Posted by PreemieNurse on December 18, 2005, at 22:59:05
I've been hanging around lurking for a bit now and finally decided today that it was time to register and post. This may not be the right board, but the newbie board is just not very active and this is the one that I seem to be drawn to read the most. I'm on an email list from another group, but for some reason, I just can't seem to relate to them. This post may be triggering on several issues, so please be aware of that if you decide to read all the way through.
Anyway, my story...I am a 36 yr old single mom of three kids (ages 16, 8, and 6), a full time NICU nurse, and as of Jan, a full time student again. I experienced a 14 yr history of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse and incest. As soon as I left my family home and married my now ex-husband, I put all of that behind me, so I thought. I could sit and tell you the details of what happened to me, but I never put any emotional depth behind it. It didn't touch me. It was like it happened to someone else. I honestly didn't even realize that it had an effect on me. Like some of you, I had to sit at family dinners and holidays with several of the people that did this to me and pretend like it had never happened, year after year.
When I hit my mid to late twenties, things started to fall apart. I couldn't keep it together anymore for some reason. I was severely depressed, my marriage was starting to disintegrate, and I didn't feel like I could be a mother to my kids anymore. Somehow, even through all that, I still managed to finish a full-time school program and become an LPN. My husband and I got divorced when I was 32. Keep in mind however that I certainly didn't marry the specimen of manhood. After he moved out, I was left completely alone with my own demons for the first time and it all hit the fan. I started seeing a new therapist, that thankfully I had a really good raport with, and went off the deep end. I ended up in a psych hospital three times, made three suicide attempts, lost my house because of not being able to work, lost custody of my kids for a year and almost lost my job too. I went on/off many different medications. I spent hours on the roof of a nine-story parking garage (right outside my doctor's office) trying to work up the courage to jump. I remember one day standing there just after an appointment counting the cars driving past below me and telling myself that I would jump after the tenth one, the next tenth one, etc. I completely zoned out after one session and ended up in a hotel room with a fifth of alcohol, a drug overdose and a sliced open wrist. I started using drugs again, a problem that I had as a teen. I picked up a guy off the internet, took him to a hotel, had sex with him, let him slap me around a bit, and then sent him on his happy little way and never talked to him again. I had sex in a bar with some guy that I didn't even know his name and still don't to this day. I can't even begin to tell you all the things that I did during that time period. I wanted to die and couldn't find the courage to even do that. Then, I hated myself for not being able to kill myself. My therapist and I did very little work on my abuse issues because everything was concentrated on just keeping me alive during that time. To this day, I'm still not sure why I'm alive and how I was able to get past that time period.
I remember the day that I came out of the hospital the last time. No one was there to pick me up and I simply walked out the front door, got in my car and drove myself away alone. Their only stipulation before discharging me was that a nurse had to walk out to my car and remove any sharp objects and drugs. There was still blood all down the driver side door. I stopped at the gas station to fill up the tank and stood there thinking about how I wasn't supposed to be alive anymore at that point. I had never felt so sad, so empty, so completely alone as I did right then. I even felt like my therapist had abandoned me at that point. He had called 911 and had the police sent to that hotel room when I called him to say goodbye. He betrayed me. Yeah, I know. "If you hadn't wanted to be saved, then you wouldn't have called him." I didn't want to be saved. I wanted to say goodbye. I wanted to hear his voice. I wanted to be able to carry that sound in my mind until I was gone. I wanted him to know what had happened. But, I ended up in the hospital instead and never heard another word from him until I was released. They called him to set up an appointment. He told me to just keep the appointment that we would have had a week and a half later. I felt completely naked, raw and stripped of every defense I had at the moment and he just nonchalantly told me that he would see me in 10 days. I think that's when I really shut down to him. He was the first person in my life that I had ever really trusted and that I felt like cared about me as a person. But, I think it disappeared on that day, right then. Then, I went home and logged onto a newgroup that I was a member of, only to find out that a friend had attempted suicide at almost the exact time that I did and had succeeded. Talk about feeling like a failure.
Now, I am with a new therapist and have been for about a year and a half. I feel like we are just now beginning to touch on the very edges of the effects of my childhood. I have very little memory of it, no flashbacks, no waking up in the middle of the night in a sweat, and no panic attacks. However, I have yet to find the ability to tell him exactly what happened back then and I think that is a huge blocking point for me. There are only a few specific incidents that I recall, but I know that there were many more that I can't remember. My first memory is a sexual one. I was somewhere between 3 and 5 years old as I can best tell. I know that I hadn't started school yet.As for today, I'm certainly doing much better than I was doing three years ago, but how much better? I'm still alive. I don't feel so far removed from that period, though. I don't make plans to die anymore, but it's not that far away on some days. Guilt and fear keep me alive most of the time, but guilt and fear drive me towards wanting out most of the time too. Some days, it is a real battle still and no one in my real life knows that. I hide that from everyone. I'm ashamed of feeling that way when I am supposd to be cured of that. I'm tired of feeling like some kind of mentally defective object. I'm so tired of feeling like I'm someone that people have to protect themselves from (a touchy subject with my therapist right now). I'm tired of hating myself. I'm tired of being angry with myself all the time. I'm tired of feeling guilty. I'm tired of being alone. I'm tired of not being able to connect with anyone because I can't allow myself to even try.
As far as the touchy part with the therapist, like others that I have read in here, I have fallen completely for him. It's scary and extremely painful most of the time. One of the issues that I'm struggling with right now is the feeling that I have to protect him from me. I've even considered stopping therapy with him at times, just because of this. But even THAT thought is torture most of the time. I question myself constantly about this. Do I love him? Yes, without a doubt in my mind. I trust him completely and I've never trusted anyone before. I thought I trusted my previous therapist, but looking back over posts from my old newsgroup, I realized this weekend that just a few months into seeing him, I was already stating that I wasn't able to tell him certain things because I didn't feel safe enough. Is this real? I keep telling myself that it's not. I keep telling myself that I am just living a typical cliche. Everyone falls for their therapist, right? It's just part of the process. But you know what? It's maddening and insulting to think like that. This is so real to me when I admit it to myself. It's frustrating. We discuss it in depth and he knows how I feel. I put on my 'rational' hat and step back to look at it. Of course I would have these feelings. He knows more about me than anyone ever has known, he lets me say how I feel about things without making me feel judged, he focuses on me alone the whole time that I am there, he remembers everything I tell him, he's learned how to read my moods and feelings even when I can't find the words for them, and he makes me want to be a better person. There have been several (thousand) times in the past couple of years that I have been longing to do something destructive, but stop myself only because I don't want him to be disappointed in me. But there are a lot of things that he doesn't know about me also and I really know very little about him. I know, I make him who I need him to be and ignore the fact that he is probably just another typical man that leaves his dirty underwear on the bathroom floor and just rolls over to go to sleep after sex. In the last month, I have thought about him constantly. I need him. It's not even so much of a 'need' thing most of the time. I WANT him and I'm terrified at the depth of that. Here's my sappy confession. On two occasions, I've gotten in my car and driven around the hospital area just because I knew he was there and I wanted to feel some kind of connection with him. I have fought all of this so hard and I feel like I'm losing it sometimes.
Away from that issue, I'm to the point now with my therapy that I feel like I HAVE to go deeper (another extremely frightening thought). It seems like there is something pushing its way up through a lot of layers and if I don't acknowledge it and let it out, it will just break out on its own. Make any sense? It's a rage that I bite back on, a self-hate that will kill me one day, a guilt that drags me further down everytime I look at it, a thought that something is looking over my shoulder waiting for the moment to make me slip, an inevitability that I'm running from, and a fear that I will never be sane again once it's out. But it is screaming at me and when I'm alone writing something like this, I feel my sanity slipping a bit anyway.
Sorry so long for a first time post.
poster:PreemieNurse
thread:590262
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20051216/msgs/590262.html