u/napstablooka

[TW: mention of emotional neglect, domestic violence, emotional abuse, enmeshment]

After my recent struggles within an enmeshed friendship, I've started to fully acknowledge to myself that I do not want to be the 'therapist friend' anymore.

I had realized that the life experience, that had been driving my co-dependent relational patterns as a 'therapist friend' the most, had been my persistent effort to stave off the feelings of utter powerlessness that I had to endure as a child at the mercy of an emotionally unstable, abusive and neglectful 'caregiver'.

Back then, I had become my "mother's" therapist in an effort to take control of her out-of-control emotions, in an effort to give me at least a moment of peace and reprieve in a home environment which was dominated by her fear, rage, depression and shame on a daily basis. Of course, I was completely powerless over her emotions, but the denial of my powerlessness, the mental escape from these otherwise overwhelming emotions, is what helped me to go less insane in a physically inescapable situation. It was reassuring to believe I still was in control somehow.

But reflecting some more on the 'Why?' behind my child self's co-dependent coping mechanism, the 'Why?' behind her stepping into the parental role for my 'mother' in this way, I also noticed that it wasn't only control that I must have been looking for.

I realized that this form of enmeshment also gave me access to another resource that I so urgently needed in order to survive, but which my 'caregiver' was never willing to give to me freely:

Connection.

When I remember my 'mother' all I can see are memories of her looking away from me, staring off into the distance with a bitter and dissociated gaze. I can only see her back, hands shrugged behind her, as she is walking ahead of me for the entirety of the way from my school to our home. The only times she ever bothers to actually look at me is during one of her frequent rage attacks which usually leave me so shocked, frozen and dissociated, that there is still no connection to be found.

But when little child me sits next to her on her bed, as she lights a cigarette and tells me all the horrifying, graphic details of how my father, her siblings, her parents, the police and many, many other people have failed and hurt and abused and betrayed and abandoned her, I can feel a fraction of what I had always longed for: To feel connected to my mom emotionally.

In this moment, I don't mind that all of these big emotions, that she is venting out into the smoke filled room that we're both sitting in, are already starting to suffocate my own. I don't mind the fact that this is now all about her, and not at all about me, and that her rambling is further adding to my deeply ingrained sense of abandonment. I don't mind that her detailed retellings of her domestic abuse incidents traumatize me, again and again and again.

I don't mind that I have to perform a version of me that is not really 'me' in order to become the therapist that she needs, because — at least for once — she is talking to me without yelling and this is what I so desperately need.

So I learn to find comfort in this enmeshed arrangement that we now have. And I learn to dissociate away from everyone within in me who might sabotage my 'therapeutic work'.

I dissociate away from the parts of me who feel rightfully angry over how unfair it is that our 'mother' is pushing the parental role back onto her little 8-year old child.

I dissociate away from the parts of me who feel so confused, unsettled and overwhelmed from the mature and completely inappropriate content that our "mother's" vents contain.

I dissociate away from the parts of me that feel absolutely nauseated and disgusted over our "mother's" complete lack of boundaries and repeatedly overstepping ours with her never-ending trauma dumping.

I become the child who can truly 'be there for her' when everyone else in her life has already walked away. Subconsciously I know I don't have the freedom to go anywhere else, so might as well become the best emotional support child that has ever existed.

Who knows, maybe she'll even change her mind and start loving me one day?

[TW: mention of risk of death, emotional abuse, emotional neglect, enmeshment]

'I need to stop being the therapist friend' is what I told myself many, many times throughout my CPTSD recovery once I realized that my way of relating to other people was very often very codependent.

After many years of beating myself up over putting myself into the 'therapist friend' role again and again and again, I'm only just now starting to ask the simple question of: "Why am I doing this?" or better "What am I getting out of being the therapist friend for everyone in my life?"

This question was prompted by a recent impasse with a friend which jarringly held up a mirror to me to show me those parts of myselves that I was very adamant of ignoring and not acknowledging up until now.

Observing my friend's — as I would have described it — 'codependent' relationships with her family and other people in her life, with her getting resentful again and again and her subsequently coming to me, over and over again to vent over these interpersonal issues, with no real insight into how she was playing into the dynamic made me feel so angry, resentful (!) and agitated. Her stating that she pitied (not 'empathized' or 'could relate to'!) these people that she was 'helping' reeked of so much superiority to me, I felt absolutely nauseated.

My friend's behavior and the way she justified it, then in turn reminded me of my own codependent relational patterns in a pretty painful and embarrassing way.

It reminded me how just like her I also, so often, put other people in the role of the one 'who needs saving' and me in the role of the 'savior' — even if this comes at the cost of my own time, focus, energy, health and sanity. It really highlighted to me, even though I never managed to find the words for it so accurately as my friend did, that I really did look down on these people around me who I deemed to be less self-aware, less emotionally intelligent and more in need of guidance than I was. I really thought they had no clue and I had it all figured out. Ironic, how it took me 'figuring it all out' for the friend whom I described above in order for me to realize that I'm the one who has no clue what they're doing. I felt so ashamed and disgusted with myself when trying to acknowledge that so clearly for maybe the very first time.

And then I asked myself, maybe also for the very first time, what I even got out of this whole codependent spiel other than feeling better than other people in a self-gratifying way.

It brought to my attention how I, as a child, had always been the 'little therapist' for my mother who not only emotionally abused and neglected me, but also encouraged me to provide a space for her to trauma dump onto me on the regular.

In the context of this type of enmeshment and parentifcation I endured, I also must have picked up on the reassuring mental pattern to overly focus on the helpless, little child part of my traumatized mother and cater towards whatever I was sensing there (which would put me into the 'savior' role and again in control of the otherwise terrifying situation I was in) rather than coming to terms with the full, overwhelming reality that this grown woman was abusing me and allowing her life to fall apart because it was her deliberate choice (which would make me the 'victim' at the hands of an uncontrollable caregiver who I also paradoxically still very much relied on for survival and this would be just too much too handle for my still developing brain at the time).

It was more reassuring to infantilize my abuser in my head, than to fully accept my powerlessness over the inescapable situation that I found myself in as an abused child.

And it made me appreciate how much sense it would make for that part of myselves who was — for her literal dear life — hanging onto this coping mechanism of trying to become the best therapist for everyone, and for her to also refuse to let go of this way of coping for all these years, no matter how much I berated myselves for codependency being 'wrong' or 'unhealthy'.

Better to be wrong than to be be left for dead, am I right?

[TW: mention of risk of death, emotional abuse, emotional neglect, enmeshment]

'I need to stop being the therapist friend' is what I told myself many, many times throughout my CPTSD recovery once I realized that my way of relating to other people was very often very codependent.

After many years of beating myself up over putting myself into the 'therapist friend' role again and again and again, I'm only just now starting to ask the simple question of: "Why am I doing this?" or better "What am I getting out of being the therapist friend for everyone in my life?"

This question was prompted by a recent impasse with a friend which jarringly held up a mirror to me to show me those parts of myselves that I was very adamant of ignoring and not acknowledging up until now.

Observing my friend's — as I would have described it — 'codependent' relationships with her family and other people in her life, with her getting resentful again and again and her subsequently coming to me, over and over again to vent over these interpersonal issues, with no real insight into how she was playing into the dynamic made me feel so angry, resentful (!) and agitated. Her stating that she pitied (not 'empathized' or 'could relate to'!) these people that she was 'helping' reeked of so much superiority to me, I felt absolutely nauseated.

My friend's behavior and the way she justified it, then in turn reminded me of my own codependent relational patterns in a pretty painful and embarrassing way.

It reminded me how just like her I also, so often, put other people in the role of the one 'who needs saving' and me in the role of the 'savior' — even if this comes at the cost of my own time, focus, energy, health and sanity. It really highlighted to me, even though I never managed to find the words for it so accurately as my friend did, that I really did look down on these people around me who I deemed to be less self-aware, less emotionally intelligent and more in need of guidance than I was. I really thought they had no clue and I had it all figured out. Ironic, how it took me 'figuring it all out' for the friend whom I described above in order for me to realize that I'm the one who has no clue what they're doing. I felt so ashamed and disgusted with myself when trying to acknowledge that so clearly for maybe the very first time.

And then I asked myself, maybe also for the very first time, what I even got out of this whole codependent spiel other than feeling better than other people in a self-gratifying way.

It brought to my attention how I, as a child, had always been the 'little therapist' for my mother who not only emotionally abused and neglected me, but also encouraged me to provide a space for her to trauma dump onto me on the regular.

In the context of this type of enmeshment and parentifcation I endured, I also must have picked up on the reassuring mental pattern to overly focus on the helpless, little child part of my traumatized mother and cater towards whatever I was sensing there (which would put me into the 'savior' role and again in control of the otherwise terrifying situation I was in) rather than coming to terms with the full, overwhelming reality that this grown woman was abusing me and allowing her life to fall apart because it was her deliberate choice (which would make me the 'victim' at the hands of an uncontrollable caregiver who I also paradoxically still very much relied on for survival and this would be just too much too handle for my still developing brain at the time).

It was more reassuring to infantilize my abuser in my head, than to fully accept my powerlessness over the inescapable situation that I found myself in as an abused child.

And it made me appreciate how much sense it would make for that part of myselves who was — for her literal dear life — hanging onto this coping mechanism of trying to become the best therapist for everyone, and for her to also refuse to let go of this way of coping for all these years, no matter how much I berated myselves for codependency being 'wrong' or 'unhealthy'.

Better to be wrong than to be be left for dead, am I right?

I don't have any episodic memories of >!getting sexually abused!< as a child. In fact, a lot of my childhood memories are blocked out, especially those before the age of 6 and especially from my life at home.

But I have a faint memory that makes me wonder if something happened to me. It's a snapshot of a scene: it's me looking down into the underwear that's hanging between my legs, which >!has blood in it!<. In the snapshot I can also see a pink-colored potty underneath me that I used to have as a toddler.

For many years, way into adulthood, I connected this memory with a story my mother used to tell me: that I fell off some playground equipment when I was a small child and that 'I accidentally >!hurt myself between my legs!<' that way.

The reason this story and the memory came to my attention again, was the new marriage of my mother with her current partner who has been convicted for >!raping his step daughter from a previous marriage!< (who was a child at the time). When a family member told me that my mother (I'm no contact) had presented her new husband as an innocent victim of the justice system to the rest of the family, with the bizarre explanation that the child >!he had assaulted!<, had simply 'fallen on a tree branch and >!got hurt this way between her legs!<', I only then, for the first time, questioned if the story she told me about my injury as a toddler had also been nothing but a lie.

For part of me it's unnerving to not know more details of what had happened, but given how in denial I can still be about how other, >!non-CSA traumas!< have impacted me today, it would also make sense why I haven't been able to recover more, corroborating memories up until now. I'm scared.

I feel so jaded when I reflect on my past experiences with therapy. 'Jaded' might even be an understatement.

I feel angry, disillusioned, unseen, unheard, gaslit, ignored, rejected, humiliated, disappointed, bitter and hopeless when I think of the prospect of finding another therapist, yet again, only to add a fresh, underwhelming at best, or retraumatizing at worst, experience onto the already existing pile of haunting memories I have collected while being under the 'care' of various, self-proclaimed, 'trauma-sensitive' therapists, counselors and coaches.

As a person who is trying to recover from complex trauma by myself and with the 'help' of mental health professionals for over a decade, I came to the realization that so many people in the field have literally no idea what they are doing, especially when it comes to the treatment of any developmental trauma that is more complex than e.g. parental emotional neglect.

Particularly dissociative symptoms, such as structural dissociation, which is often a result of complex trauma, is extremely overlooked and unacknowledged and it absolutely boggles my mind to think of the many situations in which I, as a client, had to literally educate the professional sitting in front of me in session, about the basic meaning of these terms.

I do believe the main reason for the fact, that I have these horrifying experiences with therapists who claim to be able to help me, but then go on to leave me in a spot that's even worse than when I first found them, is a mental health care system that's at the brink of collapse which doesn't leave room for:

a) proper and obligatory, in-depth training for therapists who are willing to specialize in complex trauma and

b) enough therapists to enter the field while still being able to make a decent living without having to offload all of the financial burden fully onto their clients (why is it, for example, so hard in most countries to get your insurance to pay for even just 20 hours of psychotherapy?), leaving people like me, who are struggling with basic, daily functioning and who are not willing or able to pay $200 / hr out of pocket, to work with whatever professional the system still has to offer me besides that which tend to be therapists who are just not that good.

Access to high-quality therapy is basically impossible for people like me and it absolutely enrages me.

To think that abusive parents all around the world — in the vast majority of the cases — get away scot-free with the crimes that they are perpetrating against their innocent children;

that society then continues to ostracize those traumatized children as they become adults,

and that not even the mental health care system, who touts itself to be the 'end all, be all' for all the problems in the world, manages to support these very people who could use the help the most, is absolute nightmare fuel to me and I do not think I will ever be able to make peace with that thought.

Like what are we, as a society, doing here???

I've been becoming more aware of and recovering from my post-traumatic symptoms for the past decade, but ironically I never really addressed the pink elephant in the room, which is my disordered eating. I've been using food since early childhood in order to cope emotionally, overeating whenever I get stressed, anxious, sad or embarrassed.

Even though I have been aware for a while now, that for health reasons, it'd be in my best interest to address the issue and find my way to a more healthy relationship with food, the prospect of tackling the issue just seemed so overwhelming to me that I continued to avoid it up until now.

My parents, and specifically my emotionally neglectful and abusive mother, taught me very early on that I couldn't rely on either of them for emotional nurturance, support, validation, mirroring or even just acknowledgement of what I was feeling at any given moment. The emotional neglect was vast and pervasive — it took me many, many years of therapy and work by myself to even develop the capacity to name my feelings sometimes.

My mother (and as a later also figured, my maternal grandmother) had this habit though of overeating, particularly sweet and sugary foods, to calm herself, and she was also very much willing and committed to provide me with plenty of sweets and junk foods as a kid, too. I'd quickly learn that food not only tasted good, but that I could use it to calm down myself, whenever the stress I was experiencing in a household that was devoid of any love at best, or terrorizing and psychologically annihilating at worst, was becoming too much for me to handle.

There was never anything gained from going to my mother with any ounce of sadness, shame, anxiety or despair I was feeling, because she'd either just ignore me, leaving me feeling invalidated, unseen and ashamed, or worse, she'd fly into a rage fit, which would leave me terrified, ashamed, frozen and oftentimes highly dissociated. My monsther was dangerous, and her consistently threatening reaction to my feelings showed me, that my own feelings were dangerous to me.

Food was, in contrast to my volatile mother, a safe option for soothing and getting rid of those 'dangerous' feelings. It never caused me emotional harm the way she did two or three times a week, and it kept me quiet, docile and safe in my room, away from my monsther.

But the downside of my eating pattern was, that I was also never really able to learn how to regulate my emotions in any other way. So I kept on eating well into my teens and my adulthood. I stuffed, and I continue to stuff, uncomfortable emotions down, specifically the ones that I have been shamed for or raged at the most, as well as those feelings that remind me of parts of myself that I had to hide from her.

I'm only just starting to learn what it even means to not automatically stuff down my feelings with food, but to have a more authentic, emotional relationship with myself. Something that I wished my parents would have helped me to build. Something I wished my parents would have modeled to me in a healthy way, not by using food, but through compassionate self-talk, physical self-care, adequate rest and healthy relationships.

Has anyone else worked through binge eating / overeating issues as part of their recovery? What has your experience been like and what was your way forward to heal those parts of yourself that had to overeat in order to suppress 'dangerous' emotions?

A gaze averted from a young woman in a blonde pixie haircut, I don't know who she is even though her face seems familiar. Her gaze turned away as I talk to her revealing my most inner feelings, my best kept secrets. She is sorting plastic bottles into trash bags, cleaning up the room that we're sitting in. When she is sorting out the trash this way, she reminds me of the staff at the hotel that I stayed at a few weeks ago. I try to get her attention but all to no avail. She is my therapist and we're sitting in a room that somehow looks like an actual therapy office, but also like my mother's bedroom at the same time.

She runs away from me, all throughout the apartment that we find ourselves in, a living space that looks somewhat like my current home, and somewhat like the one from my childhood. As I try to confess more of my thoughts and feelings to her, her gaze turns anywhere but my face: she is absorbed in the bookshelf in front of us, she stares at the ground, her look wanders to even more plastic trash bags filled with those dozens of bottles.

No matter how hard I try, I cannot get her to look at me, to actually listen to me, to — at the very least — attempt to relate to me.

There are more therapists before and after her, same spiel: They don't care to look at me, listen to me, let alone attune to me. Just running away from me all the time — figuratively, by occupying themselves with busywork, or literally by making physical space between us using their feet. All I see is the side of their head or their backs turned back at me all the time, every single time we meet.

I get angry. I shout into the space of the room, slightly turned away from her, hoping this ignorant therapist-mother figure might be able to hear me know. How dare she do this to me, she is supposed to look at me, to pay attention to me, to attune, to love me. How dare she treat me like this?

Suddenly, her husband and their little child are standing there in the same room with us, waiting to pick her up. Nonchalantly she is leaving the scene, and all I'm left with is my righteous anger and this sense of deep loneliness.

How does she get away with it, just like that?

Me and two friends want to challenge ourselves by not eating added sugar for a month, and I'm feeling pretty uncertain if a) I can even do that for a full 30 days and b) what this challenge will bring up for me — emotionally and cognitively — regarding my disordered eating.

Since I can remember, I've been using food as a way to deal with my emotions.

Growing up in a household characterized by domestic violence, emotional neglect, emotional abuse and enmeshment with a mentally ill, mostly untreated parent, there was plenty of family dysfunction to go around for my body to be stuck in a state of either flight, fawn, freeze or collapse constantly.

Growing up with very little parenting and barely any emotional safety throughout the years, I never really learned how to 'feel' all those overwhelming feelings stemming from trauma, let alone how to cope with emotions like the other children did. All I learned was how to drown out the noise by eating; particularly by devouring large amounts of high-caloric, processed, sugary foods.

Decades after having left my childhood home and having cut contact with my parents, I still struggle to manage my emotions in a more healthy way and feeling worried that the next 4 weeks of doing this sugarfree challenge will turn out to become a tough moment for me. I'm afraid of having to look into the mirror, and acknowledge the full extent of how addicted I actually am to candies, chocolates, ice cream and cookies, and find out that if I don't overeat on those foods — all day, everyday — I am losing control of my emotions again and then control over my entire self.

Has anyone else dealt with overeating in their recovery from CPTSD? And what has helped you to come to terms with the emotional aspect of compulsively eating too much?

I'm going to be honest, that I went into this first session with my GP with plenty of doubt.

Could this actually help me in any substantial way? Isn't acupuncture just based on empty pseudo-science after all?

But at this point of my recovery, I also knew, that I had very little to lose (other than the bit of time that it would take to go through with this 'experiment') and much more to gain (potentially feeling better, progressing in my healing or — at the very least — figuring out that this modality actually does not work for me and that it's time to refocus on other areas of my recovery instead).

After my last bout of Neurofeedback at a UK clinic a few years prior, I noticed that I was in a much better space to not immediately dissociate if feelings of anxiety or anger came up for me.

But I also noticed that a lot of the resulting stress from negative emotions was noticeably held onto directly in my body now; particularly in my chest, upper back, shoulders and thighs / hips. Every time I experienced something stressful, I could now sense the muscles in my torso and my hips tighten up and creating a newfound sense of lingering pain that I hadn't experienced, or possibly hadn't been aware of, before in my familiar state of trauma-related, lifelong dissociation.

The acupuncture session itself was pretty unremarkable at first. As the doctor inserted about a dozen of needles into my ears, wrists and calves, there was very little pain to be experienced. As I lied on the bench, still in a state of tension and low-grade hypervigilant awareness, I could sense a needle piercing through a small part of my right ear before it starts to feel and sound as if someone submerged my head slowly under water.

Sounds around me sounding so much less crisp. So much less sharp. So much less threatening.

A mental image of myself being submerged into the shallow ends of cool sea water.

Will I sink all the way towards the sea floor and if so, what will I find there?

My GP leaves the room. And me alone with my thoughts and feelings. I stare at the ceiling and a sense of relaxation starts to settle in — very subtly, gradually, slowly.

As I turn my gaze to the wall on my right, I see a poster picturing a slightly unsettling scene. It's a drawing of a human standing there, in confident and upright postures, with all of his muscles laid bare as if his skin had been peeled off. Dozens of annotations all around his core, head, ears and limbs indicate various acupressure points. What an educative, yet unappealing poster this really is.

Even though my fascination with the bizarre nature of this image draws me in at first, that disturbed feeling, that grows and grows and grows, as I stare at a person with no skin on (even if they're just a drawn character) ultimately prompts me to turn my head away, back to the ceiling. The drawing reminds me too much about how vulnerable my body really is, about how vulnerable I am and I cannot deal with that right now...I think.

I sense into my body. Trying to pick up on how my body feels.

At first, there doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary until my attention wanders to my hands, lying there, cautiously, on the bench together with the rest of me, fingertips softly grazing the leathery surface beneath them.

These hands feel so heavy and grounded. It honestly feels very, very weird.

As I continue to focus on this weird sensation, hot tears fill my eyes. A wave of fear, disgust and shame paves its way through my body, along with the thought: "These two hands are revoltingly present."

Revoltingly present in a way, that they haven't been in a very, very long time.

I'm left with this ominous thought without much additional context. What the hell is wrong with those hands? Why do I not know? And why did I realize their wrongness only just now?

A quiet sadness comes over me and I just lie in it, not knowing what else to do. "It's ok" I tell myself despite not really knowing what "it" actually is.

I continue my day in a state of heavy, parasympathetic lull. It's not that I cannot think clearly while in this state — I just notice that prompting my body to move takes much more effort than it used to before I entered the doctor's office that morning.

But it's a pleasant feeling. Feeling so grateful.

I walk around slowly, quietly as if I had forgotten the meaning of the usually, oh-so familiar word "rush". My thoughts slow down to a pace that makes managing them surprisingly easy.

Waking up in my bed the next morning, I still feel some of that relaxed afterglow from the day before, but there's also something off. I cannot put my finger on it.

Looking around my room, it feels as if everything was ok, as if everything was alright.

I do not feel that horrific tension in my body that used to plague me all these years anymore. The sun is shining and my room is pleasantly quiet.

But something still feels wrong for no good reason.

I wander around in an almost translucent, light-grey veil of dread this morning, yet every time I turn around, every time I try to extend my hand in order to grab it by the subtle shapes that the fabric creates in the air around me, it just silently disappears between my fingers.

What is this dreadful feeling about and how did it just suddenly appear out of nowhere?

Or has it been here around me all along, I was just too afraid to see it?

The thought of potentially having been >!SA'd!< as a child has been nagging at me for a while and even more so since I started trauma therapy about a decade ago.

I've been diagnosed with CPTSD / a dissociative disorder (OSDD) in the past and for a long time I had convinced myself that these mental disorders were simply a result of longstanding neglect and emotional abuse by my "caregivers", and not necessarily of >!CSA.!<

But relating to several stories of >!adult CSA survivors!< and to how they describe their signs and symptoms before they found out about their personal trauma history, I'm starting to feel scared that I've also been abused and that I've just forgotten all about it, as many children have to.

Signs and symptoms that make me feel concerned, include:

---

In Childhood

- bedwetting up until middle school and having "accidents" in public up until primary school age
- compulsory nose picking and disposing of residues around where I sit or sleep
- intense fear of seeing my own blood (e.g. when experiencing nose bleeds)
- frequent nightmares of being chased by monsters or including disturbing mouth / teeth themes
- scared of using the toilet and frequent constipation
- >!vaginal discharge!< before puberty
- >!sexualized play!< with dolls
- regularly drawing men and women >!(half)-naked, including genitals,!< up until primary school age
- growing up in a dysfunctional household (>!alcoholic, violent father, severely mentally ill mother!<, early divorce and growing up with a neglectful, single mother for most of my childhood)
- not really remembering much about my father (even though he lived with us up until I was 5)
- wearing really baggy, loose clothes from primary school age up until puberty
- gaining a lot of weight throughout primary school to the point of obesity
- overeating

---

In Adolescence / Adulthood

- being afraid of >!sex, and particularly penetration!<
- vaginismus
- feeling asexual / greysexual most of the time, but having >!vivid, intrusive sexual thoughts and urges!< under high-stress and short periods of >!hypersexual behavior!<
- fantasies of >!non-consensual sex!< up until my late 20s
- confusion around my gender / sexual orientation
- continued pattern of overeating and dieting
- problems forming emotionally deep, vulnerable relationships
- social isolation
- hypervigilance, dissociation, depressive symptoms, emotional flashbacks and other trauma symptoms leading to CPTSD / OSDD diagnosis
- intense fear of my menstruation throughout teen years
- feeling disconnected from my body
- not knowing what I feel
- inability to notice injuries in my >!genital area!<
- nightmares of being chased by monsters, people or being stuck in a mass shooting
- feeling as if certain parts of my body don't belong to me when I'm in a emotional flashback and feeling an urge to cut them off
- fear and distrust of men
- feeling a mix of terror, shame and nausea when going out on dates with men
- startled when being touched on my shoulder
- not having access to most of my childhood memories, particularly the ones from my childhood home
- fear of doctor and dentist visits
- physical self-neglect (poor clothing choices, skipping showers / tooth brushing)
- being triggered by trauma survivors speaking about the emotional aftermath of their abuse

- having the thought that "I cannot do this another time" spontaneously occur to me when my mother reveals that she will marry a convicted child sex offender and have him move in with us when I was 15 and not really understanding where the thought is coming from

---

Concerning Memories

- There are less than 4 or 5 memories that I still have of my biological father, with all of them being barely anything more than snapshots or very hazy, vague, few second long "clips". But of these few memories, there is a snapshot of >!his penis with the backdrop of the bathroom!< in my childhood home
- I remember a snapshot of seeing blood in my underwear while also standing up from a potty for toddlers / kindergarten children. For a long time I believed that this memory belonged to an accident I had at a playground as child, but now I'm wondering if this was just a story my mother came up with in order to justify my injury to medical health professionals
- There is an adult friend (who I believe was also mentally ill to some extent), whom my, at the time already single, mother had befriended and who really creeped me out as far as I remember. I cannot tell anymore why I was so afraid of him though
- When I was 8 my mother ran away with me and two prison inmates to another country in the hopes of starting a new life. I barely remember anything from this trip, but recall a scene of sitting with one of these men in his car at night, as he is wrapping his hand around my right shoulder and a sense of uncertainty and unease is coming up for me. The memory goes all dark after that

---

I'm currently not in therapy, but I do get some support through peer-based childhood abuse support groups and will be looking into finding a therapist again soon. I just wanted to finally write all of this out, because this fear of what might have happened to me has been weighing on me and has never been something I managed to disclose in such a manner to a professional before. Thank you for giving me this space to share.

My mother never wanted me. In fact, she supposedly never wanted the three children whose conception preceded mine, either, but she still gave birth to three of us.

My mother continued to chain smoke two packs a day while I was growing inside her womb. Was it just the laziness of not wanting to kick a comforting habit, at least temporarily? Or did some part of her hope that the nicotine could increase the chances of >!inducing a "natural" abortion!<?

My mother ignored me. Ignored me as an infant, as a toddler, as a child and as a teenager. Her ears turned deaf towards my cries for help and my pleas for mercy. She played dumb when I made requests or asked for support. In her mental world there was never supposed to be any space for me, so she couldn't be bothered to pay attention to neither who I was nor what I went through.

My mother left me to my own devices. Every morning I tip toed past her bedroom door to go to school while she slept in until noon. In her schedule there was never supposed to be any time for waking me up in the morning or getting me ready for the day. So she just left me to figure it out on my own.

My mother blamed me. She raged at me for acting like a child and blamed me for looking like my father who abused her. In her eyes, everything was my fault — even my own existence; as if I had the ability to will myself into emerging into this world. She shamed me relentlessly, for who I was, day in and day out. In her most rageful moments, she screamed that she always wished that she could have >!aborted me when she still had a chance to (legally) kill !<me. That she never wanted me.

She told me, again and again, how she never wanted me, that it would be better if >!I wasn't here, if I was dead, again and again,!< until I finally stop reacting to the stinging sharpness of her words. But even as I stop reacting, I never stopped remembering.

Deep down I always remember that I was never wanted in this world. That my existence was nothing but a mistake, the consequence of an awkward lapse of judgement. I go on wandering around the world in utter confusion, dedicating years and years and years to the search for a relief from the inner despair this jarring memory left me with. Always looking for an answer to the question how on earth a shameful person, like me, could ever be loved if they had been born unwanted.

I'm just so tired, exhausted and low-key hopeless.

I feel so painfully isolated. I'm a mixed-race Black, genderqueer person living in a predominantly white European country and on top of the daily micro-aggressions, harassment and being constantly treated like a nuisance at best, and like a literal criminal at worst by all kinds of people in my day to day life, there is just so much isolation and loneliness pervading it.

It's as if going through decades of loneliness and isolation growing up with abusive and neglectful parents wasn't enough — no; even the environment in which I exist in today has to constantly remind me of the fact that no one believes that I would have any right to exist here, let alone relate to anyone in any human way. If there's no emotional violence being thrown in my face at any given moment, there's just a lot of ignorance, dismissiveness and the pretense that I was invisible, all day long.

On top of that, there are so few spaces meant for PGM / BiPOC around where I live, that are actually accessible to me (due to Long Covid, I still take infection precautions that limit my opportunities for socializing in meaningful ways with people who don't take precautions anymore) which made everything about my already limited social life pre-Covid just so much worse since the pandemic in 2020 started. I'm part of online communities for CC folks of color, which I'm really grateful for, but I also acknowledge that no kind of online space can truly replace what real life, long-term connections with other people is supposed to provide: a sense of being seen on a deeper level, a sense of belonging, the sense of caring for others and being taken care of. I don't know what to do at this point anymore.

The thought of moving has come up for me frequently over the years, but with nationalist, racist, queerphobic and particularly anti-Black sentiment rising all over the globe, where am I supposed to go for a better life? Or are my plans of moving maybe just a distraction from the unavoidable, which would be to accept that my marginalization will follow me to every corner of the world and all I can do at this point is to find a sense of inner peace and try to build a local community for myself even if it doesn't exist for me, yet?

I'm not sure what I'm looking for with this post, but I'll take any relatable stories, that you have to share, a word of encouragement, even just an acknowledgement, that you can understand what I'm talking about, anytime. Thank you for holding a bit of space for me today.

>I have been in and out of therapy for the past 10 years in order to help me in my recovery from CPTSD / a dissociative disorder. Even though, I cannot claim that all of the therapists that I had consulted in that timeframe caused me harm, many did, especially once I started to become more aware of the complexity of my trauma and how my expectations for grounded, attuned therapy tailored towards complex trauma survivors oftentimes differed from the reality existing inside the therapy rooms that I have found myself in over the years.

>The writing below is an unsent letter to one of my former therapists, who I had visited for about 2 years from 2018-2020. "The unsent letter" is a writing exercise that helps with getting out one's thoughts and feelings towards a person whom you might not be able or willing to talk to anymore. The exercise's purpose is to reflect on, validate and release old, negative feelings from previous interactions and relationships. In that regard, the unsent letter is not necessarily meant as a logical and concise retelling of a story or one's point of view, but it may rather resemble a collection of more intuitive, sometimes irrational expressions of thoughts and feelings.
All names have been changed for privacy reasons.

[TW: mention of emotional neglect, emotional abuse, sexual abuse]

Dear Mrs Daedalos,

I have to admit that, at first, it came as a shock to me to hear you say these words. One might think, that you, as a fully trained, supposedly trauma-informed therapist with over a decade of work experience in her own practice, would know better than to shame and berate any client for "not getting better" at the kind of pace that you would envision for them. It also is interesting to realize that you are the person that is paid by me, every single session, to support me in getting better; so, when I don't get better, when my recovery is stalling — how much does this say about my failure as a client, and how much does this say about your expertise as a therapist? I never managed to ask you this question in person, but I also doubt you would be able or willing to come up with an answer for it.

It is through the work with you that I first educated myself about the way psychotherapy is supposed to work. I read up on many different concepts and theories that mental health professionals like you should also be intricately familiar with — object-relations theory, transference, countertransference, projective identification — because I wanted to understand why I often felt so ashamed, invalidated, belittled and misunderstood when I was in the therapy room with you, particularly in the last couple of months of our work together.

I wanted to understand why you'd tell me that the person, whom I was dating at the time, repeatedly trying >!to coerce me into sex was not such a big deal as long as he didn't outright rape me!<. I was so confused by your reaction and it made me wonder in what shape or form you deem >!the sexual boundaries of any person!< worthwhile when this nonchalant response to my distressing story was your default. It made part of me so worried that you may not be able to help me if you cannot call out abuse for what it was, while another part of me agreed and empathized with you — because this was still my go-to coping skill at the time for dealing with confusing authority figures since childhood.

I wanted to understand why you'd never give me an invoice on time. Instead, you waited for weeks, sometimes even months, before handing one to me to the point that I had to pay you thousands of dollars in one go a couple of times. What was up with that? Did you have writing invoices just that much, that you procrastinated on it or was it simply a way for you to manage your own anxiety around charging a client, who kind of never really got better, much rather worse, under your care? I never dared to ask and I'm not sure if you would have been ok with answering that question either.

I wanted to understand what had happened, after figuring out through my own research that dissociation might play a major role in my symptoms and asking you for a differential diagnosis, when you simply avoided the topic in session anytime I brought it up and only months later confessed to me, that you were not able to do the diagnosis, after all. Why was it not possible for you to tell me that before I had put another thousand dollars into therapy with you, the pro-claimed trauma specialist?

I wanted to understand what happened after this diagnostic impasse when you acted all passive-aggressive towards me, by suddenly giving away my weekly time slot, that I had used for almost 2 years at this point, to another client, only for you to offer me new therapy appointments on a week-by-week basis at random times scribbled on a little post-it note. I wanted to understand why you also started, at this point, to arrive at our sessions 5 to 10 mins late consistently, even though punctuality had never been a problem for you before, and why you suddenly started to make impromptu cancellations. Was the mere sight of me, the reminder that I was a complex case who cannot be solved easily, but who still earned you money, so unbearable, maybe shameful or guilt-inducing even?

In contrast to the other mishaps, I actually did confront you about the inconsistency around our session times, but part of me wished, I never did.

I will never forget your tightly crossed arms and your scornful face, eyebrows digging into the center of your forehead and half-disappearing behind your already stern-looking, thick-rimmed brown glasses, that look of anger and hate aimed towards me that reminded me so much of my always hateful, raging mother. You claimed you didn't understand what I was talking about when I asked you why you acted so aggressively towards me with your hostile body language, with the angry tone in your voice. You showed me with your words and actions that you were unwilling to go there with me emotionally, to provide me, as your client, with the chance of relational repair and for my needs and concerns to be fully heard and understood.

But I had to assume that you, in fact, did hear me well, you just were too lazy to take accountability for your actions as the mediocre, smug therapist who you were. That you were unwilling to step up, even if your unwillingness to act on what your client reflected back to you meant re-traumatizing them for years to come. Because which psychotherapist still cares about their clients' wellbeing these days, am I right?

Genuinely >!screw you!< for causing me harm and even charging me for it.

Cheers,
napstablooka