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Originally Posted by Open Eyes
Actually, as a person who also struggles with ptsd and is sensitive as you are, I understand what you are saying when you talk about not blaming the victim. What I said was not "consciously" realizing what you are holding onto.
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OK, I'm responding to this too. I think while the experience is not even fully integrated emotionally, it's really pointless to talk about hurt feelings. It really just makes me feel like...I don't know but it definitely just hinders the processing of the trauma. This is my experience, this is not the first time I hear advice like this.
And everyone I've talked to who experienced trauma has said the same to me, that it's maybe well-meaning advice but it's not really good for trauma. (A few people)
And then even for the old feelings of care and love, it's not good for that either, for me personally at least. But I wrote about that in my previous post.
And yeah I said it's cruel having to try and kill that previous love. I try to think of it as, the person I used to know just no longer exists. The feelings are still there somewhere for me, even if in real life I do not go to feeling them anymore, this is really complicated though. So they still are there somewhere deep or something and maybe they will always stay.
This is for the nonromantic one BTW.... the other one was the bigger trauma (the romantic relationship), and for that one I deal with it differently because I did not know them in the same way like I did the person above. (Sorry if that was vague)
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When I say what part of this experience did you play, it's not about blaming you at all. Instead it's about how you got pulled into something that was unhealthy for you. We tend to hang onto things that ended up hurting us because there is something about the experience we still need to see for self preservation. Our emotions contribute to our self preservation more than we consciously realize.
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Sure, I've tried to understand all that too during these 3 years.
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I believe that you made an effort to be a "good" friend to both these individuals. Because of that you invested more into these two people than they deserved or had the ability to respect and appreciate. You ended up getting hurt and as soon as you set up your own emotional boundaries you got abandoned in some way.
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The last sentence about the boundaries ---> abandonment was great. Exactly how it was. In both cases. Even though I was the one who cut them off....they still wanted things out of me.
To be clear one of the relationships was not a friendship. The other one was...but was like as if she was my sister. So kind of similar to you maybe. ....Anyway well I didn't make an effort to be a "good friend", it was just truly coming from inside, not just some appearance of a "good friend".
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I am sure both of these individuals had something about them that you liked. They also most likely responded positively to your effort to care about their needs too. They rewarded you and you thought they cared when they did that. THAT is the part you miss, that feeling that someone was appreciating your effort to care. We ALL like to be appreciated, it helps us feel positive about ourselves right? We can be so willing to engage that way that we don't see how our effort is not as valued as we think it is.
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I think she just made me feel happy. I'd rather not talk too much about the other relationship. I finally let go of that one. (That's not the best wording, "let go". It's way more complicated than that. But yes I feel free. And trauma mostly processed, I just need to recuperate and heal some more bad effects, but the trauma itself I've done a lot of work. Removing the spiritual abuse helped a lot, too.) With her, it's different. It's not the same as a romantic relationship. With her I "just" have had to accept that she was pretty **** to me. That was kind of simpler.....she did not do mental gaslight like the other person.
So...what you describe here, that dynamics, I don't know if I understood the part about being appreciated. But I don't think I understood it back then about her either, I thought she was in a bad situation and was depressed and thought I should be able to "take some ****". Except it was so much **** I didn't realise it wasn't normal. When I saw her taking me for granted I still thought it was just her being depressed. We knew each other for a long time before things went for the worse. She was already very important to me before that. But. I had no idea that as soon as money issues would enter the picture she'd change so much. And she was so good at timing her things, words, behaviours, that I thought we were still friends, but we were not. She only needed the financial and practical services from me from the point that the issue of money started playing a role. I did not know she changed her picture of me due to that. It took me years to realise that. And when she already had her picture changed of me, I still got more attached to her due to being there for her during hard times (or that's what I believed, her view was so different obviously). It's sad.
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Now, you have said here that you can't change another person and the only one you can change is yourself right? Well, it's ok to continue to be a "nice/caring" person and to even feel good about helping others too. However, what you need to learn is how to recognize the signs that your efforts are not being respected and appreciated the way you really want, a way that is actually healthy for you.
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I think I'm past that.......yeah she tried to train me to take crumbs, but I thought it was OK and normal - temporarily - that she didn't care that much because of the "depression". But then it just got too glaring, and she became careless about the pretending and the timings too.
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By understanding how others may not really appreciate what you give them of yourself. What you miss is that period where you thought they did. It's important to understand how some individuals can be very charming and how they can pull you into their drama where you don't realize it's really ALL ABOUT THEM. You most likely miss the love bombing you got, the idea that you had value, yet, as soon as you had emotional boundaries of your own, what happened?
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I just miss feeling happy but I don't need to be happy for a while now.
Oh...happy with regard to both of these people but neither was an actual happiness grounded in a real relationship, of course.
I never had the conscious idea that I had value but I did like feeling the "attentiveness".
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That is not a relationship that you should ever re-engage. Instead it's more important to see it for what it really was so you don't fall into engaging in that kind of relationship again. Yes, sometimes we hand our heart to the wrong person and that's what you need to see in this experience that keeps nagging at you emotionally.
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Yeah, my issue was more that with me fleshing out this over the 3 years, some things were still pulling me back into the compulsive doubt and that was due to some gaslights and subconscious blaming and intrusive guilt and so on. The latter also from the traumas.
To be able to fully absorb it viscerally that they were the wrong people, I also just have needed to become less dissociated, less avoidant of the experiences, but it's impossible to deal with the whole horribleness of the experiences in one go. It takes / has taken time.
In addition, with the nonromantic one, she really seemed to change right in front of my eyes. But I was not seeing it until it was impossible to miss. Was hard to process that too.
And you know what. How did I get my boundaries set up. I didn't even mention much about that in this thread - or I don't remember if I did - but you figured that that's what happened. When I started to pay attention to more than these people in my life was when I set up my own boundaries yeah. With both I notice there was this thing, that they tried to pull me into their own bubble. Making themselves my whole world or something. With the romantic one I didn't let that go on for long but alot of damage was caused anyway. With him it started happening when he started to manipulate me more after he found a way "in" to do that to me (he didn't manage to for a long time). With her...it went on for long years. She had me pulled in for long years. But only because I knew her before that too. I just didn't know her COMPLETELY, clearly not.
But it's ok, with her, I can accept this was this, even if it is painful, I could integrate more of it by now, I just have to undo damage and make sure I don't get pulled back into the past about her.
With the romantic relationship, I think I really am over him. I no longer see anything in him. I almost don't even understand why I was interested before, ha ha. I mean I can now have that pov where I don't understand ha ha. It feels freeing.
Maybe I'll get there with her too, I don't know. It's not really a goal for me with her. My only goal is not to be pulled into the past about her, and I think to achieve that, I don't have to hate her or anything like that. Plus of course undoing all the damage she did to me (quite some damage on top of the first trauma).
But it's true it's hard to answer if she was ever an OK person.... She wasn't always a complete emotional vampire. I was always around friends though who would sometimes be like that, I had a too high tolerance for that even in middle school.
The difference is I didn't care about those other friends, I didn't see the things in them I did in her, they were less special, no attachment.
EDIT: In my previous post I write about not invalidating my own feelings. .... But I think I can view it as, it's my feelings, and less about the other person if they really were not deserving of these feelings. Or maybe I can just miss the times when we still did not have such an unbalanced relationship. But I just cannot see my emotions about that as invalid. Or even the emotions I had when she already was treating me in bad ways. I don't know if this makes sense.