Mourning

[helliepig]

I'm finding it hard to engage with life at the moment as It's as if I'm mortally tired of trying. Tired of trying to manage the shifting parts of myself, tired of trying to be enough and get it right.

I'm dissociative and have many fragments and parts. For instance, I have a good job and can be really sociable and bouncy and enthusiastic.
But when I go home there is another set of "me"s that are so automatic and heavy and stuck it has been hard to see where they kick in, all I feel is the heavy bloated confused misery that is those parts.
So I've been trying to find those parts. I think I am making progress because I think I am beginning to get a sense of who they are.
They are holding me really trapped and I can see that but until I heal them....

For instance, I get a powerful icy panicky loneliness at weekends where my son is away. Sometimes I can plan things and others I just am capable of nothing more than hiding. My house becomes a mess and I feel shocked at how alone I am - always have been . Somewhere inside I cannot believe it is true, that I was supposed to be and have so much more than this.
So I look at other people's ordinary functionality and family life and the fact they don't dread their home life and feel really inadequate.
If I think about it changing, - meeting someone, getting a family life, I panic. I cannot imagine someone here. I can't ever find anyone. I find men approaching me terrifying. I convince myself there is no one left out there. And with people I often feel so worthless and bad and empty I just want to run away.
And so I vacillate between not being able to bear the loneliness and panic at their being no hope.

Lately I've promised myself to go out and experience people differently and I'm slowly doing it. Sometimes I retreat into my fear and call it off, and often my stuff kicks in and spoils it so I want to stop, but sometimes I've had a good time. And so there is a tiny grain of hope that wasn't there before.

I know it will take a lot of hard work to change.
Meanwhile I am trying to heal the terrifying parts that kick in at home. Up to now they have been too scary and full of such immense pain I didn't dare, but bit by bit I am getting the courage to sit with the feelings. I have come across Dr Jonice Webb and her childhood emotional neglect posts and that, and all my therapy learnt tricks, are slowly getting there.

I woke up yesterday and in that half world between waking and sleeping saw very clearly how awfully nasty and cruel my family were compared to how families are supposed to be places of love and succour, and I truly understood why I am so afraid, so self hating, so lonely.
That is painful but frees up mourning rather than stuckness. It feels more hopeful - at times. I think I am starting to grieve the absence of that vital mother love and security and all the cruelty I endured.
There is a part of me that does not want to be conscious, cannot bear to exist. It has wiped out anything of  meaning for me at the moment but I am trying not to panic and dismiss it as depression. It is only by feeling it that it is processed and the understanding comes. I just have to trust that one day I will be able to feel loved and involved and just worry about normal everyday human pain as opposed to this primal stuff slung round my neck.

[Blueberry]

I'm finding it hard to engage with life at the moment as It's as if I'm mortally tired of trying. Tired of trying to manage the shifting parts of myself, tired of trying to be enough and get it right.

I'm dissociative and have many fragments and parts.

I so get that. I've been working on myself flat out for about 18 years and was doing so before then too, off and on in waves.
I used to manage a whole bunch of inner children and teens, though they are less prevalent now. Just 'keeping going' is one of the things I have most trouble with. I have no solution but jsut want to say "standing with you".

[helliepig]

thanks Blueberry

[JamesG]

lot of resonance for me on your post here hellipig.

C-PTSD seems to be all about phases, and this one of yours was me about four months back. That frustration is a VERY good sign.

I think that there is a process where by you have to get nearer to the fire before you reach the fire escape. Seeing the sheer abnormality of your trauma, in yours and my case the family, is important. But it's hard, because a family, no matter how off the wall they are. provide you with your means of seeing the world and it is very hard to turn that round and realise that this most basic of human processes was as mad as a bucket of frogs is tough. I think it comes down siding with one world instead of another, and your family doesn't win that. At the end of the day, normal is normal and yes, what is that really? All families are odd, of course, but some are more odd than others. Posting a great link from spartan life coach at the bottom that was huge for me on this.

Dissentangling the bits of yourself that were created by your family from who you really are and really should be is tough. It takes time and can be very hard work, but you have to keep looking at how you are and look for the clues as to outside influences and the true needs you have for yourself. Do you clean the house for yourself? Or do you clean it to avoid criticism, that kind of thing. I got into a mantra of that for a while and I think it really paid off. Abusive families train you, first they teach you how to walk, then they teach you how to kneel. You are too intelligent to accept this and so your mind is fighting back, so take heart, the pain is a sign of strength.

And yes, the public face and the private pain I recognise only too well. We've grown up using social skills to navigate the world, but they don't work when it is just us, and being co-dependant people pleasers, we are not good at using these things for ourselves. But you should, so next time you have a free weekend, plan ahead and indulge yourself in anyway you can. Book a massage, get the movies that only you like. Phone an old freind. Book a couple of sailors... anything. Be good to yourself. Your sense of self has to be fought for.

I'm a bit further down this road maybe, and recovery times vary, but I will say that my recovery accelerated when I turned to face the deeper story. You have to dig out ALL the splinters, or the wound will go on aggravating you. But you know what is normal, and you have seen what is abnormal and you have made a choice, now you have to cut away any remaing cobwebs linking you to the spiders.

Here's that link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goDE9ODAAgw&t=10s

[helliepig]

Thanks for the link James, and your words of support. I like the notion of the fire and the fire escape.

I kind of known this about my family for a while - I've had very little to do with them for years and years other than the odd foray there for family funerals which only serve to show me how shut down self centred and basically weird they are.

But that understanding alone doesn't really cut it - what I'm struggling with now, and what I think you're describing, isn't so much "them" as much as the wounds I'm left with, fear of people and confusing contradictions.  I've been aware of it all for a long time but just at the moment I'm feeling the pain keenly , and like you say, the frustration. I think I am feeling it all at a much deeper level, the mourning level. I've been here so many times before and seen this so many times before, but in a less intense, way. I'm letting myself feel the full force of it and it's hard. Despairing and intensely painful.

Beneath all the crazy stuff inflicted, the primary wound is one of feeling  not valid, wanted, seen, chosen, noticed, important. Always feeling left out, unnoticed. Walking in a crowd of people and seeing why they are all lovable but there is no space for me to be noticed, Valueless, invisible, always feeling I'm not real or what I do doesn't count. Unable to find my place or my people.

And another equal part of me not wanting to be noticed - because that bit meant abuse or contradictory crazy *. People and families are not safe to be near. I cannot trust myself as anything that comes out of my mouth is bad, wrong, inflammatory, inspires hate or attack and people ganging up against me. That is the bit I am trying hard to reprogram, to weaken that belief.

Being trapped between "terror or isolation" and "terror of closeness" isn't nice. There isn't much comfy space in there!

I know it has to be baby steps to avoid over facing and triggering the scared children that sit either side of that precipice. Going back to the notion of fire escapes, it's as if I can't escape the fire as either way still the fire escapes seem to lead to more heat and flames.  One day I hope I will see a way down that leads to safety but never having had a notion of  being safely alive as the real me, that's a hard thing to imagine. I hide in pretence and achievement for a while and feel artificially safe but it doesn't hold for so long before the cracks appear and I realise it's all been smoke and mirrors.

I now where this comes from but it's so hard to find a way to pierce that inner wall to get in and heal it.  There's something really yukky and stuck and existential terrifying underneath it.

I know there is so much more. I've achieved a great deal in my life in reality - but none of it really counts compared to this stuff - when you've built your life around being a success, an achiever, it's hard when you feel none of that matters a damn because actually you've not got any nearer what you really want What I want now is to lose this constant existential dread.

The hardest thing at the moment is knowing I am not reacting like a normal person. I know I overreact to things and I can't explain it cos it's too complex and contradictory and I'm tired of being that person!!

[JamesG]

well I completely understand those feelings and thoughts, only too well.

I feel I'm coming through that finally and I can only really offer my own observations on it by a bit of back story and hope that finds ressonance.

My confidence had some severe holes in it and I'd grown to assume that it was just who I was. It wasn't. My brother had gone all out to deconstruct me from childhood reaching a severe crescendo in my early 20s. That's a bad time to be abused in that way and I went away  into the world with some very deep programming. There was stuff I knew on the surface, but what was deep down was far harder to get at. A lot of it I didn't even know was there.

It took the crisis of my mother's illness and death and my partners decline into alcoholism to force me in to close quarter combat with my insecurities and feeling of worthlessness before I realised the true extent of his malignancy. As C-PTSD hit home I was obliged to dig deep and realised that I'd had trauma after trauma in my formative years.

The problem with families is that they gloss over the wounds they create and dismiss any dissent. This protects the abuse in an ongoing programme of gaslighting and it reinforces the damage it is causing to the likes of us, the least abusive of all. It is the most sensitive and the most empathic that get the worst of it, internalising this insane behaviour, taking it on like Christ taking the sins of the world. Families are like castles, the thick walls serving both as a defence and a prison, trapping a mounting madness, free from the soothing normalisation of a wider society. Many families are run like failed states and dictaorships, some of which make North Korea look like the Waltons.

this
https://genius.com/John-cooper-clarke-a-distant-relation-lyrics

But when you escape you still have the marks. When I was a student I worked in a supermarket in Bournemouth in southern England, a sea side retirement town. There was a big Jewish retirement community nearby and it was regular to see the concentration camp tattoos on the forearms. That's an extreme example, but that's the sad thing about families, they drive you mad and they won't go away. They scramble your brain like eggs and then leave you to try and make sense of the world equipped with dung tinted glasses and hypervigilance.

And, of course, because you know only one type of person, you meet more of the same and each new relationship looks like the last until you are certain it IS you.

It isn't.

For me, the big recovery tool has been that realisation that what was happening in my childhood was NOT right. IT wasn't right at all. And something absurd and cruel and !@£$% up like that was bound to do damage. Festering wounds go on and on and they fill you with poison, they don't just go away, so the only way is to take that time and measure it against what is considered an average childhood (not a superb one) and ask if it was acceptable. Of course, it wasn't.

So the next thing is to look at the effect it has had on you, decide what about your nature and personality is YOU, and not THEM, and start dropping anything that drives you other than your own hands. There needs to be one set of hands on that steering wheel. Then clear out the back seat. None of us are born insecure, none of us are born unhappy. Life puts things in us and we live with them. Whatever anyone ever tells you, you do have control of that and people can change if the revelation is big enough. If we can be changed by bad things, we can be changed by good. We are after causes not symptoms in the end, looking for the roots and not the branches. Kill the roots and the weed will fall over of its own accord.

Trust me on this heliipig, there is only one fire, and that is the causes of your initial pain and trauma, everything will have followed from that. Understand that and you will be in better shape to go down the fire escape able to make life decisions that minimise future disasters. Understand that first inferno and you will have filled your life with a sprinkler system. Go with this pain and see it as the challenge it is, it's a grudge match between you and fate and it is a match you are about to win.

[helliepig]

Wise words James.
I hear what you're saying. I guess my forays out are me trying to learn what IS me and what isn't and dropping the latter.

I've socialised a million times before but not from a place of the real me, vulnerable and undefended, (or relatively!..... ) and willing to learn rather than poised to run.

One problem I have that a fair proportion of my trauma was preverbal, and extremely formative eg not being wanted, or celebrated from birth - they wanted a boy so abandoned and blamed me - and Mum not connecting with me right from word go. Not that she was able to connect much anyway I think. But my memories are of her bright and elegant and capable and always with someone else not me (that was probably her false self) and hating me. The very word "mother" conjures up instant cold, hard, distant images.

So not being seen, mirrored, held, soothed, celebrated or even seen. She seemed to blame me for her life. (The rest of it sex abuse as a baby and so on I've detailed elsewhere)

So a lot of what blocks my fire escape is deep rooted visceral fear and behaviours that are from very early hardwiring and thus hard to withstand, let alone override, that date from the earliest parts of my life. They have over the years of therapy created nightmares, neurological and physical symptoms of such intensity I would not have believed it if it hadn't happened to me. I have literally run away from people and things because something inside suddenly decries it, with no comprehension of why,  and there are a lot of existential dread- like feelings and a deep emptiness which is hard to define.

So it's not just about dumping off what I have that isn't mine, it's all the loss and absence and the shame of not knowing "how to do it all" ie, be enough. i find it really painful when others talk about family, belonging, who they're doing what with, the ordinary stuff of life that they do without thinking that makes me feel so empty and inadequate. Even when I myself do those things it usually feels empty and "not real" because a tiny part of me only wants to do it with "mummy" and my family.
...........Odd how much you can yearn for something that was dreadful - or is it just the absence of not having it. Damn it's confusing........

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/tech-support/201703/daughters-unloving-mothers-mourning-what-you-deserved

Although I've healed a lot of stuff,  the very early neglect and lack of love and mirror is definitely the hardest to heal. It's so amorphous and vague and in every pore of your body it's hard to see it let alone understand it.

At the moment I am trying to stay with this layer of feeling rather than dismiss it as depression and fight or medicate my way out of it and run back to the happy part of me. I know that other part of me is there, I just gotta find a way to connect the dots between those two sides of me and heal the young damaged parts.

I carry it around and try and feel it and let those parts know it is ok now, and hope that over time it will sort itself out.

Bit by bit I think I am starting to clear all this out - but it is hard to know who the real me is beneath all this as it wasn't defined in the first place, it wasn't allowed to exist with any value at all not even in the simple task of being welcomed into the world or given basic safety and connection at the beginning - let alone something as lofty as love or caring!

There's a part of me that simply does not understand living and actually is afraid to be conscious. I sit at home trying to figure out what I want to do and all I feel is this emptiness and the desire to hide away from life in permanent sleep,

[JamesG]

I hear you. All the same, odd as it sounds, I think it is a good sign. The reason I say that is that you are expressing it with increasing objectivity and that means that the wood for the trees effect is wearing off. You know what, you know why and the future is becoming something you are considering and trying to figure out.

In my case I had to suffer a lot to look at causes and the depth of the injury to my confidence. Seeing the way it had affected me all my life and was holding me back even now, was something I had to look at. Who wants to feel so manipulated and changed by such darkness?

But it's all down to perceptions, there are times I feel "marked", "damaged" and "doomed" but there are times when I totally don't. There are many reasons for that pendulum swing but with C-PTSD, we know that with careful and steady work, we can alter those neural pathways and get back the person we should have been were it not for the abuse.

Time and again I have found that I have confounded that inner and outer critic garbage and just lived. I could have stayed in my shell but I got out and contradicted the programming. I know it's terrifying at times and it can seem insurmountable, but you CAN face this down. You are an articulate intelligent person and you just need to reach out to the right people to start building a new map of your life. You have experienceed the worst, now start reaching out for the kind hearts, the honest souls.

You've got this.

[helliepig]

Thank you James. That all really hit home.