Hi nelliefay,

So sorry to hear your story. I will admit that I need to keep busy, yes. For 10 years I was with an abusive man, who could not give me the necessary support to cope with what happened with my parents as a child. I started volunteering just to get out of the house, having been scared and almost housebound for years.

The volunteering gave me something to get up in the morning for, new and accepting people to meet, and tasks that both made me feel I was contributing to something worthwhile and occupied my troubled mind.

I do self-medicate if I am honest, too... work, food, watching films and tv series. I am not sure if it is loneliness or a fear of being forgotten or the memories that I am running from. Or if I just long to be seen as a normal person going out and doing things, after all this time of feeling anything but normal inside.

Does this help any? Safe hugs xx

I was not sure if I knew how to articulate it properly just now, but it just came to me:

I think I started working because I was so frightened of 'disappearing' under the weight of my Dad and other men draining me to fill their cups. I felt like I would lose my identity altogether if I did not hurry up and repair it by being 'something' in society. That best describes my feeling.

Hope it helps xx

I have similar feelings.

I can't deal with too much at a time. If I dredge up too many memories or discuss my relationship with my sister too much, I get very unsettled and I need to get away from it all.

I remember a lot of it now, but it doesn't stay. At times I go back to forgetting it all again, but eventually it resurfaces. It took me a really long time to get past the denial. I believe it happened, but my mind doesn't want to recognize the wrongness of it. I want to go back to thinking it was no big deal to have my older sister always trying to hit on me sexually...like that's normal...or that it's normal to have my father make sexually suggestive comments about me and leer at me...or call me "his little seamstress" because I sewed some buttons back on my coat or something.

I want to make my family normal in my memory, not the carnival fun-house they really were.

And I also find that I have to be busy all the time, or entertained with engrossing action on TV, or reading suspense novels. If I sit still and remember things, I start to come unglued somehow.

We can change our future to some extent, but not our past. And the things that adults did to us when we were children are not in any way our fault. We feel ashamed, but in truth all the shame is theirs.

Absolutely. I spend most of my time distanced from what happened.

When I let it come close, which I have to sometimes in order to deal with it, then yes, I get a crisis. Sometimes bad, sometimes serious (tho as I have dealt with it more and more the times it is really serious has become less and less often).

I would say that for 99% of the time in my mind I know theoretically that it was me all this happened to, but I treat it as if it was someone else. That way I can function. If I didn't, I couldn't.

thank you for your replies. I am doing a bit better today, just living in the moment. take care everyone.

What you describe isn't just common amongst abuse survivors, but every human being that experiences something traumatic. It's our psychological defenses kicking in to make sure that we can protect ourselves in a fundamental way, and not go mad as you say.

It's funny that I'm frightened at times of 'going mad'. I already have a major mental illness. (schizo affective). But, it's a fear that I'll lose myself completely.
anyway, thanks everyone, I'm sorry you've had to go through it too.

Try not to worry, Nellie. It's said all the time, but I don't think anyone truly "goes mad" from stress and trauma. We may lose touch with reality for a time, but that's more or less temporary.

I had a major psychotic break decades ago, and it was an extremely bad experience to say the least, but eventually I got back into more rational thinking.