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sprytling 
1:29pm, November 23, 2008
I made an appointment with a counselor and actually went twice. We didn't do much except the intake form and I got hit with this inner ear infection. I can't drive, and I'm back to looking at four walls. Oh, I could cheerfully stay this way...locked into my house, making my husband do the grocery shopping, going to school online and talking on the telephone. But I don't think it's good for my husband, and he has a heart condition. I'm scared something will happen to him and I have to get in control of my life.
I was also going to PT three times a week for a few weeks, to try and get walking better. I had pain in my hip from a back injury. The pain in the hip is gone, but my back hurts nearly all the time now and I can't stand for more than a couple of minutes at a time. I've let myself get so heavy that I have diabetes and high blood pressure, and still I'm not able to do anything about anything. I'm trying to figure out if I like being this helpless....and I don't think I do.
I have to get rid of this vertigo so I can drive again. I have a motorized wheelchair and Vocational Rehab is helping me to get a chair lift for my truck, so I can get out and go do what I need to do. Is this vertigo my body's answer to my fear? I wish I knew. I know I don't want to leave my house, but I've been making myself do it. Maybe the vertigo is psychological. I don't know...all I know is that I'm not doing what I want to do and that is to get better.
I'm only a little nauseous today, and I actually got dressed. That's a big day for me lately. I have made it to Daily Strength, but I have so many different problems that I have no idea which group I should try and join. Sometimes I feel like a hypchonriac. Between diabetes, high blood pressure, rheumatoid arthritis, gout, PTSD and depression, I truly am a mess.
Maybe today I will put dishes in the dishwasher and do a couple of loads of wash. Maybe today I will exercise a little, and hope that it doesn't hurt too much. Maybe today I will try and help myself. I know all the answers, I just don't seem to have the energy necessary to try most of the time. But today will be better, because I want to get better today.
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I talked with someone for the first time today. I'm 58 years old and I've never told anyone how bad things were when I was growing up. All my life I've had bad dreams of my parents and my mother hurting my father and throwing him out all the time, and of being awakened from sleep with them fighting in my bedroom. I remember my father lying on the kitchen floor with my mother standing over him and telling him to die, after she hit him in the head, once with a big seashell, another time with a steel soup ladle and yet another time with a baseball bat. When she managed to throw him out, she turned on me. I was the eldest of six kids.
I was 21 when I ran away and married a man I met and knew for about a month. I stayed married to him for ten years. He wrote bad checks, conned people and lied to me, and I had two children and we were always running away from whatever he had done. So we moved alot, and I was really frightened all the time. One day a man knocked on my door and told me that my husband had invited him. He beat and raped me and I couldn't do anything because I was afraid he would hurt my children. The funny thing is that mixed in with the bad dreams, the rapist has my mother's face sometimes. I've been so afraid I was crazy for years.
I've been waiting to grow up and forget all the bad things. When do the bad dreams go away. All of this happened years and years ago and I divorced and remarried 27 years ago.
I'm physically so ill now, and I get panic attacks. Not all the time...but when I'm not having one, I'm afraid I will. I guess I'm a mess. But I want to try and find my way out of this maze I've created for myself. I am afraid to leave my home anymore, but even if I wasn't, I don't feel well enough to go out. But my doctor thinks I should go to physical therapy. I've applied for disability so I can afford to fix my car. Today the psychologist that Social Security sent me to said that there was a way to help me with the panic attacks. She suggested counseling and she said for what I'd told her, I wasn't so strange. I don't know if I agree...but I really want to try.
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I'm just feeling a little down right now. I did raise five children and I've had a good life too. But I'm so tired all the time, I think now that they're raised and on their own, I need to help myself. Everything seems like such a struggle.
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I've had double pneumonia since I wrote the above. It's September 18 and I still don't feel really well, but I've been going to physical therapy three times a week, except for when I was on the antibiotics. My hip feels better, though it's still weak and I'm still walking with a stick. I started seeing a counselor who I think was crazier than I am. I started seeing her in June, and stopped at the end of July. I just started seeing someone else. She seems a little flighty, but at least she started the first meeting with trying to find out about me. The other one was telling me that I hated my mother and that I never should have had children because I was passing on a bad seed. I was more depressed after speaking with her than I was before.
I did get approved for disability and Vocational Rehab is trying to help me get a job, but we've decided that perhaps it would be better if I get a little further with therapy than I have. I'm really terrified to leave my house...I do, but it takes every ounce of energy to not turn around and run back inside. I'm so scared I'll have a panic attack while I'm driving.
Anyway, I found a cognitive therapist who says she can deal with helping me to get out of this maze I have myself in. I don't understand why it takes so much energy to concentrate. I'm taking classes online and I've earned my associate degree in Business Administration with a concentration in accounting. Now I'm working on a bacheor's in paralegal. But if I'm doing my schoolwork, I can't concentrate on anything else at all. It' takes ALL of my energy to concentrate on anything. I haven't really read a book in years...I feel as if my brain is scrambled eggs. But I have really good grades in school. I don't understand.
I'm getting better. I'm looking for a job, but I'm still really scared to leave my home. I'm doing it, but it takes every ounce of energy to go out and stay out. I have panic attacks and when I'm not having a panic attack, I'm afraid I'm going to have a panic attack. They feel like I can't breathe and my heart beats so fast that I'm frightened to death.
sprytling
I was 8 years old when my mother's cousin began molesting me whenever I visited my Grandmother. He was from Ireland and boarded with my Grandmother for years. I guess it stopped when I was about 11, but I've always felt guilty because when he was molesting me I never told anyone. He kept saying that when I got big he was going to marry me...and in my little girl mind I suppose I believed him.
When I was 15 I went to visit my grandmother who was ill at the time. I was supposed to take care of her. When Danny got up, I got up too. I thought my grandmother regularly fixed his breakfast and I should do so also. When he came into the kitchen, I kissed him rather than him kissing me. He had been tongue kissing me from the age of 8 mind you...but he pushed me away as if that had never happened and he was shocked at my actions. I was really confused and I never told anyone about that either.
As I got older I knew that he had been molesting me and that it had not been a normal relationship.
Yesterday I talked with a cousin of mine who I had not spoken with in years. In the course of the conversation she told me that she had been molested by that cousin as well. She also said that she had a breakdown in 1990's because of that and other things in her life.
I feel horrible. Maybe if I had told she wouldn't have been hurt. But more than that, I just feel awful. It's as if I finally have verification that what I thought happened , really did happen, and not only to me. I feel so wierd. It's not as if he was the only molest, but he was the only adult, and I had it in my mind that sex was what girls were made for. It took years for me to realize that thinking was skewed.
sprytling
I'm still trying to undo the "sex is what girls are made for" mentality, even tho I know it's skewed too...sprytling, we CAN overcome this. Try not to feel guilty about anything. How old were you when he molested you? Try to think back at how young and innocent you were and what your thinking was at the time. Were you afraid to tell, like I was? Most of us are afraid we won't be believed, then there is also sometimes fear of retaliation, and let's not forget the shame our molesters make us feel, the embarrassment and ..........the list goes on. Hun, you did the best you could with what you had at the time and you are not to blame, not for what happened to you and not for not telling. HE is to blame for all of this, the way you are feeling, the things that happened to you and the things that happened to your cousin. There is a kind of a positive side to this, if you care to look at it this way...you DO have verification now and you know. Now that you know, it gives you the power to deal with it and get your life back. Loves & Power for YOU
mtnmama62