Recovering from child abuse......help needed

[adelicatequestion]

Hi

I have been having hterapy for almost a year now for child abuse issues.

The problem I have is no emotions. I talk about the abuse as if I was buying a bag of potatoes or commenting on the weather. I can;t seem to bring out emotions about it to process them,.

Daily I have panic attacks and wake up in the night shaking.

Has anyone been thorugh this. What are the stages you go through. Will I ever be able to experience emotions. I do cry about other things - sometimes, but am not an emotional person.

TIA

DS2 took his own temp this am and decided he was going to school. He is absolutely full of a cold( wont be swine flu otherwise his temp would have been up for longer i think)
He isnt himself,he looks washed out,but he hates taking time off school.

I am really glad you have got to a break through point. Was it the knowing 'when to ask for help and cuddle' ...realising when to say 'no' and not taking on too much.

Just try and show a little bit more of the vulnerable you...nicer people will always want to help if they see that side(they havent got crystal balls ,just open up a bit even tho it is scary.)...but if you put on that facade, that one that you and i know so well(the one that copes with everything life throws at it)people will back off.

I am pleased i could help, and if you need to talk more just post for me.....i wish you the best of luck and keep up with the positive thoughts....

PS will send the bill later........... very big

Today has been a mixed day.

Saw my psychiatrist today and he has suggested something that has rocked my world.

It has taken me a considerable amount of time to be able to tell him things about my abuse and now the thoery is that I am in some way not opening up because I enjoy the attention (attention I didn't get as a child from my mum and dad)I get from my therapist.

I can;t believe he suggested this. It made me feel crap. Lilke I was some kind of time wasting, attention seeking diva. Everything I dislike in people and he might think that of me.

He wanted me to think about it.

hello again ADQ,I thought you were going AWOL for a while because you felt so good.
Im sorry this has happened to you, when you were feeling so positive.

Your psych, is either being very insensitive or he is now being deviously clever at his job.
Now he knows that you experience alot of feelings of anger( to do with the past and present),just maybe he is trying to evoke such incredible anger within you that you may ... have a blow out next time you see him.And rid yourself of alot of pent up anger.

Maybe he is hoping that if you are able to vent your anger,about his suggestion of attention seeking,that you will then engage in every manner of feelings about other issues.

One consultant did an almost similar thing with me and asked me why i seemed to have so many illnesses.He suggested i had Munchausens syndrome.( i was devastated) I was going to him with stomach pains,chest pains,panic attacks,feelings of dizzyness,sick,feeling as if was going to collapse....all very real feelings to me caused by stress and anxiety and my breakdown.
I was so enraged at this accusation, i actually went to my Gp to tell him how angry i was at this suggestion. Initially he didnt believe what i had said until he read it in the consultants letter. Luckily for me my own Gp had had a nervous breakdown himself and he knew that stress,anxiety states can manifest themselves as a variety of very real ailments.
Real to the patient,but diagnostically impossible to confirm..

What do you feel about what he said?
You start to doubt your own sanity dont you?

adelicate just read your post. I'm sorry I have been having an awful week and haven't felt able to come back until now. i've been doing my usual thing of not thinking about it all because it's too painful. My therapist says this is because i developed the ability as a smnall child to switch off my feelings and focus on unimportant stuff, so i'm able to do that as an adult.

I know quite a lot through my job about therapy and particularly psycho-analysis and it wounds like your psychiatrist is trying to provoke what's called transference - getting you to play out your anger and general behavioural traits in the therapist room. It's a well-known technique and is thought to be effective in the long-run but can be confusing and frightening for the client.

I will come back again soon; for now i feel overwhelmed by it all and need to retreat a bit and try to get on with normal life. Hope things get better for you xx

cremeeggs thankyou ,transference....that was the word i was looking for in my waffly post..but couldnt remember what it was called.

Alypaly and Cremeeggs

Cremeeggs - sorry your feeling overwhelmed. I don;t mean to trigger people by my posts.
Hope you feeling more positive soon.

I came away feeling really upset and confused. Considering I don;t cry in front of people, I started crying when he suggested it and then he asked me to leave when I was still upset and crying.

I was so upset because it threw me. I didn't know if this was what he was saying I was doing or whether it was just a suggestion. I thought, well if it made me cry, it must be true and that's why I'm upset.

Actually I think he really upset me and I felt like a crap person. He tapped into every bit of low self esteem I have. I felt like I was a horrible person, who was doing a horrible thing (even if it was unknown to me). Every negative connotation of attention seeking went through my mind. I'm not an attention seeking, manipulative person and he made me feel like that. If anything I don't let people know what I'm feeling. I certainly have never seekd attention.

He has really really upset me.

Last night I had awful dreams again and woke up feeling dizzy and sick. I just wish they'd go away.

Is it my fault that I can;t open up to them?

He also said why haven;t I told them any of the details of the abuse so they can help me. He says I'm not letting them help me and that's why I think he suggested the above.

Had you locked away feelings and emotions or were you able to be emotional in front of people?

Cremeeggs

"My therapist says this is because i developed the ability as a smnall child to switch off my feelings"

I think I did this too and now find it almost impossible to be emotional now as an adult.

I want so much to move forward, but have such huge fears of being emotional in front of people that it obviously comes across as me not helping mysoef or in some way wanting to hold on to the therapy.

He has got me very confused because I can;t put my hand on my heart and know which it is. What if I am attention seeking (in a nice way to validate what I didn;t get as a child).

That would make sense? I am soo confused.

Thinkng about it objectively, from the point of view of what he is trying to do, it sounds like you're very engry with him for the way he has made you feel about yourself this week. If you then express this anger with him you would-maybe?-play out some of the anger you feel towards your abuser about leaving you feeling so crap about yourself with such low self-esteem etc. This is exactly what he is trying to provoke - the "transference" of your feelings about the abuse would thus take place in the therapy room and you'd be able to work through them......this would be one way of connecting with the feelings. The theory is that it DOES work in the long run - I'm not saying it does; that's just the theory - thank Mr Freud for that! It sounds like he's finding it hard to make you angry so he's getting more and more provocative by implying the attention-seeking behaviour etc....,

I think it's totally normal not to want to be emotional with others; I can't cry in front of other people, it's impossible. It has been so drummed into me as a child that crying is bad and weak and I learnt very early to bury feelings and not show them. Thus it's normal not to be able to express them as an adult. There are strong feelings of shame attached to any emotions you've buried I think. Also if you outwardly don't show emotion and seem "fine" it's harder for people to "believe" you - as the expectation is you'd be a quivering wreck of tears if what your's saying is true, so at this point people can accuse you of attention-seeking. Very very hard to accept/understand when you're trapped in it but it's the harsh truth of how people react to you when your emotions have been turned off....

Sorry that's very rambling and probably not clear; I hope you get the drift....

It's so hard to cope with all of this isn't it, and carry on with "normal" life. Sometimes I feel like I'm going mad.

hi ADQ sorry you are having a bad weekend...

in answer to your question
'Had you locked away feelings and emotions..' i did lock them all away...thats why i appeared confident,capable,probably tough or even harden (but not hard)worldy wise.... I didnt show alot of emotion to my ex.
I really didnt want to be touched or wear my heart on my sleeve...a self protection probably...........i dont know.

After i had had DS1 i was even worse...little to no sex life....no emotion...(even tho,deep down i still wanted both, really)
Unfortunately i am stil like that now and dont feel as tho i have the ability to fall madly in love again... I have become very matter of fact and i suppose very cynical/realistic.

If my BF walked away then i'd have to deal with it but i still feel emotionally very numb with the exception of my children.......they have all of me, and it seems to be enough to keep me going.

Thank you for being so honest.

Did you ever feel that you adressed the emotional side of the abuse during therapy sessions or did they stop before you got to that?

cremeeggs

That does make some sense. It all seems so manipulative though.

There must be other techniques to get me to be angry. I have been mildly angry at him before about things, but no matter how much I try I can;t get angry at what I need to get angry at.

I want to do it, becausee I know it's the route to progress but can;t seem to make it happen.

I wonder if unless you can really feel the anger you won't be abelt to get past this IYKWIM? Unless you can actually physically get it out of you, it will always be there, hidden and festering? That's kind of how I feel anyway. I go through bursts of making myself think about it and then try to ask myself what it has left me with as a person (low self-esteem, inability to be touched by most people, sense of being unworthy of love...you get the picture). Then I tell myself that's not fair/right etc and I didn't deserve all that I got as I was so small how could I? So then I feel a bit angry and a bit sad. not enough-i still feel quite numb at the bottom of it all but I'm working on finding those feelings. I know I have them but they are beneath several steel layers of denial and very hard to find....

I wouldn't like his methods but I think they're coming from the right basic motivation-trying to get you to connect with your feelings. If you get really angry with him it may make you say what you'd like to say to your abuser-that's the theory anyway. No-one says it's easy though. In fact it's unbelievably hard - yeta another thing to feel angry about as it's that * bastard putting through stuff. again. xx

I agree with everything you say regarding the self esteem.

The odd thing is, I can get angry with teh children when I'm feeling stressed so why not the people who abused me?

I also need to get angry with my parents too.

So if anyone's got any tips on getting anger out please let me know.

Take care

ADQ.... not quite sure what you mean by addressing the emotional side of the abuse..in what way, addressing?
At the time i didnt have any emotions other than the fear of god that my brother threatened me with,if i ever told my mum. At 8 i didnt know too much about emotions other than feelings of always being scared in my home with the physical abuse from my dad and sexual from my brother. I knew no different.I never had cuddles and at that time didnt know any different and thought that was the norm. It is only retrospectively that i now know what i missed...and i am sad for that loss.I think i have mentally tidied up most of the wounds and put them away in a box...hopefully thrown away the key.

I stopped my own therapy sessions as i became very disenchanted with them. As i said to you earlier,for me ,they were too structured,too timed,too false,and far too theorised IYGWIM. They were all too much out of the text book psychology and psychiatry for me.They kept asking me the same questions and i got quite bored TBH.

The main help i got in dealing with the betrayal i felt from my brother, was to write the letter that my consultant advised me to do. It took me days and pages to complete.And i also questioned my mother to see if she did know as i did feel betrayed by her too.(like ,how could she let this happen to her little girl).
MY ex also helped me thro alot and i must have told him the same story so many times til i could cry no more. Then i knew i was healing when i didnt cry from my stomach and heart.(i stopped that uncontrollable sobbing that you have described)

But i believe thatwhat we are dealing with now, is retrospective pain. Its not a pain that we dealt with then because we were involved in the scenario( now , if youi like we are almost the voyeur on that past trying to make sense of it all...we are trying to deal with it now because something else in our recent past has caused us a similar pain.Hope i am making sense.

Adq ...what do need to get angry about?

what you need to do is get a piece of paper.
i know this sounds stupid.
put headings on it like
Angry at
sad with
I hate so and so...becos ......etc

then add the peoples names to the appropriate lists and put why you are angry with them. Then logically see if it issomething that you can deal with face to face...dont avoid it..otherwise it will always remain as unfinished business.
Deal with the things you can deal with first and tic them off ,one by one and then you will feel as if u have achieved something positive.

Dont be afraid of dealing with anger at the time,even if u are cross with the psych...it is all about controlling your anger rather than letting it control you,which is what it is doing at the moment.

"ADQ.... not quite sure what you mean by addressing the emotional side of the abuse..in what way, addressing?"

I was talking about emotions now that relate to then. I think you have explained it. I talk about the abuse as if I was buying a bag of chips - with no emotion be it anger, fear, frustration. I have been extremely upset by the lack of cuddles as a child and that has come out though feeling abandoned by the therapist.

I still can't get angry or have any emotion relating to the men that abused me or towards my mum and dad for their lack of emotional support growing up.

That's what I was referring to as addressing the emotional side. Did you feel no emotion or have you always felt angry at your step brother?

It has been suggested last week that I write a letter to my mum and dad.

I suppose I'm a bit scared too because I know how painful the emotional abandonment was for me and worry the abuse will be much more pain.

I wake up in the middle of the night or at other times with this feeling of fear right through my body. I thought something was triggering this horrible feeling and I keep telling them i want it not to happen. And then to have them suggest this was me attention seeking and avoiding talking about the issues has made me very upset and confused.

I do appreciate talking to you.

Write that letter and keep reading it over and over again...it really helped me.
Dont worry about their suggestions they are trying to get you to react...it is the way they are told to delve into your hidden emotions...dont fight it because you are scared...go with how you feel at that moment and dont hold back..it will help you long term. Dont try and rationalise,s there is no rational ,or right and wrong reaction...just be you.Be that little girl that you crave so much.

When i was about 14 i started to feel angry at my brother and utterly repulsed by his very presence. He gave me the creeps. He became ( forgive me for this in case you are religious....i do not have a religious bone in my body)a bible bashing laypreacher and i used to think he was such a hypocrit. To me, he was just hiding behind the church,probably hoping for some divine cleansing.

Then, as time went by til i was about 16/17 yrs old, i sort of put it behind me. Then, as i said before, i think the abuse affected my moral judgement and i became,what i would now call, promiscuous. Maybe, i was so misguided as to what affection was and i thought that i could get affection almost as a reward for sex. How sad was that? I fell in and out of love,searching for that father figure that i never had and with relatively few inhibitions,as my innocence had been completely taken away from me.
When i look back i feel dreadfully sad about my behaviour,because i was never going to find real love and affection or cuddles that way,but i knew no other way. I do know that none of it was my fault.it was all my brothers and i blame him 100%.

My last outburst of anger towards him was my final act of revenge.
23 months ago when i so tragically lost my mum(who i did love very much over the last few years)i never told my stepbrother that she had died.( he never knew,as he never visited her) It was a totally rational,calculated decision to hold my mums funeral ,to organise everything with her friends and mine,and to completely exclude him from one of the most personal ,tragic events in my life. I did not want him near the only person other than my children,that i truly loved. He was never going to take that moment away from me,by his presence.
I never mentioned him in my tribute to her,it was as if she had only one child,one that really loved her...and nothing or nobody was going to take that final day away from me.

3 months later i rang him and informed him of her death,to which i received a 'hmmm oh well'. Then i launched into my verbal assault on him I called him a paedophile of the vilest nature,threatened that i would tell the church,his family and anyone that new him,as they never really knew the real him( although funnily enough one of his close friends who came to the funeral did comment that she thought he was weird).
Anyway,as soon as i had finished my 10 minute outburst,i asked him never to call me again....and slammed the phone down.I cried and cried for hours and then i felt such total relief as i had vented everything that i had bottled up for all those years. And to be honest i have never looked back.
Sorry this is a long one.

It's so hard to start having feelings when they've been brutally stripped away. You will get there. It took me a long time to accept the nature of the abuse I suffered because to the outside world it was barely visible.

What happened to me affected my esteem. More most of my life, I have felt (financially) worthless. Fortunately now, in my 40s, this is slowly changing in some ways. It's hard to have vast chunks of your life being stripped away.

We build up tremendous barriers to protect ourselves.

you're so right we do build up barriers(and as women, i think we have amazing coping mechanisms)because we have to multi-task in every walk of our lives,at home and at work.

I have never accepted the nature of the abuse, i have just learnt to cope with it..to compartmentalise it, so that it doesnt have this omnipresence....thankfully that has worked for me...and it doesnt affect me to talk to you about it(the memories are still in there as you can probably see,but they are not so painful,now that i ahve dealt with the emotions)..its just nice knowing it may be helping you throw some bad times.

'It's so hard to start having feelings when they've been brutally stripped away'....believe me you have got feelings,they are just jumbled up and they are manifesting themselves in ways and magnitudes, which you are unable to deal with.

'I wake up in the middle of the night or at other times with this feeling of fear right through my body.'...what are you frightened of when you wake up in the night?

you are obviously very angry angry about this suggestion of attention seeking....if you analyse how you have dealt with critisim in the past...have you always internalised your anger,for fear of seeming unprofessional.Have you allowed it to simmer and fester?

I wake up in the night and the fear is usually there because I am aware of a dream but don;t always know what the dream is.

I think the panic, fear etc is probably what I felt when being abused and is coming out now too - but I can't attach any other emotions to it to be able to process it.

I was upset and then angry with the psych after what he suggested. I hate the thoguht that he might be right.

I always internalise criticism. If my mum criticises me or asks my DD about my weight, insptead of getting acngry with her I hate myself for not being what she wants.

tell her how she is making you feel.Stand up to her,you are an adult and she has no right to make you feel uncomfortable. Are you overweight or underweight. Why is mum asking DD and not you?

What do you think (and I say think carefully) that your mum wants. Is it what you believe she wants or what she has inferred or told you she wants. Or is this where your insecurity lies in that you perceive you should be something else to please others.

You may find NAPAC website helpful.

It is very hard sometimes to unlearn what we have spent a long time learning, from people we are supposed to trust.

It also takes a long time and a lot of perserverance with a therapist, to take on board and understand what has happened, to allow yourself to feel.

What is wrong with wanting attention? After all, it is not your fault that you were victimised. In fact, it had nothing to do with you at all, and everything to do with the perpetrator(s).

It's no fun being afraid. I am sometimes still afraid, but much less so than I used to be. It is easy to take things out on the little ones.

You are making so many steps on your journey of recovery. Keep travelling!

I felt too that I just wanted to please my family, and felt so disappointed with myself that I wasn't good enough. It's crap!

Thanks for the link.

This all boils down to little or no praise and high expectations from parents with little emotional reward when you have achieved things,doesnt it?

I dont believe there is anything wrong at all with wanting attention for the right reasons. It isnt attention seeking...it is a cry for help? I think its very wrongly worded.

I believe i am virtually recovered ADQ but it has left me quite a lonely person ,not out of choice...i am just lonely and would love to have a close lady friend to talk, like we have done really,but about nice things too and to share happy times.
I always feel slightly sad that i have never had a really close friend because i am a very loyal and trustworthy person in terms of friendships and i would always be there for someone...that what friends are for.( my family life and my split from my ex has had a great impact on my NON social life !! Its sad really when i see so many people talking about their supposed friends behind their backs and i sometimes feel they dont deserve good friends... but hey thats life i guess.