u/PanoramicViewer

That's it really.

I just left a group chat with my cousins, that I set up around the time our aunt was dying a couple of years ago.

One of my abusers was part of the group. Seeing comments from him was just too distressing for me.

I'm so sad that only 2 of my cousins have made any effort to understand why I have greatly reduced contact with my abusers and enablers, and the others just... don't care?

Sigh.

I know I'm doing the right thing to protect myself, and I'm getting to the stage where I realise that they are not worth wasting my precious energy on. This excites me because it feels like a shift in the right direction. I've done a lot of grieving. But for now, it is unfair and it still hurts.

A friend told me this week that I am too much.

It really stung at first. When you know you are drowning, it doesn't really help to be told you're behaving like a drowning woman.

Then I realised, this tells me more about them than about me. I already know my flaws and how needy I am right now.

I may be "too much" for them. That tells me about their capacity. It doesn't tell me anything new about myself.

And suddenly, I understood that the only person that can fully hold me, is me. For a few moments I was terrified.

Then something beautiful happened. I realised, there is a strength within me I didn't know I had. A capacity to hold myself tight and promise to never let myself go. To love myself despite my flaws. Not to fawn to try and rescue the relationship. To love myself fiercely and deeply.

In that moment I knew, I'm going to make it through this. I'm not a drowning woman after all. I know how to swim.

It took a lot of work to accept that my childhood was 'not normal' as I came from a lot of pseudomutuality and heavy gaslighting. But I feel like I got there a few months ago.

Now I feel like the next stage requires acceptance that I carry deep harm from my childhood, that I'm injured.

I feel a bit like a wounded animal that keeps struggling to get up, when what it needs is to lie still and let its wounds be tended to and then rest and heal. I think I'm trying too hard to get well, if that's possible.

My sense is I need to lean in to acceptance somehow but I'm finding this so difficult.

I think a few things are keeping me stuck -

Deep conditioning that if I'm not performing perfectly, I'll be abandoned

A feeling of being 'trapped' in a state of recovery, which is in itself triggering

Fear that if I relax into acceptance that I am injured, I can't see how I will emerge from it and fear it will tip into despair or depression.

O wise souls who are further on, do you have any pearls of wisdom for this weary traveler?

I'm so grateful to all those who post and comment here. I have learned so much. Knowing what to expect, so their tricks don't catch me by surprise, has helped me so much.

Yesterday my mother sent my husband a text saying "I sent PanoramicViewer a message, can you see that she gets it."

The first text in a year and it is like she's barking orders at him. No greeting, no basic manners. No asking how he is.

She's blocked on my phone and no, he won't be doing her bidding.

They are so predictable.

I have a sibling who was both a perpetrator and an ally when I was being harmed by others. It left me trauma bonded. It has been a year since we last had any meaningful communication. They asked if I was ok. I explained as gently as I could that my childhood experiences still impacted me. And that was it... they never replied.

It hurts. I have cried many tears and raged as well.

I have a sibling who was both a perpetrator and an ally when I was being harmed by others. It left me trauma bonded. It has been a year since we last had any meaningful communication. They asked if I was ok. I explained as gently as I could that my childhood experiences still impacted me. And that was it... they never replied.

It hurts. I have cried many tears and raged as well.

What symbolic acts have you used to help you process the many layers of grief that CPTSD recovery inevitably involves?

Looking for ideas that I can use in therapy, alone, or possibly with found family.

I'm reading a book by Francis Weller where he suggests digging a hole in the ground, lying on your belly and pouring your grief out into the earth, asking it to hold it... then covering up the hole.

Also interested in anyone's experiences with the use of symbolic acts. The idea both appeals and terrifies me with what may emerge.

I've used the phrase symbolic acts rather than rituals because I am looking for more secular ideas than shamanic/religious type stuff.