Greetings to my wonderful new friends in the book club.  Sarsha, once again thank you so much for the invite and i am so excited to be here.  I read through all the posts last night (I guess they're available to site members logged in?) and I am so excited about taking part in the discussions.  What is the book that you all are reading now about ptsd?  The discussions of it are already illuminating for me.  I took some notes last night while I was reading:

It is a wild and terrible place I go to in my mind.  I get trapped there.  Yes, there are terrible selves there.  Deciding not to go there?  That’s where my OCD symptoms kick in.  Oh yeah, three hour showers and sheer howling panic if my husband gets grease on the kitchen sink knobs again.   I used to sit on the edge of the bed for hours at night, more or less ready to get in bed and thinking, “I need to get in the bed now,” but unable to move.  Is this dissociating?  What about de-realization?  I go to such scary places, and I cannot get out.  I want out.  These places dominate my consciousness at least as much as any Apparently Normal Personality.  I feel as though I will slip away entirely, like Frodo when he put on the Ring.  I find myself pantomiming to someone who is not there, as if I was talking to him or her.  It is not a hallucination, I do not think the person is actually there.  Persecutory EP’s, yes yes yes!  C-ptsd, yes.  Nineteen years of trauma and abuse.  Continuous persecution.  Yes, Sarsha, what you said about isolation and losing all your friends, people shunning because you are showing them something they don’t want to see.  Yes.  I have sometimes found solace in creativity, often not.  Now only in writing.

So that those are my thoughts that came up while I was reading the posts.  About myself:  . . . this is hard.  I no longer function.  My anxiety dominates my every experience.  No, terror.  My memories and flashbacks of the abuse have worsened over the last ten years, despite doing real work to recognize the patterns and where they come from.  I get angrier all the time.  I was not sexually abused, except by attitude, but I describe my childhood relationship with my father as "emotional rape" because his boundaries were completely nonexistent emotionally even though he never touched me in a sexual way, as far as I am aware.  He did act like the jealous, controlling boyfriend/spouse.  I could not have any other friends.  He ran them all off.  Loneliness gapes inside me, and gets worse year after year.  I was happy for a few years but it has been gone a long time now.  I am frequently suicidal.  I hope that is okay here.  I do not have any supplies here in the house or anywhere else to carry out a plan of suicide.  Please let me be here.  I am so hurt, and there is not a single setting in my physical life where I can even mention my madness, hurt, anger, loneliness.  I do not have a single real friend.  People like me and they think they are my friends, but they silence me swiftly if I try to get through the shallowness.  It is a culture of yuppie hypocrites.  I want out.

I have found friendship and understanding on the icarus forums for the first time in years.  Permission to be myself.  My husband is supportive, and recently we have been seeing a couples therapist who is supportive and insightful and helpful for us.  But icarus, my husband and this therapist are the only support I have.  I worked hard to get into a dbt program at the university hospital here and I was so hopeful, but the coordinator kept putting me off and not calling me to schedule when she said she would call me, and then I found out they had lied to me all along about how to get in.  Other people have had the same experience.  I do not want to be in that program now.  The woman in charge of coordinating is the same doctor who leads the group.  I want nothing to do with people who lie to me and manipulate me, I have had enough of that already.  And it destroyed my relationship with my therapist, who was also my psychiatric doctor, because they were at the same hospital and my therapist just let this other doctor talk circles around her and would innocently repeat the confusing and misleading non-information about how to get into dbt week after week until I dreaded going in to see her.  It was a betrayal I cannot forgive, and now I don't even know if I can continue seeing the couples therapist because she was requiring me to see an individual therapist at the same time.  I am completely and irreparably fucked.

Well, I'm sorry I don't have anything nice to say.  I do have too nice kitty cats, Poppy and Freddy.  I am going to take a break and go pet them now.  anyway, it is good to be here and I hope my intensity is not too much.  I am ready to learn, I think, even though it hurts.  I quit school years ago because trying to focus on academic material seemed to shut down all my emotions and then I would go into depression and sleep, sleep sleep, paralyzed.  I think I can focus on these materials you all are studying.  It is about my life.  I want to survive, although I'm not sure if i will or not.  I hope I will not be kicked out for saying that.  Thank you for letting me be here.

Mary