Waiting and feeling like a fraud

I had to come to hospital this afternoon for an urgent MRI scan. I’m in a room off A&E waiting for the results. The GP told me I had to come in because my back pain, numbness in my legs and incontinence have got rapidly worse than usual and he was concerned I may have nerve compression. I feel sure the scan will show nothing or at least nothing new. Waiting and waiting it’s getting worse. I feel a total fraud. I feel sure they will tell me nothing is wrong. That I’m crazy. That I’m stupid. That nothing is wrong and there’s no reason for the pain. I feel panic and sick and dizzy thinking of it. I want to go home. My mind is spiralling thinking how angry my GP will be an how my relative who has found out I’m here, who doesn’t believe I’m ill in the first place, will use this to show how “it’s all in my head”.

I feel like I’m such a fake.

I want to go home to bed.

I’m so tired of pain and tired of hospital. Everything I’m trying to do, which the pain clinic tells me is meant to help, is making the pain worse. Or it’s getting worse despite it.

My head aches and my stomach feels like something clawing it and twisting from the inside out.

I don’t want to bring only despair

I am sorry I have not written in many weeks.

I am shattered.

There seems to be no end to the pain and suffering my husband and others I care about are going through. No end to how many times we are brushed off or turned away by all those who should support us. My husband is seriously ill physically and mentally and we are utterly overwhelmed by what he is dealing with and the fear of what’s to come and the frustration of being passed from department to department in the hospital, ultimately left to cope alone.

It feels like fighting and screaming for help in a massive black hole I’m at the bottom of whilst the people I would have depended on stand way above me at the edge of the pit and sneer and laugh at me. And it’s so many times worse because I’m crying for people I love to be heard and helped and understood, not for me.

I’m exhausted. I’m in a huge amount of pain. I’m struggling to do more as I’m “supposed” to but the pain is worse and worse and I don’t know how much more I can take. Physically, so many small things are now really difficult. So many things I want to help my husband with, I’m physically unable to. I’ve been going through a very bad time with family realising how the abuse I suffered is actually not over and people whose behaviour I excused, actually perpetrated abuse; how control and manipulation is still happening in my family and hurting vulnerable people.

Worse still, family members refuse to hear me when I speak out about what’s happening, precisely because I’ve been abused – they use this to say that the problem is me and that I’m the one with a sick view of the world.

This negativity and exhaustion and despair is not what I want to bring to this blog. I want it to be honest but I don’t want to write time and again about hurt and loss. When I started this blog I wanted it to be about hope. Holding on to hope is very hard right now. Lots of days I can’t write at all. I desperately want to share good things and desperately need to be more thankful. When I’m so low all I can do is try to walk through the day and I have no words left.

I need to figure out what changes I can make to shape this blog differently; to still be honest but write more consistently and change the balance of what I post about.

Ginny xxx

Panic in BPD and dissociative episodes – spilling over and used up at the same time

My mind won’t stop. Yet at the same time I can’t process anything. There is constant clamour; panic and fear rolling round my head, gathering speed and swirling til there is nothing else in my head. I cannot hear properly. What I do hear is senseless, clanging, distressing sound with no words or meaning.

Remember a feeling can never be bigger than you, my psychologist said. But this feeling is. It’s boiling and spinning and pouring and rushing, and once it had taken every space in my mind it rushed outwards and spun round my head, like a hurricane or a tornado, slower but heavy, making a colourless, invisible, but impenetrable barrier between my mind, my eyes, my heart and the outside world.

I’m full but drained. In my heart it’s like only the dregs of me are left.

The panic has sucked everything out of me, draining away like water down the plug hole. Nothing is left but exhaustion, emptiness, and emotion that has no route to be expressed, so it just feeds back somehow into an explosion of pain and anxiety. The barrier round me gets stronger. Panic locks it tighter in place.

I need to cry and scream and I need to be silent. Silent inside and silent outside. I need to stop, so very much, but my mind is unable to stop spinning because of the panic force driving it on.

I need to be held, I need to be safe, I need everything that I have no right to in the adult world, because the only part of me left after this tide of fear is done with me is a screaming toddler, overwhelmed by the world. A little child who needs to be carried and protected. Adult me is lost in the panic, feeling forces she doesn’t understand, and little me comes out all alone.

***

Pain after pain, trauma after trauma, repetitions of past abuse, are all happening to people I love the most. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help. I feel so empty and I don’t know how to protect them. There is so much I need to give them and I can’t because the panic has emptied me already and that’s so selfish and stupid.

I’m exhausted and afraid of these exploding emotions that I don’t know how to control. I feel I’m barrelling on towards disaster. I feel failure. I feel the losses and longings and guilt and dread of terrified little me, alone after the abuse. Not knowing what to do or say when I see my loved ones suffer it too.

Xxx

A beautiful day

Today was amazing. I don’t know why but we were both full of hope for the future. It wasn’t that the many obstacles in our way at the moment had been moved. Yet we both felt lifted up by God’s grace. The magic and beauty seemed to be stirring in our hearts and giving an energy Ive never felt before. This evening I’m buzzing and high even though I’m exhausted physically and mentally. The voices are telling me this happiness and goodness isn’t for me and doesn’t happen to me; they are trying to fill me with the dread and guilt I always feel after any brief elation.

No. I choose Jesus. I choose my life by grace with Him and in the love of my fiance R. We are richly blessed. We are created for good.

Thank you Dear Jesus.

Ginny xxx

God whispers and the world is loud

I stumbled across this quotation today.

It’s apt for me. I need to rest and listen for God’s “still small voice of calm”. Amid anxiety, distress, confusion and an awful lot of dishonesty around me right now, His voice guides and assures and gives hope for now and the future; His voice is always there if I allow myself to hear Him. I know He is with me working out His plans. Where I am right now, He needs me to be and needs me to serve Him.

I don’t know who drew the beautiful illumination in the quotation or who wrote it, but I found it thanks to the Facebook page Contemplative Monk.

Ginny xxx

On the move

Its a few weeks until the wedding but I am getting ready to move house, packing boxes to go over to our new flat. It feels as though I’ve been trying to get to this point for months and not making progress, through a combination of my exhaustion, my physical disabilities and mentally being unable to make decisions or forward plan. At last we are making progress! Thanks be to God!

The approaching deadline of our wedding is certainly a motivating factor. So is the fact that we are putting our home together in the new place (my fiancée has moved there already). We are blessed that our financial situation is better than it was and this means for the first time – first time ever for me and first time for years for my fiancé – we can actually choose some furniture we like and pieces which all match or coordinate, to make a calm and restful environment for us both. It’s somewhere we both want to be and feel thankful to be. For the first time it’s not a move that’s fleeing something, escaping somewhere, or because of a loss (death, broken relationship, having no money to live, for example). We are moving to start our married life together and that’s wonderful. That helps me keep going.

It has been very hard for me to tolerate the mess and chaos of packing. My threshold for feeling overwhelmed and having a meltdown is lower than usual. I’m trying to recognise that and actively spend mental time focusing on the good we have achieved so far and the good to come. Actively thinking about the good is much more effective for me than saying “just don’t think about it [the things panicking me]” “just push it away” “just don’t worry about that” “you just have to keep it simple and be positive”. (What exactly does that last one mean, anyway?). I can’t “just” stop a thought or feeling by choice, and the fact I can’t do that when other people require it is likely to make me feel even worse. But I can dedicate time to thinking of a positive future, however imaginary it may seem, or to counting tasks I’m thankful we have achieved.

Yesterday a friend of mine in the parish took lots of my surplus kitchen things and clothes to give to a poor family and some refugees arrived in the parish. They will be able to use some of my furniture as well, if we can find a way to transport it.

Tomorrow a lovely charity are coming to take away all kinds of other things I can donate or that need to be disposed of, and to help me pack because I can’t physically do it myself. This is amazing.

My cat doesn’t think it’s so amazing and is walking around with a very suspicious look on her face. She doesn’t like a lot of bustle or things being moved round the room. She’s alternately ever so affectionate, then moody and trying to scratch. I think she has lived in so many different homes before I adopted her that she thinks she will be left again – that the signs of moving mean I’m going to go away and abandon her. Poor puddy cat has attachment problems just like me! 🤣

We shall have to see if her mood improves once she realises there will be lots of cardboard boxes to hide in…

Ginny xxx

Picture by memecenter.com

I told him what I see. He explained it away.

I told my dad today about my concerns over how he’s being treated by my step mum. I told him I’m worried for him. I told him about how she’s treating me and other people in the family. He denied it is happening. He denied any possibility that he may be being treated very badly and that he may not realise because he has had so many previous years of emotional abuse. He says there is no problem for him. He put my experience and my concerns for him down to the fact that I had harmful experiences when I was abused when I was younger and that means I perceive interactions now as a repeat of what was done to me back then when actually nothing is wrong / there is no similarity, and that my “world view” may not be a good one because of what was done to me then. Basically I am wrong, I am the problem, and there is nothing wrong at all in how my step mum behaves to him or me or others. He denied events that have happened, denied things that have been said, and bought totally into my step mum’s view of me as a failure, a let down, spoiled, the problem, unwelcome, at fault… he even upheld her emotional attacks on me as being fine and my feelings essentially as being because I have problems.

It was pretty much what I had expected would happen but he had a much deeper rooted explanation than I was ready for, for why things are not really as I have experienced them to be. At least he did not deny my experience. But he explained it away in such a manner that it secures my step mum’s casting of me as the difficulty and her as the perfect spouse and mother figure.

My concern was primarily for him and how he is being treated but she has cast me in such a role that no concern I raise, no event I try to discuss will have weight with him.

It is rather as my mother did, drawing my dad in to such an extent that he would not hear when I told him multiple times about her emotional, physical and sexual abuse. She could invasively abuse me pretty much in his presence, emotionally taunt and threaten me for hours on end partly in his presence. At the time he supported her, joined her in her emotional attacks on me, often continuing himself afterwards; somehow he ignored her physical actions to me… and then later when at long last he listened to me (when I was an adult, hospitalised) he claimed no memory of any of the events. He was that drawn into her world.

His blindness now both traps me again and leaves me alone. Traps me where I cannot reach him to warn him what is happening as he just won’t hear me. Leaves me alone because it feels universally declared that I’m mad, I’m wrong, I’m the problem; what I’m experiencing and seeing isn’t real. It feels like all the power has been handed back to my step mum. I feel as I did when I was a child; alone and my sense of reality torn to shreds.

Xxx

If he doesn’t realise he’s being abused, what do I do?

I’ve gone too long not saying anything. I need to talk to my dad about what my step mother is doing to him and to me.

What happened to my other family member, who was being abused for months with no-one’s knowledge, has made it clearer to me that I need to speak out. I know what can go under the radar; how for those closely involved in the abuser’s world, it can be impossible to see what is happening. And look what went under the radar when I was abused as a child. I’m trying to separate myself from my anger about all the times I “should” have been helped. Right now it just shows me how important it is to not let it go by when you see abuse happening. Another event that has made it clearer to me that I need to speak out is that third parties have commented on my step mum’s behaviour and how my dad is and how another vulnerable member of the family is treated – this was not based on what I told them but on what they themselves observed. It isn’t just me being crazy, or misinterpreting because I’m too sensitive because of my early life experiences, or imagining it, or because I subconsciously resent my step mother so somehow want bad towards her. It’s really happening. Then on top of this, my social worker and a psychologist I have been seeing at the pain clinic have both said to me that for my wellbeing the only course of action may be to restrict contact with my step mother. This is on the basis of the limited number of incidents I’ve described to them from the past 7 years or longer.

It’s really happening. It’s sustained (worsened actually) over time. My dad has no idea or if he does see it wants or needs to ignore it (because he thinks it’s normal? Because he thinks he deserves it? Because he doesn’t know what to do?). My step mum has been able to convince other members of the family that she is perfect, blameless, that she is the one being mistreated, that I am the one mistreating her or causing the problems, that I am the one doing wrong to my dad, that another person in the family is again a cause of problems and to be ostracised (and she has orchestrated this ostracisation), when actually they are vulnerable and desperately in need of help.

As well as being angry with my step mum, I am angry with my dad. This is totally wrong. Misplaced. I feel furious anger at my step mother’s abuse going on unseen and unchecked, even when it is done in plain sight. Why do I have any anger towards my dad? My anger should be only towards her, and the immense control she exerts and deception she weaves, which allows her behaviour to be unacknowledged, unnoticed or excused. That’s all part of her abusing. Does abusers’ behaviour somehow get you angry with the wrong people too? Or is it because all the feelings are brought up from when I was a child needing my dad to help me, trying to tell him what she was doing? Because I can’t really understand why he couldn’t see what my mother was doing to me and what she was involving him in back then? He was deceived by her but he also did wrong, but that’s another story.

However, I am left with the fact that again he’s in a relationship where he and others are being abused, and either he can’t see that it’s happening or he can’t / won’t take action. I don’t want that to repeat for him, for anyone else I care about or for me. It went on 30 years in his relationship with my mother. I don’t want him to go through more years of abuse, never taking action or only taking action when much more has been lost. He is fit but not so young anymore and if he were only to realise what’s happening when he’s elderly, it would seem all the sadder.

I can’t force my dad to take action. I can’t pull him free from the situation. What I can do now, which I could not do as a child, is try to openly tell him what I’ve observed and what I’m worried about. I can also tell him how she behaves to me. It’s likely he won’t believe me or will refuse to acknowledge it. This is what has happened when I’ve told him previously what my step mum has been doing and it’s what happened when I told him what my mother was doing when I was a child. But now I’m not a child. My safety and my world do not depend on him believing and saving me. Sadly, his safety does depend on him acknowledging what is happening to him.

How do I help him do this? How do I raise what is happening without him being so hurt and angry that I’m saying it that there is no chance he will be able to reflect on how she’s treating him and how he’s feeling? How do I do it without him stopping talking to me at all? Then there would be no chance I can help him. If he just utterly blanks it all and changes the subject, or leaves (both have happened before), what then?

Whilst he is not isolated as we were when I was growing up, in a remote village in a shut up house, nobody allowed in, no relationships allowed outside the home, he is isolated in a different way. Apart from his work, the world he’s in is still hers. Her part of the world, her house then the house she chose, her choice of leisure activities, her friends. Almost everyone he has contact with outside his work is her world. Potentially controlled by her. I can think of nothing he does separate from her, apart from his work. I can’t think of any friend he has contact with who is not first hers. No way he spends any leisure time away from her, except for the rare occasions she goes away on holiday without him for a couple of days, or the rarer occasions he comes to see me without her. It seems there would be nothing and no-one to help him move away from her control.

This is worse than I thought.

Xxx

Again, and never again…

[This post mentions abuse and discusses painful mental experiences. I am currently safe.]

A couple of weeks ago I found out someone I love was being abused. Had been for months or years. By a trusted person. How did I not know? Blind. Does it make me as bad as the abuser if I didn’t know? That’s just one of their tricks so you won’t tell, a distant part of me says, but it doesn’t make a difference.

Today I found out my fiancé has been much more ill than I knew in recent weeks. How didn’t I know? We’ve been with each other a significant part of each day. How could I not know? How stupid and blind am I? Insensitive, I must have been too selfish to notice. Spoiled, bad, ugly, brat, greedy, you haven’t said sorry enough, no one has done as little as you, the voices join in.

Today, in a way (too personal to him to write about) a point of security we had counted on for our future is gone. He’s / We’ve been tricked again, lied to again, lost again. Probably what is lost can’t be got back. Stupid me. Stupid me for trusting again. Every security I’ve counted on has been pulled from under us. Stupid. How could I not know this was just a dream and would be the same?

But I did really need it to have any chance of coping, the sick broken me says.

I’m watching my dad be put down, manipulated, knocked back by my step mum. Whilst she is emotionally abusing me, and doing what she can to confuse and control my relationship with my dad. And I believe she is hurting another vulnerable member of the family too. My dad appears blind to what she is doing to him and to me. A frightened but angry child in me is screaming, how can he not know?! Why won’t he do something? Look what she’s doing to him… and why won’t he help me?(That last part I’m so ashamed of.) Which is ironic and hypocritical of me, given what I too have been blind to. I should not be surprised at least, as he remained blind to my mother’s far worse behaviour.

I feel as if I’m fragmenting into too many pieces.

Too many voices are screaming in my head, repeating my guilt, to make me doubt and paralyse me. They will kill me with their screaming and the noise and pain and reliving, unless I cut myself. There are too many parts of me and they all have voices too and it’s dangerous. There’s another voice too though, and she’s saying, never again. This stops now. Act. Make it different this time. Get help. I don’t know how. I don’t know how to choose when I and the people I love have always been used or tricked or abandoned in the end. But I have to stop this somehow.

Whatever I write seems to trivialise what happened to her

I stopped where I did in my last post as I feel too horrified, confused, guilty and so much tumbling round my mind, that I can’t write more. It feels awful and incomplete to leave it there. I don’t want to trivialise it and feel as if I have done, somehow. I can’t write more right now. I’ll try again in a little while or a couple of days’ time.

Xxx