worsens with age?

[radical]

Thankyou everyone who has talked about this.  It's been on my mind even more than usual.  I'm 56 and this year I've had a run of illnesses and injuries that have made me feel more vulnerable, and anxious about the future, than ever.  I'm so aware that my body is no longer as strong and resilient as it used to be and that I will continue to lose health and strength, even in the best case scenario, as time goes on.  And I'm alone.

I used to ignore pain, and I shrugged off illnesses and assumed they would go away.  They almost always did.
At the moment, my feet and legs are numb in places and I have a lot of pain.  I can't walk far.  I'm dependent on professionals, and feel the need of their goodwill, of their listening and believing me.  I've been triggered a lot because it's so like being a child again, and when i was a child and dependent, I was hurt for needing.  It felt like my normal needs as a child were used against me.  It doesn't help that I'm so trigger-happy about the smallest signs of danger.  I can't just behave naturally, because to me, dependence + need =abuse.  It feels like Im enacting a kind of performance of what is actually happening and how I actually feel because to just 'be' would take more trust than I have available to me.

What I'm trying to do is to stop stopping myself from feeling what this is bringing up in me - that I was betrayed and let down repeatedly when I needed to be able to rely on the people closest to me.  That i was treated as an object and came to see myself as an object, and paid such a heavy price for that.

[saylor]

Every post has resonated strongly with me. There are definitely some common themes here, and hoo boy, a lot to process.
Some additional thoughts:
On the issue of resentment, I was referring to resenting my F for the abuse, which caused me so much misery growing up and continues to plague me in other ways to this day, decades later. For the shame, terror, self-hatred, timidity, and absence of joy, confidence, and hope that it left me with. He never faced any consequences whatsoever for what he did to me, and he's dead, so he'll never have to confront the utter mess he left in his wake (not like he'd care, anyway). Also some lingering resentment toward my M who saw what was happening all those years and chose not to intervene or otherwise protect her babies, because that would have required too much effort and risk on her part, and it was her preference that we kids suffer rather than she (in other words, she took the easy way out, at our expense). (He didn't beat her, by the way--only us). I agree that there's a stigma to resentment (think pouty child) that adds to the unpleasantness of feeling it. Validation of ones pain seems elusive (but coming to a place like this definitely helps).
On the issue of aging, I agree that as one grows more frail, that return to physical weakness and the awareness of increasing dependence upon others (or nearing that state) can be very triggering. I had never really put that all together before, but it makes sense: the idea that we'll return to being vulnerable (like when we were children) is frightening, because we're then more exposed to getting abused again. The midlife loss of general confidence in ones competence also feeds into this. I find myself questioning my ability to do things that used to be second-nature to me, and it's scary to think I may rely on others to do things for me one day. I'm also very isolated in life, having no family and no particularly close friends, so I'm even more exposed than the average person in my age group.
On the issue of coming of age, this sounds to me like never really having gotten to grow up (I'm fuzziest on this one...) It's like because I was never properly (sufficiently? completely?) parented, there's a vacuum  or hole inside me, where I'm left wanting that parental care. Because I didn't get it, I feel (or parts of me feel) "stuck" in some stage of childhood. Sometimes I think I catch myself looking for someone to parent me, and that's embarrassing when I realize it (and who knows how often it's happening and I don't realize it?--gah!) This feels so silly, because I've been a self-supporting, working, single person for decades, and yet here I am, hoping a parent-figure will come along and nurture and comfort me, and maybe take care of stuff when I feel I'm collapsing and can't handle it all. (Of course, maybe even non-disordered people feel that way from time to time.)
It's amazing how reading things, and interacting with folks, on these topics is really revealing a lot of interconnected threads that explain so much of what I've experienced and felt.