Hi sarcgeo, I looked at what you have shared so far and it's very possible that you are struggling with complex ptsd. Your history with your mother was very unhealthy for you. Any child that suffers because of their mother's unhappiness doesn't deserve to feel that deep hurt. It's understandable that you don't want your own child to suffer and it sounds like you did try to pick a woman that was not cruel and selfish like your mother was.

Truth is, when a child is hurt and abused the way you describe, that child really doesn't know how to deal with the feelings they experience due to the mean behaviors they experience from a parent or some other toxic presence that is mean to them and tends to encourage them to feel they are "unworthy".

I struggle with some very toxic things from my own childhood where I was encouraged to feel I was not "good enough" too. I was treated in a way that what I valued was not important and did not deserve to be valued. Truth is, it was not my mother that sent me those messages, instead it was my older sister. My older sister really hated my older brother, even tried to kill him when he was very little and wanted me to hate him too. That pretty much never changed and never will change.

It's good that you stopped turning to drugs and alcohol to help you deal with the anger and self resentments. However, from what you have shared, you never actually healed those old wounds. You still don't feel you are worthy of being loved and valued. And you continue to struggle with the anger you experience from your early history and your inability to protect yourself better from being hurt by your mother. This most likely prevented you from being able to experience a healthier relationship. Often this brings on an extra challenge when it comes to being intimate and you may struggle to explain what that means TO YOU. It's like when you look in the mirror and can't love and care about the image you see in it. It's the same challenge you experience when it comes to accepting that you can be loved and can actually feel a sense of safety with it.

I believe you when you share that you genuinely do not want your child to experience this kind of pain. I am sure you wanted to give your child what you failed to get yourself. I am sure that picking a woman that is a good mother and NOT like your mother was, was important to you. You don't want to mess that up when it comes to your child. You don't want your child to suffer like you do and you wanted to have something that was somehow unattainable for you because of that deep hurt your mother put in you.

People have said to me how good I am at helping others, yet, whenever I share my own challenges I know I am going to confuse people, and it's true in they say you help others and yet you struggle so much yourself and can't seem to do for yourself. Well, as you very well know it's not "intentional".

Last night I went to sit with my therapist and I was so sad. He asked me how I was feeling on a scale of 1-10 and I answered that I feel VERY low in sadness. Things in the now of my life have been very toxic and for the most part I have been VERY alone with it all. It's strange because therapists tend to want me to talk about my past, and yet others DON'T want me to talk about my past. I hear things like "let it go, don't allow, just get over it, just deal" and for anyone who suffers from ptsd, all that really means is to continue to keep your deep feelings and emotional challenges to yourself.

My therapist said to me last night that in what he has discovered in providing therapy for individuals like me is that it's like a weed and you cannot get rid of it unless you dig down and get the root. My therapist does this therapy with me that is similar to EMDR, only he has me revisit different trauma's and first see them while watching his hand in motion and then going back and changing things around that I could not change when I experienced these traumas. He says that I never processed these experiences and our brain tries to do that in our sleep, our brain does that during REM sleep.

You are not a failure, and you are not ugly and you don't deserve to carry these deep hurts that your mother handed you. I know, it's not so much that you don't want to care, and you do care too. Instead it's that you don't want the HURT.

I had this man come help me on my farm to catch up because I have been so behind on all the barn work here on my farm. I got to talking to him and he is trying to get sober and he talked about his history with his father who was very abusive. He told me he was the oldest child and that his father was a mean angry drunk and when his father came home he would take all his anger out on him and beat him up. He told me how he used to get so stomach sick and even throw up anticipating the abuse he was going to experience at the hands of his father.

I KNOW what that kind of stomach sick is personally. Just in the last year of my parent's lives I wanted to visit them, yet I could not do that without my toxic sister hovering and I tried to get a way to find a way to visit them and be safe, but my sister always found ways to stalk and hover and she was prone to going into rages and being mean. I wanted to visit them and yet on whatever days I was supposed to be able to do that, I only ended up getting extremely stomach sick and experiencing the dry heaves. I would end up crippled all day on my sofa trying to find something on the TV to help to distract me. I would lay there and still do tbh, and feel so sick and suffer from the chills.

It got so debilitating for me where I could not be around my older sister at all. And to my parent's last breaths, it was just too toxic for me to get near it with my older sister constantly hovering and refusing to allow me space to be with either one of them alone. I did not go to my parent's funerals, my sister was all over that with all her control and it was just all about her. My husband felt so bad for me and tried to talk to her in an effort to arrange for me to have private time alone with my mother. My sister said terrible things to him and then said "absolutely not". There is nothing left of my parents, no bodies, no graves and only their home and I went to mourn them one day and just sat outside and the door was locked, remains locked so I cannot even go in my own home and sit and mourn my own memories of my parents. This started when I was very little, she is four years older, and my mother put me in a room with her when I was just a baby. She was always bossy and controlling and angry and I was way too little to know what to do about that. These chills, these stomach aches, they go way, way back for me. I believe you felt so much empathy when you saw that very young child in distress when he was pulled away from his mother. You know that distress very intimately, as I do myself.

These stories need to be shared and talked about too, people insist young children forget, BUT THEY DON'T FORGET. You are not ugly, you do deserve to experience love too, yet you need to be allowed to work through these very old hurts that haunt you even now. This man I talked to told me that his psychiatrist and therapist told him he needed to forgive his father. He looked at me and said, I just can't forgive that and I said to him, I know, I actually know how that feels and I think what a person needs more is to forgive themselves for not having the knowledge or strength to stop the hurt from happening to them. You look at these two children with a lot empathy and concern, it's because you know the pain first hand and you don't want them to struggle the way you do yourself. It was never the love you ran away from either, it was the hurt. You are not a bad person (((sarcgeo))), you are a hurt person, there is a difference. YOU are not ugly either, it's the hurt that's ugly that your mother handed to you that you never deserved and a part of you does know that. A person with deep hurt is not the failure, it's the person who encouraged them to feel that way that is the one in the wrong.