Hi

[Master of my sea]

I have been thinking about making a post for a long time but never had the courage. I have come and had a read and then retreated and come back. Seeing so many others doing the same sort of thing has given me the final push 
I am still figuring out some of my story, if that makes any sense. It is only in more recent times that I have started to realise and have it pointed out to me, that a lot of things that have happened in my life would be considered traumatic. For me it was just daily life.

There have been so many things that trying to sort through the mess in my head feels like an impossible task. But being unable to do this has caused more issues for me. I find myself completely isolated, unable to maintain healthy relationships with anybody really. Trusting people is a huge issue for me, I have been through so much, much caused by the people closest to me. So the very idea of letting anyone new in is terrifying.

I'm hoping that by finally posting here I can find a place where I don't feel so different. That I can finally communicate with people that truly understand the chaos I deal with everyday.

So on that note...Hi all!

[paul72]

welcome Master of my sea...
Thanks for sharing!
I hope and trust that you find it supportive here, as a place to feel heard and understood.
I am wishing you much healing and comfort.

[woodsgnome]

Master of my sea ... welcome 

I resonate very closely with your condition, plus your concerns and fears about coming forward. I felt that way; still do, to an extent, but after some years here have found my fears greatly diminished; in other words, I feel safer than I would in many other circumstances. Along with therapy and some other developments, I'm probably doing better than I have in several years, at least regarding my own place in life. Mind you, there's still so much healing, and that involves daily efforts to keep in mind.

One notable thing, is I'm extremely isolated, starting with my own residence in a very remote region; by choice, I must hasten to add. Despite that, I was able to practice vocations over the years which were quite social in nature. This helped but the urge to stay isolated for the most part still dominates, and I've learned to accept that while staying open to how  I can alter that somewhat. And one way has involved plugging into this site where and when I can -- even though here I'm still a bit withdrawn (old fears never die, it seems.

Whoa -- I didn't mean to invade your intro with so much per my own state of being. Mainly I just wanted to illustrate how this forum can become a part of your working efforts at recovery; as it has for me; in addition to many other approaches I've added to the mix I've preferred to call discovery -- finding a new life, basically.

Alright, here's hoping you find the support and understanding here you've been unable to come by in your other approaches.

[Papa Coco]

Hi Master of my Sea,

Great name, btw. Empowering. I like it.

I'm glad you joined. I respect your need to sort through the past that made you who you are today. That's the hardest part for me, trying to sort out exactly how it all happened. I still find myself shaking my head in disbelief at times when I contemplate how much control it all had over me during my lifetime.

My theory is that we are survivors of circumstances that not all people are strong enough to survive. But we made it. We're scarred up a bit, and most of us are a bit confused, but we survived. We each needed to use mental tricks, like dissociation, minimizing, humor, fawning, isolating, things like that, but that's what it took to get us through a mess that wasn't our fault.

I hope you find what you're looking for here.

[Armee]

Hi. You don't sound different to me. We're all in this boat together.

[Master of my sea]

Thank you all for the warm welcome 

Master of my sea ... welcome 

I resonate very closely with your condition, plus your concerns and fears about coming forward. I felt that way; still do, to an extent, but after some years here have found my fears greatly diminished; in other words, I feel safer than I would in many other circumstances. Along with therapy and some other developments, I'm probably doing better than I have in several years, at least regarding my own place in life. Mind you, there's still so much healing, and that involves daily efforts to keep in mind.

One notable thing, is I'm extremely isolated, starting with my own residence in a very remote region; by choice, I must hasten to add. Despite that, I was able to practice vocations over the years which were quite social in nature. This helped but the urge to stay isolated for the most part still dominates, and I've learned to accept that while staying open to how  I can alter that somewhat. And one way has involved plugging into this site where and when I can -- even though here I'm still a bit withdrawn (old fears never die, it seems.

Whoa -- I didn't mean to invade your intro with so much per my own state of being. Mainly I just wanted to illustrate how this forum can become a part of your working efforts at recovery; as it has for me; in addition to many other approaches I've added to the mix I've preferred to call discovery -- finding a new life, basically.

Alright, here's hoping you find the support and understanding here you've been unable to come by in your other approaches.

You haven't invaded at all  Isolating and withdrawing has always been a go to for me. Many people throughout my life have never understood why I do it and it is only recently that I am starting to understand and appreciate the need myself. I know I am not currently in a place where attempting to socialise face to face is just not an option. Hopefully I can bridge that gap somewhat here.

Papa Coco, thank you. It was something my last counsellor said to me virtually every session. To remind me that I am the one in control of my life. I decide what happens to me. It's also lyrics to a song. The song resonates strongly with me and always gives me a bit of a boost. I find it very powerful.
I thought I had everything under control but a couple of years ago the lid was ripped off the box and so much just hit me and knocked me off my feet. I'm still trying to pull myself back up. It's a confusing jumbled mess and I have found that when I try and explain things to people, my stories lose their clarity. What comes out of my mouth is quite literally what is happening in my head and even I don't understand. So other people have no hope.

I find it helpful to read and research and find out as much as I can about what I am dealing with but nothing can beat talking to actual people with real life experiences. Just to actually see that I am not alone and I am not mad.

[Papa Coco]

Hey Master of my Sea,

I can really appreciate your comment of how difficult it is to explain your situation to others. I'm going to go out on a limb and wonder if you were gaslighted. Gaslighting is designed to blur the lines of truth and fiction enough for the victim to lose their ability to trust their own perceptions. Gaslighting us is literally how to drive us so crazy that we don't know when we are being abused and we don't know how to describe that abuse to anyone else. We just know something's wrong, but when we try to describe it, ALL the trauma-drama comes back to us at once, and we sound like we're babbling when we try to get help with it. Gaslighting isn't about being traumatized by one catastrophic event, it's about being traumatized by a million little, not-so-serious little events. And if we try to explain how those little things have driven us crazy, that just makes us look like whiners. And EVEN IF WE DO find a way to start trying to tell our story, if our listener asks "Oh, now why would they have done that?" It completely throws our brains into a tizzy. We're intentionally made to be too confused to tattle on our abusers, or to ask for help. Whenever we try to articulate what has happened to us, the words all come out at once and, again, we sound crazy. Gaslighting is such an evil practice, it should be punishable by prison time.


Gaslight victims lose the ability to trust our own minds, thoughts, and beliefs. My family told lies that were so close to the truth that they had my baby sister and I unable to know truth from fiction. They put on the facade of being the perfect, loving, tight family, so my kid sister and I thought we were the ones who were crazy, not them. They changed their stories regularly, making us think we had dreamt their previous stories, or to think that we were so stupid that we totally misunderstood them the first time. They blamed me for all their unhappiness, and I always believed them. I took on the guilt for all their bad decisions in life. Whenever I did anything, they assigned a devious motive behind it, so I'd feel like no matter what I did, it was for the wrong reasons. They humiliated me if I failed at anything, but if I succeeded, their jealousy made them find ways to make me feel bad that I'd succeeded. I was humiliated if I lost, and also if I won. They accused us of lying and doing things we were innocent of, but they kept accusing until even WE believed that maybe we were guilty. I followed my dad around like a puppy for most of my childhood, helping him with every project, from cutting wood, to building fences, and rebuilding cars and trucks, and yet he turned on me later in life because my elder siblings told him to. In the end, after 50 years of being their Cinder-Fella, I finally figured out that they did it for a bigger slice of the meagre little inheritance. 

When I called us survivors of trauma, I was thinking about two boys I went to Catholic school with who both took their own lives at age 19. I tried also that same year, but the pills I took weren't strong enough to finish me off. I recovered. They didn't. All three of us were victims of the same abuse, but I survived and they didn't. Also, my little sister eventually lost her fight with the insanity in our family and took her own life when she was about to turn 43. I may be a confused, messed up fawn-type, but because of my ability to dissociate and go into a powerful daydream world whenever my real life became too unbearable to bear, I survived.  I'm a survivor of what too many people in my life didn't survive. My childhood was fraught with episodes of sexual abuse, and sexual pressure. My family life was confusing as I lived my whole life honorably trying to believe the lies my "loving" family were always telling. I no longer take that kind of abuse, but I also still live in the wake of what I've already taken, and I still have to work hard to shut off the defense mechanisms that once saved my life.

For me to explain this to someone else, was impossible because I couldn't even really understand it myself. When people ask why a child doesn't tell someone that they're being abused, the answer given is usually because of fear. But for me it was more about having been too confused to even know what to tell someone.

For me to be able to sit here at my desk today and tell my story with clear detail, took many years of figuring it out myself. For most of my life, all I could do was question myself, and if I asked for help, I didn't know what help to ask for. Being gaslighted to take on everyone else's guilt, made me feel like it was all my own fault anyway. So why would I tattle on myself? Peeling the onion of the complicated life I've lived took decades.

Today, we have access to better information than I had in decades past. So a child who lives through what I lived through, has a fast-track shortcut now to learn in months what took me decades.

But for now, I just remember that I was trapped with my own drama because I couldn't articulate it. I didn't know who to articulate it to, and I didn't understand why I was so crazy that I couldn't even recognize abuse as abuse.

[Master of my sea]

Hey Papa Coco,

Yes I have. I am now realising just how often this has happened and by how many people. I find it quite shocking. It's like I have spent my life attracting these sorts of people. The times I have and still do question my own sanity and my own knowledge. Being told things happened that didn't, or vice versa. Or that I remember them wrong and it wasn't like that at all. The amount of times I have been called crazy or a psycho. I constantly doubt myself and if I have remembered things correctly. I find myself repeating things in my head over and over so I can be sure I have got the right information. I expect to be told I'm wrong when I recount things. Regardless of what that thing is, it could be so insignificant but I always wonder.
I don't even trust my own accounts of things. I question what I know to be my reality all the time. But I can't say this to anyone because I'll just be told I'm being silly or it's not like that. If I repeat something that I have been told and I get something wrong, I immediately apologise and feel terrible about it. I've always been told I apologise too much but I can't help myself. My brain just immediately wants to diffuse what it sees as a potentially difficult situation.
You are right as well, the words just fall over themselves. They fall out of my mouth at the speed they are going through my brain and I don't even know what I have said. There is always this underlying desperation that I must get it out and must explain all at once but the tangents I go off on can be wild!

I come from a large, single parent family and I totally understand the facade of a 'tight-knit' family. I honestly thought that's what we were for years. It's only looking back with a different perspective that I can see that we were never truly 'tight-knit'. There was always a divide in my family, I just didn't truly see it for what is was until I got older. I have had plenty of love and support from my family but I never felt like I belonged. All advice was given in lecture form and ultimately it was firmly placed on my shoulders to 'break the chain' as I was the youngest. One of my brothers was physically abusive with me, my sisters and my Mum but me and Mum got the worst of it. I am currently no contact with anyone besides my Mum. I honestly don't think they will ever accept or appreciate the damage my childhood has caused and their parts to play in that.

When people ask why a child doesn't tell someone that they're being abused, the answer given is usually because of fear. But for me it was more about having been too confused to even know what to tell someone.

This resonates with me in a big way! My last partner, this is one thing he just couldn't understand. That why as young child when these things happened to me, why I didn't run home and tell my family. In his head that is what a child would instinctively do. I could not get him to understand that actually if you look closely, most kids don't say anything, like you say out of fear. Fear of not being believed and fear of what comes after you tell. The other thing he just couldn't understand is that although I loved my family, it wasn't actually a space where I could talk openly. I never felt like I could go home and tell anyone. When I did finally talk, it was to a friend who promptly spread it around and I was accused of lying. So I learned to not say anything to anyone. This became a lifelong habit.

My last counsellor was amazing and I miss our sessions a great deal. He was the one that helped me open my eyes to a lot of abuse I have experienced. I would be talking about things in a very normal way, not bothered by what I was saying and he would say to me after, 'What you have just described is abuse, that's not normal behaviour.' or something to that effect. It really made me realise that all these years I've spent saying, 'oh it wasn't that bad, others have it worse', it was rubbish. It was that bad and the people causing it had me completely convinced that there was nothing wrong with what they were doing. Or that there was simply nothing I could do about it.
I am constantly amazed by what I have gone through and not even realised.

[Papa Coco]

Dang, your life sounds like we might be more alike than different.

I won't ramble on this time: I just want to say I TOTALLY perked up and nodded and said "YUP" to several of your comments:

----Before I learned what narcissism was and how to spot it, I attracted them like moths to a flame. Even strangers thought they could tromp my boundaries. It's like I had a target painted on my forehead and everyone but me could see it.

----Being so confused and frustrated that I used to try to tell the entire story of my life with all the words gushing out of my mouth at once, made me look insane, and my family and peers used that as proof that I was.

----Even to this day, I wonder if I'm guilty of offenses I don't remember having done. If you told me I shot Kennedy when I was three in 1963, I'd eventually believe you and I'd confess...even though I was only three at the time. My family taught me to accept everything they accused me of as the truth. I learned to live my life on the defensive. Once a person becomes defensive, the attacks grow stronger, quicker. It's like "you teach people how to treat you" and being defensive teaches people it's okay to attack.

----40 years ago it was hard for me to begin to learn that I was abused. But now, at 62, I'm still learning that the abuse was worse than I'd ever let myself believe. Many times, I'd tell my T that I had suffered a "low level of abuse" and each time I said that, he'd raise his brow and stop me to say, "You barely survived. That's not a low level of abuse. That's major!" I believe we minimize our abuse because minimizing it kept us alive. We learned to "walk off" the damage done to us so we could survive and earn a living and get on with life. But minimizing lives like we've lived, isn't giving us the gift of healing. We really need to understand how severe it really was, so we can surrender that information to our therapists and work through the healing at the deep level that the damage was done in.

----I estranged from my family in 2010. All siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews...I couldn't start healing from their abuse until I STOPPED the abuse at the root.

I just wanted to share with you, again, that everything you're telling us makes perfect sense to me.

[Master of my sea]

It feels so strange to have someone understand (that isn't a therapist) what I'm saying. Even when I feel like I'm rambling.
To have someone that has experienced these things themselves put into words what I never can.

I have always been good judge of character and can read a room really well but when it comes to personal relationships all of that seems to go out of the window. I've always said I have big flashing beacon above my head that only the wrong people can see. For some reason I never see the truth of these people until it's too late.

The self-doubt I have is incredible. It affected my last relationship in a big way. I have zero faith in my own abilities anymore and zero faith in my own mind and memories. I'm always questioning if it actually happened that way.
It's exhausting to battle this daily and to feel so alone through all of it.

I really appreciate everything you have shared with me and I'm feeling really positive about this forum. Thank you Papa Coco 

[Hope67]

Hi Master of My Sea,
I also like your name, and wanted to welcome you.   
Hope 

[Master of my sea]

Hey Hope 

Thank you. I appreciate it 

[Papa Coco]

Hi Master of my Sea,

I'm glad that you've found this forum, and that you're finding a place where you can begin to open up with non-professionals. This is our version of AA. Survivors supporting survivors. T is still critical, but so is this. I joined a year ago, and I've learned a lot about myself through the good people on this forum.

I like what you said about your ability to read a room, but in relationships, that skill goes out the window. A few years ago, I learned the term "Highly Sensitive Person." HSP. That term pretty much describes a lot of us C-PTSD survivors. HSPs are great comedians, counselors, teachers, or anyone who needs to read a room in order to do their jobs. It could explain why so many celebrities are drug addicts with long strings of failed marriages behind them. Their HSP makes them into fantastic entertainers but dealing with being HSP is a stress they can barely handle on a personal level.

A lot of us HSP C-PTSD survivors (also called Enneagram 6s), are living with two personas; one is we are highly intelligent. We're street smart, and well read on psychology. We can see right through Narcissistic people. We're kind, and we fawn over others. We're there for our friends, but we almost never ask our friends for help in return. We're self-reliant yet understanding of others. We can read rooms. The other half of the time, we're exhausted from having brains that won't rest. Trust issues pop up like weeds whenever we try to share our lives with others. We tend to isolate because we feel safer when we're alone. We try to meditate but we can't stop the active thoughts from dragging us all over the place. We struggle to sleep. We are prone to trauma flashbacks, which make us appear to be manic/depressive, and we have big emotions that argue with our big intelligence, making big decisions into very difficult conundrums.

And as far as self-image goes. Ugh. Some days I can't look into a mirror without feeling disgusted by my appearance. Other days I'm fine. But I NEVER look into mirrors in public places. For some reason, seeing myself in a mirror in a public place frightens me. Like others might see me with the same disdain I see myself with.

I'm glad you're on the forum. We're stronger together. Talking back and forth strengthens each of us by making us realize that we're not alone. For me, it's no longer two teams on the earth: Me vs everyone else. I now have people on my team who truly understand the world the same way I do. Humans are social creatures. We need each other.

[Kizzie]

Just wanted to add a hello and warm welcome to this community Master of My Sea 

[Master of my sea]

Hi Kizzie 
Thank you. I just want to say that this is an amazing thing you have created here. I have only recently found it but I am already so grateful for it's existence 

Papa Coco,

A lot of us HSP C-PTSD survivors (also called Enneagram 6s), are living with two personas; one is we are highly intelligent. We're street smart, and well read on psychology. We can see right through Narcissistic people. We're kind, and we fawn over others. We're there for our friends, but we almost never ask our friends for help in return. We're self-reliant yet understanding of others. We can read rooms. The other half of the time, we're exhausted from having brains that won't rest. Trust issues pop up like weeds whenever we try to share our lives with others. We tend to isolate because we feel safer when we're alone. We try to meditate but we can't stop the active thoughts from dragging us all over the place. We struggle to sleep. We are prone to trauma flashbacks, which make us appear to be manic/depressive, and we have big emotions that argue with our big intelligence, making big decisions into very difficult conundrums.

Wow! You have real way of articulating things.
This made me cry, I just keep reading it. I feel like I'm looking at myself on the page! Just yes.

I have always been told I am clever. I'm aware of it too. I'm not crazy intelligent but I'm sharp enough lol.
I've also grown up being told I would make a good counsellor (told this by counsellors) and also a good teacher. I was looking through my school leavers book a few weeks back and I found a message from my English teacher. It made me smile as she was telling me she would be expecting my application to the English department, (I used to help her grade papers and verbal assessments at times).

I like what you said about two teams. I very much feel this way and have for a long time. I'm trying to break that mindset and I'm hoping I can start making some head way being here