As the conversation continues in this entry about survivor’s struggle with friendship, I’m starting to notice a difficult trend when it comes to healing, and that is deciding what your motivation is. It’s a difficult question to answer, and something…

Exactly. It’s all about stop worrying that you are different and how people judge you. People are always going to judge you on meeting you anyway.

It all got better once I stopped trying so hard to make people like me. I did things for myself that I liked and made me feel good.

I really hope Pat and Andy reach that place and I hope they know I am rooting for them, and everyone else going through abuse survival

I have lived my live with MPD/DID. Basically, that means my grey matter is shared by many different people aging from childhood to old age. All of my life, people have judged keepers (the name I have for my system of alters.) and condemned us for being different. Eventually, keepers learned to just live our lives and not let it any one else’s opinion of us have any more than a passing power over us. It does not really matter at all what anybody thinks as long as you are in a good relationship with yourself.

peace and blessings,

keepers

I don’t think you ever fully trust anyone again. You have to accept that part of healing is giving yourself to people (family, friends, partners, coworkers and even people you meet through blogs) and some are going to blow you out of the water again. But this is where, I think personally, dealing with the effects of the abuse come into play. We are not unique in having trust broken. Many people experience betrayal and broken trust in a variety of guises. What makes us different from those people is we think we deserved it and we find it hard to get over the hurt. The other people move on and see it as part of life.

For example before I met my husband I lived with this guy and I loved him totally. He was a bit of an arse but just in the way 22-year-olds are. He dumped me and I found out he had been unfaithful. My first thought, if I am honest, was: “How could he do that to me when he knows everything I’ve been through.” By that I mean, how could he shatter the trust I so willingly gave him?

But, if I was a non-abuse survivor, I would also have been devastated. But me reacted was twinged with the victim stance of “Oh no! It’s happening again and I told him everything about me too. Will anyone ever be just nice and reliable?”

The answer here is no. Not really. No one is perfect. Even my husband, who loves me deeply and I him, can be a berk. And, more to the point, I can be too. We are just human and we have faults like everyone else.

I guess my point of coming to terms with everything (and I was never aware of a single point of “YEAH! I AM OK NOW!”) was when I stopped thinking everyone should treat me different, be kinder, nicer and protect me from harm. What I needed was to deal with the hard knocks every other person deals with (shit jobs, being skint, being dumped, friends being crap, etc) and learning that it is ok to be fed up when these things happen. I also stopped trying so hard. I tried to be the best friend you could ever have, the person who would drop everything to help and who tried ultra hard at work. These days I do things I like and mostly for myself and my family. If I meet people along the way who want to hitch on the ride that is cool. If not, well, it’s really is ok too.

Interestingly, the only time I became aware that I was “better” was when I came close to actually harming myself in 2003. That’s when I thought: “NO! Mr X is not worth my life and nor is anything else thrown at me. I want to see what happens if I let go of it all and just accept what happened but also accept that I am a completely different person now.”

I don’t mean to rub it in by saying I am the happiest now than I ever have been, but wish to give you hope in a, hopefully, non-patronising way.

I wish most of all for you to find your own happy path in life. While you find it, at least you have met some other survivors who are here to listen and help if you need it.

I’ve come to realise just how scared and wary of people I am these days; I’ve noticed more and more my body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, inflection and so on, and the thing is, I’ve only just realised I’m doing it, so yeah, I’d have to say people are going to be seeing this and respond accordingly, probably all subliminal, in the first 3 seconds or whatever it is that we judge people by.

Though we have similar reactions to the world, our abuse was obviously unique to us, so our coping mechanisms will allow us to try to operate as normally as we can, given our past. Self healing, moving on or being able to function in life is a process that takes place in a time scale that we can’t guess at.

In my case, I was initially diagnosed with PTSD and then, after uncovering the child abuse, I have exteme hypervigilance, something which has become second nature for me, instinctual, even. Breaking out of that mindset, after 30 years isn’t going to happen immediately, nor will insight to knowing about it make is suddenly go away.

That’s what makes reading about healing and making friends and achieving things hard to swallow, all because my experiences are different from everyone else, my ability to heal, mend, get over, come to terms with and integrate what happened to me into someone who is at peace with themselves. I can’t say that I am yet.

Sorry for the long waffle, I did have a point, but it got buried in the text somewhere. I guess that my experiences and past have a profound affect on me and that along with how people perceive me will go hand in hand until I’m moving on, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get over being able to trust people because of what happened – I’m still reacting to the world as a five year old child.

I can relate to the bit where you say that “I think being an abuse suvivor can make you far too analytical and retrospective. You are thinking everyone is as critical of you as you are. IN your head you think you don’t deserve good mates or that you are worthy to talk to because you have been conditioned that way.” Since I left university, my self-confidence has gone down and I find myself thinking thoughts that no one likes me and there’s something wrong with me – thoughts I didn’t use to have so much before. All the new people I’ve met since I’ve been married are through my husband (not an abuse survivor and a very relaxed, secure person), and they are all “normal” (I know I’m over-generalising here) people who I think find me confusing because they’re just not used to my type. When I was single and in university, I tended to meet more people who I clicked more with (not necessarily abuse survivors) and who could understand me and they didn’t find me strange (without having to even talk about the past) so I was more relaxed. I’m just very different emotionally from the kind of people I tend to meet now, so we connect less, and my self-esteem isn’t very secure, so I can be very sensitive to people who look at me like they find me weird. I should just try to be more tolerant I suppose.

I can also relate to what you said in your first paragraph. I also used to have very high expectations of close friends in this way in the past, but then I realised that (in my case anyway) they were functioning sort of like a substitute family, and the thing is, friends are friends and can never be family. They might be able to fulfil this need for a while, but not forever, (they will get tired of it, become too busy with other things or you grow apart, etc.) while family is always family (for good or bad). I am now concentrating on building the love and trust in my new family that I never had in my first one, and am seeing friends as “just” friends. It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t try to get very close if the relationship goes that way, but in general I try to keep it lighter and I make a very clear distinction now between friends and family.

Since 2003, when I fell out with my father spectacularly and nearly spiralled into the blackest pit going, I realised that friends can only really help you so much. In fact what I preferred and when I was happiest was when enjoying a social situation with friends where we talked about everything else other than my Dallas of a life. Talking about other stuff meant I have fun.

I think being an abuse suvivor can make you far too analytical and retrospective. You are thinking everyone is as critical of you as you are. IN your head you think you don’t deserve good mates or that you are worthy to talk to because you have been conditioned that way. You have to try and talk yourself out of that. Once you feel you have something to offer, other people will recognise that straight away.

Once I had my daughter, I met a lot of people in my town. Some of which I have a lot in common and some of which just the parenting role in common. In a way I like having a big group of friends that know nothing about my past life. I have quite a lot of old friends who know it all and that’s enough for me. I don’t think anyone who would meet me would know my past. In fact, the blog I’ve been writing has been a shock to many of my friends.

I definitely think when you are happier in yourself you draw more people towards you.

It will take awhile and be hard, there are no shortcuts, but the end results are worth it.