Angry to the bone

Writing it down will help you gradually begin to see the type of things that make you angry, there is typically a theme. What I have noticed about you is that you are a nice person, you don't have any desire to hurt others. However, from what I have noticed by what you have shared is what gets you angry is when you put the effort into helping someone or protecting someone, even from themselves and despite that effort the person does something bad. You get shocked and angry but you also begin questioning yourself, "what if I did not do this or why didn't I see this or that to prevent this". You get angry with the other person but also with yourself too. That's hard because it's producing a lot of negative energy that tires you out and you have not been able to take that energy and turn it into something positive. You have always tried to take the energy from angry stress and use that energy. However, since what took place with your father happened, you have not been able to do that.

You still "care" it's in your nature, but, you are now VERY sensitive to anything that happens that resembles being let down. Now when you get angry it hits very deep/to the bone and you don't know what to do with all that negative energy. Plus when someone lets you down, it tends to hit your injured place and triggers you instead of deciding "let go their loss", it becomes YOUR loss.

I have a hard time with this myself. It's important to look at things and be able to embrace "that person is doing this to them self, not me". And sometimes the sad truth is that often as much as we want to we cannot save someone from "themselves".

SaharaSon, when you experience this you have to sit and say to yourself, YES, that happened to me, I remember but I am SAFE NOW, I am OK. When you do that your flashback will reduce in intensity and your conscious mind is allowing your brain to file that experience and process it rather than coming up with this question of "is this happening now"? Trauma in the brain doesn't process like other experiences so we have to help it along once we understand that the trauma is over and we are actually safe and survived.

I can agree with most of this. Why I get so angry with my self is that I trusted people again and it always ends up the same where I end up emotionally injured or emotionally near death. Supporting people here is different than real life. Here we are supporting words that have some type of name attached to them. We don't know who we are talking to, which most of us know that can blow up in your face. But we can click out of it, block that name and words, with a click of a button and not be bothered again by those words and name.
In real life it's not that easy. There's a human you know and are usually around this person at certain times. You develop a trust, then they emotionally stab you through the heart and leave you for emotional death.

I can totally understand/relate to this and I know the anger you are describing. Well, the truth is a lot of people are cowards and selfish but, this is something a lot of people develop subconsciously. It actually takes courage to "care" Trace and a high percentage of people simply don't have that kind of courage and would rather see things that are only important to them and their needs and opinions about things. A lot of people simply were not taught to care either so something you may expect from someone else is often something that other person genuinely doesn't know how to do.

I see how YOU do care and it's important to understand that you only have the power to help a person help themselves. When I found a therapist that helped me the most when I was in really bad condition, the reason he was good at helping me was because he experienced a breakdown himself. He had to learn how his only power in doing therapy was to help people learn how to help themselves and that he would not be able to FIX them or their challenged lives for them. The only thing he could do is help his patients slowly learn HOW to handle that themselves. Yet, the other thing he provided was that when his patients slowly opened up to their life experiences, he became a "witness" for them which is something very important to mental health.

When I listen/read what you share what I have noticed about your life experiences is how often, even in very traumatic situations that came into your life path, you did not have a witness, nor did you have anyone there to not only witness but help you learn how to overcome whatever you genuinely didn't know how to overcome.

When you were very young a major trauma happened in your home and your parents did not want you to see it. What also happened that you experienced is that you also witnessed how much what happened traumatized your parents and your father especially NEVER was able to get over it.

What has amazed me is that affected you in a way where in your life you put yourself into situations where YOU handled the trauma and did your best to keep key people from seeing whatever that horrific trauma was. You did see how severely traumatized the people who saw the horrible result of a traumatic accident really were. You wanted to "fix" that somehow. I have read so many ways you have done that over and over again in your life where YOU handled the horror and did everything you could to prevent others who could be so badly affected from having to be traumatized. And because of that, you have seen tremendous horrors that MOST people never see their entire lives.

What I have come to understand about you is that you became a person who wanted to protect so much that you made it a point to make sure others did not get traumatized by an extreme reality. So for you when you see anyone who would disrespect your trust, it will affect you on a level the average person is not going to understand.

I also think one of the things you wanted was to take away the pain your father suffered from. And in that quest you made it a point to experience it first hand like he did so you could learn how to help him. You wanted to SEE what he kept you from seeing that you watched change him so dramatically. Also, you wanted to find a way to bond with him because that had been missing in your life and instead not only did you watch your father traumatized, but, you also saw how that changed him to where HIS anger and how he vented it was a threat where he was not "safe" to be around. Yet, you always wanted to fix that too, try to SAVE him somehow and feel sorry for him. You actually did that with a man who was a major threat to others where you could have shot him, but you handled that situation where his life was spared instead.

What you found out about that man who presented a major threat is that he ended up acting out "his" extreme anger and resentment where he did take the lives of others. That was a huge challenge for you in that you struggled with how your saving his life may have been the wrong decision. How, can any average human being understand that kind of challenge and the depths of it that even you did not completely understand.
This is connected to wanting to give your own father a chance even though he had been a threat, you NEVER really wanted to see him that way, instead you wanted to "fix" that somehow.

Trace, you tried harder than ANYONE to not only understand your father, but to help him. And despite all that EXTREME effort he ended up taking his own life. And when that happened despite all that you had tried to do out of "love" for him, he let you down in a way you can't even articulate the way you need to, to the depth of you. Yet, he did not hurt anyone else, instead he probably saw his own failures and got to a point where he could not bear it and just wanted to end it. You think he was selfish and was not thinking of you when he did that right? Yet, when someone is seeing their own failures, sometimes they get to a level where they actually do love others and don't want to hurt them and genuinely can't see how THEY can fix that because they are SO BROKEN.

Actually Trace, you have seen this before and even how horrific the result can be to a point where it's best to hide it from others. You were not able to "fix" or change "any" of these individuals who got so broken they just gave up. And no matter how much you wanted to love and help your father the hardest thing to find a way to accept is how he chose to give up. And he did not leave a note either, and the reason why that happens is that he did not have the capacity to articulate why he gave up.

Sometimes Trace, when we want to love someone we have to learn to accept that that somebody is beyond anything we can do to "fix" them. That when they get to be in so much painful confusion and they struggle too much, sometimes loving them means letting them go. Your father did not want to "hurt" you Trace, he was not thinking about that, his reality was more about his own pain that he never found a way to deal with and that began long before you were in the picture.

One of the things I have noticed about "complex" ptsd is there is something a person set out to "fix" that affected them deeply in their childhood. The truth is that this is actually a part of how human beings are designed because we are designed to hold things in our subconscious mind that was a threat so that we can try to change that for our offspring.
Yet, how we set out to do that can depend on if we are male or female too and what we actually "did" experience that left us feeling confused and vulnerable in some way. Yet, it also depends on how one is genetically set up to compensate too. People are all different in how they learn and what they have genetically where they are born with qualities where they can problem solve in different ways. One thing that we fail to understand is how not everyone can fit into what is considered to be "a norm of achievement". Truth is we were never actually designed that way to begin with.

Your life is your life and you have done the best you could to "thrive" despite whatever you were exposed to. That is what we are ALL designed to do. There are so many things YOU did in your life that a lot of others would NEVER be able to handle too. You experienced a major trauma that you are trying VERY HARD to figure out how to "accept". And when it comes to complex ptsd/trauma what you are experiencing is your history of your own personal way of handling "life and others" to make up for whatever was missing that affected you. That is how we are designed to be and NONE of us will handle things we experience in our lives perfectly. And you WILL most definitely come across others in your life path that will remind you of just that.

Thanks Open Eyes, Great bit of advice. I think I kind of went into that mode that you described. I had to talk (think) myself back to reality, slowly. It happened so fast, and was quite shocking. The intensity is what really surprised me. As quickly as my brain registered what was happening (split second) I turned my eyes away. I think it might have helped to shorten the duration. Thanks again, Open Eyes. Shalom.

I know what you mean, I have experienced flashbacks that way myself. It takes time to learn "slowly' how to weaken these kind of flashbacks because you are right, they can come over a person before a person even decides to experience them.

I feel like this sometimes. If people don't give me my space when I am overwhelmed with life and stressed and need to recharge, when people insist on being bothersome pests when I just want everybody to screw off, or especially when people are regularly disappointing me when I need help with something important (such as employers denying me jobs when I need money, people rejecting me when I need somebody to talk to, or people being little bullies or scumbags), I feel hatred and resentment towards them and when that happens, they had better stay out of my way if they value their own safety and well being. Anybody who knows me well enough knows better than to bother me when I'm in one of my "moods" as they disturb me at their own peril.

When these things happen, my first instinct is to escape and close myself in a room. If somebody still won't leave me alone, I become compelled to physically attack them.

I agree, backing me into a corner is not going to work out well for anyone.
I think expectations of people is a form of emotional self harm, that we need to stop. When you expect something from someone like support, honesty, understanding people almost always fail at coming through with that. The we beat ourselves up for ever giving them that power.

That's a good way of putting it "we beat ourselves up for ever giving them that power". Yet, it's always important to remember that sometimes we ask others for something they simply don't know how to give. So, one has to make sure expectations are not too high when reaching out.

That's very true