This blog entry continues from yesterday.
One reason I have so much trouble feeling safe and protected is because I have had abuse lie dormant and then resurface. My mother went 10 years without abusing me and then attacked me again after my father died, so a part of myself is always on alert for when the other shoe is going to drop. No matter how much time has passed without being abused, a part of me lives in fear of it happening again.
For the most part, I do a good job knowing what my triggers are and how to diffuse them. However, getting blindsided by the theme park has rocked my confidence in my ability to keep myself safe, which leads to my feeling the need to take more control, which is what prompted my focus on control this week.
The thing is that I was objectively safe at Legoland. Nobody hurt me there. Nobody was even rude to me despite my terrible attitude in my triggered state. However, being immersed in a “land” of something that is clearly a trigger for severe trauma (based upon my severe reaction) has caused the traumatized child in me to feel extremely unsafe.
I have always loved to travel because I can let go of control and feel safe because I am physically far away from the threat. Now that part of myself fears leaving home because who knows what terrible trigger is lurking out there? I am working hard to dismantle this pattern. I don’t want to spend my life looking backward and navigating the landmines of potential triggers.
I am sick to death of my life being controlled by my childhood. I lived in the trauma for ~ 20 years. I have lived longer without the trauma, so why do the bad years get dibs? The war is behind me – I am so tired of living in a foxhole now that the war has ended.
I really want to move forward. I did not invest all of that hard work and money into healing and therapy so I can still feel unsafe most of the time. The little girl inside is screaming that the “safe” part of the world just got much, much smaller, but I am fighting back – I am not giving up something I love (traveling) because of one big trigger.
The other thing is that I am not going to put a bunch of work into trying to recover the memory this time. I remember enough to have a pretty good idea of the level of trauma associated with the Legos. I don’t have to relive it to heal this. I am sick to death of reliving past trauma – I haven’t really gotten “new” information in years, just more of the same. My abusers were sadistic bastards who tried to break my will, but they didn’t succeed. I want to move forward, not continue focusing on the past. I think it is enough to acknowledge that Legos are a trigger, accept that the trauma was really, really bad, and compassionately move myself forward. I never need to put myself around Legos (and certainly not Legoland) again, but I also don’t need to live in fear of them. They are just Legos.
Photo credit: Hekatekris
“I am sick to death of my life being controlled by my childhood. I lived in the trauma for ~ 20 years. I have lived longer without the trauma, so why do the bad years get dibs? The war is behind me – I am so tired of living in a foxhole now that the war has ended.”
I think I understand. What no-one tells you about recovering from childhood abuse, and isn’t really discussed in survivor circles since we tend to talk more about crisis moments, is that it gets *boring*. Every day there’s monitoring of feelings to be done, routines to be gone through to avoid triggering, blah blah blah. It just bleeds into every area of your life and can become like wallpaper in front of which anything new is played out. It’s strange, because it’s not like I’m used to it; I’m still angry and outraged and frightened; but sometimes I just think FGS *please* can’t I do something else today.
Perhaps getting to the point of feeling that way is a good sign.
couldn’t agree more. I’ve been in crisis groups and I don’t know what, daily discussing how you felt when you were cooking and blah blah blah. Really, indeed, boring.
I quit going there because it kept reminding me of how bad I felt before. I want to move on, but they don’t exactly allow that.
Faith, You’ve already made it this far. So I’m sure you’ll be able to get past this.
Sincerely,
– Prozacblogger
I totally hear you on being sick of the past controlling our present. It’s exhausting, isolating, and as the previous poster pointed out -boring. I also agree that it’s a good sign. Now if we can just get “everyone” on the same page, I’m sure that some form of freedom will follow.
Boring and tiring and feels like running on a treadmill. It is the nature of having survived. I hate it too. Cuts down on some other things I could be doing if I weren’t always managing my illness. But having said that, recognizing the trigger, being compassionate for the self that was abused, and not being too hard on yourself (making life stressful) is actually moving forward.
7 years ago I asked the person who was then my therapist does anyone heal with out going over the trauma and was told yes. I also told her that we were bored with doing all this trauma work.
We have a thing where we tell our therapist we are bored or that we think we are done with therapy. It is a little trick to check if there is more trauma that needs work on.
Now we have some Oh moments. There is something gong on with the programing about Tiger Lilly. Now that we know that it will work itself out over time.
It is boring and laborious the volume is incredible, a life time.
So Tiger Lilly is the Indian in Neverland. Explains why we always use a orange notebook, want a feather hair extension and wear an orange shirt to therapy when we are going to do trauma work. We now see many of the ink drawing in the books used for the programing. Explains why we took a pen and ink class. That is the way it works for us now.
When ever there are memories coming we go to a different type of consciousness., There is always water or frozen water. The other day we felt water coming on our back through a window. It was like “Really that is all you got.”
I have noticed this about people and trauma and this includes all trauma. When I see some people I can count on them going over and over it. I have a friend who every time I see him he will mention that his childhood was pretty much that of an indentured servant and it is boring. He is not processing. I could list hundred of examples of this.
I can see where I learn to process and it becomes one thing that I do among many and not just about the trauma.
Hi Faith,
This is such a momentous topic for me that I found myself spinning within all the implications your post brought up. I found myself thinking of so many things I wanted to say that I finally realized I was crafting a response in my head that could easily take about 30 pages. I got stuck in not being able to narrow it down and, as I am so much of the time these days, being frozen and unable to speak at all.
So I’m going to give this a try. And I apologize in advance – when I’m badly triggered I either clam up entirely or I ramble on and on.
I can’t know what has made you feel this way, but I’ll throw out some of what this brings up for me, just in case it’s of any relevance.
I remember a horrible incident when I first attempted therapy with a local family services agency. I was brand new to therapy and unprepared for the nightmare that can happen, partly because at the time I hadn’t really realized that I was abused. The woman was trying to teach me relaxation skills and started out by telling me to imagine someplace safe. I thought about it, and thought about it, all the while starting to feel ever so slightly more and more uncomfortable. I’m an IT person, so for me this was just an exercise in logic, really. I finally said, without realizing what I might be unleashing, that I couldn’t think of anywhere that truly felt safe. Well that had ticked her off, but in those days I didn’t know how to recognize danger signals. So she started to ask me questions to ‘help’ me. It did, but not in the way she meant. I for the first time started to glimpse the the tiniest truth of my situation and realized that there was no place that ever ‘stayed’ safe, and that the more safe a situation felt the more guaranteed I was that my mother would hunt it down to destroy that for me. Because my mother, probably like yours, was a ‘hunter’: she would wait to hunt you down, for as long as it took, for as many decades as that took. There was no place in my world that wasn’t ‘mined’ with all kinds of hidden bombs that could go off – in my case often with horrible slander and misinformation that she had planted about me with all kinds of innocuous strangers – just in case I ever happened to come across them. Well, this ‘therapist’ became enraged with me for my response and accused me of being intransigent and stubborn. She stormed out and on my next session brought in the director of the organization and the two of them grilled me together. At first he participated in the grilling which was meant to convince me of the error of my ways, but fairly quickly he realized that I was completely unaware and uncomprehending of what was going on and that the problem was hers. Eventually I was allowed to switch to another therapist, but my lesson had been learned, that I had to keep the most frightening mind-f***ing aspects of my life hidden in therapy.
I’ve never had any therapy that ever really dealt with the big stuff, or even the middle stuff for that matter. And the big stuff for me is the contradiction between all the brainwashing (sorry, that’s how I feel about it) and my actual reality. The brainwashing I got was that I’m not currently in danger, that the danger is in my own head, that I’m exaggerating, etc… For the longest time I took that in and accepted it and convinced myself of its truth. Until I ran into a situation after my beloved grandmother died and I was newly married where my world was once again shattered by her. This was over 5 years after I’d broken all contact with her. Because the truth is that when you’re dealing with the worst type of sadist/psychopath the potential for danger will remain for as long as they live, and for some of them even afterward, and IT IS NOT JUST IN YOUR HEAD AND IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH WHETHER YOU ARE A CHILD OR NOT. Those type of people lie in wait, and just because the amount of time they are actually attacking you may be low, UNLESS YOU KNOW HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF WHEN IT FINALLY COMES YOU ARE STILL IN DANGER.
What finally started to turn things around was after I accidently discovered my father had passed away. My husband arranged by phone for the local minister to do a service at the graveside. Somehow my mother found out about this and, unknown to me, contacted the poor minister who obviously must have believed her. My mother, as usual, really got in and f***ed with her head so the service was, well, interesting. I met with her afterwards (we’d never met in person before) to ask her about whether I should try to reconcile with my family. Her advice to me after meeting me in person, realizing she’d been played by my mother, was to protect myself: to start using my husband’s last name, never come back to my grandparents home town, and to never let my family find me.
All that my ‘therapy’ ever did for me was leave me entirely defenceless and unprepared when I once again hit another one of her landmines in adulthood.
So I’ve started to go the other way – to recognize that sometimes the danger is real, and instead of asking myself ‘what are the odds?’ teaching myself that the odds are pretty good that there are at least a few more out there that I may encounter in the future. And asking myself different questions, such as ‘If there are more bombs out there, what could they look like, and how could I prepare myself to avoid them or minimize the damage?’
I’ve started to notice that in the mental health field there are, curiously, no predators, only neurotics who need to learn to quiet themselves with relaxation or cognitive therapy. But any tour through the crime section of the newspaper quickly disavows one of that notion. So I’m now trying to teach myself what has gone into my continued victimization and what I’m doing that makes me vulnerable. I’m not trying to get into my mother’s head, but I AM trying to understand exactly what type of person she is and how they operate, to help prepare me for any future suprises, either in my own as-yet-unencountered triggers, or should I encounter another of her type in future. I recently came across Millon’s subtypes of sadism, which really opened my eyes and helped me better understand. I believe my mother is in the category of ‘Tyrranical Sadist’. Knowing this helps me better prepare myself. As I’m facing more and more of the truth of my reality I’m finding that I’m isolating and freezing more and more (becoming paralyzed is what I do when I need to control fear). Part of this is due to, for the first time ever, finally seeing enough of the truth to feel safe enough to finally feel my triggers. But I am also starting to be aware of a larger truth, and to finally glimpse a way out of this. I’m finding that the ‘truths’ of my life aren’t found anywhere in the mental health literature, more likely in the areas of criminology and self-defence and emergency response training.
I realize the above is just a big ramble, and may not make much sense.
There are a few links I can think of that – loosely – tie this all together in a way that starts to make sense for me. I’m throwing this out just in case any of it may make some sense for you, or for any of your readers:
1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadistic_personality_disorder#Millon.27s_subtypes
2) http://www.protectivestrategies.com/victim-selection.html
3) http://www.protectivestrategies.com/awareness.html
4) The “Victim Selection” section of the documentary “I, Psychopath” – specifically the research by Prof. Angela Book (available on Youtube)
5) Articles on stalkers (don’t have a good source yet)
6) http://www.lovefraud.com/blog/2009/01/04/sociopath-proof-in-2009/
7) “Sadism” section of book “Personality disorders and older adults: diagnosis, assessment, and treatment” – pg 138
(link here: http://books.google.ca/books?id=1Y0_UwGdakcC&pg=PA138&lpg=PA139&dq=millon+types+of+sadism&source=bl&ots=Z_7y6Hmcxc&sig=g-zUjP14ZzlkJn1rTwUDgSjKaJ4&hl=en&ei=x-cyTvDoEoXTgQfliPibDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CDkQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=millon%20types%20of%20sadism&f=false)
Very interesting, thanks. I agree that understanding (in a technical way) ones abuser can be very helpful in predicting what kind of danger one is in. It does require study of clinical psychology though; there’s no use pretending all psychopaths etc are in prison, because the ones that get caught account for a tiny minority.
Usually only stupid psychopaths are typically caught and a smart one will avoid much punishment usually.
Birdfeeder
Just wanted to say this is the way I have developed also. Unfortunately I think people who have not ever had to live with a sadistic psychopath have very little idea of just how dangerous and terrible it is in an objective way. Many classic abuse therapists just don’t understand the effects of psychopathy. I’ve had the same negative experience of therapy as you, and exactly the same chain-of-events when I was asked to meditate on ‘somewhere safe’. I’m only going to continue therapy now with someone who understands the effects of having been raised by a sociopath (one who continues to meddle in my life or has the ability to do so, despite a very long estrangement).
Hi Faith
I so empathise with this wishing to move on and not always backwards. A few thoughts from my own healing: (a) think theme parks out of hours are likely often used for ritual abuse and I avoid them though sometimes have problems with fairs as well (b) sometimes I am drawn to go to a place/ do a thing that will be a trigger because a part wants me to reconnect with their experience (c) sometimes when having done that it will be unavoidable that there is an onslaught of memories but sometimes it is enough – at least for the moment – to do as you are, recognize the feelings of unsafety, reassure self, not dwell on past. I have that with tropical fish at the moment – had an urge to buy a tankfull, researched online how to keep them etc, went to a tropical fish wholesalers and was triggered. Have not recovered the memories of why but have remembered vomiting whenever there were programmes of tropical fish on TV as a teenager, having a sort of phobia of them, also being bought tropical fish as part of grooming before some of the worst rapes, but feel I was also in a place where there were tropical fish when raped but haven’t recovered that. Telling myself that’s enough and it’s compassionate to avoid tropical fish for now but also telling myself the good things about what I wanted to do – start a new hobby, watch beautiful creatures etc. This is healing.
You so deserve to feel safe…world is unsafe, theme parks are anyway weird because you’re supposed to have ‘fun, fun, fun’ there yet they are subconsciously associated with major accidents, danger etc – and that’s too high an expectation maybe? Abit false anyway.
Ax,
I have memories of a fair ground not yet processed. It was a temporary amusement park in a way., The memories right now are all tied into going to the fair which I used to do at the end of the summer. End of summer is coming up is it not? The only reason I know it was the fair ground is the smell as I was blind folded. I also have a weird location instinct.
The cults had a practice of using places that they could not be associated with specifically. I expect it is a rule. They use houses that they know are abandoned or no one will come to the house. If you have a memory and go back to the place there is no way to trace it., They use many public places. The dump, a cemetery, a school or school gym or state park. They use warehouses. Funeral homes are a favored place. Who is going to a funeral home unannounced?
A cult member who can pick a lock is much valued.
Michael
Hi Michael
Deep breath then replied. For alot of my teens I recall boasting to friends how i could unpick locks, including car door locks. I recall how to unlock a car door, in that era anyway, by cutting open a tennis ball and placing it airtight over the lock outside which would trigger the central locking system somehow due to air pressure and would come undone). I don’t recall who taught me, or the other kind of locks…
Some of my most terrifying memories involve being abused in derelict houses, particularly derelict institutional houses, e.g. old hospitals. Tying in with my earlier post and also with what you say, I think fairs are easily used because people are primed to ‘have a good time’ there so even more inclined to turn a blind eye to anything untoward. Screaming is normal etc etc. Much of my abuse was down under the cover of theatres (acting theatres not surgical theatres).
Take care
Having love and giving love is like bringing heaven to the heart. Having passion to give comfort and love to myself and others, is compassion from the soul and I am thankful.
The strength that has brought us here is strong and growing, even in struggle that strength is always with us. The achievements already gained are never lost. The swimming in the pain is the pain trying to hold on, but its grip is certainly become less. We are all doing the right thing for our souls.
Having love and giving love is like bringing heaven to the heart. Having passion to give comfort and love to myself and others, is compassion from the soul and I am thankful.
i’ve missed you, friend. Sorry your vacation was unpleasant.
Hi Faith,
I’m sorry you were triggered by Legoland. I can understand you are tried of the past controling you. I too don’t want ot dig into every memory of trauma I have (and I in fact have very few memories), because I want to move forward. At this point, I am relatively stable as far as the PTSD goes, and I don’t wan tot dig up all the hurt from the past again and go through even more flashbacks than I’ve gone through already in order to eventually, hoepefully heal. I know that exposure can be healing, but trying to recover every bit of memory may not be. There are trauma experts whoagree that it is not necessary to know all that happened to you in order to heal from PTSD and dissociative disorders. I tend to agree with them. Good luck and wishing you strength on your healing journey.