Hi. I know what you mean. I feel that way too. I wish I could just be done and over it already. Even with years of therapy I'm still having to deal with it every day. I hope you're able to some how find relief and Lasting peace.

Hello Claire. Welcome to the forum. Sorry for what brings you here, but glad you are here. You are most definitely not alone.

Family members make lousy therapists, even when they are qualified to therapute other people. Loved ones are entirely too involved for objectivity, whatever their qualifications outside the family. Peer support is less finicky, but even there, the close entanglement of family colors the perspectives mightily.

I hope you'll find this to be a safe place to sort through the yaddahs of your personal blahs. Sort freely. Sort often. We're listening. Hope healing happens here.

Hello Clairebear and welcome. No, you're not alone. My parents are both uncapable of empathy and abusive, so I can relate. I still deal with it every day, though I am getting better (generally in long term, but always with ups and downs) through therapy. A DS friend reminded me several times that repressed memories always come back when we're strong enough to deal with them. I believe that's true, though I understand the feeling of "oh no, not again" very well.
Much strength to you

Hello. You are in the right place. There is a good book you might want to read. It's by Peter Walker "complex PTSD from surviving to thriving." In it, he says we need to let go of the fantasy that our symptoms will one-day completely go away. Because that fantasy hinders our progress. Tell your husband that this will be a battle that will take a long time. And he needs to have patience. There's no other way around it. He doesn't have to be your therapist. That's what your therapist is for. He just needs to be your husband and support you in your moments when you need it. And if he can't handle it, he will have to move on. Which would not be your fault if he did. If he loves you and wants to support you, he will. Perhaps couples counseling would help so that he knows better what to do. And that he knows it's not all on him or all on you. You're a team. He signed up to be on your team for the rest of your lives when you guys got married. And that includes joy and sorrow. Remind him of that and reach out for resources for both of you. You may want to have him read the book to. It may help him understand more of what you deal with and how he can support you.

Hi, Clairebear, welcome from me, too. With Father's Day coming, I started a thread here about the impact on me of the inability of a mentally ill father to connect positively with me. In working toward a forgiving explanation for a lifelong pattern of destructive responses to care, my therapist speculated that my father's negativity was rooted in untreated bipolar disorder. For example, from K-12 we made manic moves every year, from state to state and then abroad until finally a foreign government intervened and deported him and my mother back to the USA as persona non grata.

Which brings me to my mother, who my therapist speculated exhibited behaviors rooted in untreated borderline personality disorder. My adult sister, in her struggle with a lifelong eating disorder, confessed to me that my mother actually coached her in bathroom sessions on the proper technique for purging. She also involved my sister in her related pill and laxative abuse.

My father's probable bipolar disorder and my mother's likely borderline personality disorder made for a toxic union in marriage and parenting. It is no wonder I was so mistrustful of marriage myself that in my own life there were two divorces with no children. Family was a dangerous thing in my experience and parachuting was my first fight or flight CPTSD impulse when encountering turbulence.

Such a background affects everything I do since, as Complex PTSD, it reaches back to my brain development itself as my sense of self grew from childhood. I cannot turn it off. That is frustrating for any partner in intimacy.

I've begun to believe that something about the difference between the support of a partner or a friend vs. the support of a mental health professional. The basis of the therapist's professional's commitment is to engage with our repetition as a job when it comes to building a narrative for ourselves to live with the traumas of our pasts. We pay a mental health professional to enter into a contract to tolerate how repetition brings mastery as far as learning to tell our stories to ourselves to build a healthy sense of self. Here on DS our peers also enter into a volunteer contract for the same, the terms of which are sort of, "I'll support your repeating yourself every day as you'll support me repeating myself every day, too."

Every time we repeat our story we gain mastery over how trauma has controlled us with its triggers before. The first time I spoke about being molested as a boy I choked on the words and was unable to concentrate on daily tasks for a week. Now as I wrote that sentence about it here I can remember it without reliving it. That happened because every time I retold the story here and in therapy it held less sway over me. It will never go away, but that's healing for coping with its chronic CPTSD effects on me.

A partner or a friend is not a professional who has committed to our repetition to bring mastery as their job. Most likely they already have a job. Their time with us is off the job and meant to be rest and recreation from it. Understanding that has helped me take their different response to my unburdening myself on them about my trauma. I wish I'd had such clarity before my divorces--no, actually even before my marriages. I realize that in my case part of my motivation to marry, just speaking for me, was to marry so my partner would make me "normal."

Not their job. Plus, what is normal? I can measure function, I can't measure normal.
Realizing now through therapy that being high functioning is the real goal of my CPTSD recovery, I take responsibility for my own false expectations of my close relationships. Now I socialize more in my social life, I work more in my work life, and I heal more in my therapy and support life. I don't keep each separate to the point of having different personalities or anything, there is some overlap. But I have some boundaries now and I understand their usefulness, something I never did before.

Writing about them here is how I maintain clarity about them. Dr. Viktor Frankl, Freud's student who was tested by the Holocaust, called it "logotherapy," My endless repetition of words here online about how trauma shaped my sense of self helps me not make repetition the basis of every conversation off line. I don't su ck the oxygen out of every room I enter with my CPTSD now as much as I used to do. I have a place here to put my memories as they continually pop up.

So I ramble here, please forgive me for that. It's a safe space for it. I hope you feel free to ramble here, too. It's a healing place.

Thanks to all who replied! It's really nice to not feel alone in this! It took me a while to really read and process your advice. It makes so much more sense now than it did. I'm going to read the book and I had a really good discussion with my husband. No one was angry and we really came to a great place.

I'm realizing that this just isn't going to go away and I've relinquished my poor partner from the responsibility of being my therapist. If I need a therapist, and it looks like I probably do, I'll discuss such issues with that person instead.

My husband said putting that kind of pressure on him will ruin our marriage and he's right. I didn't realize I was doing that, but I do now.

It is a bit freeing to realize that the PTSD may never go away and that's ok as long as I recognize what it is and deal with it appropriately.

I've decided to set up an appointment to discuss this with my Dr. Doesn't look like I can get rid of this through excercising to eliminate stress or through finding new hobbies. It's time to stop trying to do the self-help thing and see a professional.

Support as you work it out.

I'm haunted by childhood too.

Way to go, Clairebear82! Share what you learn with us here, too, won't you? Chronic PTSD is the gift that keeps on giving, so we all can use all the support we can get.

Welcome to the board Claire..... This is a good place to come...... I'm sorry for what's brought you here but I'm glad that you've found us..... Gentle hug....xo

I definitely will share what I learn with you all. This is a great place to be and have found.