I had a chaotic childhood (only child) with a fair bit of trauma including witnessing parental domestic violence and witnessing a parents suicide attempts, also being sent to stay with a boyfriend at 15 and suffering from domestic violence and sexual coercion there.
I now am NC with my father and and LC with mother (they are divorced), this happened after I had a breakdown three years ago and my father disowned me.
My father is an addict and perhaps has a personality disorder and I have grown up very codependent, I have had a fair bit of therapy in the last three years and understand my traits quite well now. I have had EMDR which seemed to help me start to talk about some of the memories (before that I used to get a mental brick wall).
However three years on I have a debilitating problem which is very intrusive ruminating on past childhood memories. I have been judged a lot by my father’s siblings etc for maintaining NC with him after he disowned me. What tends to happen is that I will start to ‘play’ a bad childhood memory in my head as if I’m playing it in a movie to a faceless army of people who think I’m a terrible daughter/bad person. It’s like in my head I am trying to show the faceless army how much he damaged me.
But as my husband pointed out, no one sees the ‘movie’ but me! And then I get a racing heart and spiralling anxiety.
It is also becoming difficult to avoid triggers as my children are coming to the age when I suffered the most. Eg I will chat to my son about his mock exams but afterwards I’ll spiral into a memory of a time just before my own mock exams began when the police attended a violent incident at 2am after my dad knocked my mums tooth out and I was crying on the stairs alone, and the police officers could not calm me down.
The memory will then trigger the physical affects and I’ll be distracted from what I’m doing and can’t get rid of the thoughts.
The other thing is that a neighbour of my dads (who is a stranger to me) has very recently been somewhat harassing (turning up on the doorstep on our anniversary among other things). She is extremely critical of me for being NC with my dad but does not wish to hear my story. This has left me reeling and the rumination in my head is on overdrive (the faceless army feels realer than ever).
The rumination needs to stop ASAP as I need to be present for my children, not living in my 1990s-2000s memories!
I have self referred for NHS CBT but it is delayed for a while due to the therapists being unwell. I was wondering if anyone else had experienced this problem and could offer any advice.
I have never taken any medication for two reasons, first is my dad is an addict so I’m terrified to take prescribed drugs. Second is I’m a transport worker so any medication I take would cause a big faff, possibly light duties for several weeks with lots of attention on me. I can’t bear the thought of it as I just like to fly under the radar and be mrs perfect employee.