Papa Coco's Recovery Journal

[Papa Coco]

I've started Papa Coco's Journal to try and train myself to stop being too wordy on the open forums.

My therapist reminds me that I am being heard for the first time after a childhood of being ignored, and after working 42 years in a John-Wayne style male dominated industry where sharing my fears could get my tires slashed in the parking lot. I learned, as most men my age learned, being a man is about NOT talking about your feelings or your childhood abuse.

And now that I've found a safe place to talk, I feel like I might be overdoing it.

I apologize to all of you for being too wordy out on the main forum, so I'm going to start putting most of my thoughts here in my recovery journal, which is, (I believe) a safe place to talk about anything I want to talk about, because no one feels they have to read what I've written if they've gotten tired of my long responses.

I've always been an open book, but the years when I was forced to act macho and disconnected with the emotion-phobic men and women I worked with were pretty exhausting years. Forced to talk only about cars, women, and fishing for 40+ years made me feel like I'm one of those Facebook pictures people post of themselves with a broad strip of black tape over their mouths.

Anyway, I commit to spending more time in the future on this recovery journal and less time writing long responses to your stuff. There's a fine line between being engaged and being a troll. I worry I might be seen as a troll if I keep responding too often and too long to everyone's posts.

I really like this forum and many of the people on it. I don't want to mess that up.

[paul72]

Papa,
I am so grateful for your replies to me in the general discussion area.
I don't think anyone would begrudge the extra words... they felt to me like extra care, extra attention, extra effort to help ... and that's a gift.
I hope your journal is beneficial to you...it resonates a lot, what you say about not talking about your feelings.
It makes sense to be hungry to talk now... I am too.
Hope your weekend is fantastic!

[Papa Coco]

Thanks Phil,

I appreciate the comments. I mean it Phil, I REALLY appreciate you saying this to me. My emotional Flashbacks are triggered more by silence than by noise.

Since this is my recovery journal, I'll express some background information about myself which explains why I believe I feel the need to post, and then feel the fear that I shouldn't have posted: Like I didn't have the right to say what I said. Or I didn't have the authority to say what I said. My family hated it when I succeeded at anything, so they got real, real good at taking me down a notch: Even when I did something right, I was in trouble for it.

Even with zero self-esteem, I managed to push myself out into the world during my 30s through my 50s. I think I was born to be one guy, but raised to be a completely different guy, and both those guys are alive and well and taking turns in my body.

I feel like I was BORN to be "out there" boldly interacting with the world. That's why I feel so compelled to post my comments. But I was RAISED to be quiet, humiliated, subservient, and discrete, which explains why I regret posting my comments later. On one hand I have a naturally strong sense of humor, and an extremely overly empathetic, caring nature. I love people. I like to help people. Making others happy makes me happy. On the other hand, I can be killed by a well-timed eyeroll and...I'm terrified of people. It's confusing to me and it leads to different people knowing different versions of me. Some people know me as a comedian who's always quick to help, while others know me as an easily depressed, neurotic man who flinches at the hint of confrontation, and hides in my house, sometimes for weeks on end. I'm not faking it. I'm both of these people.

I am a former public speaker, a retired corporate educator, and even a former stand-up comedian. I communicate best when I can read my audience. It's sort of like I have real-time views on how my words are or are not being received by my listeners. I feel safest when I can see people's reactions to my comments. I'm extroverted so much that I gather strength from the environment around me--which works well in a public setting. Writing posts doesn't allow me to read my audience real-time, which feels dangerous to me. So all too often, my posts push me into my emotional flashbacks, due to a sudden realization that I don't know if I've offended someone with my words. When my words dangle out in the world, unresponded to, it reminds me of what Jerry Seinfeld, in his 1990s TV series used to say, "That's a pretty big matza ball you've got hangin' out there."

In my family, from age 0 to 50 the rule was that when I've made someone unhappy, or if I've said something stupid or embarrassing, the family was to ignore me until I apologized. They would refuse to talk with me, but they'd talk with each other about me, and the longer I stalled my apology, the more people in my FOO would hate me for...whatever I was said to have done or said. And they were narcissists, so it was my job to apologize even for things THEY did. If it happened once, it happened a thousand times, that I had to apologize for my NPD sister's behaviors. To this day, speaking without instant feedback just perches me on that cliff's edge again hoping not to fall into my dissociative state of humiliation and begging for forgiveness.

It's a true, true statement I need to make to the whole world, Trust me, "It's not you, it's me."  This is just another way that my trauma plays itself out on a daily basis in my life. I prefer standing up at a microphone over writing to people I can't see, but my days of public speaking are over. It's time for me to learn how to trust that what I say in writing is not always evidence that I need to be banned from writing more. It was MY family that did this to me and now it's MY job to overcome it.

[Not Alone]

Brave of you to write with all the feelings associated with writing.

It's confusing to me and it leads to different people knowing different versions of me. Some people know me as a comedian who's always quick to help, while others know me as an easily depressed, neurotic man who flinches at the hint of confrontation, and hides in my house, sometimes for weeks on end. I'm not faking it. I'm both of these people.

That does sound confusing and like a lot to juggle. I hope that all the versions of you feel heard and cared for here.

[Armee]

You qre definitely not a troll Papa Coco. And I am glad you've claimed a space for yourself here. I look forward to reading and offering a word of support here and there.

[Papa Coco]

Thanks NotAlone and Armee,

Thanks so much for the encouragement. I'm glad I can "check in with you all" whenever I'm stressing over my posts. I used to say to people, "You have no idea the clever ways I've learned how to torture myself."

I don't ever want people to think I'm fragile and need to be handled with kid gloves. I'm a former amateur standup comedian. I can handle a rough crowd. This isn't about being fragile, so much as it's just me having to check in once in a while to make sure I'm not missing the cues that I'm talking too much.

[sanmagic7]

i've appreciated your responses, PC (is that ok?) and, as armee said, thought they were full of care and thought.  so very glad you started this for yourself - you have every right to be heard and all your sides/parts have a right to be seen.  thanks for this - we're in this together.  love and hugs, if that's ok.   

[Papa Coco]

Thankyou Sanmagic,

I'll always take virtual hugs from the good people on this forum. It's a safe place for me and I can feel the camaraderie that many of us share. I like reading your posts and I'm glad to hear my long posts aren't bothering anyone. My irrational fears around how my posts are received are not driven by anyone on this forum, it's all from past experiences...trauma: the gift that keeps on giving.

Meanwhile I really DO try hard to write shorter posts. It's just a good skill to be more direct with fewer words. I think that's called "economy of words".  I'm always sort of chuckling at Mark Twain's famous line, "I don't have time to write you a short letter, so I'm just going to send a long one."  So, one rule of thumb for me is that the shorter my post is, the longer I worked at writing it.

LOL.

[Hope67]

Hi Papa Coco,
I also wanted to say that I appreciate all your posts that you've done.   
Hope 

[Papa Coco]

Hope,

Thank you!

[Papa Coco]

August 14, 2022

I'm nursing some complicated triggered emotions today.  In fact, as I'm writing this journal entry, I'm struggling to be sure it makes sense. In my current state of mind, I'm not a good writer. I hope this entry ends up being legible and not too confusing. What-and-how I write is a manifestation of how I'm thinking at any given moment. My brain is tangled up right now. Emotion is fighting with common sense, and I'm trying to make sense of my thoughts. I expect the following external post might reflect that internal turmoil.

• But first, a footnote: The good thing about being an extrovert is that I gather my strength from my environment, which means I easily connect with people where they are. Someone once said I'm good at reading the temperature of a room and adapting to it quickly. Extroverts are good listeners, good teachers, funny comedians, because we meet people where they are and communicate from that point.
  
  The bad part (the challenge) of being an extrovert is that I'm quickly dragged into flashbacks when the environment around me becomes toxic. Sometimes I envy introverts who, no matter what is going on around them, they maintain their own steady moods. They get their strength from within themselves.

But I am what I am. And today I've been dragged back down into a frustrating and confusing EF.

I have two sons: S1 is 38 years old, is narcissistic enough to have no compassion for anyone, ever. He's on the autism spectrum AND now he's schizophrenic. He hates everyone for various reasons. He currently hates his mom because when he was in puberty (22 years ago) he had that dream a lot of boys have where his mother killed him. I had the same dream when I was a teen. It's nothing more than a normal dream where the developing brain is trying to make sense of feeling the separation from being Mommy's little boy to becoming an independent man.  But to him, it was a future prediction. And for 22 years the voices in his head have been telling him he's right about that. He's never been diagnosed with anything, because he refuses to see doctors for any reason. But when I hear there are voices in his head and he turns and runs from the people who love him the most, then with or without a diagnosis, that screams schizophrenia. 

He nearly died of cancer 6 years ago because he refused medical help. His friends found him on his apartment floor dying. He was unconscious, so it was okay for First Responders to take him to the ER. For anyone whose ever had cancer or had a loved one with cancer, the term Chemo-Brain is a very real problem. He was on chemo for nearly a year, so when I say he's schizo, He's ALSO a person who never addressed his "chemo brain." Chemo brain doesn't go away on it's own. You have to work at it. He does not work at it. His stubbornness has always been his downfall, but now he's just plain mean. He went No Contact (NC) with his mom because of a dream and a series of follow-on voices in his head telling him women are too dangerous to associate with. Over the past year or so he's gone NC with me now too because I got vaccinated for COVID and he believes that trump is a savior and COVID and 911 were democrat plots. He absolutely hates the fact that I'm not a democrat or a republican, but that I vote for the best person, regardless of party affiliation, for each position in government. He goes onto Facebook and tells the world that we hate him and he has to hide from us. TRIGGER!  My FOO had torn me down to being an emotional basket case by spending 50 years accusing me of things that weren't true. Telling the world I hate my son is exactly the kind of demonic trash my narcissister used to do to me. S1 is triggering 50 years of pain in me by his insane accusations. He is sure that his beliefs are all correct because he hears voices in his head telling him things like on 911, the towers were not brought down by airplanes, but were demolished by democrats who were trying to jab at republicans.

That's fine. Given enough time, my wife and I are learning to live with the loss of our son. But the guy doesn't know the value of Total NC. I wish he did. I've actually stopped using Facebook for a couple of reasons, one being that I didn't like being blindsided every now and then by his occasional PUBLIC angry rants at how stupid my wife and I are for believing COVID is real or for not voting Republican across the board. Every now and then, after we've come to peace with our loss, he lobs a rock into our world just to upset us again.  This morning S2, his little brother, and the father of our two grandsons, forwarded a text to us from S1. The text came to him on Thursday. S2 is like me, VERY open. VERY emotional. He goes on FB and tells the whole world about his life. This week S2 had delicate surgery on his back. After which his brother, who hasn't texted him in years, sent him a get well text, but he couldn't leave it at that. The text also included a cryptic, crazy paragraph of how stupid Dad is and because Dad is so stupid, he himself is "not allowed at family functions."  What? How does MY being "stupid and vaccinated" bar him from family functions? Again TRIGGER!  Once again, I'm being publically blamed for HIS decisions. That's just Narcissistic as can be, and it's what I grew up defending myself against for 50 years.

Before the schizophrenia, S1 was fiercely honest. His Autism made him that way. Since Schizophrenia, he's become crazy enough that every time he talks to someone, he gives a completely different reason as to why he has estranged from the people who love him, and EVERY new reason is someone else's fault. Just like my Narcissister and FOO.

Anyway I have to make a decision: Should I tell S2 to stop including us in his brother's communications? At first, it seems like YES is the quick answer, but S2 is very emotional (like me). He loves his family no matter what and he can't stand holding back information. Like me, he needs to express what's in his brain in order to get it to stop hurting. When S2 says he debated for days before sending the text, it made me wonder if by letting him send it to me, he was able to let go of some of the stress of having received it at all.  I can't take that outlet away from S2. So I'm not going to ask him to stop forwarding S1's crazy rants.

I know that when my FOO was trying to get me to kill myself so they could have my share of an inheritance, any time they lobbed a crazy lie at me, I felt myself bursting at the seems if I couldn't share what they'd done with someone. Being alone with abuse is the worst!!!!!!  Being abused and not being alone with it is a thousand times easier to deal with.  If I tell my Son2 to stop bringing Son1's abusive attacks to us, I worry I'll be hurting Son2 by not giving him an outlet for his own stress over his brother.

I shared it with my wife this morning, and now I feel like I'm sorry I did that. Now she and I are both going to spend all day feeling horrific sadness over how our son feels about us. She told me that she believes this is his control fettish. He was a serious controlling child. Now he's a controlling man. She believes that he knows that if he sends these little hate messages in to us a couple of times a year, that he can control our moods and keep us miserable. It's working.

I went 100% NC with my own FOO because I just wanted to be safe. No part of me wants to poke that bear by sending occasional hate messages into their little world. I want them to forget about me while I forget about them.  I WISH S2 would do the same with us. Either stop hating us, or stop telling us how much he hates us. One or the other.

My mood today: Sad. Frustrated. There's some anger, especially knowing that my wife is hurting again now too. If you hurt my wife, you hurt me. Period. I need to find a way to distract. Maybe I should go grocery shopping or something so I can stop obsessing over this. I just got a new smoker for the deck. Maybe I should buy some fancy meat and come home and learn how to smoke the meat. Anything to break my focus on feeling so heartbroken again.

[rainydiary]

Papa Coco, I appreciate you sharing all of these reflections.  I hope that you found ways to ease the triggered feelings.

[Papa Coco]

Journal Entry: Monday, August 15, 2022

I'm tired of feeling overwhelmed all the time.

In reality, my life is not that overwhelming, but ever since I was 19 years of age, I've had this nagging, constant, relentless feeling of being unable to keep up with my responsibilities. I'm retired now. RETIRED! But I probably feel more overwhelmed with life's responsibilities than ever before.

Roots: As a boy, I was so badly damaged at school that I developed a bad learning disability in the 5th grade. I lost my ability to focus. I was so scared, all day long, that fear was keeping me completely disconnected from teachers and homework. Peanuts cartoons (Charlie Brown) were on TV a lot back then. In the cartoons, when adults spoke, there were no words, just a Waa-Waa-Waa sound. That's what my reality was like. I couldn't comprehend anything I was being taught, like the teachers were talking in a foreign language. I dissociated so badly from the rest of the school that I couldn't learn anymore. I spent my time 24/7 trying to find ways to feel safe, rather than learning math and science. My grades tanked to straight Ds and nobody cared. Catholic school is run by parents' tuition money, and in Catholicism, nothing is free. I'm pretty sure I was passed from grade to grade only because holding me back might make my parents stop paying tuition and put me in a better school.  D grades mattered to no one. My parents didn't care, the teachers didn't care. It was like they all knew I was a loser, so they just let me fall behind and brushed me aside. That's actually a good thing, I guess. Back then, in my family and in my Catholic school, no one would have asked, "Do you need help?" Instead, they would have asked, "Why won't you just learn like the other kids?" NOT having to answer the question might have been a godsend. It was probably a gift that no one asked me to tell them why I'm choosing to be stupid. In my school and family, being ignored was safer than being helped by their mean, accusatory ways.

I lived through Catholic school by using coping mechanisms and waiting to age out. Now I've discovered that the boy can leave the Catholic school but Catholic school never leaves the boy. I've since lived my life feeling like I'm still falling behind everyone else. Over the years I've overcompensated in a hundred different ways, accomplishing things many people just wish they could, but every single accomplishment just turns to ash in my mouth when the next morning, I wake up feeling like I'm the world's biggest loser again and nothing I do matters to anyone.

To make this worse, the more overwhelmed I feel the less I do. I keep asking my T why I'm so lazy now, and he keeps having to remind me that this isn't laziness, it's more of a lifelong traumatic paralysis. I'm not lazy, I'm paralyzed. Paralyzed by depression, overstimulation from an insane world, and a chronic sense that no matter what I can accomplish, I'm never going to be good enough to deserve any respect from anyone. When I was a middle-aged man filled with vim and vigor that feeling of not being good enough drove me to try harder. Today, at 62, it drives me to give up and ask, "what's the use in even trying at all?"

I think I may have even brought this up to the Forum back in 2021. But I can't remember what we all said about it.

All I know for sure right now is I feel like I've lost my footing, I've fallen off the turnip truck, and now I'm hanging onto the bumper and being dragged through the city streets unable to get back onto the truck.

I have the time and tools to finish all my house and car projects, but I can't do them because I feel like I'm too busy to get to them. Or too lazy. Or just...too depressed...too emotionally paralyzed to unpack my toolbox and start wrapping up all my half-finished projects.

I'm really getting tired of being tired all the time.  This feeling of being overwhelmed has nothing to do with the real world I'm living in, it's a disease that's living in my brain, making me perceive that I'm overwhelmed. I know this, but still, it just...won't...stop.

[Bach]

Papa Coco, I've read this journal and I wanted to tell you that I've appreciated your responses to me in my journal, and that I appreciate your sharing here.  I know it must be hard because of how much it goes against your conditioning.  It's so much easier to decide that you're too much and that you must carefully edit yourself or even stay silent to keep from being misunderstood or burdening others.  I struggle with that all the time but when I manage to express myself it is such a relief.  I hope you are able to enjoy some of that relief here.

I also relate very deeply with what you say about having things you want to do but feeling too emotionally paralysed.  I'm working on allowing myself to feel that all my efforts are valuable and constitute progress even if they're only small and I'm unhappy with myself because the whole job isn't done yet. 

Since you said you like them, here's a hug

[Papa Coco]

Hi Bach,

Oh yeah. I like hugs. Thanks for the virtual hug. And here's one right back atcha:   

I'm sorry to hear you're also struggling with the paralysis. I've been thinking about this all night, and I think I may be finding a solution>>>

When I was in AA I learned, very well, the Serenity Prayer. It's not just for drinking, it's for all sorts of ways that we manage the clutter in our lives. Most people know the Serenity Prayer; "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Another source is Stephen Covey's Circle of Influence, which is three circles drawn like a target. Inside the bull's eye, is labeled "Control". The next bigger circle is "Influence", and the biggest circle is "Concern." Then the blank outer space beyond the circles is "interest". Things I like to learn, like history or sociology that have no responsibilities at all attached to them. My job is to write down everything that's overwhelming me, but to put them into the correct circle. It's like organizing my cluttered brain so I stop being overwhelmed by the totality of everything.

Right now, I feel like I need to meditate on both of these things: The Circle of Influence and the Serenity Prayer, because maybe my paralysis is coming from feeling overwhelmed by the things I cannot change; the things that I'm concerned about but can't DO anything about: Climate change, political tomfoolery, crime, my son's back surgery, or how my house needs to be painted but I can't afford to hire painters right now, etc. These need to be put in their proper place, which is out in the "concern" circle. Meanwhile I need to focus on the center circle: The things I have absolute control over: My time management, my exercise and diet, my projects that still need to be done.

(I'm thinking outloud right now): But maybe today's solution to the paralysis is to make sure I'm clear in my head about the difference between knowing what I can control and what I can't. Maybe I won't feel so overwhelmed if I just allow myself to not worry about that outer circle.

Last night I was watching a documentary on John Wayne Gacy. During the time when the police were digging up the bodies of 33 boys he'd buried in his crawl space, someone asked a detective how he was able to emotionally handle what he was seeing. That guy said something I'll never forget: He said that he carried a special kind of coin in his pocket while he worked. Then, when he got home from work, he'd leave the coin in the car. He'd never allow that coin to enter his family or his house. He used it as a prop, and consciously decided that everything he saw or did at work was attached to that coin, so by not taking it into the house, he was able to subconsciously leave his work out of his personal life.  I think that's kind of a cool idea, and I am going to start, maybe, trying to find some way I can use a physical prop to help me organize my emotions into the things I can control, versus the things I can't. Maybe I can declutter my brain enough to stop feeling overwhelmed by the weight of the whole world when all I need to do today is eat more salads, gas up the car, and finish putting in the new toilets in my bathrooms.

I really like being an empathetic person, but this morning I can clearly see that empathy has gone too far if I'm letting the problems of the world weigh on me like I feel responsible to be the one who has to fix everything. I was raised as the scapegoat in my family, so, as a child, I got hardwired to believe everyone's misery is my fault. Time for me to use a little cognitive behavioral trick, like find a coin or write out all my worries into the proper circles on a piece of paper to separate myself from the world's problems and just do what I can do with what really IS in my circle of control.