Tag Archives: pain

PTSD and After Effects of Abusive Relationships

Posted in Mental & Physical Health, Personal by

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A couple nights ago I was feeling so confused and conflicted inside that I started to feel a little bit claustrophobic. Some of you may not understand that feeling if you’ve never had it yourself, but it is something I have experienced more than once when the emotional and rational parts of my brain just can’t seem to find common ground. It is even worse when the emotional parts of your brain are telling you different things at the same time too.

Part of my brain might be telling me that someone does care about me because they buy me stuff (they are so generous!) and make such a fuss over me whenever I see them. While another part of my brain is reminding me of the times they fucked me over and left me to cry alone. From what I understand, this is a common thing experienced by those who have been victims of abuse. There is a real trauma bond that is created between abuser and abused, which makes it so very hard to see the abuser for what they really are and to be able to keep your wits about you when they suddenly do something nice or swear yet again that they’ve “changed”.

I know I have complex PTSD and a buttload of cognitive dissonance going on in this weary head of mine. I know that the healing process is long, and realistically, never-ending in some ways. I know that none of it was my fault, even though I still struggle with feelings of guilt, insecurity, and inadequacy. I know that I have made wide and sweeping relationship changes I had to make for my own welfare, but I still find myself feeling sorrow for what could or should have been.

I am often confused and desperate to understand what is beyond understanding. And I guess I have to make peace with that. I really have no other choice.

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Wishing for a Family

Posted in Asperger's & Autism, Mental & Physical Health, Personal by

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I’ve been severely depressed the past couple days. Two nights in a row I’ve been teary and weepy and feeling very much alone. Late last night I lay curled up on the bathroom floor crying, a position I often find myself in when depression gets severe.

I do have the support of a wonderful husband and he spent probably a good hour yesterday listening to me cry and talk about how I’m feeling. Sadly, he struggles with much of the same issues I do, so I always feel bad unloading on him because it brings out the same feelings in him that I’m suffering with.

I think what is getting to me the most is just the desire for a loving, supportive family, which I simply don’t have. Most of my immediate family is dead, only one member is still living and they seem to not be talking to me right now for some unknown reason. In some ways it might be best if we don’t talk since the constant ups and downs of the relationship really affect my moods, but it is still not easy to know that your only living close relative doesn’t seem to want anything to do with you or seem to care about you.

I wish I could replace those family relationships I have lost, but where do you find family if you don’t have one? You can’t exactly go shopping for one or even expect friends to step into those positions (if I even had friends). Sure, I could make friends if I tried harder maybe, but it still wouldn’t be FAMILY. It wouldn’t fill the huge hole in my heart left by those who have left me.

Family Issues and Ex-Pastor’s Wife Resentment

Posted in Asperger's & Autism, Mental & Physical Health, Personal, Spiritual or Inspirational by

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So I am going through a couple things right now. For one, my already strained relationship with my mother seems to be going farther downhill. To get a bit of the backstory on our relationship, you can check out this post. Anyhow, ever since I confronted my mother about the past, I could feel her slowly backing away. She now lives in another state and at first she would call me once or twice a week and would call back within a day if I called her. Now she doesn’t return my calls for a week at a time and it has been three weeks since she last called me, even though she said she would call me in a few days the last time we talked.

I can’t help but feel a little snubbed and like I am slowly being phased out of her life, which doesn’t surprise me now that she has remarried and doesn’t need me so much anymore. This has always pretty much been the pattern when she gets a man in her life. I stop mattering as much. Honestly, there have been times I’ve considered going “no contact” because the little bit of contact we have now only tends to make me sadder, and the more I feel put aside and ignored, the more I hurt.

I’ve also been dealing with some pent up resentment I didn’t even realize I had about the years I spent as a pastor’s wife. For the first 11 years or so of our 15 year marriage, my husband was a pastor. In the past few years we have kind of drifted from the faith and become agnostic, which is a huge change from what our lives used to be. However, I just realized when having a conversation with my husband the other night, how much being a pastor’s wife for so many years deeply bothered me.

For one thing, I constantly felt judged by the congregation and compared to previous or other pastors’ wives that the congregation knew. I was not old-fashioned. I was not meek and submissive. I did not want to teach, play piano, or lead anything. It just isn’t my personality. My social anxiety makes leading anything a horrifying thought for me, but yet, I found myself almost forced to sometimes be in these roles I hated. I was pretty much forced to teach at times, and while I loved the kids, I felt panic at the responsibility. No one helped or trained me, I was just thrown right in. At one point, I had a panic attack and burst into tears about my fear of teaching in front of the head pastor, his wife, and my husband and yet none of them seemed to take it seriously and pretty much just patted me on the shoulder and said I would be all right. But I wasn’t. Even when I found out I had autism and tried to explain to the head pastor why that made social things so hard for me, his response was that everyone has those problems. But no – everyone does not!!!

My husband now realizes how many mistakes he made by pushing me. He is sorry and has genuinely apologized for putting pressure on me and making me feel like I had to do things that made me anxious to the point of sickness. He realizes now that he learned that behavior from his own parents who pressured him constantly about being involved in church and often tended to ignore his feelings if he didn’t want to do something. Like most people, he was acting out the unhealthy patterns of his family as an adult and unfortunately, I got the brunt of it.

Literally Drowning My Sorrows…

Posted in Asperger's & Autism, Mental & Physical Health, Personal by

Well, today has been a really shitty day 😦 I only got about 2-3 hours of sleep last night, even with my Seroquel. Something happened last night that really upset me and made me just want to run away. Unfortunately, I have nowhere to run to.

Today I decided to go to a local park with a dam. I knew it would be crazy there with all the recent rain and snow, and felt that maybe seeing the turbulence roaring inside me portrayed in front of me might make me feel somehow better:

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Even way above the dam, and behind a fence, the water was so violent that I got splashed pretty good. You can’t see it in the photo below, but my pants were much wetter than my jacket. Even my hair got a little bit soaked by the spray:

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I was crying a good bit of the time I was there, just from all the stuff going on inside me, and I think one poor guy thought I was going to jump in. He came over and started telling me horror stories about people who had jumped in and died. One was truly sad about a family dog that fell in, so the mom jumped in to save it, and the dad jumped in to save her, so the two kids watching behind the fence watched all three of them drown. Such a horrible story. It made me forget my own pain for a little bit and feel empathy for those poor kids.

Going No Contact with Abusers?

Posted in Asperger's & Autism, Mental & Physical Health, Personal by

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Lately I have been really struggling with the temptation to go “no contact” with someone who has been abusive to me throughout my life in different ways. If you follow my blog closely, you can probably guess who I might be talking about. I did manage about a year ago to get some physical distance from this person, which helped a lot, but I still have such feelings of dread, sadness, anger, hurt, and despair whenever I hear from them (or more consistently lately, when I am ignored by them).

I know my therapist would probably do a happy dance if I decided to go “no contact” with this person. They won’t say so outright, but it is clear to me that they see that the relationship is not conducive to my healing. The last time I saw my therapist, she asked me what I was getting out of hanging onto the relationship…and I couldn’t really say. Other than hurt and frustration, I’m not sure I’m getting much at all.

However, I can’t help but feel that if I totally disengage with this person, it will cause me to feel guilty and fearful. Guilty because I was groomed from a young age to feel responsible for this person and to be their caretaker. Additionally, I feel guilt about what my other family members might think. The fear would mostly be due to the fear of confrontation, whether in person or through more passive-aggressive avenues. The thought of letting go also plays on my fear of being all alone and unloved.

Rejection Issues – Am I Overreacting?

Posted in Mental & Physical Health, Personal by

I tend to be an overly sensitive person who easily feels rejected or uncared for by people who may not actually mean to make me feel that way. I know I have some self-esteem issues and take things personally too often. Right now there is a situation that is leaving me wondering if I am feeling legitimately rejected or if I am overreacting a little bit, so I figured I would share my feelings here and see what others think.

There is a person in my life, a close family member, that is sending me rather mixed messages and honestly confusing me. What is confusing to me is that when I do talk to this person, they say they really miss me and love me, but they rarely ever call me and even if I call them, they often take days to bother getting back to me, if they do at all. Is it unreasonable that this is leaving me feeling like they don’t really care?

I will say that the relationship in question already has a lot of “water under the bridge” so to say. There is a lot of hurt and a sense of betrayal from the past, which this person has often promised to make up for, but the way they actually act towards me makes me wonder if they really want to mend the relationship at all.

The Most Humiliating Experience of My Life

Posted in Asperger's & Autism, Mental & Physical Health, Personal by

Today I’m doing something rare for me…two posts in one day! I didn’t plan to post this second entry today, but I feel compelled to do so and get something off my chest that I’m tired of hiding. For a long time I debated whether to tell my real story or not, because even when our family hurts us, we still feel a need to protect them.

So this post is about the most humiliating and potentially traumatic experience of my life. It happened when I was 15 years old. At that point I had already endured a rough childhood of turmoil, including being surrounded by and sometimes the target of verbal, mental and physical abuse, my parents’ constant instability in relationships, and the death of my father when I was 12. So, I was already pretty banged up emotionally and mentally. Not to mention the fact that I had undiagnosed high-functioning autism, which made it really hard for me to find my place in the world or understand it.

Anyhow, when I was 15, a boy who was I had been school friends with for years started showing interest in dating me. He was two grades ahead of me and 17 years old at the time. I agreed, but wasn’t sure if I really wanted to date or just be friends. So, I did bring him to my house a few times to hang out with him. In the end, I decided I just wanted to be friends and we decided not to date. Ironically enough (as you shall soon see), my mother actually helped me officially “break up” with him. We never kissed or anything like that, but the kids at school thought we were together and he was technically the first boy I ever “brought home”.

So after deciding to just be friends, I thought life would just go back to normal. But I was wrong. My mom started acting sort of weird. She was sneaking around having mysterious phone conversations and I even once caught her hiding outside, smoking, something I had NEVER seen her do before! I knew something was up, so one night I quietly picked up an extra phone extension to see who it was she was talking with at night. I was shocked to hear her and the guy I had been “dating” exchanging “I love you’s”. I confronted her after the call and she admitted to being in a relationship with him. I was angry, humiliated, shocked, and sickened.

After that, she quit hiding it and started taking off on dates with him pretty much every night, leaving me all alone night after night after night, or even dumping me off on random people so they could go away for days at a time. Before long, she moved him in and I had to live with them. By this time, everyone at school knew that he was dating my mother, which brought me a lot of uncomfortable questions about the situation, since they had all thought I had dated him. I even overheard teachers talking about my mom and the boy. Everyone treated me like my family was insane, and I felt like they had a right to do so because we WERE insane. It felt like Jerry Springer type stuff.

One of the most hurtful incidents I remember during this whole time was when I got into a fight with my mom’s new boyfriend. It was just a verbal fight, but I made him so mad with what I said that he punched me. I was so hurt by this that I jumped on my bike and rode away, even with my mom yelling after me to stop. Eventually I came back home, and instead of making him apologize to me for hitting me, my mom threatened to send me away to live with relatives. At this point, I felt like I was nothing and no one wanted me.

My mom married this boy the very day he turned 18. So I was going to the same school with my new “step-father”. Even though school had always been a refuge for me in the past, now it felt like torture every single day. I started skipping constantly and barely ended up graduating in the end because of all of it. When I was 16 we moved to another state and I went to a new school, but the feeling of shame followed me and I had given up on caring about school or about anything else. I was soon diagnosed with depression for the first time (not surprisingly!)

To this day I still hold a lot of resentment, anger, feelings of betrayal, and embarrassment about the whole thing. I have a relationship with my mother, but it is precarious and not the most trusting.