My intro post

[Pippi]

Thank you so much for this forum and for being here and reading this.  I have been working hard with my therapist for the last couple of years on acknowledging all my childhood trauma, and exploring ways to heal from it.  My therapist is excellent and I have also been immersing myself in books and podcasts about attachment, trauma, and various theories and healing modalities (IFS, IPNB, ideal parent figures, self-compassion, meditation, somatic work). All this is transforming my life for the better, and I am beginning to feel as if I am waking up from a lifelong sleep. My therapist and I have determined that I fall mostly into the dissociated (freeze) category, and I've spent my whole life being an ambitious perfectionist who always feels like a fraud, imposter, and just plain "bad" person no matter how hard I tried to be "good."  So far, I've done this work only with my therapist, and although trusting and relying on others is very scary for me, I want to feel less alone in this process.  I have good friends and even a supportive spouse, but none of them can really speak the language of healing from CPTSD.  I'm here to find fellow travelers on this profound journey through trauma to healing.

More specifically, I'm seeking support around sibling abuse.  Although my parents were neglectful and narcissistic (setting me up to parent them from an early age), the most horrendous abuse came from my older brother, who terrorized me throughout my entire childhood.  It can be hard to take my abuse history seriously because it was "only" my brother - not my parent - who enacted the most obvious abuse.  So I'm struggling to give weight and validation to the fact that siblings CAN do great harm to us.  And I the fact that our parents allowed such abuse to occur is, at least in my case, also a form of abuse. I would love to connect with others who have also experienced sibling abuse. 

Wherever you are when you read this, I hope that you are safe and receiving the love and compassion you deserve.  I'm sending you my warmest wishes and hopes that we can all heal from the traumas that limit us.

Thank you.

[Papa Coco]

Hi Pipi!

Welcome, welcome, welcome!  What a great introduction.

Yes! I do believe siblings, or even BFFs, are responsible for a lot of C-PTSD survivors around the world. For me, the damage was done by: a Narcissistic older sister, a sociopathic best friend who launched a mob-bully (aggressive isolation) campaign against me from age 10 through the end of school, and parents who just sat there and let it all happen no matter how much I begged for help. I, myself had to estrange (11 years ago now) from my parents and elder siblings because I wasn't going to survive if I stayed in their reach. To this day I don't even know if my older sister and brother are still alive. And I don't care. They were teens when I was born. My parents not only allowed the abuse, but would hold surprise interventions if I ever tried to remove them from my life for self-protection. In my adult years, Mom used to trick me into coming over for something. When I'd get there, they'd all be sitting around the room ready to shame me back into being "a good little brother." (I was their designated Cinder-Fella whose job was to give them money, cars, and repairs for their homes). I can't count how many times I was forced to apologize to my older sister and brother for protecting myself from what they did to me! Mom would get all whiny and say "Ooohhhh. I just want all my children to get along." Boo hoo. I always felt like I was being stripped of all my defenses and dangled by a rope in their cage just so she could feel like a good mother whose children all got along.

I joined this group about a month ago, and for the same reasons you described in your intro. I have found it to be one of the coolest groups of people I've ever been connected with. They are intelligent, compassionate, and easy to open up with. I was diagnosed with PTSD in 2000 and like you, I've got a fantastic therapist, I read the books and visit the websites. I'm quite far along in my healing, but I can really see that I'll never be completely free of traumas and triggers. I describe it like a person who lost a leg in a shark attack. The person can never grow the leg back, but they can learn ways to live a great life despite the deeply rooted damage of their past. I am learning how to mitigate my trauma responses. I can live a happy life even with the traumas still in my past. Like you, I have a great support network; a supportive wife and great friends who let me open up to them, but, they are not C-PTSD-savvy, so it's difficult—impossible—to really share the deeper traumas and triggers with them on a soul-to-soul level. After a while they get frustrated and wonder why I don't just get on with my life as if my childhood had never happened. They try, but empathy is only possible when you've walked your mile in someone's shoes, and almost no one in my life has walked my path. They love me. They support me. But I needed to talk with people who don't need me to explain why I fall into triggered reactions from time to time. I needed an empathetic arm in my social network.

I really believe the most successful path to healing with C-PTSD is a multi-pronged approach: A C-PTSD savvy therapist, an active desire to seek out information from books and the web, a few supportive friends who enjoy my brighter side, and a C-PTSD specific network of fellow survivors who understand both the brighter and the darker side of me. And I have found some very kindred souls here on this site. I found exactly what I needed.

Welcome to the group! I'm very glad you found it.

[BeeKeeper]

Hi and welcome Pipi,

This is short because i'm typing one letter at a time on my phone, but wanted so say YES, count me in for older brother abuse, which has taken over 60 years to unravel. More later.

I too think your intro post is not only great, but thoughtful, articulate and shows how seriously you take your recovery.

This is an open group that doesn't hesitate to share from the heart. We learn from each other.

[Pippi]

Thank you so much, Papa Coco and Beekeeper, for your kind replies.   You really  made my day.  It fills me with incredible hope to think that others are navigating similar territory and might be willing to exchange stories and ideas with me.  I've been absorbing so much amazing material over the past year or so (so many life-altering ideas, from Pete Walker, Dan Siegel, Rick Hansen, Daniel Brown, Pat Ogden, Bessel Van der Kolk, Kristin Neff, and other trauma-focused healers), and am really longing to explore these ideas with others who are as eager to heal as I am.  With most of my friends, it's just not relatable to them.  And I can definitely relate, Papa Coco, about encountering family/friends who just think I should be done healing by now!  I think I'll be healing as long as I'm breathing, and I'm OK with that - especially now that I am finally learning some ways to embrace, value, and accept myself. 

Thanks also for sharing about your own sibling abuse, Papa Coco and  Beekeeper.  I am so sorry that you had to endure that, and I know how real and devastating that kind of abuse can be.  My brother was like a monster rampaging through every part of my childhood.  Nothing was safe, ever.  And my parents expected me to be good, quiet, and not cause a fuss, so that's what I did.  When I finally fled my childhood home (at age 22) following another frightening incident with my older, much stronger brother who was once again verbally and physically bulling me, guess who got in trouble?  Yes, I was the one who was blamed and criticized for finally rescuing myself.  I have cut ties with my brother, who continues to bully and exploit all those he encounters, and I have limited contact with my parents, who remain incapable of providing me with emotional support or validation for what I have endured.  I have since realized that my father was a textbook narcissist and that my mother's own trauma history made her unable to show up for her own kids. 

I feel sheepish sharing this, like I shouldn't complain because I have enough to eat and a safe and stable life in the present.  But I struggle every day to FEEL safe and worthy of even the smallest kindness.  Thanks for listening.   

[Larry]

Hi Pipi

[Dante]

I know that feeling of sheepishness.   Same here.  I had a roof over my head and foot to eat, so what am I complaining about?   I'm complaining about the emotional neglect, contempt and manipulation through toxic fear and shame.  In my family and there were no hugs, no I love you's, and excoriation for anything that made mom look like less than a superstar.   So I was ignored most of the time and punished when I wasn't ignored.   I learned it was better to be ignored - except now at 50, I long to be seen and heard.  This is what this forum has given me.  The opportunity to be seen and heard and to see and hear and help others. 

Welcome!

[Blueberry]

Welcome to the forum Pippi

I'm sorry you were terrorised your whole childhood. Older siblings can do a lot of damage.

Until a few years ago the rule of thumb in my country was apparently that older siblings had to be at least 5 years older than you for it to count as abuse. My brother is only 18 months older so it was often not taken too seriously and seen more as typical sibling rivalry and typical sibling fights. But it wasn't. I really suffered under him. There has fortunately been some progress since then in the understanding of cptsd. In my case too, parents allowing it to happen was a further form of abuse as well as emotional and even physical neglect.

There is no need to feel sheepish here just because you have a roof over head etc! I did too growing up in an educated, well-off family but was horribly neglected and abused anyway. "You have it good, why are you complaining?" is a typical Inner Critic kind of thing most of us learned from those who abused/neglected us so they could continue abusing/neglecting or simply looking away.

It sounds like you're working hard and have made a lot of progress I hope you feel the support of the forum here.

[Papa Coco]

Same here about feeling sheepish. Remember, many of us were raised to believe that we deserved what we were receiving, so feeling sheepish about it is part of the toolkit we were given.  I was raised in a clean, quiet household with no alcoholism or violence. Unfortunately, that made it impossible to ask for help—or even to recognize that I deserved help. The biggest hurdle I had to overcome, once I'd been diagnosed with PTSD in 2000, was coming to grips with the severity of the abuse. Our scars are hidden beneath the skin, but they are very real. Even we don't always recognize them at first.

I tell this story a lot because it describes a pretty important moment in mine, and many fellow survivors' healing: People who've known me for decades, know me as a kind, funny, comedic, cheerful person. I've spent decades hiding my dark side from them. My wife and kids know all too well how depressed I can get, but out in public, I'm Mr. Happy. A chameleon. An imposter. Since I was a standup comedian in the 1990s, I can literally say that I'm the quintessential tortured comedian. Pain is what drove my jokes, and what connected me so well with audiences. But in 2012 or so I began coming out to my friends and coworkers, by telling them about my soul-crushing depressions, my multiple suicide attempts, and exactly why I had no choice but to cut all ties with my own big "happy" FOO. Their first reactions were "I would have never guessed." Then they'd ask if they could tell me their stories. Too often to count, they would start with, "My life wasn't as hard as yours, but here's what I went through..." then they'd sheepishly tell me stories that sometimes made my skin crawl. They were indeed as difficult, if not even more so than mine.

I admire each of us for how much effort we'd all once put into our belief that we really didn't have it so bad. In a positive light, I see that as an example of the gift of adaptability which is part of our human survival instinct. But it's important that we each accept that whatever happened to us really was bad enough to make us miserable for most of our adult lives. Having a happy childhood doesn't produce traumatized adults. We each deserve to accept the severity of the negative parts of our upbringings. By accepting the severity of the abuse, we are more ready to accept the depths of the help we need to rise up from it. Most of us did have some fun as kids, which muddied the waters of our own understanding even further. Every second of every day was not abusive for me, so how could I now confidently stand behind my belief of how abused I really was? That muddy water led me to assume that I had no excuse for being so broken, which then undermined my ability to ask for appropriate help.

The moment when I finally accepted that my family's love was conditional and cruel even though I'd pretended for years that they really did respect me, was one of those key moments when my healing curve took a sharp bend upward.

[Dante]

That realization was very recent for me (like weeks), but as Papa Coco said, it was the turning point for me.  I can't say things are all fixed but just understanding and acknowledging is helping me immensely.

[Pippi]

Thanks for all these responses.  I totally resonate with this - so helpful:
"Having a happy childhood doesn't produce traumatized adults. We each deserve to accept the severity of the negative parts of our upbringings. By accepting the severity of the abuse, we are more ready to accept the depths of the help we need to rise up from it."

[Kizzie]

"Having a happy childhood doesn't produce traumatized adults. We each deserve to accept the severity of the negative parts of our upbringings. By accepting the severity of the abuse, we are more ready to accept the depths of the help we need to rise up from it."

Welcome Pippi.   

Spot on quote as we've all found here and I hope you can too. I endured covert or stealth narcissism and felt much the same way because I wasn't physically or sexually abused and the emotional abuse was subtle (or so I thought until I learned about Narcissism). Anyway, what's telling is whether we have the symptoms of CPTSD - it's that "Yup, it was that bad" confirmation many of us need.

I wanted to point you toward Laura Corbeth who is a survivor of sibling bullying (abuse) and wrote a book about it.  Her web site is here - http://lauracorbeth.com/bullying-is-an-epidemic/.

[Pippi]

Thank you, Kizzie! I'll definitely check out that book. So grateful to you for providing this safe and loving place to heal and grow.

[Not Alone]

Pippi, I wish you a warm welcome.