still going on

[wolfspirit]

VAC,
Thank you for caring. I wrote a long post earlier but then it disappeared.
Every day I feel the emptiness inside telling me to give up. I plan how to die. But then I use what I've learned in my trauma therapy to talk back to that voice. I hear my girls say, "Mom". I read my letter goodbye that I wrote last year and remember that I've lasted this long.
It's an emptiness coming from a place inside that was supposed to be where I came to believe that I was worth something. Where I learned how to love and receive love. That space never formed because the two people who created me did not nurture it. No, they burned those neuropathways. They cut off those pathways. I can't recreate that in therapy (although I've been able to feel love from my therapist and that's a good step) or "find" it somewhere outside of myself. I know it doesn't work that way- I tried that for the first 30 years of my life.

Those sayings you know, that are self-help/ self-realization mantras:
You can choose who you want to be.
Your thoughts determine your reality.
Throw your intentions out into the universe and they will return to be a part of you.
Don't let the past determine your future.
Let it go and move forward.

These are all statements that just don't seem to work for me. There's one on this card someone gave me: I can FEEL positive if I THINK positive.
Oh yeah, so here I am thinking positive and grateful if I can manage to do that, and then later that evening the emptiness knocks on my mind. "You thought I was gone?" Nice try.
"I'm not empty or worthless," I say back. "Those are the beliefs my abusers taught me."
"Ah, but we will never change because you are the same person you were as a child. You can't change that," the emptiness replies.
So I hang on until my therapy session where my t teaches me about circular thinking and asking myself if my thoughts serve me or hurt me. And I answer that they hurt me but I don't know anything else. So she quietly lets me cry and hide and holds my hand. She comforts me and tells me I am enough. That I am more than the trauma.
Then I leave her office wanting more time with her. Wanting to feel that peace and faith more often.
But I am just her client and I see her for 90 minutes once a week. That's like five rows of stitching in a 10' x 10' quilt.
Not enough time to contain anything.
And now I am at a point in my healing where I am trying to reach out for friendships. I have no friends, just my husband and my sisters. It is so hard. Anything new triggers me. Any new person feels scary to my child self.

And that is my whiny, self-piteous story of where I am and why suicide is my shadow.
Why I come here to isurvive to feel somewhat normal and connected.
Why I read your posts and others' and think about them when I'm overwhelmed.

I appreciate all of the encouragement you have given me. I hope that someday I can feel that faith. I can fill that hole.
That I can spend just one day without that voice telling me to quit.
You've probably been in that space before.
You were strong enough to get to a place of stability where you are stronger than that voice.
A lot of survivors do.

<3

ws

[VAC]

Wolf Spirit,

Your incredibly powerful post is anything but whiny and self-piteous.

I have heard the voices, but they are dimmer now.

I have a basic philosophy of life that I have always believed as long as I can remember, that there is Light and darkness, and Good and evil.

For you to have a loving husband and sisters makes you not alone.

The thing that reasonates in my inner being is that I want to live....recently I watched a man choose to die. He could have lived for years, but refused to take standard medical treatments that could have been temporary.

His wife and children loved him and begged him to stay. It was pitiful to watch. He was afraid. He was a big man.

I am a friend of the family and was involved.

After it was over I thought about it for a long time.


Then I went home and with tears told my wife I would do anything it took to just spend one more day with her.


I have love of which I do not feel worthy, but I am loved nevertheless. I like to watch my wife and the small family we have. I like things that would bore the socks off most people.


I am still sorting through the last remaining flotsam and jetsam from my generations. Just yesterday I put out a handmade shelf by the road and waved to the man who stopped to pick it up.


I would like to think that I dare the demands to die, to be disgraced, ashamed, demoted, and all the hurtful self evaluations imprinted in my core, by refusing to take identity there....it is not easy. Sometimes I have to make myself function, but it is laughable when I remember how I would get up in the morning (if I slept) and run until I could not take another step. Constant motion was my peace for too many years.


You will live, Wolf Spirit, and will live out your days. I am thankful you have a T who is genuinely engaged with you. I had T's for years who told me to just do more of everything that was destroying me, not to feel guilty about it, and would give me stronger drugs than I could buy on the streets. Those were dark and fleeting days.


Peace and live to you, Wolf Spirit, who is neither whiny or pitiful.


VAC

[VAC]

VAC,

Checking in...doing ok. Rough several days with the nervous breakdown of a friend who can't see he is fragmenting...

Many triggers for me.

I have to be careful sometimes how close I let myself get, just because I get too close in my inner man, and it stirs up too much.

I have a theory that many survivors verge on being empaths.

I sometimes have dreams about what others go through.

It is a reality check for me not to be callous.

I repeat, I hate the voice of suicide whispering in the ears of wounded people.

Sometimes we reach toxic overload and just need to find a quiet place.

I apologize profoundly to anyone I have hurt or disappointed on here....never my intention.

The deepest wounds I think for me besides betrayal, are shame and regret. The things that helped me make it through these years is that almost 100% of my family relationships when I was a kid, outside of my home, were very positive and reassuring. I am thankful for this.

Peace to every storm,

VAC

[wolfspirit]

VAC,
Thank you for sharing so much of your wisdom gained through such painful experiences.
Empaths are definitely part of the survivor family. I am one, myself.
It's why I can't be in crowds. Traffic is hard. Grocery lines. I'm so raw all of the time.
And I know that's why I fall so deeply, too.
The extreme emotions call my name.

I hope your friend will stabilize soon. That is a hard place to be and I know you want to relieve that pain.
Tell me if you will, how do you keep yourself grounded in your own energy and reality?
My T is trying to help me set those boundaries. Not the physical ones. The empathic ones.
Like when I'm walking into the store and I see a group of three people crossing my path and can FEEL the angry energy they exude. Like a lightning storm around them. So frightening and repulsive.
I just walked away from them and let them get some distance from me. Then I could do my shopping.
Happens every time I am in the public environment.

I've had people tell me it is a "gift". Its a gift I don't know what to do with.

peace

ws

[VAC]

Wolf Spirit,

I believe what you may have is "discerning of spirits"...it is a gift and a tool.

Long days here, but good.

VAC

[VAC]

Hello,

Several days with a smattering of images and memories, and the accompanying shame that would like to be a heavy burden upon me.

I really have so little to complain about, outside of what goes on in the space between my ears, and that seems almost seasonal.

I have done things I have not done in years, things that would mean nothing to most people, but in which I take great joy.

I want to say on here that I believe I understand why some survivors have to run.

Standing looking out a window today, and went back to the scene in "Forrest Gump", "Run, Forrest run!" Later on he did, he just ran. I can remember looking outside an apartment and seeing the surviellance I sometimes earned due to the lawless life I led.

I would wait for the car to leave, after having everything I wanted packed and down the stairs, and I was off again, to go somewhere else for a "new life". My mom called me when I was seventeen and told me that detectives were at the house and wanted to talk to me. I told her that she did not raise a fool and I was not coming home.

'She told me they were coming after me if I didn't. I told her to tell them to catch me if they could.

I left the area for a while, and saw the country side.

When I want to run, I now believe it is because something good is coming to me, another level of freedom.

I would like to run out what I feel some times, but that would be a walk in stages now, and it is honestly not safe to walk alone in this city now. I used to walk and run for miles....last time I went got harassed by the police looking for a robber. That was in the later 90's.

About to do something that has pressed on me since I was 10, and that was a while ago. I am going to go and stand upon my ancestral land and look at an old family cemetery. The house stood on the highest place in our county. I have a small piece of earthernware that survived the razing of the place at the end of the Civil War...it still has signs of fire on it.

I had a vision at the foot of that bluff in a boat with my dad when I was 10. I told him what I saw and he turned white as a sheet and pulled the boat over and began to shake. I have since seen a picture of the man I saw standing on that bluff that day who called to me. I look like him. My dad told me that was where the family home once stood, after he had recovered himself.

I will hopefully get to go and stand there soon.


Run, Forrest, run!

VAC

[wolfspirit]

VAC,
What will you do when you find that spot? Call the spirits of your ancestors? Talk to them?
I'm imagining you standing there with a gentle wind moving your clothes and eyelashes as you embody the energy of the people who's blood run through you.

ws

[VAC]

WS,

Don't know what will happen, but I need to stand on that land and look at those old graves.

I need to stand on the bluff and look down at the river, and to try and find the foundations of the old family home.

It is a thing I know I must do.

I do not believe in communication with the dead, but I will see it.

Thanks,

VAC'

[VAC]

Hello,

There is a cycle that is so thoroughly diabolical and predictable:

When good comes to me, joy, kindness, satisfaction, reward or good things of any kind, there is a switch that goes off in me that I must take myself down, at least in my mind.

I have narrowed "my search" for the source of this down to when I was very young, around 4. The best words I can use to describe this is, "a vow of destruction".

This automatic response to "wonderfulness" varies in degree, but it is overwhelming and hits me the worst when I am tired.

I believe the tenure of this inner device is coming to an end.

It also stirs up intense sorrow and regret. It is almost humorous, in that it is overkill to the point of ridiculousness: not who I am or want to be.

There is more to this I believe...it stinks. Literally, it has a smell. I am coming out of this.

It is the child in me looking for reasons to hate myself. This is a fading frenzy and no longer holds the power to rule me. The things it says/tries to prove/insists on reliving are fertilized by regret and sorrow.

That man no longer exists, and is only a shadow in my imaginations, like a wicked cousin not seen in many, many years.

I not only am alive, I want to live.

And I will.

[Fleur]

Hello VAC

What you describe resonates with how my new T explains my self sabotage. She and now you give me hope I can change

Thank you