beauflow
you have touched on so many similar things in this post. i come from a family of six kids too. 3 boys and 3 girls and i marvel at how different we all came out. we were born in groups of two with four year breaks between us. my sister and i are a year and a half apart and have the most predominant mental health issues. she has spent years institutionalized and has multiple diagnoses. lives on disability. i often wonder what separates us? sure, i have been hospitalized a couple times, but i have managed to get my degree and i hold down a job and i am functional. how did i make it and she didnt? nearly all of us have mental health dxs. my oldest bro is a house husband and stays high. my oldests sister cant hold down a job for more than a year. my younger bro has maintained employment but has had issues with alcohol and food addiction and my little bro is an addict. as messed up as i am, i think i am really the least dysfunctional member of the family. i really have nothing to do with any of them. i refuse to live the lie.

i jsut wanted to comment on a few of the things you said.

beauflow wrote - "I got told my constant suicidal thoughts, even in happy times, are due to my rage, my past.... I got mad at the pdoc when he said "you seem to have a lot anger" in my head was I am not angry you mofo-- sigh looking back I think so esp. with such a response."

interesting. i started praying for god to take me away when i was six. in my teens i started having suicidal ideation. my goal was to die by the time i was 21. i was really pissed when i hit that birthday. even though i am no longer suicidal, i still want to die. i find such comfort in the idea of death. i have never connected it to rage. i too would get angry when confronted with the idea that i was angry. T brought it up again and again and i would never admit it. He would say, "admit it kaliope, youre pissed! youre pissed off at your dad for how he treated you." And i never could because i wasnt allowed to have feelings as a kid. I would get ridiculed or beat for getting upset or crying while i was being ridiculed or beat. It took a couple years and working with my new T and finally one day i felt safe enough to admit i was angry. i was so excited. i emailed old T to announce i finally did it. He was so happy for me.

beauflow wrote - "It took me years to accept that maybe someone would love me, and struggle even with that today."

i certainly understand this. my mom hammered in my head that nobody would ever want me because i was fat. so the first people who took an interest i latched onto. on top of that, they werent very nice. with the whole abusive dad thing, kaliope has to be perfect in order to be worthy of love, i thought if i could get these guys to love me, accept me for who i am, then it would make up for dad, prove him wrong, so i stayed with 2 bad men for 20 yrs of my life. i have been alone for like 9 years now. i am afraid that i will repeat the pattern, that i am not healthy enough to make a good decision in a relationship. it is just not worth it to me, to give myself up for another man.

but someone loving me in general i find hard. i finally accepting that my kids love me even though i made bad choice in a step father, lived in poverty and could not provide for them emotionally. they understand that i am limited due to my mental health and forgive me. others in my life, my last job say they love me but i thought it only because i do so much to make their life easy for them, but now i am working at another place. we are all close and people say they love me all the time. i do not do for them. i went on vacation for three weeks and when i got back they were so excited to see me. this one girl in particular had a sparkle in her eye as she smiled and gave me a hug to welcome me back. all i could think was that these people would really miss me if i died. these people really do care. it was really eye opening, heart opening for me. i really felt loved and i dont know that i have felt that before.

beauflow wrote -"IE someone gets mad, if it is a guy (even my boyfriend) i think I did something wrong/I need to fix it- push my feelings aside and get some thing done, and that thought of I may get beaten.... "

wow, this is a big one. always, something goes wrong, its my fault, im the one that is going to get blamed, get in trouble, get beat for it. once at work i was at the front counter with my boss and one of our renters came out and said the sword from one of his knight bookends was missing. after he left, my boss is like "what happened to you, he asked that and i saw you panic and your eyes sorta whooshed and went blank." total ptsd reaction. i used to call it getting suicidal over burnt toast because if my BF didnt get pissed at me/blame me for whatever when wrong, i beat myself up for it. i would SI, hit myself over the head. I needed to be punished.

beauflow wrote -"I cant help but to be on guard constantly, i feel tense over probably 80% of the time, waiting to be smacked down by a being or an unforeseen bad thing ,i have been told i have been agitated a lot'

All symptoms of ptsd. what i hated the most was when people would catch me off gaurd and i would jump a mile in my chair. it would take me so long to recover from that and the panic it would trigger, tryingto suppress the need to cry in a professional setting just was so hard to do.

beau- do you have the dissociative symptoms as well? depersonalization? derealization?

gosh, i havent thought about this stuff for so long. i truly have come a long way in the last couple years. i dont know how i functioned back then. i guess not very well or i wouldnt have ended up hospitalized against my will. huh? lol