Struggling to be

All good!!

Hi @Aonaran,

I love the way you write. Your descriptions of childhood experiences with anemones painted a vidid picture in my mind of your experiences with others.

I agree, healing does not occur in isolation. To me, it occurs through healing relationships - ones that are accepting and nurturing of your needs and vice versa. Everyone's needs are so unique and it's not one size fits all. For some, a healing relationship requires openess and time spent with each other. For others, it takes downtime and giving each other space. In my own experience, my most healing relationships have offered me different things at different times. Some times they have allowed me turn inward, and have granted me solitude. Other times, they have spent countless nights with me with a box of tissues and ice cream watching sappy movies. And I have done the same for them. At times, we've clashed where one has wanted something that the other couldn't provide, but we've worked through it, largely through acceptance and communication. Does that make sense? What are your thoughts? What do you feel like you need from others to develop a healing relationship?

CB

Hi all,

Thanks for such encouraging words. And yes, Ellie, I would gladly accept a hug! 😉

I think for me the issue about the Cosmic Kick-Me Sign is that it makes putting myself out there an act of self-endangerment. Why would I stick my head out of the cave when I know I'm going to get slapped or bitten?

Perhaps that's a dilemma a lot of us face? On one hand, we've been admonished so many times that no-one can change things but ourselves, but on the other we know better than the advice-givers that putting ourselves "out there" isn't consistent with protecting ourselves. It's a Battle of the World-Views.

I don't know how to resolve it.

That's partly because I don't quite grasp what's going on. For instance, a short while back I found an organisation meant for adult survivors of childhood abuse, which introduced me to the concept of complex trauma. It was a revelation to me, and shed light on what I'd been feeling, and how things had impacted me, for my whole life. (I raised the subject of complex trauma with my GP, and asked if he thought the description fitted me, and he said, "I would've thought that was obvious!") So I rang the organisation's "professional counselling" line, and explained I was trying to understand how complex-PTSD fed into the Cosmic Kick-Me, hoping that understanding would lead to some kind of shift. I was dismayed from the outset at how proscriptive and autocratic the people on the phones seemed to be, and how overtly cross they got if I said that one of the sweeping conclusions they lept to on the basis of single statements didn't feel to me like it fitted. But the website said these are highly-trained professionals, and I'm predisposed to think that the problem is always with me, so I hung in there. After a few more calls, still just trying to get an answer to my one question, I noticed that the people I was talking with were becoming openly adversarial. I mentioned this to one counsellor I was speaking to, asking help with understanding where this was going wrong, and she abruptly ended the conversation in a kind of righteous indignation. I could only think of that cliché of "if you don't know what you've done, then I'm not going to tell you!"

So I managed to speak with the woman who "co-ordinated" the phone counselling, whatever that particularly means, explained my experience and asked her what was going on. She started the conversation as aggressive and insulting, and gradually sank into being openly abusive and (frankly, childishly) spleen-venting. As the conversation went on, her insults became more and more overt, and when I didn't bite, she finally called me by my real-world name (which is also Gaelic), and made the comment "if such a ridiculous thing really is your name!" ... I said, "Oh come on, that's a bit gratuitous", and she flew into what seemed like a stage-managed panic, and shouted, "Oh myGod, I'm not safe with you! I'm terminating this onversation!!) and hung up. She'd got where she wanted to go, it seemed. But along the way she'd told me the team had often discussed me and complained among themselves that I was "insubordinate" (the word she actually used) and that I had rung too many times (despite no-one ever raising this with me as a problem, and in fact each time saying "ring back whenever you need to!").

I still have no idea what I did "wrong". But I was really shocked that they could let this situation develop to outright hostility before ever saying anything to me, and I was also shocked that this "trained professional" could find no better way of addressing it than speaking in hurt-scoring complaint.

Part of me, of course, feels a futile rage at being treated this way. It was unprofessional. It was reprehensible. It was damnably unfair. But another part of me cannot handle thinking blamefully of professional people, actualized and government funded ("Who do you think you are?!" rings my mother's voice in my head) and so becomes convnced that the problem must be with me, even though I cannot see what I did that was objectively wrong, let alone to justify such treatment. Did I ring too often? I clearly needed to, and as professionals shouldn't they have handled it constructively? Did I not give due deference? Then that too should have been handled in the conversation, not bitched about behind my back and then flung at me blamefully, causing intentional hurt with the knowledge that I'd been complained about.

But I have trouble thinking ill of someone else's behaviour, so it must be me who is at fault. And I really can't grasp the thought that they treat everyone that way -- that would be just too appalling -- so I figure it must just be me. But even then, what kind of "professional", even if they thought their anger was justified, would be as abusive as she had been and leave a traumatised person dangling in that manner? Wow, I *really* must have screwed up.

That's a very hard thing just to shrug off. I'm not one to brood, but without anyone around me to help me debrief, or to change the pictures hanging on my mental walls, it means I'm sitting around perpetually in my own dirty bathwater.

So why not get out of the bath and put on clean clothes? Because, experience tells me, they're only going to get more mud flung on them.

Is ... a puzzlement.

Thanks for the heartfeelings, @peace — they're sincerely appreciated.

The ridicullous thing was that the phonecall to the co-ordinator was supposed to be an attempt to mediate the situation. I had no idea the team sat around bitching about callers — my naivety, I suppose, but I'm still feeling the humiliation rising from the way I wa told — there was no consciousness coming from that woman, and a strong sense of spite, which I strongly feel a professional, in a professional situation, has no business expressing.

I can summon words when I write (and I know I've been quite verbose on this thread, but I go days without speaking to another soul, and I'm starved for communication), but sadly not in voiced conversation. I'm hypervigilant, like so many of us, and as soon as I detect the interaction siipping into old familiar wheel-ruts, I go into pretty much isntant resignation. And it terrorises me (literally) to hear the familiar pattern of the other person going into a kind of naked gloat when they recognise that I'm down with my throat bared. What makes people behave that way? I recognise the patterns of distress it causes me.

@Alessandra1992, thanks for the sense of solidarity. 😉 It's really appreciated.

I haven't pursued it with the organisation, because the woman I spoke with actually went out of her way to make it clear (pro-actively, without my even raising the suggestion) that if I did, it would be my word against an entire "professional" team. She did everything she could to reinforce an image of myself as dysfunctional and untrustworthy in my perceptions, which I consider a gross abuse of her position of power. The organisation in question is quite high-profile; my initial inclination when posting about it was to name'n'shame, because i think their behaviour is not only bloody outrageous and unprofessional but toxic, hypocritical and destructive ... and then, as usual for me, it all implodes and I fall back on thinking it was All My Fault. But the struggle here is that I really, honestly, heart-of-hearts cannot see what i did wrong. I stuck my ground, but I wasn't angry or discourteous. I think it's simply that she read my Cosmic Kick-Me Sign.

And yeah, they are pretty much the only group I can find on the matter of adult survivors of childhood abuse.. 😞