next layer of the onion

[JamesG]

so, CPTSD entering a new phase. All good but hard work. I'm in to a new period. The analogy is very much a boil - it's looking pretty angry but it's a good sign, it's gonna look a whole lot worse before it pops.

Harder to explain in many ways but I'm up against the deeper issues and learning to unpick some of the core things that got me here. Learning to stop and rest is like picking up spiders, I have been deep programmed to push and push and push - not for my benefit, but because the people around me have been driven by these insane guilts and image based needs to appear busy, important or beyond reproach. This is a new thing for me, I didn't see that til recently but it's clear to me now that the people around me all my life have been driven by some very warped motivations. It manifested itself in all sorts of odd ways in a host of people I know - the need to appear something and to display visible suffering while you did it, is something they all have in common. I used to think I was the odd one out because I was more carefree about that and I was attacked for it endlessly, especially by my brother, but it was very much a thing of my circle and I now see how much I didn't fit with it. It's called Protestant work ethic

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-protestant-work-ethic-heaven-knows-im-miserable-now-8563139.html

Brother took this attitude to extremes and then failed spectacularly, which is a bit like Superman falling off a roof and breaking his foot repeatedly for 55 years. My business partner strives forever to do extra homework and get a better exam result than an A; baffled that the world is not clapping him for his effort like they do Kin Jung Un. Mum, darling darling mum, was of course, a saint, a holiness factory loved by everyone who met her, at least that's what it says on the wikipedia entry she hoped I'd write for her because she was too lazy to do it herself. My ex was tortured by her own secondhand motivations, the by product of her status-mad mother, a woman who drove herself and her children along with the sort of bad atmospheres you can use to take barnacles off a battleship. All of them were labouring under these dreadful silly clouds and then reflecting it back at everyone around them as if it was something wonderful to be shared - the manual for a perfect life. But it isn't. It's a recipe for self-loathing, unhappiness and a life of endless disappointment. Do all the right things and surely, life will follow.?

Well... no.

No wonder I was attacked, I was confounding their logic, defying the gravity that they think makes them grounded but which superglues them to the baggage carousel at the worst provincial airport on earth. But there I was, joking and laughing; making light of things to keep buoyant, finding ways around the things that blocked me and improvising my way along with a spring in my step. HERETIC! Hadn't I read the memo? You have to suffer for your art, along with suffering for your dinner, your health, your peace of mind and your misplaced cool. You have to suffer when you cook, you read, you learn and you play. You need to display abject misery and shame while you exercise, have sex, watch a movie and wash. Sackcloth and ashes, forever battling through a seige that was lifted before it had ever begun, a need to appear heroic to a world that is not even slightly interested in their intellectual austerity. No wonder I horrified them. And not just when I was trying to just live my life in "normal" times, then I had to go and fry their duty obsessed minds by out performing them at their own game after Mum had her stroke. I called their bluff. "Goodness me, the trivial clown is catching the baby, and catching it well, does not compute." So, they attacked. They threw more and more responsibility at me to make me crack – but I didn't crack, I just kept going. But once they'd failed to make me buckle, they began to attack my coping mechanisms, my humour, my enthusiasm, my tolerance and the strain began to really hit home. But I held on and then, when it was all over.... then I cracked.

I've leaned so much about all this recently, In my new life there has been a trend towards people who have fought back against this conditioning, and it's good, but for me it's been so amorphous and vague. My four horsemen were a cocktail rather than a single hit of hemlock, a complex blend of four messed up puppies making a single epiphany harder. But the key to it now is that I don't ultimately need to understand them, either as a group or individually, I now need to see myself as the only issue that needs consideration. It's how I feel and how I live that matters now. They lose relevance every day.

But this is all hard fought for, I'm crying in my sleep a lot right now. I'm clearly starting to vent the deep held stuff. The noticeable effect is that the huge part of my head that was taken up with this garbage is starting to empty, but it leaves an odd void behind it and I find it quite alarming. It's like suddenly having no legs to run with or having an arm in a sling and feeling you need to be juggling. It creates an odd see-saw effect where I relax, then panic, relax panic relax panic..... I'm an agoraphobic in a greenhouse.

Docs and counsellors and friends are all screaming at me to rest and recuperate, and I'm finally listening. But it's so odd. After all that concerted effort and mental strain I just stop? Oh sure.... er... how? But I've got some really good peeps building up now, proper supporters who seem to feel I'm worth it. My older friends, yeah well... let's not go there.

Writing and its promotion is having to take a bit of a back seat as part of all this, I was pushing there too, the thing now is to say, it's ok, it's not going anywhere, recover. My plan now is to deliberately retreat into the welfare bubble, keep a small amount of work ticking over and write as part of my recovery as well as a long term strategy. Time to mellow.

New happier music
Healthy food
Exercise
Art
Fun
Life

tis time

[Three Roses]

Brilliant! Fantastic! "Picking up spiders" haha! Although I had to mentally insert something else there, as I am quite fond of spiders.

Your gift for writing is not going anywhere. I've read that our capacity for understanding, insight, and compassion is greater than in what I call the "Normies", that segment of the populace that have never experienced trauma. The silver lining, perhaps one that we would never have chosen, but incandescently silver all the same.

I'm happy for you that the denial and suppression is being washed away. Thanks for sharing.

[helliepig]

There were bits of what you write that really speak to me. The crazy carousel. The way everything hurts while you push yourself
I've realised how much I've run around trying to look successful and happy to deny the terrible internal critic all the while feeling lonely and shut off and an imposter inside
Recently I had a few days where I suddenly found me, remembered what makes me happy, it was such a relief to say "this is me, this is what I want" and experience a different way of being, to feel like I had a right to choose, a right to be on this planet the way I wanted.. All the activity and trying to live up to "their" ways seemed so stupid
But I've lost it now.
Guess at least if you find yourself, however briefly, it's a start
I get "the void" too. Hard to sit with that.

[JamesG]

It's a great sign that you feel the beginnings of your self again. It's a pig when it goes again but you known it is there. Write it down, make lists, journal, look at things as objectivly as you can. Treat your recovery as  a project, something worthy of interest in it's own right, that really works for me. We are going to come out of this a whole lot wiser.

[helliepig]

We most certainly are! In my better moments I find it so exciting. Then the clouds cover the sun again...

But at least once we've seen the path it's not the floundering we were doing before. We aren't doing the trained monkey thing, getting the same results by doing the same thing over and over. We can question our self attacks and self defeating beliefs and hang onto the glimpse of the way forward.

Sounds like you have been doing some incredible work.

[JamesG]

defiance Helliepig, I am f**** if I am gonna hand these people a convenient narrative by combusting. Defiance is everything, we know these people deflect their own failings at the person kind enough to empathise, well that ends now. Now we save the good stuff for ourselves and the people worth loving.