Newbie here, hello everyone!

[Ronja]

Hello everyone! 

I'm bad at introductions, and English isn't even my native language, but I'll give it my best shot! Ever since the pandemic started, I've worked hard to become more emotionally stable and rebuild my basic trust. I grew up in a family that ridiculed any "unpleasant" emotions, and I was physically punished for any mistakes I made. I never felt save talking to my parents or my older brothers, who more or less accepted the belief that emotions are a bad thing. Add to that bullying in school, and I've entirely lost my trust in other people. For years now, I've been isolating myself both physically and emotionally, which did protect me from getting hurt, but also made me feel incredibly lonely and resentful. I've realized that my tendency to push other people away is incredibly hurtful - I don't want to become the toxic one, the one who could not be bothered to work through their issues, taking it out on others instead.

I recently joined a local self-help group, which has proven to me that kind and understanding people are really out there. I also met my now-boyfriend there, who has been lovely and supportive, and with whom I've been working on building a healthy relationship based on trust and communication. I've never allowed myself to fall in love before (I'm in my early twenties), so this is an entirely new experience for me. Being with him has also been incredibly motivating: I really want this relationship to work, which means that I cannot fall back into toxic patterns.

Thank you for reading this small introduction! I'm looking forward to contributing to the forum, and I'm sure that participating will be most helpful in my recovery!

[Dante]

Hi Ronja, welcome.  Your story is the same as mine, and I suspect you will hear the same from many others here - as I have since I joined.  This is a place of healing, and we are all healing together.  I'm glad to hear you've got someone supportive in your life, that's incredibly important and valuable.

[Kizzie]

Hi and a warm welcome to OOTS Ronja    It sounds like you're doing a lot of things to help yourself at a young age which is so good to hear.  I didn't even know about CPTSD until my mid-50's and it's one reason I started this forum and web site - to get the info out so younger people would learn about relational trauma earlier on than a lot of us here. 

Hope you find the info and members helpful.

[Larry]

 

[Ronja]

Thank you for the kind words everybody, I'm glad to be here

[Papa Coco]

Hi Ronja,

Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Your story also sounds like mine. I live in constant sense of loneliness on this crowded planet. My elder siblings, (one of which was a very sick narcissist--I call her my narci-sister) and parents treated me like my emotions made me weak and I was too incompetent to live without their help...and by "help" I mean constant ridicule and criticism. At 50 I finally walked away from the entire family and have been working on my healing ever since.

From birth I was their worst nightmare, a boy with emotions. I had them. Big ones. Here's an example of how they hated my emotional connection to life: I was 13 when my best friend's mom died. She was the only adult in my entire life who treated me like a person rather than a family pet. I used to have great conversations with her. I wasn't invisible to her. She liked me as a friend. I really, truly saw her as my surrogate mom. But one morning, my own mother came into my room and said "Mrs. A died this morning. And DON'T YOU DARE CRY OVER IT!" Out of fear of getting caught crying over the first death of a loved one I'd ever experienced, I did as Mother instructed and I held onto my tears until one day when I was almost 40 and I couldn't hold it in any longer. I fell apart and had my cry 27 years after I should have been allowed to.

So, like you I grew up in ridicule by my own family, and ended up ashamed of being my emotional self.

This is a good place with a lot of good people as members. I'm glad you found it. It's been very good for me.

[Ronja]

Thank you Papa Coco! Your story really resonated with me, and I'm glad to hear that you are able to express those long suppressed emotions now. It also made me think about my own situation: I used to hide my "difficult" emotions from my family, and now I struggle to feel anything at all, let alone expressing my feelings when I'm with other people. But then, when I'm alone, I often feel completely overwhelmed. It's been a huge effort to break this negative cycle, but I'd like to say that I'm now a lot better at recognizing, as well as communicating my emotions!

[Papa Coco]

Hi Ronja

It always breaks my heart to hear that anyone has had to work so hard at suppressing emotion. The real tragedy is that emotion is good, and the people who taught us to be ashamed of it were wrong. They were wrong. People who freely express emotion are the more intelligent of us. Emotion connects us to life.

When you say you now struggle to feel anything at all, I hear "trauma!" I suspect that your emotions didn't leave you, they just got walled off behind a dam of shame that was built for you by the frightened bullies of your past Family Of Origin--(FOO).  Basically it's trauma. Most likely this is a part of the "freeze" aspect of trauma. Your learned inability to feel the emotion (that you know you were born to feel) is trauma: Given to you by the people of your past. With therapy and some good open dialogue with other people who've experienced similar trauma, I believe you'll eventually start to feel things again.

Emotion is the energy of life. Even animals feel and express emotion. You and I were lucky to be born with it. I don't believe it's gone. I just think it went to sleep and is waiting to be woken up.  When I had my cry over Mrs. A, 27 years after she died, the emotional release felt good and finally allowed me to mourn her death. Better late than never, and it's never too late to start to feel things again.

Here's an example of the lie that was told to me about emotion: I was a boy, born in 1960. I grew up when John Wayne movies were popular here in the U.S. My parents loved John Wayne movies.  John Wayne was a "tough guy" who stuffed his emotions and was what people called "a real man." I've done some research on John Wayne as a person. He had developed a funny sideways walk for the movies. He also developed a strange, drawn-out drawl in how he spoke on camera. It's been said that he developed this fake walk and fake voice because his real walk and his real voice were too effeminate for his fake image as a TV tough guy. So that tells me that even the stoic unemotional heroes of my parents' day were lying about how tough they really weren't.

But isn't that how bullies work? They are so afraid of their own emotions that they bully and ridicule us for having them too. So, I see you and I as having been traumatized (bullied) by frightened family who were so afraid of their own emotion they wouldn't even let us have them. But I'm not connected to my bullies anymore, so now I'm free to feel whatever my body wants to feel whenever I want to feel it.

I hope for the day that your healing journey begins to make cracks in that dam of shame and allows you to begin feeling emotion again...as you were born to feel it.

[Pippi]

Hi Ronja. I'm so glad that you are here.  Your post really resonated with me.  Like you, I grew up in a family where emotions were forbidden.  In my case, they were mocked or ignored or angrily criticized (called selfish).  Or they were used against me by my narcissist father, who would be charming and sympathetic one moment, then turn on you the next.  I learned that emotions were dangerous, so I stopped feeling most of them.  I even found myself annoyed and critical of people who did express their emotions, because this seemed weak and even false to me (of course, I was wrong about this!).  When I started working on this in therapy, I told my therapist that I felt like a robot.  That's how cold and emotionless I felt.  Like a machine, not a human being.  I thought there was a piece missing in me, and that I was so different from other humans that I could never join in and be part of humanity.  I'm new to this recovery, so I'm still struggling to trust other people, and I'm still struggling to feel my buried emotions, but when I do, I find such peace and joy.  It's like learning a whole new language, or discovering a treasure that I could not have imagined existed. 

[Not Alone]

Welcome.