Where I went “wrong”

I think I figured it out today, where I went “wrong” (see the clip).  The one “wrong” thing I did.

I trusted.

I think I’m slowly learning to live with that. It feels so horribly slow though sometimes, I get so frustrated with my trust issues. It hurts and it’s scary but slowly I’m learning trust is ok to do.  Learning to trust is something we have to do.  I’m slowly learning to communicate with the emotional parts of my brain, slowly I’m learning to calm those parts.  Slowly I gain the trust of those emotional parts. Slowly those emotional parts are learning to hear the logic parts and understand those logic centers.

I wish I could just let go and trust when the situation shows that it’s more than likely safe to do so.  It’s not that easy though.  Lately I’m just so sick of the issues that come with my past and DID.  Lately I’ve been wishing that there was some way I could make it so none of those traumatic experiences ever happened, I’ve been wishing there was some way I could just be over it, “normal”…  Lately I’ve felt like pushing myself harder to change, to try and heal, to go faster than what I get done in therapy, to risk doing things that might re-traumatize or trigger memories I’m not ready for.  I’m NOT going to do that but it’s a struggle to deal with those thoughts and not give in.

Everything will happen in time.  Maybe someday I’ll have more manageable  trust issues.  I can start to see that trust can be a good thing though.  I think I can!  I know I can!  I am…slowly.

Trauma Nightmares

I’ve been sleeping like the dead ever since last Friday’s vertigo episode.   I’ve been dreaming like crazy too!  I don’t know why but I tend to go on more episodes of dreaming living here than anywhere else.  I used to dream like crazy when I was a little kid, nightmares galore lots of times too.  Then as the Fibro got worse I went into classic Fibro non-dreamer mode.  When I moved away a few years ago I started having really horrible nightmares that were obviously related to trauma (as opposed to the more vague, symbolic, nightmares about my life and, or trauma.  For example the reoccurring “Mom is smothering me with a pillow” nightmare).  When I moved back here to my home the trauma nightmares slowly went away (thanks in part to the Remeron) but, now they’ve popped up again.  I don’t know if they are back temporarily or if this is going to be the plague again.

Both last night and the night before I woke up from these unshakable nightmares.  Yesterday, I barely got through the day.  I kept shaking like I’d had too much caffeine, my heart wouldn’t slow down for quite sometime.  Today, it’s not as bad but I can’t stop thinking about it.  The images just keep popping into my head!  In a minute I might go draw or something see if I can get the image free by releasing it on to paper.

The night before last the dream was about my brother.  It seemed to dredge up a lot of long buried feelings and memories.  So much of it felt so familiar that even in the dream I was wondering “what does this mean?”, “Was this something that really happened or just part of this dream?”, “There is something I’m not remembering, it was very similar to this”.  The really strange thing was even in the dream I felt myself dissociate at one point.  I was cowering in a corner, feeling myself slip away into some dark unknown part of myself where I could just sleep till everything was over.  Then somehow I snapped out of it because I heard my brother coming up the stairs again and knew I had to get out of the room quick.  Strange how familiar that feeling was, maybe not in context with my brother but just in general, the feeling of wanting to slip away inside to “sleep” but then having to react to some immediate danger in the next second.  There was even a part in the dream, shortly before this dissociative experience, where I had a small “flashback”.  I think that’s one of the points where I wondered whether my brain was really trying to recall something real or if it was just a symbolic dream flashback.  Then there was the part where I was running to my room and desperately trying to lock my bedroom door, the door not closing or locking.  This comes from old memories of incidents with all of my family members I think and not just my brother.  The incidents with my brother where the more violent ones though I think, he was much more likely to try and force his way in than anyone else.  I can see some symbolic meaning too much the same as in  some of the “Mom smothering me with a pillow” dreams, some of those deal with my feelings of privacy and I think this dream does too somewhat.  Then there is the part where my brother comes after me with a pair of scissors and chases me down the hall with them.  Was watching one of my favorite Hitchcock movies a few days ago and I have to say I think part of this is my guilt complex (pat yourself on the back if you know which movie I was watching!), once as a kid I got so angry at my brother I nearly killed him with a pair of scissors.  It happened in a moment of dissociation I do believe and I don’t think I ever really got over the fact that I DID do that.  It upsets me a lot when I think about it.  I think the other piece to this part of my dream was the memories and issues I’d been talking about in therapy a few weeks ago regarding the violent fights my brother and I got into as kids.  There is more to this dream in the beginning but I don’t feel comfortable talking about it at the moment.  It’s been really awkward feeling for the last day and several hours having my brother in the house and going out of my way more than usual to avoid him.

The dream last night was about medical trauma.  I’ve been worried about this upcoming appointment and have put off calling back my other doctor because she want me to come back in to “re-evaluate” me.  I think I’m somewhat terrified that means she wants to re-test me.  So in the dream I was back at her office, being re-tested.  Only this time instead of the small needles there were the huge crazy dream needles, which of course the crazy dream doctors have to shove into you as far as possible.  Of course everyone else in the dream is looking at you like your nuts and there is no possible way that could hurt that much.  So I can’t quite get that image out of my head.  At least I’m not as exhausted as I was after yesterday’s dream.  God, I wanted to sleep so bad yesterday afternoon but was too afraid.  At least today I think I’ll make it through the day ok.

Here’s hoping tonight is a better night!

Winner or Loser

I’m one of those survivors having a tough time with this weekend.  I suppose I’ve always been mixed up about this day but I think most of the time my feelings got blotted out/ignored.  A few years ago I started to realize how hard this Mother’s Day (Mothers) thing is for me because I have two moms, a birth mom and an adoptive mom.  I ignored my real feelings about that for a long time and to some extent I still do.  I think right now it’s hard because I’m finally trying to come clean about my feelings toward my adoptive mom and the minute I let myself have those feelings I feel so horribly ungrateful.  The minute my mom mentioned Mother’s Day earlier in the week I started to feel that little ball of rage spark up  (“You and your brother need to figure out what your going to do for me Sunday!” There was more to it that left the feeling of “or I’ll be so pissed!” I swear sometimes I think my mom is becoming another Narcissist in my life.), we went out today and I felt the flames start to grow.

At my last therapy session last week I started to talk about the fights my brother and I used to get into.  Some of them were just the usual sibling fights over toys, tv, or me wanting to tag along but then there were the vicious fights that I can’t seem to recall how they started or ended.  I don’t know that my parents ever caught those, except the one where I really almost did kill my brother.  I was thinking about those fights some more during the week and what kept popping into my head was my shrink asking me how I felt recalling them.  I said I felt pretty removed from them but I seemed to recall being in them to win.  They were “passionate” fights, it really felt like they were to the death situations.  As those feelings kept going through my head I realized how much I felt/feel in competition with my brother and that I think he felt/feels the same way about me.  Maybe it started out as a “competition” for rights to tear down a block tower, or the tv remote but ultimately I think it was a competition for our parents, and for the things we felt we weren’t getting.  I think I can kind of admit to these feelings of “If he wasn’t here then…”, it’s a hard thing to admit to thinking and I don’t really like admitting to it but it’s true.  I think I can only see underneath a few scratches how sad that is, to feel driven to that point.  My parents couldn’t see what they were doing, what was going on, and we were hurting.  I don’t really know about my dad maybe he’s a little better (though last summer he took my brother and I out with relatives separately) but, my mom hasn’t changed she’s gotten worse I think.  When my brother was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum after 17 years, she really started catering to him.  The wedge was, for me anyway, permanently driven between us.  That ball of fiery rage just sits there waiting to spark up and catch fire again it feels like.  So when she tells me what my brother got her for mothers day in this tone of voice like an elementary school kid bragging about what a better friend so-and-so is because so-and-so gave her a better present, it takes what little energy I have that day (if you have straight up PTSD you know what I’m talkin about, throw DID in the mix and whew, some days…!) to hold my tongue from wanting to say something mean “What a waste! I hope you didn’t spend a lot on that!”  I don’t want to compete anymore, I really just want to withdraw myself from it all but at the moment it’s not entirely possible.  Dunno if I can get away with sleeping through most of the day tomorrow but, I’m gonna try.  I really need it.