Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Support Group
Find support with others who have gone through a traumatic experience. Whether you have chronic or acute PTSD, we are here for you.
I am a recovering chaos junkie. Being raised in the back of a station wagon with 10 other siblings in a traveling, over-sexed freak show pretty much made chaos addiction a coping mechanism for me. Prison cells were the most stable environments available. Stability was a frightening proposition. Fast forward a few decades and stability means being trapped in the Toxic Mom role by abusive expectations.
Over the course of the 2 years of my current transition into my second parenting career, stability has come to mean simply knowing what to expect when the 3 young orphans (currently 2-8 years old) wake up in the morning and go to bed at night. The long hours between waking and bedtime are beginning to feel predictable enough that I can actually plan activities and carry through on the plans. Sometimes. Works in progress. Even the Corona politics are feeling a bit less menacing to our stability. A little. Sometimes. Adding hypodermics full of untested vaccines to their arsenal has made the maskites scarier than ever, but at least there has been a partial return of indecently exposed smiles. Where there are smiles, there is hope.
More and more I believe I am at the stage of the transition where, herstorically, my fear of entrapment has begun its self-sabotage antics. Am I building myself another Toxic Mom throne? Am I creating community contacts which will eventually morph into mean, inflexible stereotypes and expectations?
Am I making sense? Anybody else dealing with self-sabotage in their recovery, up close and personal? There is a plethora of detached expert advice on the subject. I can and do research those on my own. Any strictly personal stories from fellow patients who have worked the phenom from the inside? Personal experience is much harder to come by than expertly detached theory.
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Hey All...I hope that you have a lovely, peaceful beginning of your weekI have a bunch of chores that need doing but may put them off til tomorrow and just hang out with my landlord/roomie todayWhat about you?...Anything special going on?Have a great day and take good care of you!!..Xo
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Once again I've had a fever today. I'm not going to the hospital because that's a huge waste of time but I did schedule a dr appointment for Wednesday afternoon.
To not permit myself to see even the possibility of recovery.
My doctor in the hospital advised me to make "new loops" in my head.
I am trying to work on that but it is tough when the old loops won't be pried from the old tape machine...
I have no idea if i am making an iota of sense here....
You are making allot of sense to me, Silver. I like the analogy of prying the old loops from the tape machine. If only I could pull those old loops out of my mental tape player as easily as I used to dig tape out of a tape player.. Hope you heard the sarcasm in the **easily**. Some of those old tape machines could really hold their tape.
Sigh. . .
Itsy bitsy baby steps. . .
So the tricky thing for me was that self sabotage was costly--I literally went bankrupt--yet it yielded crucial insight for my recovery. If that's true for you, could you get straight to the insight part without going through the self sabotage this time to get there?
My own style of self-sabotage is far more subtle than romantic cliches. Social distancing is more my style. Pre-therapy, other continents was usually enough social distance for me. Equally, I can melt into a crowd and hide under a romantic suitor's nose. You'll have to catch me before you have any chance, whatsoever of convincing me you won't be talking to divorce lawyers in 6 months. I have yet to be found before I **wanted** to be found, if ever.
I knew your style of self sabotage was different from mine by how you stayed married so long that you've become a grandma now. The sad thing is that you didn't reap the rewards of being a traditional grandma in return, suffering such a terrible loss in the deaths of your son and your daughter in law.
Teaching death and dying classes to nursing students for the last 10 years, I learned that the usual 5 stage grief process (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) would involve anger under the most normal of circumstances. In this unusual case those "small irritations
you mention are even more justified.
I had an evil grandmother, arfie, just like her son who beat me so badly every week that I ended up with PTSD here. When my cousins were left with her briefly by my aunt while she worked out some problems in her marriage, rather than care for them my grandmother called social services and put them in the foster care system.
They ended up being put up for permanent adoption out of the family and out of state from Virginia to Missouri halfway across the country. I only met one of them on a visit to Missouri decades later as an adult. The other I've never met. It crushed my aunt's spirit and mind, as you can imagine. She never recovered at all, she just went mad.
My cousins' separation as adults has left a hole in their hearts.. I have silently admired how you've done the opposite by taking your grandchildren in to raise as your own, then. I can only imagine how hard it is to do that, and send you my support while telling you that keeping them together for each other will pay off decades from now when you and I are gone.