Milkandhoney's revovery journal

[milkandhoney11]

I have struggled with the decision to start a recovery journal on here because I know how difficult I have always found it to share my thoughts, feelings and experiences with others in the past. I think that I am a very good listener but when it comes to speaking my own truth and connecting with others I tend to just freeze. It's a lonely, petrifying and shameful feeling but so far I have never been able to move beyond it. I don't want to be a burden to anyone and so I have wondered whether it would be the right decision to start sharing what is going on in my life, however the truth is that I feel like I don't really have another option if I want to heal.
I have only very recently hit rock bottom when I lost my job and any connection with the person I love within the same day. It was (and still is) a most traumatic experience that hast caused me to suffer from intense emotional flashbacks and deepened my depression to a point where I was thinking about taking my own life. The only reason I am still here is because I don't want to cause any further hurt to the few people that are remaining in my life. I know that if I gave in to my suicidal thoughts, my personal pain would end, but the suffering wouldn't really go away, it would just get added to the people around me who would have to live with the consequences.
So, I am trying desperately to find a way to heal and move forward. There are times when I get completely overwhelmed with anxiety because I have no idea where life is going to lead me, but there are also moments when I am starting to feel a little bit better and those are the moments I am desperately clinging to for life.
It's proving to be very difficult to find another job and I am finding it quite hard to soothe my broken heart, but I am slowly and gradually starting to process all that has happened to me in the past- not only the most recent traumatic events but especially also all the emotional and physical abuse that have made me the person I am today.

So, I hope that I will be able to use this journal to write about some of the things that happen to me as I am trying to recover from all the pain I am feeling at the moment. I feel very vulnerable even putting these words out there but I know that if anyone can truly understand, it's going to be the people in this forum.

It's a scary thing to embrace your vulnerability in this way and start sharing some of your innermost thoughts (that I have never been able to express before) but I feel like I have nothing to lose at this point so I can only hold on to the small hope I have left that I can somehow find a way to heal - perhaps with the help of all of you.

Thanks for taking the time to read this (and possibly any following entries to this journal), it means a lot to me.

[paul72]

hi Milkandhoney
It really is such a scary thing to embrace your vulnerability like you said.
I hope your journal will be a wonderful tool to help you with that, knowing that those who read and reply can empathize with you and want you to progress with your recovery.
You have a willing audience, you are not a burden at all.
I think the journal writing has helped me be more vulnerable outside of here even.
I hope so for you too ..  I'm sorry for what you've been through.

[milkandhoney11]

hi Milkandhoney
It really is such a scary thing to embrace your vulnerability like you said.
I hope your journal will be a wonderful tool to help you with that, knowing that those who read and reply can empathize with you and want you to progress with your recovery.
You have a willing audience, you are not a burden at all.
I think the journal writing has helped me be more vulnerable outside of here even.
I hope so for you too ..  I'm sorry for what you've been through.

Thank you so much, Phil. I really appreciate your reply and I hope that you're right and I do get to become a little more vulnerable over time

[Papa Coco]

Hi Milkandhoney,

That's a beautifully written post to start your journal with. I'm sorry to hear about losing your job and the person you love on the same day! That's two big deals at once. However, I'm so very glad to hear that you kept yourself from suicide, and I agree with your reason for pushing it away. I have spent most of my life pushing it away also. Today, I rely on the same reasoning you do, that if I harm myself, or leave the planet by my own hand, that I will horrifically and permanently traumatize the people who love me.

I have all the proof I need that suicide is the worst thing I could do to my loved ones. In 2008 I lost my baby sister to suicide. That was 14 years ago, and I'm in tears right now as I write about it. I haven't stopped missing her, nor have I ever been able to stop blaming myself for not stepping in and rescuing her before it was too late. So, lesson learned. I now know I can't do that to my wife, son, daughter-in-law, grandsons or friends. If I truly love the few people who have loved me unconditionally, then I won't do that to them.

We, C-PTSD folks, usually Fawn types, often don't realize how many people really do love us. We tend to be empathetic people, and others appreciate that more than we even know. So... it's best for these people for me to keep going and let old age get me when it's the right time.

I encourage you to write as much as you feel safe writing about in this Recovery Journal. The journal is yours to do or say what you need to. You can write long stories or short blurbs. It's yours. If you want to start by slowly telling small bits to see how others might react, that's just fine. In fact it's a good plan to not push yourself harder than needed. I respect your apprehension. Pushing yourself to tell more than you're comfortable telling would feed into the trauma you're already dealing with.

If you're like me, I tend to delete more posts than I post because after I write them, I feel too vulnerable and too in danger of being scolded or laughed at. It would never happen on this forum, but my trauma voice still remembers a thousand times in life when I said too much and brought a wave of criticism and judgment instead of the help I was asking for. So my trauma voice protects me by deleting posts that it feels are too revealing. I know that we humans don't like to air our dark sides, but like you said, healing won't happen if we continue to hide our problems from those who care about us.

I guess vulnerability is a double-edged sword. It can put us in danger if we're vulnerable to the wrong people, but it can also be our savior if we're vulnerable to the right people. And so far, my year on this forum has proven that these are the right people to be vulnerable with.

My trauma makes me delete a lot of posts I didn't need to delete, but...that's what trauma does. It applies the right fix to the wrong problems.


---

I have a personal story about the positive aspect of vulnerability:  To mitigate my trauma's fear that I'm writing too much about myself on your forum, I've turned my personal story blue. Rather than me going away feeling afraid I should delete this post, I'll let the blue color of the story give you the option to read or not read it. That makes my trauma brain feel safer about my long post.

In 2010, on the two-year anniversary of my little sister's suicide, while being the new "youngest sibling" I was now the target of my elder narcissistic siblings' hate. The confusion was too much for me. I was about 15 minutes from jumping off a bridge near my house when the phone rang, and a very panicked lifelong friend had somehow detected through the ether that I was in serious trouble. When I answered the phone, she didn't say "hello" she yelled, "JIMMY, WHAT'S WRONG?" This was further proof for me that we humans are connected in ways we can't fully understand. Her call, from 2000 miles away, saved my life at the last second, and science can't explain why she knew to call me as I was grabbing the car keys to drive to the bridge.

   That was too close a call. The incident proved to me, beyond doubt, that my life depended on stopping the abuse completely. I was 50 at the time and two elder sibs and my own dad were still abusive to me. Since the ringleader (the Putin of my family) was a narcissistic sister 11 years older than me, she had the entire family in the palm of her hand, and they were all using it to slap at ME with. I had to walk away from my entire Family Of Origin (FOO) and to go FULL No Contact for the rest of my life. As soon as I changed all my phone numbers and email addresses and walked away from my 3 remaining siblings and my dad, and all my aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews, a never-before feeling of sweet freedom washed over me.

    I suddenly felt compelled to write a tell-all fiction novel about a boy who'd suffered everything I did. At the time, I worked at one of the world's largest companies and I had many, many friends who all knew me as a happy, kind, comical, compassionate person. (A perfect example of a C-PTSD Fawn type). The excitement of writing a novel made me talk about it. People would ask "What's it about?" And I'd tell them it was about a boy who'd been abused sexually, emotionally, spiritually and physically as I had, and who was so suicidal that he needed help getting through life--just like me.

    My friends, many of whom had known me for decades (I worked there for 42 years--but never told anyone the stories of my childhood or my evil FOO), said "I NEVER would have expected to hear that from you. You're the happiest person I know!" Then--and this is the whole reason I'm telling this story--THEN, many of them leaned in close and with sincere, often pained look on their faces asked, "Can I tell you what happened to me?" I'd say yes, and they'd start, "I've never told anyone this before but..." And then they'd tell me horrific stories of the pain they've lived with their whole lives.  Needless to say, that moment often deepened our friendship for a long while since.

My point for telling you this story is that I made a profound discovery back then: A lot of people want to share their darkest secrets but have been conditioned to believe they have to "suck it up" and get on with life. What I saw in the flushed, vulnerable faces of so many of my friends was a release like they had never really known before. When they discovered that this happy, cheerful, got-the-world-by-the-tail person they thought they knew had been fighting for my life since childhood, it gave them permission to tell that they were feeling the same way.

Realizing how much pain is really in this world led me to start saying, "There are more novels walking the sidewalks than there are on the bookstore shelves."

To me, that showed that vulnerability, when handled in the right way, is contagious, and it frees people to open up their hearts just enough to start letting people into the secrets that have been eating them up inside for years. It turns out that a HUGE lot of people are living in imposter syndrome, pretending to be in charge of their lives while feeling utterly alone and disconnected like they're the only person alive who feels how they feel.

I guess I've lived with bad imposter syndrome for my whole life. I felt like I was the garbage that was too dirty even for the trash man to pick up, but I acted like I had the world by the tail. I told jokes. I helped people move. I never asked anyone for help with anything, but I was right there always helping them with everything. I held a big, global job, I performed standup comedy in the evenings, I taught classes to aerospace engineers, I took care of my wife's aging mom for 14 years, I held big neighborhood parties for every holiday, I was the dad of the neighborhood's kid-friendly house. All the neighborhood kids hung around my house with my kids, because we were fun and kind and treated the children like they were valued human beings with real feelings and fears. All the while I was chronically plagued with recurring nightmares so bad that on some nights I got no sleep at all. I lived every day so close to ending my own life that I have to keep a no guns policy in my home for no other reason than that I'm too afraid of having an easy solution to a bad day right at my fingertips. When I was a kid, there was a song on the radio that sang "Good time Charlie's got the blues" and I always resonated with those words. Back then I didn't realize the seriousness of the fact that I felt like I was "good time Charlie" who was hiding my dark depression behind a big, happy smile. But as I aged, and the world began to understand trauma, well...I now know why I used to hum that song a lot as a kid.

I guess I learned, as many of us do, that people only want me around if I'm happy, so as a small boy, living with suicidal ideation from age 12 on, I learned to be happy when I was near other people. It made people not push me away.


---

I'm sorry that I tend to write long posts, but I've tried many times to shorten them, but for me, sharing my own stories with others who can resonate with me, has proven to be the best way I have to connect. I'm not a therapist by any stretch, but I do have stories of my own that might help others feel safer with their own stories. I learn from other people's stories as well. My deep sadness is most often deep loneliness. Nothing stops loneliness quicker than sharing with others.

I believe we are all connected, and that through that connection, our lives are shared with each other, and if we choose to share in a spirit of love and connection, then those stories do good out in the world. I want healing to be as contagious as trauma is. People's traumas traumatize others, but people's compassion and vulnerability help talk over that trauma voice.

Normally, I'd delete this post before you can read it because this post is long and talks about myself. But I'm trying very hard to not let my trauma voice stop me from sharing.

And I'm now a new fan of a comedian who just posted a very powerful 1-hour routine--all about himself--on Netflix. To me, his routine is a groundbreaking boost to our healing both as a culture and as individuals with trauma disorders and perpetual sadness. His final dialogue at the end, where he says he can't be kind to himself no matter how hard he wants to, is so powerful. The show is called Neal Brennan: Blocks. He is one of us. A C-PTSD survivor whose new Netflix routine is all about him telling the world about his own problems with sadness, depression and self-hatred. I predict his routine will save thousands of people who need to hear a successful comedian tell us what it feels like for him to have C-PTSD. That sort of makes me feel better about the stories I tell about myself. So I'm going to force myself to post this and to not crumble under the anxiety that I'm no doubt going to feel as soon as I hit the "post" button. I don't talk about myself out of arrogance, but out of compassion, hoping to connect my ups and downs with others. For this post, I'm following Neal Brennan's lead and I'm going to let it all out.

So I talk about myself, but in ways that I hope resonate with you and any others. I hope that my vulnerability is contagious and gives some peace to the fears of opening up. No one on this site will think of you as a burden. We like reading each other's stories. I like reading the stories others write about their experiences, and I hope people are okay with reading mine also.

(And now for the test: I'll hit POST and see if I go into a panic and come back online to delete this before anyone sees it. If you're reading it...then I guess I've staved off the anxiety and didn't delete it).

[rainydiary]

I'm glad you are aiming to put words with your experience.

[milkandhoney11]

Dear Papa Coco,
I cannot thank you enough for your most wonderful reply. Every single word that you have written resonated with me and I felt deeply touched by everything you said.
I haven't been able to cry ever since the day it all happened but as I read your story I was finally able to grieve and release some of the pain that I have been stuck in for the last few weeks, so I am incredibly grateful for your kindness. It feels so good to have someone who understands what I am going through and who is brave enough to share their story with me. All my life I have been longing for someone to understand but whenever I tried to share my feelings with others, it went horribly wrong.

My friends seem to be unable to fully comprehend how tiring and exhausting it is to live with CPTSD and fight for your life every single day and whenever I tried to talk to my parents about any kind of problem I have been experiencing there has been absolutely no compassion, just blame and frantic worry. To my parents I am just some kind of pathetic, dysfunctional little girl that constantly causes them to worry because I cannot seem to function like normal people can. They don't recognise that it is their emotional and physical abuse that made me who I am today and so they continue to shame me into believing that I must be a horrible person that has no value in this world.

I am trying very much to get rid of all the toxic shame I have internalized from years of childhood abuse, but I can't say that I am making very much progress. I still feel like I deserve no support from others, that I don't really deserve to be vulnerable and share my story because I would just be a burden to others. And most of the time I still feel like I don't belong in this world because I am so different from others and simply cannot connect with anyone.

But, you know, hearing your story has made me actually feel connected for the first time in what must be years. It felt so good to have someone who understands and I fully appreciate your vulnerability. It helped me realise that sharing our stories and being open about our experience, is not only brave, it may be what the world actually needs.

What you said about talking over that trauma voice really moved me deeply.

I believe we are all connected, and that through that connection, our lives are shared with each other, and if we choose to share in a spirit of love and connection, then those stories do good out in the world. I want healing to be as contagious as trauma is. People's traumas traumatize others, but people's compassion and vulnerability help talk over that trauma voice.

So, I am trying to continue to share my thoughts on here (even though, like you, I am finding it quite scary and am tempted to just delete my posts) but I realise that healing can only happen when we are starting to share with others and take the necessary steps to end our loneliness.

Thank you also for the recommendation of Neal Brennan, it sounds very promising, so I'll see whether I can somehow access this over here in the UK.

I also wanted to say sorry about triggering you when talking about the topic of suicide, I should have put a trigger warning here or used different colours the way you did.
I hope you are okay.
Take care!

[Papa Coco]

Milkandhoney11,

I want to complement you on your choice of names. My guess is that you, like me, hope to one day live in the land flowing with milk and honey. And the number 11 is a spiritual number. (My wife's dad was a very good friend to me and my whole family. He died of a heart attack almost 23 years ago. His funeral was on 1/11/00 at 11:00 AM. Here at our house, when the numbers 11 or 111 come up, we take notice, because strange and helpful things tend to happen around those numbers. We've decided to go ahead and just believe that it's Dad taking good care of us from his place in The Land of Milk and Honey. So...I'm going out on a limb and guessing you might have some of the same beliefs and spiritual connections that we do here in our home. Summary: Even if I'm totally wrong, I still like your choice of badges. (I'll close this post at the bottom of the page with a short story I've learned about The Land of Milk and Honey).



Thank you for your kind words around my long post. I confess, I had a hard time sleeping after posting it because I was so afraid that I'd said too much, used too many words, or sounded like a selfish know-it-all.  Your kind comments have given me full relief that I'm not in trouble now. THANK YOU!

I know this:  That my real self and my trauma self are two totally different people. So, lately I've been relying on my "real" self to override the reactions of my Trauma Self.  Whenever I forget this, and start behaving like my trauma self is real, my therapist puts up both hands like he's trying to stop my train of thought. He looks me in the eye, and very slowly says "That's TRAUMA!"  He reminds me often that my fears are my trauma talking.

So, last night as I squirmed in bed, worrying that I was going to be kicked out of the OOTS forum for being too selfish and too wordy, I said to myself "That's TRAUMA!" The more often I catch myself in the act of believing my trauma is a valid voice, the more easily I'm finding it to separate my "real" self from the trauma voice, and muscle my way through the night without succumbing to the trauma and deleting the post before it can be read by anyone. It's my way of practicing courage: Which is, as we know, NOT the act of being fearless, but it's the act of moving ahead in the presence of fear. I called on my courage to make me not delete that post no matter how loud my Trauma Voice was shouting at me to do so.

So, I want to address your fears too. I hope I'm able to help you see, through my eyes, that you are feeling trauma fears that aren't really real. I'm NOT scolding you, nor am I telling you to stop doing that. I'm only trying to share what my therapist does for me. Picture me right now, with both my hands up to indicate a caring pause in our conversation, and lovingly saying to you, "Your worries of saying too much on this forum is TRAUMA!" (Say the word "trauma" slowly for emphasis like my T does. It helps add drama to the trauma. LOL).

--

Boy, can I resonate with what you said about trying to talk to your family about what you go through. That NEVER went well for me either. And, just like you, I always left their presence feeling like a horrible person who is just not capable of living life as a competent adult.

As a child, if I tried to ask for help, they just told me to shut up and keep my little "boy" problems to myself.  (Boy problems like being sexually, emotionally, spiritually and physically abused at the Catholic school that they refused to let me leave). As an adult, trying to come to grips with how disastrous my young adult life was turning out to be, their response to ANYTHING I said about the pain I carried from childhood was the same. "Hey. We did the best we could!" They didn't say it nicely either. They said it defensively. I wasn't trying to blame them; I was trying to explain why I was suicidal and depressed and on medications and in therapy. Their response was always to just protect themselves from feeling any responsibility for what I'd been through. Their self-protective blocking just made me feel like I was a huge disappointment who didn't respect how "hard they tried" to be good parents while they totally ignored me and laughed at me and told me to shape up and get on with life.

--

I also resonate closely with your reports of how exhausting it is to spend every single day just making sure you survive. It's exhausting for me too. Sometimes I just want to throw my arms up and give in. That comedian I talk about, Neal Brennan, says having chronic sadness is like wearing a heavy, weighted vest every day. He says the "cures" like medication, Ketamine, Talk Therapy, etc, don't remove the vest, but they do take a couple pounds out of it.

More and more, I'm starting to realize that my healing from this lifelong confusion is going to be about me accepting it while also working to heal it. My therapist always tells me to "make space" in my brain and heart for my problems, rather than try to hide from them, or curse them, or tell them to go away. Every emotion I have is on my side. I just need to listen to it and let it tell me why. I feel bad that I have so much hatred for rapists, bullies, billionaires, politicians, thieves, and my own narcissistic family. My T repeatedly tells me that it's okay to feel the hate. Make a space for it and allow it to sit at the table with me. I find that when I do that, I start to soften and my hatred starts to wane away. It reminds me of this new philosophy about physical healing. It's said now that "No pain, no gain" is a load of hooey.  That the human body will change and heal faster if it doesn't have to protect itself from my forcing it to move or bend. The body responds to pain by building more scar tissue or by resisting the movement against me.  Apparently, my body wants me to love it, so it doesn't feel loved when it's being tortured by "no pain/no gain" hooey. Physical therapists who know this are better at healing their clients than PTs who continue to believe in the old, antiquated no pain/no gain garbage.

I relate that to my brain now. My therapist knows I don't have a violent bone in my body, so he knows that when he tells me to make space for the hatred, I'm not going to grab a bat and start smashing windshields. He knows I'm going to go into meditation and allow my hatred for chrump and Bezos and Musk and all the sociopaths and rapists of the world to have its say.  Once I accept that it's a valid part of me, and that it's trying to show that it's on my side, my hatred starts to cool down.


---

I also resonate with your comment:  "I still feel like I deserve no support from others, that I don't really deserve to be vulnerable and share my story because I would just be a burden to others. And most of the time I still feel like I don't belong in this world because I am so different from others and simply cannot connect with anyone."

Wow. It's like we're living our lives in tandem from 6000 miles apart. I'm not suffering with that quite as badly as I used to. But on some days, I absolutely still feel totally unwelcome on this planet. In fact, look at my comments above that I couldn't sleep because I wrote something to you that I believed was going to get me thrown off the site for being too wordy and too selfish. "That's TRAUMA" (LOL. My T is with me in spirit right now).

No part of me believes you will ever be a burden on this site.  But...dang it...I still resonate with you. I get it, I get it, I TOTALLY get it.  In fact,  I just recently told my therapist of 30+ years, that I only trust him because I pay him. I told him that if he was working for free I'd leave because he doesn't deserve to have me be a burden on him. But since I'm paying him, I feel like I have the right to talk to him for 45 minutes every two weeks. He is often encouraging me to call him at home if I ever need him. He sometimes even indicates that he's sorry I didn't call him when he finds out how difficult a time I'd had during the time between sessions. But I can't call him. I can't ask him to help me if I'm not paying him. That's TRAUMA but it's still too strong a Trauma Voice for me to get past.

Here on this forum, I've deleted so many posts before anyone could read them that I wonder if there are as many non-posts as posts in my history. All because I feel exactly like how you expressed how you feel. I am just sure I'm RIGHT on the cusp of being cancelled by the good, loving, caring people on this forum. It's not about the people on the forum, it's about TRAUMA.  And I personally believe that it's trauma that's making you feel the same way.

I'm not telling you to get over it. I'd have to find a way to get over it myself first, and I really can't get over it. I am slllloooooowwwwwllllyyyyy getting more and more control over the Trauma voice, but I'm a long, long way from being over it. I'm more like you than you can imagine.  I'm scared all the time. I'm sad all the time. Trauma voices are pounding on me all the time, but venues like this forum are helping me find a place where I can practice sharing without deleting.

I think of CPTSD as the loss of a limb. It's easy for me because my dad lost his right arm in WWII and I grew up with a man who had found a way to live a full and competent life with his right arm gone. (And he was right-handed, so it was extra difficult for him). Being traumatized to the point that you and I have been, is like having a limb removed. People with missing limbs can never grow the limb back, any easier than I can grow my self-confidence back.  But, at the same time, People with missing limbs just have to find new ways to accomplish what they do. My dad built houses, rebuilt transmissions and engines, worked in a factory and built a reputation as "the strongest man anyone had ever seen" in the factory. I worked in that same factory and was routinely told story after story of Dad's unbelievable strength. Many times, I heard "Your dad can lift more with that one arm than two men can with both arms."

My goal in healing from Trauma disorders is not to live my life as though it never happened, but to learn how to live my life anyway. To mitigate the things that I can and can't do. I know I can't be a landlord, so I don't rent out my house. I know I can't handle other people's pain, so I don't finish my degree and become a therapist. Maybe I'd be a good therapist. But I'd cry myself to sleep every night like I did when I was a hospital volunteer 30 years ago. I am learning what I can and can't do, and I believe that if I just keep following the new and progressive treatments that keep coming online, I'll be able to make it to the finish line and die of old age in my 80s or 90s. That's my goal. To THRIVE with the CPTSD still there. Getting rid of it doesn't seem to be an option but thriving despite its presence is a very real option.

---

Hey: I'm starting to get very confused. I think I've written too much and my brain can't handle it. I'm going to log off now. But first, I promised a story around The Land of Milk and Honey.

---

I recently learned about Chimpanzees and Bonobos. I'd never heard of Bonobos before last week. ACCORDING TO THE SOURCE that I was watching, they look so much alike that untrained eyes can't tell them apart. Their differences are mostly behavioral, rather than physical.

I was researching "why people hate" and came across this: 2,000,000 years ago, these apes needed to relocate. Archeologists believe that the species divided in half and went two directions. The one that we call Chimpanzees moved to a place where they found food and resources, but not in ample supply. Because they had to compete for food and resources, they evolved into a male-dominated social structure that included violence, competition, even rape and murder. It's said that when a male chimpanzee enters a new pack, his first action is to murder all the babies, so he can repopulate with his own babies.

Meanwhile, the other half found a place teeming with abundant food and resources. They evolved into a female-dominated social structure built on sharing and nurturing and peace.

This documentary (Actually called "Why We Hate") assessed that the need to compete for survival drives competitive violence, which burrows into the brain and causes these selfish, possessive, violent acts of aggression on fellow chimpanzees.  And that the total lack of need to compete, gave the Bonobos the ability to share and care and be good.

Okay, so...as a FORMER Catholic, I'm all too familiar with the religious promise that one day we'll live in The Land Flowing with Milk and Honey. Maybe it is the original author's promise that one day, maybe in 2,000,000 more years, we humans might find total peace because of an abundance of all the resources that we need. Or maybe this is about eternity and a life after death. (I don't know what I believe: I DO believe our souls continue to live when our egos die, but I really am not certain of it).

I don't believe in the Catholic cartoon version of heaven and heII but I do hold a space in my heart to believe that maybe, one day, as we continue to evolved from cave dwellers to space dwellers, (or as my therapist says, from ego centric lives to spirit centric lives) that one day, in our future, we will find the Land of Milk and Honey and we'll never have to deal with violence or hatred or selfishness (or the 7 deadly sins) ever again.

Hey. It could happen. And I'm hoping for that day when violence dies off because no one needs to compete for jobs, money, housing, food...anything.   ANd if I"m totally wrong, who cares? The idea of evolving into social peace makes me feel good, so...no harm, no foul.

Take care my friend. And thank you for sharing yourself with us. 

[milkandhoney11]

Papa Coco,
I want to thank you so much for your words. Once again everything you have said resonated with me- maybe you're right and we really are living our lives in tandem from 6000 miles apart. It's a wonderful thought and makes me feel much less alone.

The truth is that I was struggling a lot yesterday. Somehow the reality of all the negative things that happened during the past few weeks suddenly dawned on me and I found it very hard not to crumble under the pain. I never wanted to admit to myself how much I am struggling with being unemployed, but it really is starting to affect me at the moment and I guess it has a lot to do with feeling like a burden to others. I have always found it quite impossible to see any value in myself unless I was actively doing something to be of service to others. It's like my self-worth depends solely on what others think of me, so unless I am making a positive contribution to the community in some way I feel like my existence is worth nothing.

Part of my obviously knows that that is not true and that every single person in this world is valuable, but it's hard to listen to this part of myself when my TRAUMA voice is shouting so loudly. Sometimes I get completely trapped into my traumatic thinking and start to feel like giving up because I can't see a light beyond the horizon anymore. But your words reminded me that it is indeed possible to separate my true self from my trauma self and that all the fears that have been clouding my mind lately aren't actually real. So thank you incredibly much for this. I really needed to hear those words right now.

I do feel that suffering from CPTSD is a bit like losing a limb. There is no denying that it has severely narrowed my life chances. There are so many things that I struggle with although they come easy to the vast majority of people. I'm scared of social interactions, I'm finding myself unable to maintain any kind of friendship, I've never been in a relationship with another person, and sometimes my anxiety is so overwhelming that I can't even manage to leave the house.

I suffer every day from my limitations and I am afraid that I will never be able to fully recover from them - just like one can't regrow a limb one can never replace a lost childhood and so it seems like the trauma will always have to remain a part of me. Yet, you're absolutely right: we can grow our self-confidence back and we can find ways to slowly and gradually reduce the incredible burden that we are carrying.

However, one of the things that really troubles me at the moment, is how often people like us get being judged for being the way that we are. Our lives may be severely limited and our CPTSD may very much function like a disability, but people cannot see how much we suffer because we are not missing a limb and seem outwardly okay.

I can't count how often I have been called naïve, immature, overly sensitive, fragile, dysfunctional, pathetic, worrisome, or useless by other people. I have heard it numerous times as a child from parents, family members, classmates, and teachers. And I still continue to hear it now that I am an adult. So is it any wonder that I have started to believe these comments? When you hear them again and again over many, many years it is impossible not to absorb them in a way. Here I am, then, a grown woman who is still not able to function like a normal grown up person because I'm so paralysed with self-doubt, anxiety, and depression. Every single day that I have lived so far seems to prove that I am somehow less worthy and less good than anyone else in the world.

And that, of course, keeps my TRAUMA self nourished. It's like a perpetual cycle that can never stop. I get so caught up in trauma, self-doubt and fear that I end up either making mistakes or completely withdrawing from the world around me, but of course this causes my inner critic to lash out even more and tell me about all the ways how I am a burden to others.

So, is there any way out of this situation? From where I am right now, it almost seems like my pain can and will never end. But your words make me believe that there is hope. There is hope because there are people who understand and who will support you, people who do not succumb to aggression and judgement but hold onto "the ability to share and care and be good", as you said.

I truly believe that we can reach a state that would feel very much feel like being in the land flowing with milk and honey. I certainly long for the peace it would entail and I hope that some day you and I will be able to move beyond all the hurt and violence that has governed our lives so far.

I, too, have experienced many such spiritual "coincidences" as the ones you have described at the beginning of your post and they do give me hope that the relief that we long for is indeed possible.

So, thanks again for reminding me of my hopes and helping me see a way out of the pain that I am experiencing at this moment in time. It really means a lot to me.

Take care

[Papa Coco]

MilkandHoney11

You're in a tough spot and I respect that. I hope that being able to talk about being unemployed here on the forum is a help to you as you work through the trauma of the situation. Losing a job is like losing an identity. I lost my job 2 years ago tomorrow and I'm just now starting to come to terms with it. Being unemployed is a horrible feeling for anyone. Add C-PTSD to that and it's ten times more of an impact to your already struggling self-image. I can relate to the feelings of worthlessness. I tend to tell people I'm retired because that carries less of a feeling of shame than "laid off." Being unemployed is a problem for anyone but it's a torture chamber for people like you and me who need to keep our self-esteem up via outside sources. Add to that the black and white feeling that we are either contributors or burdens. Nothing in between.

A big, key, fundamental symptom of C-PTSD is black and white thinking. C-PTSD is a fragmentation of the brain. What should be a nice, warm cup of life, is now a cup of scalding hot and a cup of ice-cold life. C-PTSD separates the hot from the cold and only allows us to see one or the other at any given moment. I'm either having the best day of my life or the worst. Nothing in between. I'm either a contributor or a burden. I'm either good or bad. I'm either too tall or too short...too fat or too thin...too happy or too sad... The ultimate goal of good trauma therapy is to re-integrate all our fragmented, black or white parts back into one nice gray whole. That's when we start to feel a sense of ourselves without our trauma voices yelling at us to get out of the ice and into the fire or vice versa. In my humble opinion, what you're going through, by feeling ashamed of being a burden, is what C-PTSD has done to you. I suppose feeling a drive to want to contribute is a good thing. It may be the proof you need that you were born good. But we don't need our trauma voices pounding on us all day long until we find another job. It's fun to contribute from a pure heart. It's a burden to contribute because I feel like I HAVE to.

You say you know you're not a burden but your trauma voice is screaming that you are one. I know that doesn't solve anything, but I would bet you're definitely in better shape than if you were thinking that your trauma voice was the only truth. It's not. My anxiety rises up when it tries to fix something it's afraid will happen again. My anxiety still remembers being shamed for not being valuable in the past. It thinks it's helping me by making me so anxious that I'll go out and get a job before I'm punished for not having one. From what I've learned in a lot of books and websites and from my therapist, it seems that our trauma voices are trying to fix yesterday's problems today. Right fix: Wrong problem. As we continue up the road to healing, I suppose the more we can blend the good with the bad, the more we can let our rational voice talk louder than our trauma voices.



I can really empathize with you on how hard it is to be called "Too emotional" and "weak" and "Dysfunctional" and "worthless". I've endured the same names and as a man, you can add "soft" or "sissy" to that list. While I'm comfortable in my sexuality, being a "soft" man is appreciated by many and laughed at by many others. But...there we go. I've been dealing with it my whole life. I don't hide my soft side well, so I've been targeted many, many times for being too emotional.

Again: None of it is real. Being called these names is how bullies put us good people in our place. Again, if there's a heII it's not for us emotional people, it's for the bullies who use that to make us feel bad for being good.

Being a target for these kinds of labels is probably the biggest reason I isolate. A million insults about how I walk or how I talk or how I hit a nail or how I cut the lawn or how I wash my car have driven me into a life where I try hard to close myself off where no one can criticize me; or my voice, or how I sit, or what I eat for lunch...My GOSH, no matter what I did as a kid in my own family, I was criticized for it. I combed my hair left, and my family said I should comb it right. Today I work in my garage, but I keep the door closed so no one from the street can see me. I'm too conditioned to be waiting for them to criticize how I do my work, or how I've organized my tools, or the shirt I'm wearing today. No one does this to me anymore, but the roots of my raising run deep. I am what they made me into.









It's such a treadmill to nowhere. But knowing it's a treadmill and getting off the treadmill are two different things.  I could save a million babies from a burning building and feel like the greatest hero in the world. Then go to bed, wake up the next day feeling utterly worthless again. It's not about being worthless. It's about feeling worthless. For me, that's my trauma talking.

My therapist often lists some of my life's accomplishments when I'm feeling at my worst. He has to remind me that I've done good things because I can't remember having ever done anything good in my whole life. When I got laid off after 42 years with my employer, I lost so much of my identity that it drove me deeper into depression than I've ever been. I've been slowly rising up from that depression for two years now. I've still got a long way to go. Not contributing to the world via a job or volunteer post does make my trauma self feel very uneasy.

What bothers me about worthlessness is that it shouldn't matter. Millionaires and billionaires feel just fine about themselves and all they do is take. They don't give anything. Their self-esteem is in great shape.

I see myself the way I see a broken horse. Wild horses run free on the planes. I don't see where they contribute anything at all to the world. They just run, and play, and eat, and survive. But when one of them is captured by a rancher or farmer, the first order of business is for the farmer to break the horse's spirit. By a series of restraints, rewards and punishments, the farmer works to prove that the farmer is the boss and the horse will never be free again. Eventually that horse's spirit breaks, and it succumbs to a life of servitude. That's what the church and narcissistic family did to me. They broke my free spirit SO THAT I would feel bad if I wasn't doing something for them. Was the horse of no value when it ran free and ate grass? Can that free horse feel good about itself even though it's not pulling a plow?

The breaking of my spirit was done by being in a family where I was ignored if I didn't "behave" how they wanted me to. I was given tighter boundaries than all of my friends. All of my siblings were given more opportunities in life than I was. I was allowed in my friends' houses but none of my friends were allowed in my house. Mom hated every friend I'd ever made, boy or girl. She hated any teacher I said I liked. No matter what I liked or wanted, I was repeatedly shown that I was wrong for liking or wanting it. My best friend's mom was the only adult who ever talked with me like I was a person, rather than a child who should be seen and not heard. My mom knew that I really liked Mrs. A. I was 13 when she died of cancer. I remember it well. It was a summer day, no school. My mom came into my room to wake me up. As she crossed the room to open the curtains, she scolded me: "Just so you know. Mrs. A died this morning AND YOU'D BETTER NOT CRY ABOUT IT!!!!!" (I did cry about it, but not until I was 36 and it all came back to me as a flashback). In my home and religious school, I wasn't allowed to do or have anything that I wanted. If I asked for anything, they'd say "You don't want that" before I could even finish asking. It was subtle, but it was a relentless and consistent chipping away at my sense of self-worth.  My parents made sure that in my social structure of the neighborhood, I would be the kid with the oldest bike, the cheapest clothes, the tightest curfews, the least amount of freedom to go places or play sports or music or...etc. etc. My parents had money, but that money was theirs, not mine. I still played as hard as I was allowed to, but the message: "You're not as important as everyone else" was driven into me relentlessly for most of my life. Like they say, I wasn't cut with one big knife. I'm the result of a million small cuts. Gaslighted into accepting my position as everyone else's servant.

I need to log off. A friend needs help moving some furniture and I've got a lot of cleaning and packing to do so I can move back into the city on Saturday morning. (Ha ha. How ironic is that?: I have to stop talking about how I am everyone's servant because a friend needs me to move some furniture for her).  It's okay. I like this friend. I'm happy to do this for her.

I'll check back in as soon as I get a few minutes.

[milkandhoney11]

Dear Papa Coco,
thank you so much for your encouraging words and most valuable insights.

I think you are absolutely right about being stuck in black and white thinking and not being able to see any grey shades, anymore. I can always see the good in other people, but when it comes to finding the good in myself I often fail and I know that I work on that. I have made some mistakes in life that I deeply regret but that does not mean that I am an inherently bad person who deserves to suffer like this. And you're absolutely right: the fact that I am currently not working or contributing much does not diminish my worth in any way. Your example of the wild and tamed horses really helped me see that, so thank you very much for all your advice.

I am trying to see myself in a better light and to contradict my trauma voice whenever I can, but I think it will take quite some time for me to start and develop some kind of immunity against inner critic attacks. I have only learned about Complex PTSD very recently and I am finding everything still quite overwhelming, to say the least. So far, I have always tried to minimise the effects that my childhood trauma has had on me but I can't keep suppressing my hurt, anymore. I have to really accept everything that happened to me if I want to find a way to heal so I am slowly and gradually starting to do that.

I was really sorry to hear about your childhood experiences. It must have felt awful to not be given the freedoms you desperately wanted, especially since everyone around you had so much fewer boundaries. Being "the kid with the oldest bike, the cheapest clothes, the tightest curfews, the least amount of freedom to go places or play sports etc" definitely resonated with me. I think that in a way my mother just tried to protect me, but the truth is that she was overly sensitive and her constant worrying was a huge burden for me. Whenever I tried to talk to her about a problem I had, she was completely unable to hold the space for me or show much empathy, she just panicked and started rambling on and on about how terrible this situation was, which scared me a lot. She never believed in me for a second but constantly told me that I was her greatest worry because I seemed to be unable to function in this world. I guess that I was a very timid and emotional child and my parents could never quite accept me for the person I was. Instead of supporting me, they made me feel dysfunctional and worthless every single day of my life and I realise that I must have internalised a lot of their criticisms over the time.

I am not worthless or dysfunctional but they made me believe so and it's about time that I start de-installing this program of self-hatred that is constantly running in my head. My parents may have broken my spirit, but I can't let them win. They may never had believed in me but that doesn't have to mean that I can't be there for myself.

So, at the moment I am trying to heavily reduce the contact with my parents. I just don't want to deal with their constant criticisms and humiliating comments, anymore. It's hard because they're the only two people in my family that I have any contact with, but at the same time I have to accept that their overwhelming presence in my life is stopping me from healing and recognising my self-worth.

At least here in this forum I can find people who understand me and will never put me down the way they do, so thank you again for all your most wonderful replies, my friend. They mean a lot to me

[Papa Coco]

Milkandhoney11

I really empathize with what you're going through. I feel honored that you're allowing me to see glimpses into your life. To me, that feels like you trust me, and trust is one of those things I didn't get during my development years. No one believed me, nor trusted me enough to talk WITH me rather than AT me.

Recovery may be a lifetime journey, since we can't erase our pasts. But that's okay. There aren't many people on this planet who are without struggles. This just happens to be OUR struggle. So, even people without CPTSD have problems. That knowledge helps comfort me during my slow recovery journey. I know that almost everyone I meet is hiding a story of the pain and misery they've been through or are going through now. So, I don't feel so targeted. I'm learning how to handle my own issues, and that's a win. The journey is as slow or fast as my brain can handle. I don't measure my healing in days but in years. As I bounce up and down in moods and fears, I can usually see that I'm a better person today than I was one year ago today.

What we go through as we learn about our own lives is a monumental journey, I guess.  Recovery is a process that moves slowly as we accept the truth about ourselves in smaller, more digestible bites.


Complex-PTSD is called Complex because the cause was complicated, the symptoms are complicated, and the cure is complicated.

Normal PTSD is just as crippling to its host, but it has a simpler cause and a simpler-to-understand set of symptoms. A person is having a great life: They are in a bad car crash. They get PTSD. Today, they suffer with trauma responses just like you and I do, but they know why. They know who they were before the crash. They know the date and time of the crash. They know who they are now, so they know how the crash changed them. Today they know why they have Emotional Flashbacks (EFs). They know what triggers those EFs; Screeching tires, horns blaring, excessive speed, the sound of metal hitting metal and glass breaking. These are easy triggers to identify. So they know why they react as they do. I have a friend whose mom, as a teenager, was in a horrific car crash. I've tried driving this woman around town, but no matter how slowly I drive, she keeps begging me to slow down even more. She knows why she's like that.

Complex-PTSD didn't have a single car crash. In most cases, the abuse started at birth. So we didn't know who we were before the trauma. We didn't know we were being traumatized. We don't really know for sure what caused us to be who we are now, we don't understand what our triggers are, and we don't know why we behave as we do when we're triggered. Having no pre-PTSD life to compare to, we can't easily separate our real selves from our trauma selves.  A soldier knows how the trauma of war changed him/her. So he/she knows why they're triggered, and what part of their reaction is trauma. We don't. In most cases, we just believe we were born broken and somehow deserve to be without self-esteem. We struggle to know what part of us is trauma and what part is just who we would have been without the trauma.  To sum it up in a sentence: We didn't know we were broken. We thought we were just born this way.

The cure for Complex-PTSD is somewhat similar to the cure for PTSD. Same tools. But one of our biggest, additional hurdles is that a victim of a car crash or war battle gets respect for being traumatized. The rest of us have to walk around in a world that thinks we're making this up. We can't always prove--even to ourselves--that we were ever abused. We have to add a little extra shame into our heavy backpacks as we hike up the trail of recovery behind our PTSD cohorts.

For me, I had a hurdle to overcome when I was first diagnosed in 2005. Complex PTSD wasn't a thing then. I had to try and figure out why I had all the symptoms of PTSD without having ever been to war. A startling reality that I had to accept and overcome was that I realized that, since I was so ashamed of myself for so many years, I realized I, myself, had joined the team of my abusers. They told me I was worthless and helpless. I eventually agreed with them, and I took their side. I called myself worthless and helpless just as they'd trained me to. My own version of Stockholm Syndrome. I sided with my own enemy against myself. Part of why Therapy takes so long is that it took me a few years to realize that I was resisting therapy because of my bias that I was incurable. The more I resisted, the longer the therapy needed to stay in play.

Now, with the world finally beginning to respect the covert control that causes Complex PTSD, I'm no longer on my abuser's side. I now see myself as a wild horse that was intentionally broken for the purpose of making me into who my parents and church wanted me to be, rather than who I really was.

To your post: I agree with you that limiting time with your parents is a good plan. I'm sorry that they can't accept that you are not their little pet daughter, but that you are a competent adult on your own journey. I let my family have me for far longer than I should have. I kept believing in the fantasy that family was more important than my happiness.  I wish I'd have put some distance between myself and them much sooner than I finally did.

In the 1970s there used to be a t-shirt that people wore that said, "It's hard to soar with eagles when you fly with turkeys". HA HA.  I'm not name-calling, but I'm saying that as an extroverted person who gets my strength from the world around me, one of my healing techniques is to try and always hang around with people who respect me, and just not hang around with those who enjoy jabbing at me with insults all the time.

[milkandhoney11]

Papa Coco,
thank you so much for your post. I've never thought about C-PTSD in this way, but the way you describe it makes a lot of sense and I feel that it allows me to have a little more self-compassion. I've always struggled to accept myself and was never able to seek help because I couldn't understand where my depression and anxiety came from. I was ashamed of myself for being so weak and constantly blamed myself for feeling so incredibly low when others have it so much worse (objectively speaking). I felt there must be something inherently wrong with me if I struggled so much and could never quite stay in control of my emotions, but I am beginning to see that this is not true.
I thought that I was born broken because I can't remember a time in my life when I felt happy, confident, or secure, but I think you're absolutely right in that we are just finding it very difficult to separate our real selves from our trauma because it took place so early in our childhood.
I don't have many memories of my actual childhood (I guess I must have suppressed much of it because it hurts so much) but the few memories I actually do have are all so invariably sad that it hurts to think back to them.
My parents actually created a lot of videotapes of me and my sister when we were young and in those videos you can see that our our childhood wasn't all bad, but when I look at these short video clips it feels like I am watching a different person because it doesn't really match my own memories.
I guess the truth is that my dad had two very different sides: the one that was a caring father who read to us and played ball with us in the garden, but also the one that was very violent and aggressive.
I'm still finding it hard to combine these two sides and try to see my father as he really is, so I guess to a young child it must be terribly confusing to deal with these two totally different versions. And I imagine that this is the reason why it took me so long to acknowledge that what was happening was actually abuse.

I think that I am going to need a therapist to try and process all of these things, but part of me is still resisting it (much like you said about the early stages of your own recovery journey).

Anyway, thank you again for all your insights and advice, I'm so grateful for all your posts and feel honoured that you are taking so much time to respond to my thoughts and feelings. It honestly means a lot

[rainydiary]

I resonate with having parents that presented conflicting sides and a mismatch between memories and memories depicted in media.  I hope you find ways to sort through.

[Armee]

Hi Milk and Honey. I'm reading and relating to what you are writing. I'm personally really grateful to be in therapy cause I never had help before that and started in my 40s. It is hard though to go through but you can go really really slow.

The mixed messages you got are really hard to manage and make sense of but so common among us. But just because it is a common experience among a group of traumatized people doesn't make it normal or ok or not that bad. It isn't ok that your dad abused you and it just makes it a bit worse that they would gaslight you by showing curated videos of them being "loving" parents.

I'm glad you have survived and made it here. Keep going!

[milkandhoney11]

Thank you, Armee, it's so good to hear that.
Sometimes I feel guilty because I think I am being ungrateful and judging my parents unfairly, but I cannot deny that their actions have been causing a lot of trauma in my life. From where I am standing right now, it is hard to see how much of an impact their physical and emotional abuse actually had and I am a little scared of all the things I might discover once I start therapy and EMDR etc. but I guess it's what I need to heal so I am trying to be brave