Voicelessness and Emotional Survival > Voicelessness and Emotional Survival Message Board

Still need to work through early trauma

<< < (91/146) > >>

Hopalong:
Hi GS--This flouresced for me:


--- Quote ---I had a flashback to being talked to by my father who would drone on and on and on and demand that I maintain eye contact, not blink, not look away, not interrupt, not speak.
--- End quote ---

Without the eye contact demand, this reminded me a lot of how my D was during the year of her breakdown. She would demand nonstop listening for literally hours. I read somewhere later that this can be characteristic of Asperger's, which suddenly made sense. The way her mind works, should I break her flow the idea or point she was after would vanish. Same time, she was also being emotinally abusive. I wonder if at some times, she didn't know it.

On the other hand, my gentle father I believe was a bit OCD and he would sometimes go into those endless droning narratives (an itinerary was like a poem to him, sigh). But in his case, though it made me squirm with impatience, there was no abuse. I loved him and that was one of his quirks.

Neither instance in my life matches the one in yours, but the behavior did make me wonder about something similar to Aspergers in your father. Plus a cruel nature. Yikes, girl.

love and carry on -- you're doing magnificently (and they are dead and you are YOUNG, you ARE building a new self and life)--
Hops

Gaining Strength:
Back to that  place of getting worse before it gets better.

Gaining Strength:
Hops -  do you think your daughter has Asperger's? That would explain so much.

With my father, it was about control and domination. There was no Asperger's.

Hopalong:
Yuck. Your father was a JERK.
Pumped up petty tyrant JERK.

Yes, my D told me she'd been diagnosed with Aspergers. I asked about degree, and she said "Mild."
It made a lot of things make sense. Poor girl also has bipolar and ADD, so her platter is overfull.

A friend just described some really really nasty bipolar abusive behavior to me, and we
puzzle together over whether that's pure mental illness OR character defect, or some mix.
It's so much more nuanced than I grasp, I think.

I wring my hands more over the meanness than the mental illness, as I sense you do about him.

What a JERK. I'm glad you no longer have to listen to that man. Or even glance at him. Evermore.

love
Hops

Gaining Strength:
I don't really think of him in any specific ways oddly enough. But I think of the effects of his behaviour on me and , perhaps the even more destructive phenomena that no one ever stood up and pointed out to me that his behaviour was outrageous and cruel.  Because no one did and because it started from my birth, I always processed it as a flaw in my being.  And that has been the great destructive force in my life.

So today, I am reorganizing how I see myself.  I wish it were as easy as it writes.

I want to interject about how your daughters combination of afflictions explains so much about her inability to receive what you have for her.  It is so much easier, though not easy in any way, to cut the ties with a rejecting, shaming parent than with a child who closes a door, no doubt.

*****
Yesterday I began the "safe place" phase of EMDR.  I am back in "shame", dealing with "shame."  I am thankful that I made the progress I did in early summer.  It cleared away a seal that now exposes the shame that has controlled my life while taking the horrific edge off the pain of it.  So now, at long last, I am opening up the shame yet again but in a new level.

So yesterday we talked about a handful of memories in which shame and rejection paralyzed me.  These memories and me reaction to them touch where I am today.  Shut down.  BUT - now there is hope and there is understanding that this shame and rejection came on me not from my own doing and that they can be lifted and life can be renewed.

Years ago I recognized that I lived with GAD, that my anxiety had attached to everything.  And that is true about shame as well.  I hear something that has some level of shame, unrelated to me and I feel shame.  Decades ago I recognized that I tuned into negative feelings around me.  I was certainly trained to do this but I think I also was born probed to do that.  But now, I am learning how to generate distance between myself and the excoriating, disabling pain that shuts me down.  That is where the "desensitization" becomes powerful, allowing me to function in spite of the memories and associations.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page