, fears, and injuries.

[NarcKiddo]

Oh, Bermuda. That is so tough. Your friends sound like they are caring even if they don't fully get it. I think others do find this sort of thing fascinating if we give them a glimpse into our existence. My training coach does and he feels safe to talk to but there is a very fine line between me feeling able to talk a bit more openly and him asking a question that makes me immediately clam up and deflect.

I am so sorry those men behaved that way. Very, very scary for anyone, let alone someone with your history.

I am very familiar with being punished for getting injured. My mother did it all the time. I also got punished one time my sister injured herself. And the games mistress at school punished me for spraining my ankle in a hockey game because she thought I was making it up. These people are just so awful. As if we go round hurting ourselves on purpose just to make a nuisance of ourselves!

And yet, you know, I really admire five year old Bermuda for wanting that car to be a convertible and making it happen. I would never have had the guts to do that. You are stronger than you think, and you always have been.

I hope you can find time today to rest and look after little Bermuda.

[Armee]

I am over here cheering on little Bermuda making her own barbie convertible. That's a cool kid. And yet there's so much sadness in that one little tiny moment too. So many hints at the abuse and neglect behind it.

I'm sorry that you were harassed last night. It can be so triggering and unsafe feeling.

I completely understand that predicament with sharing. It's like I could just give a tiny sliver of information and then worry the rest of the month or year that I said too much that I was too much that I just need to keep it all to myself or no one will ever want to talk to me. And so mostly it's easier to listen instead.

Your friends do sound ready to start hearing a little - and they are inviting it - when it feels safe to start sharing a little bit of your past.

I have one friend who can hear it all - he's lived a long and interesting life. But even him it has taken me almost 20 years and several work road trips in remote areas, weekly coffee dates for a decade and more to fill in the rough outlines of my life.

It's nice to have a couple people who really understand you and what you've been through. You do deserve some of that understanding and empathy in your life.

 

Crying is good, earned.   
 

[Bermuda]

Here I am a professional post-deleter.

I just wanted to talk about how since writing my story to some degree how I've been reflecting on the more challenging aspects and where those aspects originate from. In my story I speak very black and white. I don't include speculation, or complex emotion. I don't dissect motives. I don't add correlation. I don't draw any reasonable conclusions. That's why my text is so long. I have to write it out in order to feel that I am not lying or exaggerating.

Part of my fear of lying is because of narcissistic abuse. I don't want to be her. There are other much deeper issues because I have minimized my suffering, experience, presence, and opinions. A lot of it was because I had to. I had no other reasonable choice in many of the situations I was placed in. I couldn't give myself the feeling of choice. I couldn't take responsibility for all the bad things. Often when I would have conversations with people, especially at where I am in my story, people thought I was daft. They thought me nieve. I wasn't nieve. It was intentional. I wasn't stupid. I was traumatised. Just because I didn't laugh at a punch line, didn't mean that I didn't understand the joke. Just because I didn't act insulted when someone called me simple, didn't mean that I didn't understand the insult. I trained myself not to react and to conceal my feelings and motives. When someone is talking about something I am interested in, I don't ask deeper questions on the subject. It's not that I am unfamiliar. I may very well be much more experienced than they are, but I say nothing. I just listen, and sometimes people think I'm not listening, but I am not spacing out. I am just avoiding eye contact and hoping I am not confronted with inclusion.

Inclusion is terrifying. That's when I go blank. Right Bermuda? ...Mmhm.. It's not that I was not listening. It's not that I am a fraud. It's not that I lack understanding.

I just can't reply. I can't bring myself to express my ego. I fear having an ego. Everyone has one and they are not all disproportionate. Where is mine?

[Bermuda]

I just wanted to add on to this about how it affects my life now. I don't really have these conversations anymore. I don't live in a country where people joke that way. It's not something I encounter.

Instead I have to write university papers. I write well. It's not something I struggle with. What I do struggle with is what to write. Everyone tells you that university is nothing like traditional school, and in a way they are correct.

A paper is written without fluff. You are not to speculate. I find that very easy, however you're supposed to read various materials and come to a conclusion from those materials that is not explicitely said within the text, and your conclusion is supposed to somehow align with what your professor believes to be a correct interpretation. I don't do that well. I can express the information that I have gathered. I can reframe it. I cannot conclude anything based on my own subjective interpretation. Professors truly believe that social sciences are sciences, and are without interpellation, but that's just blatently false. It's expected, and other people do it so naturally that they don't even realise they are doing it. --And partially because my existence has been extra ordinary, and partially because I have difficulty drawing independent conclusions, and partially because of my internalised minimalism, I don't interact academically in ways that others do. I am not sitting at the table having deep speculative conversations on topics that I am partially versed in. I can recite the text, compare text, compare methods, compare cultures, but I cannot be difinitive aside from my inability to be difinitive. Obviously.

I make it sound light, but in reality it is something I struggle with so much, and I find difficult to explain. I don't inject myself, and sometimes it's the correct thing to do. I don't sell my ego, and sometimes it's necessary. It changes the way people perceive me. I have written about that probably several times in this forum, but now I have something to tie it to. When I was living in Germany it was so difficult. People tend to introduce themselves with their professions and their majors, and I felt so extremely uncomfortable. It caused me panic. Swedish people tend to be a lot more humble, but in academia it's just normal conversation.

I am alienated from social society because of the trauma I went through. I can't express who I am because of what I endured. I have a fear of being overt. I fear being wrong. I lack the ability collaborate socially. I am always concealing my own thoughts and seemingly agreeing. I can't sit down with a professor and exchange thoughts and opinions. Sometimes I listen to students doing that while I am sitting in the university cafe, and it just shocks me every time. Other people do that.

I just read the notes I am given. I don't reply. I don't discuss them. I research the works of my professors, and do my best to come to their conclusions. It's not that I am stupid or even that I agree with them. It's not that I don't have thoughts. It's that I cannot say that 1+x=2, even if it seems reasonable.

[NarcKiddo]

That all resonates with me, Bermuda.

At school I was regarded as academically "gifted" up to age 15 and the first set of major exams. I could, and did, get high marks. At that level there generally was a "right" answer. For the exams taken 2 years later (last school exams before university) I struggled a bit, but two of my subjects were languages which made it easier, since there is obviously a "right" answer when translating. Also, I went to a fee-paying school where results were key so they made sure you chose subjects where you could do well, and I had to anyway due to my FOO. Whether or not I enjoyed the subjects was immaterial.

University was completely impossible. I was supposed to do everything from my own initiative. I left before even completing the first year.

I have to feel very safe before I can try to communicate my own thoughts. Like you, I fear being wrong. If I am challenged to explain my view on something I find it really hard. I Google things I know perfectly well just to double-check. Things as basic as the spelling or meaning of a word.

Therapy is helping me massively with this. T never tells me what to do or what the right answer is. Because the answer has to be right for me and only I can decide that. She will make points for me to consider or tell me if she thinks I have overlooked some aspect. She never makes me feel bad for not knowing. I now have one person I feel safe to be wrong in front of. I know I will not be punished or ridiculed. If I am reluctant to share something with her I usually end up sharing it because only by getting experience of being vulnerable and not being hurt can I fully accept this is actually possible. Of course it can be tough to find a good T and I was very lucky with mine. We started out with written therapy only and now do face to face by Zoom. Lots of therapists now do online sessions and I think it works very well. It does mean you are not limited geographically. We don't have public funding for therapy here (we do in theory but the waiting lists are ridiculous)  but I am lucky enough to be able to pay. This also gives me total choice on who I consult and that is very important to me.

If there was * to pay when we as children dared to have a different opinion from our abusers then we quickly learned not to express that opinion. We can often, indeed, persuade ourselves that we don't actually have that opinion. It is possible to go along with things for years, believing that you genuinely enjoy them or think them, because some other person sets value by whatever it is. You know that you have your own thoughts and what those thoughts are. That is good. Feeling safe enough to express them and defend them if challenged is a whole other challenge. I understand the difficulty. But you have identified the difficulty and that in itself is a step in the right direction.

[Bermuda]

The therapist that the Swedish agency paired me with who specialised in absolutely everything and treated everyone with CBT was going to cost me 1200KR an hour. Honestly, I would rather set that money on fire and dance around it. I have messaged another therapist from a link Kizzie sent me, but I haven't gotten a reply yet. I am open to any suggestions on where do find a decent therapist. I will pay, but not to be told that I should change the way I feel about my feelings. I think I speak for all of us when I say we all have tried that. 

It's good to know that someone out there relates to my struggles. Sometimes it feels so silly. I still get this feeling when I am in class that everyone is confused by me. Uni will be starting up again soon, and I'm really excited but nervous. I have been working a lot on being gracious and gentle with myself. I understand that I have strengths and weaknesses, and that my weaknesses may be just as weak as my strengths are strong. I tell myself constantly that I worked hard to me there, and that I belong there. That education is for everyone. That if I were good at everything, than I would gain nothing. I am supposed to be there. I want to be there. It's strange how we live in a world in which we are supposed to have the answers. We're really just supposed to be progressing, or be getting ourselves to a place where we can progress. Failing is not the same as being a failure. I enjoy the process. The social expectation bits on the other hand.... Oi.

I want to have people I feel safe with. I got a bit of a shutter when I typed that, so perhaps it's only a half truth. I don't really open up to people, at least not in this natural reciprocal way that other people do. I had a long time friend who I told once that I think I don't love like other people love, that love for me is rational. She told me that she knows that about me already, but that it's okay. Transactional love. My friendships are ones that I am constantly trying to think about how other people do things. A friend went on holiday and brought me back some chili powder, because she knows that I miss spicy food. I was completely caught off guard and am now thinking about how to express my gratitude for our friendship, how to express that I am listening. It doesn't come natural to me. Nothing seems to come naturally. I am tearing up. My social struggles are the ones that make me feel the most robbed. I mean, my mother robbed me of the money I will be spending on therapy, but deep meaningful interpersonal connection... that...

[Moondance]

Hi Bermuda,

Gosh, the very beginning of your post made me chuckle.

I really hope you find a perfect fit for you for therapy. 


I can relate to much of your writing/sharing but in particular "nothing seems to come natural" and "transactional love" really resonates with me. 

[Bermuda]

So, we have been having issues with our neighbours. I haven't talked about this but we have neighbours who live below us who are difficult. They tend to be loud, they scream off their balcony all night, they don't look after their children, and we hear domestic violence quite often. Screaming, items are being thrown out the windows, furniture slamming, banging against the radiators, the children are locked outside and often are yelling to be let in (I have gone down and let them in multiple times), sometimes they get revenge by locking their mother out on the balcony while she is smoking. Fair enough. It's extremely triggering for me, and I worry about her children, and I worry about my children hearing those sounds at night.

In Sweden there is like a housing agency that manages things, and you make complaints through this agency. We have reported her nearly every day, and recorded from inside our own home her screaming and then we send these files to the security agency that looks over the property. Last night the security agency urged us to call the police, and we did. By the time the police had come into the building this violent episode had of course ended.

The neighbour just rang my door bell. I answered it because it was the exact time our housekeeper comes. Our neighbour was standing there with two of her children. Her grade schooler wearing nothing but a blanket tied around her. She told me that the housing agency has notified her of some complaints and that she wants me to call them and tell them that it's my baby that cries at night, because they think it's her. I told her our youngest is weaning off night time bottles, and she does cry. I looked surprised and asked her if she didn't hear the fight last night, that it wasn't a baby crying. She said, "No." She heard nothing. She tried again to tell me to call the agency and tell them it was us, but I didn't want to give away what I already know. We called. It's corroborated by other neighbours. There is a file. I know she has received two complaints, and with a third she is out.

My husband said I did a really good job handling it, but I feel so intruded on. The second I opened the door I had this panicky feeling like someone is encroaching on my space. I saw my mother's expression in her's and I knew she was just trying to get information. I knew she was trying to see if it was us. I could see the manipulation, and It made me shake. I told her that I had to get back to work...

I am not guilty here. I have a civil responsibility. ...But in this moment, and this time after, I feel like it's me. The child in me feels shame and guilt. I am writing it out here to air that guilt and shame. No one helped me. No one helped childhood me. I will call. Even if it makes me appear a nuisance, I will call. I have civil responsibility. I have very little power over anything, I know this, but I won't be intimidated. I won't be the one who says nothing anymore. I can try, for them.

[Armee]

 

I'm so sorry you are put in this position and you absolutely did the right thing. I think for so many of us - myself included - the hardest part to look back on is exactly what you say...no one helped us, no one did anything. It is scary to do the right thing. Her coming to the door is scary. It would be scary for anyone nevermind the past traumas. Add trauma and triggers and it was quite brave. Thank you for standing up for the children. Poor babies.

[NarcKiddo]

You did very well. I think nearly everyone would have been scared in that situation but you kept your wits about you. 

[Bermuda]

Thanks for all the replies. I never know how to reply to replies. I often feel that I speak to bluntly and it's perceived differently than how I am feeling, so often I say nothing. ...But it's not nothing. 

I think writing it out directly afterward really helped. It stopped my brain from getting deep into the cyclone. I saw it, recognised it, wrote it down, and stepped away from it. It worked. It might be in the future that I write down more things like this before the atmospheric conditions collide with the current rising from my overheating brain.