Social anxiety and medium chill

[Finding My Voice]

As a result of T today, I had a mild panic attack around the idea of being with other people and letting my emotions show, sharing my opinions, etc.  I have made some small progress in this area (e.g. I am more comfortable with posting opinions that may be controversial online) but the thought of being more open IRL still freaks me out.  And yet I don't have what I consider to be true social anxiety, by which I mean I don't get anxious at the thought of being around others or unduly anxious about new situations, meeting new people, etc.  I dislike almost all social situations and make myself go to them rather than wanting to go to them, but I'm not scared or panicky about them, if that makes sense.  I only get anxious in the middle of the night following the social occasion, when I wake up and am convinced that I said/did something wrong and everyone thinks I'm an idiot.

So I was thinking that maybe what keeps me from having full-on social anxiety is that I am always medium chill.  I invented MC on my own as a child and I am MC with everyone most of the time.  This lets me be around people without doing the things that scare me like expressing my opinion.  If there's more than one other person around, I'm mostly silent, and even if it's one-on-one usually the other person does the majority of the talking.

My T suggested that I do an exercise called "morning pages" from The Artist's Way (I will have to tell Sandpiper at OOTF, she's always recommending that book) in hopes that it will help me to be more expressive, emotionally and in general.  The idea (I think) is that you have to write 3 full pages every morning, on anything, without editing or crossing things out, just stream-of-consciousness.

[Finding My Voice]

You know, I could copy and paste your own words with a new post that has my name on it.    I am going through this also.    And, this is fairly new with the extent of these symptoms for me.   This is the "people are dangerous" symptom.  Meeting other people's needs in over listening, which is a defensive technique as to not expose ourselves.   All the crap that NPD / BPD mothers force on their children.   Gracious, our mothers were dangerous.   How pathetic is that?

I had to listen to my mom's monologues, I'm guessing you did too.  As a teen I thought that's what my purpose in life was, to listen to other people and understand them.

I had gotten slightly better with socializing after starting T, but it seems to be something that comes and goes based on how much I'm dealing with my emotional backlog.  If I'm in the middle of dealing with old emotions, I want to hide; but oddly, I've noticed recently that if I deal with intense emotions early in the day and then have time to recover from the resulting exhaustion, I'm more able to be friendly and socialize.

I think this is what "healing" looks like with CPTSD ...complex.  Panic attacks and all.

Maybe it is like our lives on "rewind" with a cassette player.    This crap unwinds out of our bodies as we are able to deal with, and only WHEN we are able to deal with it.

I think so.  I have a definite feeling of getting a little piece at a time to deal with.

I have taken a year plus off to deal with this "crap unwinding" which has me showing anxiety, panic attacks, symptoms I have never seen before in me!

I have a theory, based on what others have said, that those of us with CPTSD get to the point where we just can't anymore -- we have been running and doing, taking care of parents, siblings, ourselves, trying to be "good enough" and avoiding the emotional baggage we carry for so long that we finally sort of break down and have to either heal or go bonkers.

I get what you are saying about the weirdness of it all -- I can't get over the weirdness of feeling emotions about long-past events that I had no idea I felt, yet I can tell I felt it all along.

Hopefully there is an end to all this "crap unwinding" ....I have to think there is.   I do know that I cannot keep carrying this trauma inside me ...I'm on constant "alert" without even knowing it through all these years.   

I have a good friend who is in his 70s and had a verbally abusive mother, and he told me recently...I couldn't remember exactly, so I had to look it up, and here is his quote: "After a time of rest, maybe your mind feels strong enough to work on it all again? I hate to say this, but I feel you won't be able to stuff all this back into the box for long, and will have to deal with it. As a "survivor", let me tell you that the calm seas are worth battling the storm."

The Inner Critic has made sure to keep me in crisis mode all these years slamming me with my parent's negative programming, so I am heavy duty crushing the critic.   Currently, I have banished him to the Moon! (he talks and I cannot even hear him as there is no sound on the Moon ....hahaha!).

Ha, good image!

I'm sorry we are both going through this.   I soooo relate to your "mild panic attack" on the "idea of being with other people" ...sounds like your therapist wants the "relational healing" bit.   Hard to do that without people...     

I don't think so, we were talking about me being more emotionally expressive in general, she wasn't pushing socializing but the idea of letting myself feel more joy, pain, etc.  We were talking about how much I smile (or not) and how my DD is impacted by my and DH's relative lack of emotion.  (DH came from a similar family dynamic, having to be the mature person because his F was not.)  And I realized that I have a hard time with letting myself be joyful, spontaneous, etc. and in talking about that we also talked about how I have a hard time showing any emotions around people.  I smile more freely when I'm by myself, etc.  The only thing she actively encouraged me to do was the writing exercise, and that was because the meditation exercise she suggested previously wasn't working out.  I think she's more of a "let's try to find something that works for you" sort of T.

However, I like what Pete Walker writes in Surviving to Thriving book, that there are some people so betrayed that asking them to be with people is additional trauma ...that the relational contact though online groups, authors, pets ...safe venues ...are relational healing.   He has seen success with that.

I agree.  I was recently in a discussion about social anxiety on an unrelated forum, and people with anxiety (that didn't seem to be from CPTSD) were saying how helpful it was for them to have an outlet like a forum.

Medium Chill ...being safe.   I so understand.    Be gentle with yourself ...as I so try to be also.   This is serious crap we are recovering from.

Thanks.  I know to be gentle with myself, but to hear it from someone else, to know that someone else understands and is patient with me, means a great deal.  DH and I host a small group study in our home every other week, and just doing that has been exhausting lately.  He's made some friends that he wants to have over, and I want to have them over too, but I'm tired just thinking about it, especially when our weekends have been so busy lately with our small group and other activities.  Hmm, maybe I don't know to be gentle with myself after all.

[schrödinger's cat]

Sounds familiar, yes. I'm glad to hear you're moving forwards, and sorry that it involves so much pain.

Being in group situations is difficult for me, too. I stopped being myself when I was about fifteen years old, and consciously molded and reworked myself into a persona that my mother and classmates wouldn't emotionally abuse. I've been that persona for decades. It makes social interactions exhausting - I'm always carefully choosing to do and say what will protect me from abuse. Then there's the "people are dangerous" thing.

I did the morning pages thing once. It didn't work for me. The reason is, freely associating about all kinds of things are what I do disassociate. I'm a Freeze Type. I can freewrite for ages without ever getting close to an answer.

What I do instead now is this. Every day, I write down how I feel. It's from a text on Childhood Emotional Neglect, and actually, one is supposed to do this three times a day, but I'm not the world's most disciplined person in that aspect, so I'm simply doing as much as I can. It's helped loads. It makes me focus on the here and now, which prevents my usual flights of fancy.

Another thing is a technique that has to be rather well known. They even have books on it in our local bookshop, and goodness knows they're only ever storing stuff that's already popular. It's called the Inner Team technique. Basically, you relax, and then freewrite a dialogue between the different parts of your psyche. It's changed my life. My Inner Critic turned out to be actually my creative side trying to protect me by warning me of danger. Freewriting about this is fun - you come up with all kinds of mental images for things. So after a year or two, my Inner Critic had a raygun which he used to blast introjects, and then he'd open a door in the ceiling, and a vacuum would suck the introjects out into... actually, not into space, but into the sewer system of Ho Chi Minh city, which came a little out of left field. A part of me must see this as the epitome of "REALLY far away". (While I'm writing this, I'm getting worried that someone might try this at home and get flattened by a huge flashback. Not sure if this is simply my usual tendency to worry... but be that as it may, keep yourselves safe. I have NO idea if this is supposed to work with CPTSD; I developed my method for myself, starting with a brief exercize in a book on writing.)

Those two things have been invaluable. Most times, it feels as if a dislocated joint has clunked back into place.

[Kizzie]

People who who talk and talk and talk used to trigger me into really angry EFs of feeling trapped listening to someone who likes to hold court.     

I actually quit a course about five years ago because my small group was dominated by a "hog the stage" woman. I would come home seething and I dreaded going because I was so angry and afraid I was eventually going to explode. So I quit. I did know that it was because of my past history with being talked over, shut down, ignored in my FOO so that was a step in the right direction - I just didn't know what to do about it.  I felt bad that I had wasted money and had let this woman who I would probably never see again drive me away from something I was enjoying.  In hindsight I realize she likely had a PD given her demand for attention and that there was a lot about her that was triggering given my reaction.  I did the kind thing for myself because I didn't understand what an EF is or what to do about it. 

Not to take away from the pain that being invisible causes for us, but talking about sending your IC to the moon Rain made me think of a great video by comedian Brian Regan that someone posted at OOTF and really made me laugh, a "right from the toes,  full body engaged laugh" which was great. I like knowing that it's just not my CPTSD that makes it hard to deal with "Me Monsters," most people feel trapped around people who are like this and don't know to deal with them.  Here's the link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBJ6yptGqm4

Oh to walk on the moon.

[bee]

Ahh, the "people are dangerous" symptom. Yes. Sharing my emotions or opinions is generally a terrifying thought. I had to listen to my M's diatribes, and be ready with the correct 'opinions' to add to the conversation. Reassuring her that I see the world the same way she does, and essentially inflating her ego.

Conversations feel like landmines to me. Learning to have a conversation without sharing an opinion is something I'm working on. Sounds weird that it terrifies me to share an opinion, and yet I have to learn not to. When I talk to someone I read them. Then I say what I think they want to hear. So I never share MY opinions, but feel I have to inflate their ego by agreeing with them. I think this turns nonPD people off, and attracts PDs, the opposite of what I want.

I have made progress though. Last time I saw my in-laws I expressed my opinion that I knew they would not agree with. It caused me anxiety, but the world did not end(as I always feel that it will). I've known them for 20 years, and they are very kind, they are not perfect, but they are safe and caring.

I like the thought of using MC when I don't feel safe with people. I think I will try that.

I had not made the association of feeling trapped by someone who talks and talks. WOW! Might explain why I sometimes want to scream at my FIL, who tends toward aspergers-esque monologues.

[Badmemories]

I just have to say I am so proud of the progress You have all made!

Posted by: Finding My Voice
« on: September 23, 2014, 09:55:43 AM »
My T suggested that I do an exercise called "morning pages" from The Artist's Way (I will have to tell Sandpiper at OOTF, she's always recommending that book) in hopes that it will help me to be more expressive, emotionally and in general.  The idea (I think) is that you have to write 3 full pages every morning, on anything, without editing or crossing things out, just stream-of-consciousness.

I have thought about this but am afraid that someone would get it that I do not want to see it.. I guess that is another protect Myself move!

Posted by: Rain

However, I like what Pete Walker writes in Surviving to Thriving book, that there are some people so betrayed that asking them to be with people is additional trauma ...that the relational contact though on line groups, authors, pets ...safe venues ...are relational healing.   He has seen success with that.

I do believe this... getting another perspective on things ruminating through You mind helps. Being with My Grandaughter helps a lot for me too. Sometimes I get reminded of what My childhood was like comparing it too what I see in My grandaughter's life. I realize even more how messed up My childhood was... I see things in Myself that were caused by pd parents. She is 7 now... My Mother left me home for short periods of time with My 2 siblings by the time I was 5, I can't imagine that now seeing how immature My GD is at 5 So being with GD is a blessing to me. 

Finding My Voice
« on: September 23, 2014, 11:50:47 AM »

Lots of GEMs here!

I had gotten slightly better with socializing after starting T, but it seems to be something that comes and goes based on how much I'm dealing with my emotional backlog.  If I'm in the middle of dealing with old emotions, I want to hide; but oddly, I've noticed recently that if I deal with intense emotions early in the day and then have time to recover from the resulting exhaustion, I'm more able to be friendly and socialize.

That is me exactly. a few weekends ago I went to the things My son planned for the weekend with his Son, ex wife and her husband and their children. first a football game from My state with 2 top ten college football teams. Then a subway ride to baseball field with our National baseball team in this area. I panicked packing My bags. BUT I DID IT   I was so worried but I hadn't seen My GS since he was a baby, so I was gong to do it no matter what!

I have a theory, based on what others have said, that those of us with CPTSD get to the point where we just can't anymore -- we have been running and doing, taking care of parents, siblings, ourselves, trying to be "good enough" and avoiding the emotional baggage we carry for so long that we finally sort of break down and have to either heal or go bonkers.[/u]

i guess this is the point that I am/was when I started to seek the internet for help...then I found OOTF. wow! what a wake up call! Now I am here also!

here is his quote: "After a time of rest, maybe your mind feels strong enough to work on it all again? I hate to say this, but I feel you won't be able to stuff all this back into the box for long, and will have to deal with it. As a "survivor", let me tell you that the calm seas are worth battling the storm."


Honestly I HAVE worked on Myself a lot... I am just moving into a new chapter. It is like it all became clear to me about other people I was in relationships with. I can see now that I can't fix them. I can't help them anymore! I have to start taking care of Myself.

Posted by: schrödinger's cat
« on: September 23, 2014, 12:35:39 PM »

What I do instead now is this. Every day, I write down how I feel. It's from a text on Childhood Emotional Neglect, and actually, one is supposed to do this three times a day, but I'm not the world's most disciplined person in that aspect, so I'm simply doing as much as I can. It's helped loads. It makes me focus on the here and now, which prevents my usual flights of fancy.

It's called the Inner Team technique. Basically, you relax, and then freewrite a dialogue between the different parts of your psyche. It's changed my life. My Inner Critic turned out to be actually my creative side trying to protect me by warning me of danger. Freewriting about this is fun - you come up with all kinds of mental images for things. So after a year or two, my Inner Critic had a raygun which he used to blast introjects, and then he'd open a door in the ceiling, and a vacuum would suck the introjects out into... actually, not into space, but into the sewer system of Ho Chi Ming city, which came a little out of left field. A part of me must see this as the epitome of "REALLY far away". (While I'm writing this, I'm getting worried that someone might try this at home and get flattened by a huge flashback. Not sure if this is simply my usual tendency to worry... but be that as it may, keep yourselves safe. I have NO idea if this is supposed to work with CPTSD; I developed my method for myself, starting with a brief exercise in a book on writing.)

These both sound useful!

Posted by: bee
« on: Today at 11:57:36 AM

I have made progress though. Last time I saw my in-laws I expressed my opinion that I knew they would not agree with. It caused me anxiety, but the world did not end(as I always feel that it will). I've known them for 20 years, and they are very kind, they are not perfect, but they are safe and caring.

Sounds like You are working on healing! 

[Rain]

I realllly enjoyed your post, Badmemories!

[Badmemories]

TY

[schrödinger's cat]

... getting another perspective on things ruminating through You mind helps. Being with My Grandaughter helps a lot for me too. Sometimes I get reminded of what My childhood was like comparing it too what I see in My grandaughter's life. I realize even more how messed up My childhood was... I see things in Myself that were caused by pd parents. She is 7 now... My Mother left me home for short periods of time with My 2 siblings by the time I was 5, I can't imagine that now seeing how immature My GD is at 5 So being with GD is a blessing to me. 

I experienced something similar with my daughter - how even as a bigger kid she needs me more than ever. Of course she's very independent now, and our relationship has changed to allow for that, but I'm still there as a kind of basecamp she can come back to for comfort, protection, soothing, and maybe even to be babied a little (in the way of her own choosing). At times she asks me questions or talks about things that I just know she'd never ask anyone else. So I don't have to feel defective for having needed my mother "even though I wasn't little anymore".

If ever we do a resources page, I suggest we get together and write down what a normal family life looks like. So many of us have grown in dysfunctional or otherwise unusual FOOs, and maybe our standards are so out of whack that we still think that even some of our weirdest past experiences are normal?

[Badmemories]

One of the crazy things going through My head NOW is this:
I think this happened before I was in school. I had a cough, I don't remember if I had a cold? I was having those coughing fits like a person gets at night. I remember My UnpdstD yelling at her  "Can't You do anything to get her to sleep"  I remember her trying at least one thing that didn't work..(honestly IN My house I always have cough medicine and cough drops for MY kids/GChilden) I remember being scared that if I didn't quit coughing I was going to get spanked( or whatever the flavor of the day was) Then He told her to give me salt that might work. So she gave me a big spoon of salt! I tried and tried not to COUGH... i WAS AFRAID IN MY BED. He was angry because I was keeping Him awake...No concern about how sick I was!

So now looking at this as an adult. Why would someone give someone SALT to keep them from coughing? Salt Dries out things (beef jerky?making hams?, curing?) I mean that is just insane! i mean why Not syrup, or maybe sugar, why Salt? Salt is going to make it worse. I remember trying SO hard NOT TO cough! What a bad time the little girl in Me had trying so hard to do the impossible, Not to cough with Salt in her throat drying her throat up! Poor Girl!       

[Rain]

oh, Badmemories ....that "do not cough" memory is heart wrenching.    Of course, the more you try not to do something, the more you just have to ...and freaking SALT!?    You needed a hug, some honey perhaps to slowly drizzle down your throat if there were not cough formula (great planning to not have cough syrup in the house, may I say).   And, there you were so afraid for getting punished for simply being sick, like any normal kid.   I am so sorry, badmemories.

Child abuse comes in sooo many forms.    That was neglect, and abuse.   Scary.

[Rain]

If ever we do a resources page, I suggest we get together and write down what a normal family life looks like. So many of us have grown in dysfunctional or otherwise unusual FOOs, and maybe our standards are so out of whack that we still think that even some of our weirdest past experiences are normal?

Great idea ...and maybe we would have to segment by different cultures too.   American and Eastern European culture's "normal" is different.     But, I get your drift.    We talk so much about what we are recovering from here, and we give little notice as to where we are wanting to head towards.    Is that what you mean?   

[schrödinger's cat]

One thought I have is my wondering if your "Inner Critic" you describe above is actually your Adult You.     My Inner Critic Snarly is anything BUT creative and he does NOT protect me by shooting rayguns at introjects, instead Snarly my Inner Critic IS the problem that I want to CRUSH with the constant negative messages he drowns me with.

I thought about this, and realized that, as I was telling the story, I unconsciously told it the way I lived it back then (almost six years ago). Texts on creative writing often talk about our "inner critic", and mean the one who gets in the way of our writing. So that's the guy with the rayguns. I'm sorry for being confusing.

In my inner team work, several inner critics came up. Raygun guy was a creative, intuitive, half-subconscious part of me. He turned out to be really nice, though, and very protective.
Then there was an inner critic who was as prim as Mary Poppins, and who criticized organizational stuff (punctuality, tidiness...). She turned out to be a somewhat ditzy part of me, a part I pictured as someone geeky-looking with glasses, who loves doing research.
Then there was someone else who had specialized in attacking me personally, and who was very doom-and-gloom and "all this will end in DISASTER". She was later really helpful - very proactive, no-nonsense, a little bit strict and dry, but invaluable.
So those were all good and valuable parts of me that simply got bent into pretzels by trauma. It was possible to get in touch with them, negotiate, and un-pretzel them a bit. I notice that stressful times pretzel them back to their old destructive selves, but it's easier now to un-pick the knots again. Mostly they profit from the same things our inner children need - simple reminders that this is 2014 and not 1984, that I'm a grown-up and not a kid, that we've got our own place and don't live at home anymore, etc. Also, paying attention to their needs and messages helps.

My CPTSD inner critic is still very annoying and destructive, though. I get EFs daily, several times a day. In my inner team work, I pictured this sometimes as a whole world that kept sucking me back in. I called it Atropa World, after a poisonous plant. ... Never thought of that as a symbol for my Inner Critic before, actually, but it makes a lot of sense. Interesting. ... One time I got a powerful mental image of my psyche dealing with this "bad" world. Bit weird - there was a guy who could turn into a huge, HUGE planet, whose gravitational force was so powerful that it just overwhelmed the bad world. And then the planet turned inside-out and became a black hole, destroying the bad world completely. After that, it turned back into a planet, one that was at first empty, but then plants and things began to grow there, and it became beautiful.

A firm "shut up" or telling the negative messages to "go away" does not work ...I have to CRUSH the little twerp...

Same here. I tried your Mr Bill method this morning, after I had an EF. The EF was over, but I was still feeling a bit low, so visualizing my inner critic and then blasting a cannon at her cheered me up no end. Poetic justice. Closure. I got a sense of my inner kid being very content and grimly satisfied.

By the way, this method works well for my two dd's. When they were little, we often imagined their "stressed-out" or "worryworryworry" feelings as critters. We pretended to catch them and then put them in a jam jar which we screwed shut. And then I told them to imagine there was a dial and a few buttons. If you press the buttons, whacky things happen to your critter: it becomes very big or very tiny, or it gets a clown's nose or fairy wings or duck feet, or it can only talk in quacking noises... (I got that idea from JK Rowling's dementors, so that was my version of the riddikulus spell). I forgot all about that until just now.

[Rain]

I so enjoyed reading this, Cat.

"The Jam Jar" technique for my worries, my stressors.   I will have to use that!!!   Thanks!!!

[schrödinger's cat]

Glad you liked it. I have a somewhat overactive imagination. Daydreaming was always part of my Freeze response, so I got in plenty of practice.