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Re: How to accept help after a life of helping others

It's funny you should ask @Shaz51 

 

My emotions are ok, but am in the midst of an ah-ha moment that's a bit unpleasant. There's a tug of war going on inside that's got me reeling; that place between the adult and child within.

 

I've probably been here quite a few times of late but haven't had the insight of today. On waking, I was confronted by a task where being a responsible adult will see me through. It bought up feelings (not thoughts) of 'unhealthy' avoidance.

 

I'm grateful for your attention and support Shaz, @outlander @Corny @CheerBear @Lauz  In view of this issue being cptsd related, I might discuss it on an appropriate thread where it can be viewed more readily. I think it's important for people to see first hand how I process things in the context of recovery.

 

Thanks lovely Shaz;

Hope xo Heart

Re: How to accept help after a life of helping others

for sure @Hope4me if/when you create another thread please do tag me Heart

Re: How to accept help after a life of helping others

if you create another thread please do tag me : @Hope4me 

you mean sooo much to me my awesome friend xoxo

Re: How to accept help after a life of helping others

Hello @Hope4me @CheerBear @Lauz @outlander @Shaz51 ,

 

Thanks for thinking of me and for your support, don’t worry about me, in time I will be OK.

 

I will never ever be the same, but I will be Ok one day.

 

I haven’t been around because as you can imagine coming to terms with female abuse, as a women myself and as a women who is only attracted to other women,…………is very, very complex to say the least.

 

Strangely, in the #MeToo era coming to terms with the female abusers, complicit bystanders and collaborators in your life feels incredibly isolating and that you are an island  - I feel very alone in the world.

 

It’s like no-one wants to talk about abusive women, it still remains very taboo. Some people even believe they’re not capable of it.

 

Motherly betrayal – it’s just different. I can’t find the words, and honestly I don’t think that they exist in the English language.

 

‘Volcanic’ is probably how it feels in my head, and when you’ve been down the rabbit hole before that is a very scary thing to ride the waves and not panic and lose the plot entirely. I just have no resilience to stress anymore, and I get scared about the future, how on earth I am going to support myself etc.

 

I did mybest & hung on as best as I could to not disrupt my life too much & fall apart and crumble, but I can feel my mind caving in as I sit with truth. It’s incredible how the body and mind contorts to obstruct the truth, and how unwell you can become holding it in, or denying it, but eventually the dam wall breaks. Well, it did for me. Maybe some people can lock truth away, but I just don’t seem to be that sort of person.

 

I am so utterly thrilled to read that you have a job Hope. You’re amazing! Incredible. Anxiety will always be there, but sometimes all we can hope for is that the really symptomatic times become shorter in duration and the episodes further apart. That’s what I hope for. I’ve accepted I will always have this medical condition. I’m just trying to build a little life around it.

 

Outlander, I truly hope that you get some reprieve from your caring role. You are so much more!!! It takes many years to feel it, and to get your own identity but I hope you do. It breaks my heart seeing people so young lose their youth. I completely understand that the choice was taken from you, but it saddens me that the government and community support is so insufficient that you have to become self-sacrificing.

 

Big, bury your face in Mufasa’s mane and snuggle in, hugs,

I need to focus my energies on my self right now, so I don’t have much to give I am sorry. It’s been very re-traumatising, in some ways more than the men.

 

Corny xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Re: How to accept help after a life of helping others

@Corny  my friend , we are here for you my dalng 24/7remember yo are not alone xoxoo

Re: How to accept help after a life of helping others

im lost for words as to what might help @Corny but want you to know that im here for you anytime you need even if its a listening ear or a shoulder to lean on for a while. you also dont need to apologise for not being here and for focussing on yourself, but im pleased that you stopped in for a check in. thinking of you and sending my love Heart

Re: How to accept help after a life of helping others

My dearest @Corny 

Words can't adequately express how relieved I am to know you're still around. Honestly, I thought your last post was 'it'! This one adds impact in its content; reasons opening my (our) eyes. A tragedy in motion.

 

Survival; it's what you know...it's what you've always known. That organ sitting inside your head must be worn and torn atm and needs to heal. Have you contemplated being admitted to fall apart with support? Sometimes it's just necessary to reboot.

 

A bed, three squares and med's to numb the pain for a while is my prescription sweet girl. To save your soul, intellect, body and heart; all so very, very beautiful.

 

And please, please don't apologise for not having the ability to support others ok.

For everything,

..there is a season.

And a time for every purpose,

..under Heaven. Heart

 

This is your time to take:

...one step, one breath, one heart beat and one minute at a time. Each one with my hand around yours, kissing it softly to prove love still exists in your world; spirit, mind and heart. The Universe will give you a sign I'm there, with you, around you.

 

Be kind to your vulnerable self and ask for help from your MH team. It's time..

 

Sending loving thoughts your way my sweet;

Hope xoxoxoxo Heart

Re: How to accept help after a life of helping others

Thank you Hope for encouraging me to connect with my health professionals and reminding me that I have a valid medical condition. 

 

I am sitting alone with a cup of tea thinking about how lucky I am.

 

I am so incredibly grateful for my doctor’s genuine care and concern, I know that he really cares about my welfare and isn’t just saying it, and I know that I am very lucky to have a great doctor.

 

I am someone who has moments of incredibly good luck in a life of terrible luck. I owe so much to the patients that came before me that suffered unnecessarily and were misdiagnosed with schizophrenia or another psychotic illness because the way that Australia trains psychiatrists is to get to the diagnosis as quickly as possible with very narrow categorical thinking. Trauma is not even a sub-specialty of psychiatry in Australia.

 

Something that has a lot to do with this is the location of where we diagnose people, which is the emergency room of public hospitals. I think that that in itself contributes to the brokenness of the mental health system and can destroy lives. They want you out the door as fast as possible and their stats down. It’s really scary.

 

My doctor told me there was one women in particular that taught him so much about dissociative hallucinations and dissociative psychosis that it was a turning point in his clinical training and it exposed the failings of the DSM and all that he has been taught. If it wasn’t for that poor women and other patients who were similar, no doubt, given my family history I would have been diagnosed with schizophrenia and placed on antipsychotics for the rest of my life.

 

My doctor said there was a women in hospital recently that reminded him of me, and that she’d been drugged to the eyeballs and was now having ECT and nothing was working. The doctor had made no enquiry about any trauma, CSA <10years, nothing, and just treated her as if she has biological schizophrenia. It makes me so, so sad that it has to be a lottery and it has to come down to pure luck.

 

I was reading about Darrell Hammond from Saturday Night Live and his experience of misdiagnosis, it was really interesting but scary too. Governments don’t want to operationalise complex personal histories & mental health conditions, we are left on our own, to patch together a medical team that has the clinical experience and clinical exposure to hopefully aid us in our recovery with what we have.  

 

I also know in my heart of hearts that I have given %150 to the 11 years of continuous therapy I have done with my clinical psychologist and my psychiatrist and that I should be proud of how far I have come given the circumstances. I was so utterly devastated in 2016 when the doctor said it will take you 12-18 months to recover from this, it was supposed to be my turn after having moved back to care for my mother after my father’s suicide.

 

It is one thing to have a great doctor, but therapy is not a passive process and not for the faint hearted when you have so many dark experiences to sift through, it is up to the patient to participate and become comfortable with being incredibly uncomfortable.

 

I know that a lot of my recovery has come from me and the effort that I have put to build the therapeutic relationship that we now have, in and not merely from my doctor. You can have the best shrink or psychologist in the world but if you don’t actively participate and do the hard work you’re probably only going to tread water or regress.

 

It does have to be a holistic path to recovery unfortunately, there is no magic pill and it can be wearying to have self discipline 24/7, 365 days a year , but we can only do our best.

 

It’s taken my psychiatrist 3 years of weekly therapy to finally get to an understanding of my father’s personality disorder and the intricacies of his abuse and manipulations and the extent of his incredible lies. He fabricated almost his entire biography and if you ever caught him out on this, that was when he was his most aggressive, vindictive and violent.

 

For many years my father’s NPD had doctors believing he was complex. He really was not particularly complex at all and his child abuse was mild to moderate. His siblings said they could see personality traits at a veyr young age that pointed to NPD.

 

My father made people feel giddy, he was that full on, and making a doctor feel giddy was misinterpreted as a having come from a very complex childhood. He fooled a lot of people for many, many years, and being raised by him gave me insight into how malleable and vulnerable we can all become when living with a dictator in captivity, when middle class Australia is so willing to look the other way.

 

It will soon be 9 years since he passed and I am relieved to say that after almost a decade of recovery from his mind games I am finally free of a lot of the effects of his narcissism.  I will probably always suffer from low self-esteem because of him, I am a naturally sensitive person, and I will always be susceptible to toxic people, but I know I have made huge noticeable and recognisable progress.

 

He doesn’t have the hold over me like he did for so many years. Maybe that’s why my subconscious mind was opening to my mother wounds, I have dealt with my father and done the hard years of therapy to break free from his spell.

 

I guess that’s what’s so fascinating about trauma and has world experts stumped, the biological and psychological effects of trauma, neglect and abuse, is not always proportionate to the effects on temperament and personality.

 

If you met my father you would assume he’d lived the worst of the worst. And he’d convince you he has!

 

He tried to destroy me and he failed miserably. He should have chosen a weaker target.

 

I hope that you are keeping toastie out in regional Australia Hope. Good luck with work, you are SO deserving and I believe in you. I’ll be cheering you on from the sidelines.

 

Keep warm,

 

Corny xx

Re: How to accept help after a life of helping others

@Corny  Reading, feeling and understanding. Sending warm thoughts. You are enough as you are. ❤️❤️

Re: How to accept help after a life of helping others

Thank you @Hope4me @Maggie@outlander @Shaz51 @Lauz @Former-Member for all your support. I am sorry that I haven't been able to log on earlier, I hate not replying to people that have taken the time to reply to me, especially as everyone on here is struggling with their own mental health conditions. I haven't been online in a long time because I got a bit worked up and fixated on this young one in the papers the last few months who terrorised the 2 sisters and young girls at Mosman swimming pool. It doesn't help that I have 2 friends in western Sydney that work in the criminal justice system, cops and corrective services, I can't resist asking them about him, but its not good for my head so I have to quarantine myself from the Internet. But I saw my psychiatrist yesterday and he has freed me up a little and lifted some of my restrictions here in hospital. I was in for 4 weeks and then went home for 2 and I fell into a terrbile depression, it was like quicksand, and my doctor came down on me really hard and said I have to go straight back in right now or he will have to section me.....He's aplogised for being so tough on me, but that's his job. This admission is probably going to be 6 weeks and yesterday the docs said they want me back in Nov/Dec.......3 admissions in one year, not my idea of a great year. But as my doctor said every single person in my whole life has let me down, from my parents to teachers to doctors and even 3rd parties who are supposed to be no more than administrative professionals have let me down and done the wrong thing. 

 

My 2 oldest lezi friends in Sydney are coming to visit me today so I am very happy about that, they are shift workers, like a lot of my friends are, and it makes it hard to catch up with them especially if they do nights, so I am stoked to see them. I missed my friends wedding because I am here in hopsital, I feel so terrible and guilty about it, but I am hoping to make it up to her and see her when she is back from her honeymoon. 

 

It's such a long road of acceptance that I have a mental health condition. Depression is new territory for me, very different, its scary when you can't see the bottom but I have been compliant and cooperative with my treatment. There are some heart breaking scenes and patients at the hospital but I have had some validating conversations with other patients, its tough for everyone no matter what your diagnosis. 

 

I hope you are all keeping well. @Hope4me  I was glad to log on and see that you haven't really been posting much, I reckon that is a great sign and that you are rocking it up and doing really well. @Maggie  I hope that you are going OK. I can tell by some of your posts that you are a deep thinker, I am a deep thinker too. @outlander I hope that you are OK and that you have been giving yourself some time and energy. @Shaz51 thanks for letting me know that help is here with Sane despite my privacy being broken on the Beyond Blue website, which was a major turn off to say the least. I've figured out why it was broken. Big hugs and I hope that everyone on here recovers as much as they can,

 

Corny xxx

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