Best wishes to you. May G-d help you!
My parents did make many choices for me, but my situation is not nearly as bad.
We’ve chatted via Facebook, but I just wanted to chime in and say the day I sent the FU letter to my mother for the last time was my Braveheart FREEEEEEEEEEEEEDOM moment.
This will take time. But you will get there.
Would it be easier to just say they’re dead? People won’t ask anything more.
I have tears in my mind reading all this. You’re a good person and didn’t deserve all the crap you got. Hugs.
Spice Weasel, I’m so very sorry that this went this route. I always route for happy endings, but please understand that I really do get it and why its better this way.
Sometimes, when I get frustrated, I chop wood. I can’t recommend that for you, but if you have a picture of your Mom, there is this…
Why do you think you turned out better than her?
What’s helped you get better?
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My Aunt, 13 years older than me. We’ve been joined at the hip since I was born, pretty much. And she was not only the only one in the family to say to me, ‘‘What your mother is doing is bullshit,’’ she was also the only one to say, ‘‘What you’re doing is bullshit,’’ when I started modeling my behavior after Mom in my elementary years. My Aunt is the one who sat me down and said, ''Responsible people do not manage their emotions this way, and this is not acceptable behavior, and I will not tolerate it, not even from you." She has influenced me in so many ways I couldn’t begin, both in how she approaches her own challenges in life and in how she has coached me to approach my own. She is the reason I survived my childhood.
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Really careful choices about who I spend my time with. I don’t generally associate with mentally abusive people and in my early 20s I established good boundaries for how people treat me, generally. I don’t tolerate abuse, which is exactly why I told my mother to FOAD this week.
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My fuckin’ amazeballs husband who is magically calm and stable in any sort of crisis, who always validates my feelings without exacerbating the negative emotions. He never took any of my trauma reactions personally either, or blamed me for my symptoms. ‘‘It’s not your fault,’’ is like a mantra of his.
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Prolonged exposure therapy for PTSD, a highly structured evidence-based approach that was extremely difficult and time-consuming but incredibly effective. This is the first time since treatment (2009) I’ve had symptoms bad enough to affect my ability to function.
No question, I’ve been lucky.
Why is your aunt more mentally healthy than your mother?
Aside from saying that it’s not your fault, how does he validate your feelings without exacerbating the negative emotions?
Aren’t there feelings or thoughts distorted by feelings which should not be validated?
What kind of trauma reactions did you have?
How does exposure therapy work for PTSD caused by abuse from people? With fear of water, dogs, cars etc, I can readily see the steps of exposure therapy but for PTSD from abusive people, I’m curious how it’s done.
She takes responsibility for her actions. She is generally more accepting of life circumstances. She treats other people with respect. She doesn’t tend to dwell on the negative and seems to have a penchant for chasing her passions and joy. She suffers mentally, but unlike my mother she doesn’t spread the misery around.
‘‘You are totally justified in your anger/sadness/pain’’ vs. ‘‘She is a heinous bitch with no redeeming value.’’
‘‘I understand why you’re afraid because you went through a really scary thing, but you are 100% safe right now in this present moment with me.’’
= validating feelings while cognitively restructuring distorted thinking
Avoidance of sexual intimacy
Nightmares/waking up screaming and physically thrashing
Inability to sleep at night/hypervigilance/ hypersensitivity to sudden noises or expressions of anger
Fear of home invasion
General feeling of pervasive danger - fear of car accidents, public shootings, plummeting elevators, catastrophic world devastation (meteor, exploding sun, etc.) - interesting factoid I picked up during prolonged exposure is that these are typical symptoms of PTSD even if the trauma had nothing to do with a car accident, elevator, shooting, etc.
Ohhh, it’s super fun. Two parts, imaginal exposure and in vivo exposure.
Imaginal: Construct a complete narrative of your most disturbing traumatic incident, or a mishmash of them in cases of repeated trauma. Speak it, out loud, in as much detail as possible, repeatedly, while it is being recorded in the presence of a trained mental health professional. Rather than push away the arising feelings of discomfort, indulge them. Repeat the narrative over and over until you are a sobbing, hysterical, terrified mess. Repeat it over and over until your feelings of discomfort reduce by about 50%. Stop recording. Listen to recording daily for one hour, for approximately three months. Deliberately shoot for a SUDS scale number of 90/100, repeat the recording until you’re down to around 50. Every day. One hour. Three months.
In vivo: Construct a list of things that trigger reminders of trauma, in order from lowest (10) to highest (100) level of anxiety on SUDS scale. So a 10 might be, I dunno, wearing purple clothes. 100 might be a movie depicting someone being tortured and raped. Every day, for an hour, expose yourself to one of these activities on a graduated scale until you work your way up to 100.
The most CRITICAL piece of prolonged exposure is to ENSURE your SUDS level drops by at least half before you complete the activity. If you quit while you’re at a 100 SUDS level it can only significantly reinforce the anxiety and trauma response. This should only be done with a trained professional.
Yes, it’s absolute hell. But goddamn does it work. I did it mostly for the stuff with my Mom and a lot of those symptoms disappeared completely. I still need to do more work on the sexual abuse.
I should also add that I had the treatment at the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety in Philadelphia, which is where Edna Foa fucking invented prolonged exposure for PTSD, so I couldn’t possibly have been more privileged in terms of the quality of treatment I received. It wasn’t cheap.
I also have resource privilege - my husband being a clinical psychologist, he knew where the leading edge of research was on the treatment of these conditions. He also treats psychological disorders in children for a living (OCD, autism spectrum, behavioral disorders and Tourette Syndrome.) He also has experience with Borderline Personality Disorder and the treatment of emotional lability in adults, so in essence, there is no better place for me to be than by his side.
What we need to do, what I’d like to make it my mission to do, is to somehow make this information and these treatments accessible to everyone, and for mental health disorders to achieve treatment parity with other serious disabilities.
[QUOTE=CCitizen]
My parents did make many choices for me, but my situation is not nearly as bad.
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Your hurt is my hurt. I spent a lifetime being told my pain didn’t compare to my mother’s and I’ll be damned if I minimize the pain of anybody else. Now… if people want to start chalking their shitty behavior up to their shitty life experiences, then I might get a little feisty.
Vimpat is schedule V, which makes it harder. non-scheduled drugs can be bought from overseas pharmacies in Canada & the UK for much cheaper (most of the time) than they can be bought domestically. If your Keppra and Seroquel is working though, hopefully it won’t matter.
Check to see if the manufacturer has any discount / savings program; newer, spendier meds often do. A quick google suggests they do but I don’t know what the requirements are.
Some of the antidepressants do a wonderful job of lowering the seizure threshold, what joy - I assume that’s kind of what happened with you. My nephew (mid 20s) went through years of worsening depression; when they finally found a regimen that worked for him, he had several grand-mal seizures. Supposedly the meds didn’t cause it, but they made it easier for a pre-existing tendency to manifest, or something like that. I think they jiggered his meds or something, and he hasn’t had a seizure in several years now. Hopefully you’ll find the same.
And: you’re well rid of your mother, as horrible as it is to think that your own “parent” is someone you’re better off without. 33 years of nonstop toxicity and the one common factor is her and her refusal to take responsibility.
What Mama Zappa said. The savings programs that the manufacturers’ offer have been extremely helpful to me and my family. In general, they work by covering the difference between what your insurance covers and a specified maximum out of pocket to you.
Hugs.
All the support in the world to you, Spice Weasel. My mother has nothing on yours, but she is an awful human being who I suspect has BPD and after escalating and increasingly disturbing behavior on her part, I cut her completely out of my life over 16 years ago. I have never, for one moment, regretted that decision, I have never missed her, I have never questioned whether I made the right call: I did. I have mourned not having the kind of mother worth keeping in my life, but the actual mother I had is not that kind of mother.
If you’re angry at yourself for not having thrown in the towel earlier, try to redefine that as you giving the relationship, for which you do not and never did have complete responsibility, every possible chance to end up as something that could work for you on some healthy level. Now you’re at the end of that line, and that’s not a failure! You wanted it to work, you did what you could on your end, but the other person didn’t do what she would have needed to so as to stay in your life.
Focus on you and your mental and physical health. Continue to work on healing the damage she did to you and allowed to happen to you. Fill your life with people who are good for you. Work on ways to be the mother to yourself that you were cheated out of when you were small. Be good to yourself; you deserve that.
Thanks for all the support everybody.
I am just hurting now, but nothing I’d consider outside the range of normal for just ending such a complicated relationship. The more I think these seizures could have been brought on by her abuse, the angrier I get. It’s just one more tangible piece of evidence of the permanent damage she did and how ‘‘sorry’’ won’t make it go away.
I was discussing my gulit with my therapist today, because this is my mother, and I’m supposed to love her unconditionally, take care of her, make sure she is safe and happy. And my therapist was like, ''Um, no. Actually that’s what she was supposed to do for you."
And I was like, ''Oh." Kind of a moment.
I had made a lot of progress on undoing this damage but I’m starting to feel back at square one. I know progress isn’t a straight line but my head is so messed up right now. My therapist and I are workng on teasing apart the negative schema from an accurate perception of reality. It’s kind of like a game of ''What doesn’t belong?"
*
I’m a stupid, selfish person.* I have a Master’s degree and write grants for a nonprofit serving victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. I sent a gift to a beloved friend who recently had major surgery. I am wildly irresponsible. I manage our monthly finances using complex budgeting software and worry constantly about my performance at work. I am fundamentally bad. The people in my life who love me are extraordinarily good human beings.
Hmm.
Thanks for telling me about this. I am going to try to make the Keppra and Seroquel work together but it’s good to know this may be an opportunity if it proves to be too much for my mental health.
I read this and my first thought was “bullshit.” You didn’t choose to be born. You didn’t get to choose your parents. Your mom is a mess and you owe her nothing.
I’m glad your therapist set you straight. Keep one thing in mind…if you were fundamentally a bad person, would you have so many people rooting for you?
P.S. I’m sleeping with my toy uterus tonight. 
We ARE rooting for you!
yeah. the day I made the connection that the unconditional love was supposed to be MY right was a huge life changing day for me. I had been raised to believe unconditional love was what I owed to my mother. Ya know, for not having killed me up to this point. Or whatever.
“The parents who say [drama]‘I gave you your life!’[/drama] are the ones who mean it as a mortgage, they want your life back with interest - that’s unacceptable and it’s just not possible!” A priest, in the same conversation in which he pointed out that “you shall not kill” includes “you shall not let your mother drive you to jump off a window” and “you shall not let your mother strangle you”.
PS. I’m kind of wanting a toy uterus… probably should get that checked giggle