Wow! How perfect! Please memorize and repeat it to yourself all day long.

I will also contribute one of my own affirmations: You deserve to be forgiven for your mistakes, past present and future.

Will it make you feel any better to know the scale of my mistakes, I wonder? Three weeks ago I killed my beloved dog by forgetting I left her in the car. As far as I know, you haven't killed anyone here .... And whatever you have done, you deserve to be forgiven.

Maybe you could talk to someone, to break into the circular track running round and round in your own mind. Maybe a priest? I strongly feel you need to quit chewing and spit something out. You are too alone with your self-punishing thoughts. (Or am I misunderstanding you?)

Thanks for share.

I had a long reply and my computer bleeped it so...


Step away from the mirror, Arfie. Put down the Finger of Doom. Shit, weather, and rotten tomatoes happen in our lives, and we cannot assume God/Cosmos/Divine is that focused on us, nor are we so powerful, that it is all about us when the bad happens.

I'm struggling to express a wisdom here, and failing, I apologize.

I think I mean: Free yourself to be hurting without assigning blame to anyone, including yourself, and see where that river takes you.

Gentle support.

What was it about the turn of the millenium, arfie? My last hospitalization was in 2000, right after yours.

I do know how you feel about regression. When the bottom fell out for me in 2010, I feared a return in very real way. I joined DS PTSD and you got me through. We'll get each other through this one, my friend.

Oh, my God, Donna. I'm SO sorry.

What an awful thing to have happen ......

Wow.

arfie ,your thought for the day is similar to what gave me a breakthrough on my path with PTSD. I have many times struggled with remembering that I was not to blame, I didn't ask for others to abuse me.Just as I became damaged in my stress responses, they too were hard-wired in correctly whether by nature or nurture.

It is the mostly unheard part of the Serenity Prayer. insert deity or belief as needed.
It was:
Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

his will, being, choosing how I use my free will to choose my actions.

My Mother abused my brother and myself. My Mother's Father had abused her. So is my Mother off the hook for abusing my brother and myself because her father abused her. I think not. She chose of her own free will to hold onto the hatred due to the hideous acts that her father imposed on her. And then she chose of her own free will to spread that filth and hatred onto my brother and myself.

She could have just as easily of her own free will sought help and fixed herself before she married and had children. She could have chosen not to have children and gotten married. She could have pursued the career of her choice and lived the life of a single career women.

For me, what happened decades ago happened decades ago. It is over and done. I have to open the door to the past when I need to so I can learn for the benefit of the here and now. I had or have no control over how someone else uses their free will. I do however have 100% control over how I used and use mine.

52 I have been studying child development in hopes to help children like me learn to cope with trauma. What I do know now is that is extreme consistent trauma were happening to a child before the age of two-3(this include your mother if that time frame applies) and goes unchecked. it can hard wire her brain with a lack of coping skills. We as those with early consistant traumatic treatment, are so busy as children stuck in fright /flight, that our brain has no energy to spend on developing the cortex where the synaptic connects that allow abstract thinking, reasoning and resilience from events is built at.
The possibility of that child becoming a healthy parent get real slim the longer the treatment is not checked,. There is promising proof that therapy done early can over come the deficits. But the longer the extreme treatment is done, the longer it takes for therapy to start, the more the hardwiring is negatively affected.

About 30% of women develop psycho-social disorders, about 27% of the men also will have these problems, as well as a higher rate of illness and pain when the autoimmune systems in both genders, is affected.

So as I would not blame a mentally challenged person for what they couldn't control, I am understanding that extreme trauma untreated can create challenged coping abilities.
By the age of around 6 the brain starts heavily pruning unused neurons in the different areas of the brain it deems not needed because they weren't used. A child's thoughts always in the amygadala where the automatic responses originate, would be dosed on corto-steriods (cortisol) and adrenolin , while not developing the normal stress response system of a coping and adapting.

If this sounds like mom? then consider she never had what she needed to learn to be a nurturing parent. She fell back into the same well known actions of a child, Tantrums, fits, blame, heck even biting and striking out. ..etc. Think the actions of a two-4 year old that don't get there way or are fruestrated.
Therapy can help if one knows they need help, but it can't do much while in denial.

This is very brief, because I don't type well and
and my typing sucks because of hand coordinaion and injuries.Believe me I could do a whole verbal lecture on it now.
Jewells
Sorry arfie for running on your thread.

a quick ps.
Children in the womb bombarded with thier mothers cortisol storm....also have a higher propensity to the same deficits, in managing stress.
Sound familiar?

It sure sounds familiar to me, Jewells. I got pregnant during my second year of pre-engineering by a man I could not bear the thought of marrying. My hyper-sexuality of the day was far from discrete. Most of the available counseling was pro-abortion. I couldn't do it, despite the horrific feelings that my dreams had been dealt a fatal blow. My nightmares, insomnia, etc., were raging. I developed toxemia and the child was born 2 months early.

He popped down the shoot screaming. His 35 year old screams are. . . Ouch.

Neither of us chose it. . . May the circle one day be broken.

Where's my superwoman cape? I am in a town with a Superman museum. Maybe I can buy new and improved one. The old one didn't work so good.

That time frame would apply to me, but not my mother. I have no memory of my abuse, but it is developing and making it's self known in my dreams/nightmares. My Mother had knowledge of her abuse, her father laying next to her in his underwear. If she told me that, then you know there is much more.

If she knew about her abuse, then she could have gotten help before she dealt out the same to my brother and myself. It is called free will. She made the decision of her own free will to do to my brother and myself what was done to her.

So no, she does not get a free pass. When I go to the church and walk up to the brick wall with the 8x8 metal sign with my brother's name on it, I do not think of a lot of scientific mumbo jumbo that would allow me to let her off the hook and look at my life through rose-colored glasses. It is what it is. She is an accessory to my brother's murder, especially when she knew where he kept the shotgun and that he was going to take his life, and did absolutely nothing. And used of all things the Holy Bible to push him over the edge and give him the out to take his life. No BS allowed here on this one.

Sorry you were victimized by such a cruel and evil mother, 52. Free pass to the toxic people dump?

Trying not to call it, "Dachau."

Healing hopes for all. No exceptions.

52, my glasses are not rose colored they are blood soaked. Her dad violated her trust-mistrust cycle which is one of the earliest cognitive development stages. Finding out about therapy after the age of 18(when she would be freely able to get), well the hard wiring in a female is already well in place.

Maybe it will help you to know that at 18 my 23yr. old brother took his own ticket out too. He really was the only one that listened to me at that time in my life.

I won't ask you to forgive/or give her a free pass, but holding anger and resentment as a fuel? that is only detrimental to you at this point.

The only people I forgave were the ones that asked and showed me they wanted to change...this wasn't very many. But they had to do both. I can now forgive myself for what I couldn't control growing up...the number of people that used me and the ones that allowed it. It's a thing I can grasp now, but I couldn't before I came here.. It took lifting a two year old great niece to realize " How could I have stopped them?"

Now I am working on the hard wiring, running different connections via knowledge, education and deeds to bypass the damage done. But also use the damage as a point of choice to help children, listen not tell them HUSH or beat then into submission as was.
Those here that know me, know that I have worked hard at learning what I can to heal the trifecta of abuse that I managed to live through. Even my own attempts to end my existence at times, some that really should have worked. I plan on being the best I can be with my abilities, working always in that direction. It won't be easy and I will fall, but I have some support now.

Also help for that wasn't really available as yet. What happened in a man's house was his business according to the law of the land. Given your age your mother was going through this in the 1940's?

Thank you, Each1.

I do not get to have proof, but emerging memories have offered clues that my very first diagnosis, (circa 1960 when my mother was trying to get her functionally mute brat into kindergarten) was, "Autism." A school official advised her to enroll me as, "Retarded" because autism was still a very scary word in 1960.

"Arithmomania" could have been one of the indicators of the autism dx. I was not talking, but I was already writing numbers and counting compulsively. I do believe I am a natural born scorekeeper.

Girl, howdy, I feel compelled to keep a constant watch on my reaction to the blame game. . . One of our culture's favorite pass times, isn't it? Somebody else, not me. Everybody seems to brasso their halo 3 times a day. . .