Today I’m grateful for feeling…

Validated about Cameron but also grief. I shared the experience with my recovery partner who really validated that yes, even if it was something he needed off his chest, context matters he had neither the right person nor place disclose that. Which probably adds to his isolation because I don’t know who or where WOULD be but that isn’t my responsibility. And maybe she was the wrong person to ask since she’s in the same SIA/CSA boat as I am. I still feel that grief because our friendship will never be the same and likely may never feel comfortable to me again. 

Angry. Reading the Complex PSTD book, I realize how much comes from my father besides the sexual trauma. I remember thinking as a teen that I had “worked through my daddy issues” and moved onto mommy issues. That was a thought that would verbatim go through my head all the time. Now here I am, rediscovering all these ways he made me suffer, and I’m pissed. I’m pissed at those crimes, I’m pissed that I thought I was done and now I’m not, and I’m pissed that I keep finding more! The more I dive, the more I’m willing to look, it’s also obvious. Now that I know what a trigger is, what it looks like, what it does, I’m beginning to look into where it started and so many roads lead back to him. Sometimes I willfully try to make my reactions the cause of something else but no. He terrorized me, bullied me, touched me, made me touch him, had me watch. For YEARS. No fucking wonder I jump to the ceiling when someone comes up behind me, have an inner critic battling for dominance in my brain, can’t handle being lovingly and intimately touched by my partner. I was so fucking young, how sick. Call me crazy but I feel like if you have a kid you are making a pact with the world to do right by them, let alone not fucking abuse them. Great, I’m in touch with my anger, my therapist would be happy. What the fuck do you do with this??

Utterly incapable of crying and frustrated about it. For all my feelings, all my revelations, I am absolutely barren of tears. I know I have to cry. I *know* it. The book says grief is the way through, and that crying is the way through that grief. How do I make myself cry? When is there time? How can I feel safe enough to take on something that big? How will I be able to survive it? I feel so clogged and pent up. But even more than that, I feel pure, unmitigated terror at the thought of feeling that deeply. Terror so extreme it makes my mind go blank when I try to think of crying, it’s like grabbing at an eel. Do I watch a sad movie, listen to Adagio For Strings? The problem is, yes, that is what I should do. I could stop typing right now and go listen and I would cry. And yet I won’t. I can’t describe how strong this resistance is. I’ll keep hopping from task to task, SIA homework to a meeting to this project, feeling accomplished while I completely ignore the path I’m supposed to take. I’m so angry about it, my inner children are raging at the world that they’re being asked to truly feel.

Humbled. So I took my own advice and stopped typing and went to lie down. I cuddled my stuffed crab, got a tissue box, and queued every single song that usually makes me cry compulsively. I started crying but it felt so forced, contrived. Like I was faking my body into it. It even felt a bit violating, to be forcing such an intimate emotion on myself when I wasn’t ready. But I didn’t know I wasn’t ready until I tried. I gave up after like 20 minutes and felt very guilty. I guess you can’t force this kind of thing. I’ll cry when I’m ready and feel safe enough to? This sucks.

Feelin’ good…

• I added Metamucil to my diet a couple months ago because some Redditor found it helped with their binging. It did help with the binging but it also seems to have fixed my chronically upset GI tract?? Not to be gross but I could probably count how many solid poops I’ve had in my lifetime, it’s that few. But since the Metamucil I’m like a new being. I feel so free of all the bathroom scares I used to have, like I can exist normally. It’s incredibly liberating. I’m so grateful to that random internet person who will never know they changed my life.
• The Complex PTSD book talks about emotional flashbacks, which seems to be the clinical term for being triggered. For cPTSD patients, these are like PTSD flashbacks but distinctly lack memories. It’s where your rational brain isn’t talking to your animal brain, you’re feeling emotions that are more from the past than from the present, and you’re completely reactive.  I know for me I feel like a wounded animal, completely out of control and powerless to stop my reactions until I can calm down. For context, maybe 2 times a week (used to be 5ish) I wake up in a complete panic when the alarm goes off. Heart rate pounding through the roof, sweaty, can’t breathe. Not being someone that remembers my dreams upon waking, I have recently been thinking that maybe I’m having memories surface in my sleep? And the book completely validates me! You can have emotional flashbacks in your sleep and wake up reacting to them! In all my google searches, nothing like this ever came up but it didn’t seem serious enough to go to the doctor for. After 10 mins I’ve kind of regulated, although some days I’m off kilter for the whole day. I feel grateful to have found this, to have an explanation for this weird way of waking up that I’ve always suffered from, and to know I can deploy regulating techniques to fix my mornings!!!