PTSD – A Way Out A mindful way to heal

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Who am I? This quandary is much more complex for abused kids.

I still do not know who I am, there are multiple people inside me.

Is this the Internal Family System on steroids?

Am I the shamed, worthless child, beaten and ruthlessly criticized, or the athletic star, or another one of my damaged personalities?

Our dissociation does not have a psychotic break, creating Dissociative Identity Disorder (multiples), but we have a big dissociation issue.

Even the athletic star’s self-worth is created by performance not intrinsic worthiness.

Every game risks loss without permanent gain, only temporary escape.

Safety and worthiness are fleeting, performance-based, they only last to the next challenge.

Worthiness and safety have never been permanent.

Some of us have never felt at peace, worthy of love, whatever love is.

The problem with these characters, none feels worthy or at peace.

I have no memory as a child of feeling safe or worthy, there is not a solid core or foundation of attachment. My childhood has quicksand as a foundation.

Trust does not flourish inside an abused child, we lack the basic ingredients for being part of a community or being happy.

We isolate, an inner battle of trauma carries on besides normal life, we live a different existence.

Regular life takes a back seat from time to time, PTSD can dominate everything.

My younger days of high-energy distraction with constant work and play are gone.

My body cannot exhaust my PTSD symptoms anymore.

We are the harshest judge of ourselves, we mirror our caregiver’s (abusers) judgments.

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https://steemit.com/funny/@myfinanceteacher/funny-never-give-up-cartoons

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We all have our paths (journeys) specific to our childhoods and personalities.

My strengths may be your weaknesses and vice versa, what works for me may have no impact on you.

We have to ignore judgments about our path from others.

I have been told I have given up and do not desire to heal.

Let it go, keep up your daily actions, there will always be detractors and erroneous judgments.

In blunt terms, they can kiss my ass.

Yes, I have shared that feeling with a few.

Very, very few people have truly understood my journey, my abuse or its impact.

What we do not need is more unwarranted criticism.

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Excerpt from “The Sweet Spot” the pleasures of suffering and the search for meaning:

“In one study, subjects were given experience with a painful electric shock and then asked how much they would pay to avoid getting the shock again.

Then they were kept by themselves for fifteen minutes, with the shock machine in the room.

Even though they said they would pay to avoid the shock, many of the subjects chose to indulge in the pain. (There was a big sex difference here. Two-thirds of the men shocked themselves—usually just once, though one man shocked himself 190 times—while only one-quarter of the women indulged.)

This is yet another source of benign masochism—pain to escape boredom.

One reason why doing nothing is so unpleasant is that our thoughts, unfettered by distraction, take us to uncomfortable places.

Boredom is the opposite of BDSM: instead of escaping from the self, you’re wallowing in it.

We are starting to get a sense here for why boredom is a poor candidate for benign masochism.

Unlike other masochistic pleasures, it doesn’t capture our attention or our interest (indeed, it does the opposite).

It doesn’t lead to escape from the self.

It might set up a contrast with future experience—something interesting is probably more interesting if it was preceded by a period of boredom—but apparently the contrast isn’t so great as to make the choice worthwhile.”

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Is Surviving always the best outcome?

I have been through worker’s compensation and SSDI debacles for six years, visiting hospitals, doctors, evaluators, federal judges, and lawyers.

Many times in the hospital wing for spinal injuries, I witnessed lives that would be better served if they did not survive.

It is easy for those who have not suffered a serious spinal injury to value life in some romantic way.

How much suffering is to much?

At what point does it cross that line?

Many severely abused kids have a life of misery ahead of them, jail, injury, cancer, mental disorders, addictions, alcoholism, prostitution, etc.

How about them?

What advice would you give them?

A hard question for me after the toll childhood abuse has taken on my life.

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