I cant afford a decent reliable van, but Im wondering if I could buy something that needs work and maybe have it done for an affordable price in Mexico. I have zero experience with this so I dont know if its a bad idea or not.
Maybe it’s connected to learned helplessness? Just life has taught you that nothing works out and usually turns out bad and you are powerless to stop it. That feels like your only option. No one will help you and you can’t help yourself.
Its really tough when these times come around.
When you can no longer function in society and no one cares about you enough to help. You are really in trouble. Society will leave you to rot and die. You are expected to save yourself, but if you cant, then they are ok with you ending up homeless and alone with no resources. Except dont park where they can see you because they dont want to see your dirty depressed suffering. It makes them uncomfortable. Also you cant go live in the woods because, reasons. So theres no where to go, nothing you can do, except suicide.
I hope none of you ever get to this place. Its hell. I have things I can offer this world. Im not garbage but thats how I am treated. I just need a space to work where I am not overwhelmed by external noise and social expectations. Except that all costs money. Money I dont have and cant get until I am able to work, which requires an environment I cant afford.
How does a person survive this? They dissociate. They retreat into their own minds and disappear and feel nothing. Except that also doesnt help you move forward. It just allows you to survive when society expects you to give up.
Those of you with autism and CPTSD from childhood abuse. I feel for you guys. You got the double whammy.
Maybe you should have had a bit more empathy for those less fortunate, but now that you are suffering its all hands on deck to fix it. Except guess what. The rich care as much as you cared about us.
Im fucked because I cant leave my area because my cars to damaged to drive away, but hopefully most of you can get somewhere safer.
Ive wracked my brain trying to solve this puzzle and I cant find an answer. The problem is I dont have a job, so I dont have income, so I am homeless in my car. That reality alone takes a ton of energy for me to deal with on a daily basis. Like the past week was a heat wave and my back was out. That took all my tolerance to tolerate. The little scraps of energy I somehow still had went to me maintaining my exercise routine, even with a bad back. Go me.
SO I have a current dream. Which is amazing because for the past several years I just existed and tried to not give up on life. My current dream is to write and create zines. I want to start a mail club with art and my writing. I dont think I will get rich, but I think if I could find a way to have the energy to pursue it, it could make enough for me to live on.
Except my living conditions are such that I waste all my energy on just staying alive and getting through the day. Its only very rare occasions I get a burst of energy and create something. My mini van is broken barely runs and is filthy and depressing to be in. I sit on my bed crunched up trying to write and its misery. Anyway you get the idea.
I know I should do a lot of stuff like clean and redesign and fix this van and it would help me, but I dont because I am overwhelmed. Also I dont have money to fix this. I guess I could go to a worker co-op except I dont want to get covid again. It gave me long covid for half a year, and I just cant go through that again. SO i dont want to be boxed in a small space with a bunch of people. So That means fixing the van.
Is anyone still reading this? You are a masochist. I have to think of these things and its torture because it never goes anywhere. I dont know why I am writing this, but I have so...
TLDR - I am overwhelmed by poverty and isolation and horrible living conditions so I dont have energy to get out of it, and need ideas.
Asheville NC
Maybe this is shameful to admit, but I do respond well to encouragement and praise. Like if I do something even small and someone says "Good job! I know that was hard for you. Keep it up!" Or something like that. It is like a wind in my sails. I know Im supposed to be an adult and self driven and all that, but Im just being honest.
So Im curious if others relate to this, and if so could we brainstorm a way to help encourage and boost up each others efforts? This sub is great for things you finish. Maybe a sub to encourage you to start and keep going? Not sure.
One day you wake up and realize "My life is not going well. Something is wrong."
You go on a path of discovery and education, and learn. "Oh the trauma and abuse I went threw are causing me to be dysfunctional and miserable. I need to get away from these toxic people that exacerbate my shutdown and triggered responses, but if I do, how will I survive?"
You are faced with a choice. Do you have the people that caused this in you in the first place continue to hurt you, but give you some sort of basic support to live. Which causes you to shutdown to tolerate it. Or do you go off and live in poverty and isolation, but shut down to tolerate the deprivation? Because again you cant function in life.
Unless you are lucky enough to find a partner to support you during your healing, find employment that supports you and doesn't overwhelm you, or just somehow have money, then you are stuck. Stuck in poverty isolation and homelessness. Or you are stuck in a home with your abusers. Or maybe you flee that home only to be stuck with a new abuser.
It takes money and your basic needs met to heal. No amount of therapy is going to heal you with out that. No amount of education about mental health, or inner reflection is going to get you unstuck if you are stuck in a hot car alone day after day with no end in sight.
I keep trying to find a way to fix myself, without this crucial step, because what other choice do I have? I always come back to the same conclusion. You wont get better without your needs met and money. Anyone that tells you different is leaving out details. Like those "self made" billionaires.
If you have your needs met, and have money but still are struggling. Theres no shame in that. It takes time. Im not saying if you have this you will get better over night. Im just saying if you dont have it, you wont ever get the change you want and need.
A video of a homeless dog that gets rescued gets millions of views. People are gushing over how great the dog is and how wonderful it is to see them get help.
A video with a homeless person gets 100 views and 1000 comments saying they deserve it, and should die. The homeless person doesnt get help, they only get shamed.
Thats a real person with feelings and dreams. They are not garbage. They deserve help. I deserve help. Instead Im just left to suffer alone in this heat, and freezing cold. Year after year. No hope in sight.
Basically every day is the same for me. There is some variation. Not much. I wash myself every 5 to 7 days. I get some groceries every 3 days or so. Water every 4 or 5. I go to one parking lot to spend the day and one to spend the night. I dissociate to media until its time for bed. Winter is coming up fast and if I thought last year was hell, this year will maybe k-i-l-l me, but Im not doing anything to prepare.
Because I am overwhelmed.
To my credit I have started to exercise and write, but really that is energy I should be using to dig myself out of isolation and poverty. Except that feels impossible. At least the exercise feels good, and the writing as well. They have some real tangible results I can see right away. Where anything to change my life just feels like I need to find a way to jump to the moon.
Its an odd way to live like this.
Title.
The joys of CPTSD and not being able to function in society. SO you are alone, homeless, hurt, and poor. Oh well. Ill try to get through each minute of the day, one second at a time. What else can I do?
A person falls and is badly injured. They are hurt too severly to stand, or even crawl somewhere they might get help.
Someone who says they love them finds them lying there.
They could call an ambulance. They could help them into a car and take them to a hospital. They could tend to their wounds. They could find someone who knows what to do.
They do none of those things.
Instead, every couple of days, they bring the injured person a glass of water.
It is enough to keep them alive, but not enough to help them recover.
When people ask, “Why are they still lying there?” the person answers, “They’re lazy. They refuse to get up.”
Then they explain that they bring them water every two days.
Everyone praises them.
“You’re a saint,” they say. “I don’t know how you put up with that. If it were me, I’d have left them there.”
So the person goes home feeling generous and selfless, never confronting the fact that the person they claim to love is still lying injured on the ground.
The glass of water has become more important to them as proof of their goodness than the injured person’s recovery ever was.
For years I basically dissociated and wasted so much of my life in this hope that my family would see me, and change and grow and care enough to alter their minds and lifestyles.
What I didnt understand was. That they strung me along tossing out crumbs because they were protecting their own ego's. Not me. They did a few things here or there so they could say to themselves they were good people, that tried. Except they didnt.
If this relates to anyone here. Don't waste years like I did, waiting on family that says they love you to help you, because they dont love you. They love themselves and their own self delusional image.
If people show you who they are, believe them. If you are homeless and freezing or boiling alive or alone all the time, or anxious with crippling panic attacks, unable to work and on and on, and the people that say they love and care for you, leave you to suffer all that over and over? they are showing you who they are. They wont change.
So i had a pretty good run of decent days. I had a little break through with reinventing memory reconsolidation. I was starting to do small MR experiments to grow my window of tolerance. I am working out. I was writing stories.
Then a couple days ago a part of me kind of derailed us. That confused me. Why would he do that.
He basically setup a scenario or test that would force a younger defender part out, to show the system that the world isnt safe. This dawned on me this morning after my workout. As usual if you want to understand why parts do something. Even weird things. Its rooted in them trying to protect you.
So this part saw us rushing ahead and doing more things he saw as dangerous, so he in his own way was trying to say. "Stop, its not safe. People are monsters."
Ill need to think more on how to help this part while also not giving in to him completely.
What do I want to say here?
Yesterday was a disappointing day. Do you ever have a day where society shows who they really are. Like you thought you knew how bad they could be, but then they open up to a new level of low. Its disheartening.
Im not saying there are no good people in this world. There are shockingly empathetic kind giving people. I have met some of you on this sub.
I try to be a positive person. For years I was stuck in collapse. Breathing felt like work to me. Moving my face out of its resting thousand yard stare took effort. I did it though. Because I didnt want to make the world worse. If I talked to someone I would take the last little bits of energy I had been saving, and I would put on a happy tone of voice and a smile.
There were many times I was sitting there alone for weeks in the freezing cold, with thoughts of ending it all every 20 minutes, and I would go online and try to help strangers on reddit deal with what was kicking my butt.
Then I look around at the people that occupy the society around me and I just see a bunch of rabid dogs fighting over scraps of rotten meat. Snarling angry selfish scared ignorant dogs.
I think that is what really brings me down. Why is it so hard to heal from CPTSD? Because look at what our society is. This isnt smurf village. Its lord of the flies.
Again, I know there are good people. I just wish we were not so few and far between.
TLDR - I "rediscovered" Memory Reconsolidation, and it helped me with two very stuck parts.
To start I will try to say this idea as clearly and succinctly as I can.
Some deeply learned patterns don't change through contrary evidence or mindset shift. They change when a person takes an action that makes the old model impossible to continue enacting. The brain needs an experience to revise what it learned through experience.
For my entire life as far as I can remember. I have had two core beliefs. I need to suffer to get help, if help doesn't come it means I am not suffering enough. And, I need permission to act, as well as approval on actions I took with permission.
You can imagine what messed up things went on for a child to take on these core beliefs. The thing is I logically knew these were wrong. I also was aware I did them. It never changed anything for me. The other thing was I could expose myself to contrary evidence and it didn't move the needle. The belief never updated. I couldnt logic my way out. I couldnt expose my way out. What was I supposed to do?
Then in an act of desperation and what do I have to lose, I stumbled on something that did help, but I struggled to understand why it worked.
One night I wrote down in a letter my thoughts to my family. I said I wasnt going to wait for them to wake up and care. I wasnt going to continue to suffer in the hope that they will have an epiphany. I wasnt going to keep wasting my life in the belief that if I just could suffer enough they would love me enough to help or change or grow. That I wasnt going to seek their permission for me to be happy or do the things I needed to do to survive.
I didnt tell them about the letter or show them. I didnt photograph the letter or post it online. I kept it to myself. Then burned it. Soon after I did something I had wanted to do for months. I started writing a story idea I had. When I got 5,000 words of the story. I bundled it up into a zine and let real life people read it and judge it. How did I do this?
I think I have an idea now of why it helped, and how it might help some of you.
Lets look at another example. Going to the grocery store. Every time I go, I dissociate and experience depersonalization and derealization. I expect people to hurt me, and it doesnt matter that I go 100 times and nothing terrible happens. The experience never updates. Why? Why did the letter burning update, but not exposure to the grocery?
Some deeply learned patterns don't change through contrary knowledge. They change when a person takes an action that makes the old model impossible to continue enacting.
Isnt that what I was doing by going to the grocery even though I was afraid? Well not exactly.
What I am putting together is this. The grocery shopping experince had a condition that was impossible to meet. I required it to always be safe and I knew it never could be. A better way to view it was. “Other people approving of me, ignoring me, or not judging me is no longer a condition for me to be okay.”
So this is not primarily exposure, mindset, or even learning a new fact. It is dropping an impossible prerequisite. I cant control my family. I cant control the people at the grocery. So if that is what I need to feel safe, it will never work.
The old structure is:
I can do X only when Y happens. But Y is outside my control, may never happen, or can never be known with certainty. So life stays suspended. The shift is. Y no longer gets to determine whether X happens.
So the experiential updating occurred because I took an action to close the loop. I didnt just know something, I experienced it. Then acted on it. I said. I am going to give myself permission to write. I am giving myself permission to do what I need to do to live. Then I did it. Which created a paradox in my system that the brain had to resolve.
Maybe experiential enacted acceptance is a better way to phrase it? Not sure. The idea is not just you know something, or do something. Its that you accept it as true and act on it as if it is, and then experience the truth first hand.
I hope that made some sense and helps someone else. Like I said I still dont fully grasp it. So maybe some of you can word it better than me.
edit - After some more research and thinking I think I know what this is. I reinvented the wheel again. Someone has already figured this all out and given it a name, Memory Reconsolidation. Check it out. Its pretty neat stuff.
Sometimes I feel like positive messages like it can get better, are not received well here, and I understand why. That said I think its good to hear from people you know are dealing with what you are, and hear they have had positive changes. I dont think things will stay this way forever for me. I dont think Im cured, but its a nice break.
Maybe I can look back at this post this winter when its below freezing and I am freezing in the car for weeks at a time. Wanting to give up, I can see that if I can hold on, there might be some good days again.
Right now. I am exercising, writing. I am talking to people and making friends. Im going to enjoy these small accomplishments while I can. I hope things can turn around for you guys as well.