Hi friends. So by now you might be wondering, um where did the posts about how I lost 100 pounds go and why am I sharing so much negative stuff about my CPTSD, family scapegoating, gaslighting, narcissistic abuse, etc? Well, the answer to that is simple and yet profoundly complicated. The simple answer is because I never could or did. In real time, while the parental abuse was happening, I didn't even know what it was. It's only been recently that I've starting to understand it.
What got me started down the path was a need to get some peace from a lifetime of bad dreams. And when I say lifetime, I mean the nightmares go waaay back. I can't remember when I didn't have them. And when I say bad, I mean reeeeallllly terrifying, disgusting, horrible dreams. And I can remember them all in shocking clarity.
I also began to explore why I have so few good memories. I listened to a talk by one of my favorite therapists, Patrick Teahan. He discussed why many people, who experienced childhood trauma can't recall bad memories. I have the opposite problem. Bad memories are pretty much all I have. It's the good ones I can't seem to come up with.
Oh I thought I had a lot of positive childhood memories, because I was gaslit into believing that the abuse that was happening wasn't wrong. And I was told I was lucky, spoiled, lying about things, too critical, negative, yada yada. And if I had bad experiences, they were my own fault and I brought them on myself. A lot of bullshit to smokescreen what was really going on which was ongoing, neglect, endangerment, manipulation, exploitation, parentification. scapegoating, physical, mental and emotional abuse, sexual abuse, spiritual abuse, shaming and abandonment. By not one parent but all four authority figures, two bio parents and their live-ins and later spouses.
But when I look back, I see that what I perceived as "happy" times were really just less bad times. or working holidays. Or good times for my family at my expense. Like the one family vacation my dad took me on but only just so I could babysit his and his new wife's kids. When I tell my husband my version of fun memories, he says those are just things most kids took for granted.
That's because I was told I was so lucky to have things like a bedroom. I didn't. I was allowed to sleep in the baby's room, at both my mom's and my dad's homes. Which of course meant getting up with them when they cried or needed anything. So this explains, in part, why I have so many dreams and can't sleep for more than an hour at a time without drinking a lot of wine. I'm geared to being constantly on-call. I'm in perpetual REM sleep and rarely delta. My sleep studies have proved this. Where most people spend about 40% of their sleep in deep delta, I'm in it for maybe 5 minutes a night.
I walk and talk in my sleep. I often wake crying or screaming. My mom's live-in boyfriend used to make fun of me when I'd wander down from the bedroom I shared with four foster kids (so my uncle and his girlfriend could shack up in what was my bedroom). He and my mom slept in the basement in a cozy little room as far from the kids as she could get. My dad's second wife ( I don't call her stepmom anymore) put a lot of distance between herself and her babies too. No prizes for guessing who had to sleep with (comfort, get up with, worry about) them?
So it also explains why I'm so difficult to sleep with or near. And why I was not popular at sleepovers or summer camp. I scared a lot of kids with my nightmares and trauma responses. But not my parents. They didn't give a shit that I was going crazy to the point of suicidal with it all. Hell, they were the ones driving me crazy.
And d'ya see how I call them my parents' homes? That's because I have never, till I got married, thought of homes as mine. I still have trouble remembering that this is actually my home. I live with other people in their homes and boy howdy, did they rub that in my face. Even when my mom moved her layabout, unemployed boyfriend into our home. It was his, not mine, or so I was told. And when he deemed me unfit to live in "his house" I was kicked out. Literally. I had to go and live with an elderly lady in town. And my mom let him. Even though they were using my child support freely as their own. And I was (wait for it) sleeping with and getting up with their kids. They really shot themselves in the collective foot that time. Now who was going to care for their kids?
I learned on Reddit that this type of life has a name and it is hidden homelessness. When a kid couch surfs between parents' homes. And it's hidden because no one acknowledges it. My parents would say I had two homes. In reality, I didn't have any. I had a place of employment at which I slept, badly.
And I don't have good memories because I don't have any. At least none with my parents and their new partners. The good ones are with my grandparents. And even there, I've blocked out a lot. Seriously. My cousin tells me that we had fun a family get-togethers when I went with my grandparents. I don't even recall meeting him. Which is really a shame because I could use more happy memories.
I'm not sure whether I had happier times and can't recall or if there just weren't that many. I know that my response to trauma was freeze and fawn. I just kind of tried to ignore the crazy and placate the crazies. I couldn't take flight or fight it out. That wasn't safe. So I think that what happened is that good memories were iced out with the bad. That in trying to just survive with all the shit that I was living with, I had to just go numb. And in constantly pleasing people and humoring them, while ignoring my own pain, I damaged myself, my ability to think clearly, feel honestly, sleep peacefully and care for myself.
But where I might have been able to drown out the fear, shame, misery and pain during the day, I couldn't at night. And I think my dreams having been waving red flags and screaming at me to wake up. To quit believing the gaslighting and protecting my persecutors. To start naming the abuse and calling out the abusers. To start dealing honestly with all this suffering because it's killing me.
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