The Couch 120: The Missing Element

maybe it would be helpful if you let people know what you would find supportive for those who wish to support you .

I hate when that happens. Vandals and Huns tossed a poolside concrete bench into ours one time.

What if in less than one week-
You are exhausted but can't rest, your thyroid medicine is making you sketchy, your DD is trying to get you involved in a drama, you brought your dog home from the groomer and discovered her topical flea treatment failed in a giant way, you treated her topically again, but that barely helped- now you can't treat her again for one week, you and your dog feel miserable, your vacuum chose this random moment to up and die, you prolly need to bug bomb the house but you have no place for you and your dog to go to wait it out, your brother is coming the day after tomorrow and you are afraid he will 1) get bitten 2) find out about your little housekeeping problem and decide you can't handle it and make you move,

And your T is on vacation.

I think that's more the style of the Ostrogoths.

Just watched D's cat chase her own tail around and around in circles in the bathtub, catch it and bite it, and then yodel angrily, apparently at the fact she was bitten. Trying not to laugh out loud at her because that makes her angry also.

Hey SD, thinking of you and your person. Hoping things are better. Please let us know if there is something we can do or say that would be helpful or supportive

Don't laugh - as shows, she's just doing a cat job.

Junior cat is a fine gravity tester.

Missing SD too. Hope you and your person are OK.

Meanwhile, my eating disorder thoughts are kicking into high gear due to unexplained weight gain ( pos hormones as my periods are all screwed up). I feel like I'm losing my mind. Part of me is like "you know it'd be easier to buy bigger jeans than to relapse again. No one cares or notices"
But another part of me is just going mad.
I even thought about giving myself horse hormones to cycle my ovaries even though that can like, kill you. In case that is why I'm gaining weight.
Technically I don't weigh myself but I've gained an inch or so. Its also possible since I've been doing a lot of yoga core work and I gain muscle fast due to my mitochondrial disorder, that I've actually bulked out my abdominals, as my massage therapist recently commented my core muscles were bigger and stronger. But that seems far fetched

Losing. My. Mind.
And at 41 and 5 ft tall with a long history of starvation and a metabolic disease its not like weight exactly falls off me these days even when I don't eat at all.
So I can't even make myself happy.

I really want to relapse even though I know that would be an awful choice when j am so close to overcoming my body dysmorphia

You learn so many historical facts on here!

Eta- Is this better?

Great question, CE. What would be helpful Crocus?

Just don't expect to win Jeopardy! with that one.

The same person telling me bruises meant love...she would be appalled if someone struck an animal.

I know what matters is what I believe, which is definitely different from her...

But then, maybe what I endured was nothing in her eyes.

Have you spoken to her about what you have been through? If you have, and she acts like that then she isn't worth the time. I would be heart broken to learn that anyone I cared about had experienced trauma of any kind. The OCPD in me would just have to try and make it better for them.

I have a little bit. Since she's DID, openly an abuse survivor, and a leader of a peer support mental health group we're in.

Which makes her comments on bruises odd and startling, though I already know she dismisses emotional abuse others have talked about as just words.

And she's the leader of a peer support MH group?! Wow. Thats kinda special. Reinforces my belief that all MH professionals have their heads on wonky though!

She sounds more damaging than supportive- can you cut this group out your life until she finds somewhere else to spew her crazy talk? Or can the group decide she's too damaging to lead and find someone else to lead the group?

I've stopped attending the group after another influential person tried to groom me sexually. That was one and a half years ago. I was told by "DID peer leader" I'm not the first victim. My then T reported him to the clinical psychologist overseeing the group...but he can still attend the group. So I stopped going.

I still keep in contact with "DID peer leader".

From what I understand, she doesn't dismiss emotional abuse publicly (in the group, abuse isn't a common topic, it's not a survivor group).

But she has told me (I presume others too) that she thinks some peers claims of their parents emotional abusing them to be fake, that it isn't abuse.

Wow, I'm so sorry you had to experience that I hope you have much more validating support network in place now?

Hugs. I don't really have a more validating support network IRL in place yet.

I suspect I'm operating on a different system than others in my life, even if they're self-identified abuse survivors.

Because it's those same people telling me to reframe painful anecdotes into positive ones, denying that having an unpredictable and severely mentally ill parent has harmed them, telling me our parents were just old school.

PC has validated me a lot more.

Everytime I post "is welts bad? Is bruises bad?", it's because I constantly wonder if it's really that bad.

I wonder that too. In my mind the bruises and welts my mum left on me as a 6 /7 year old constituted abuse. It was when I pointed that out to my mum that she stopped hitting us (mostly), so I guess she thinks so too. I've never spoken to anyone about it except my sister a few months ago (and now on here!) and my sister just thinks Im over reacting to a 'couple of wallops' and Im an awful person trying to make our mum look bad.

What makes me stand firm about the mum stuff though, is that I have DID. That doesn't happen with a couple of wallops. And if you are suffering from Trauma inflicted MH issues too, then I think you can be confident that the welts and bruises you and your brother experienced are abuse?

Holy hell, my older sister thinks I'm over-reacting too and she got hit worse than me. She says our parents are good parents and that our mother is a "good, loving mother."

I don't know how to express this (afraid I'll come across as clumsy, rude, awkward, condescending) - I'm glad you tried speaking to your sister (but absolutely not glad she dismissed you) and on PC about this. It takes courage, especially because there's always the fear that you'll be dismissed.

I am...angry that your sister thinks you're over-reacting because you're right - DID doesn't happen with "a couple of wallops". I've searched extensively for case studies involving corporal punishment in my Asian country (because corporal punishment is seen as traditional like how it is in some parts of the USA) and one thing I've read is - people can absolutely develop DID "just" from being switched/caned/beaten. One does not need to have been burned, had bones broken, or suffered violent sexual abuse to develop DID.

Saying this because very often in my country, people say corporal punishment is nothing and "good for you" and "kids these days have no respect because we stopped caning them" and it's "just" a beating...so I spent more than a year trying to dig up case studies where corporal punishment was the main cause of someone's PTSD, DID etc.

I know I strongly believe my generalised anxiety disorder and social anxiety disorder comes from what I experienced growing up (even if my experiences might not meet legal criteria in my nation...) -- because it's rooted in me feeling worthless, defective, bad due to those experiences.

Interestingly my brothers denied my mom was abusive a our adult lives. But when she died and I declined to attend the funeral they made no argument. Deep down they knew. I bet deep down your sister knows and that's whyshe is so defensive

Another day and still losing my mind. Engaging in relapse-y behavior. Not what I want but my body feels so repulsive I feel powerless

Maybe that's why my sister is contradictory yeah. She'd say our father is a narcissistic bully, then switch to saying he's a good father. Or she corroborated (out of the blue when I'm working) frequent beatings which she claims she'd try to intervene in, then switches to say we had good parents.
Bay, hugs if you want.

I think welts and bruises are bad. When I raised my child, i never bruised her or left welts. I never let a man (father, step-father, teacher) spank her because I knew they would spank out of anger. Sometimes men don't know their own strength. I rarely spanked my child because of what happened to me.

When I was 10, my father was cheating on my mother. It was no secret within the family. There were several,other stresses at home. My fifth grade teacher noticed i was falling behind in my work, I was distracted and depressed. She whispered to me, "Pre, what's wrong?" I innocently told her the truth, "My father is seeing another woman." I didn't know I wasn't supposed to tell anyone.

My teacher thought she was doing a good thing and she called home. My father was enraged. I will skip the terrorizing details and just say I was belted. I was hysterical. During the punishment I remember thinking to myself, "I'm not going to let this hurt me anymore!" Then, I discovered I had popped out of my body. I was floating near the ceiling and I felt strangely calm. I could see everything that was going on. My body was limp. I couldn't feel pain, I wasn't even feeling sympathy watching my ten year old body getting hit. I saw one brother rush at my father, shouting, "You're killing her!" My father pushed him over the couch.

My next memory is of crying and walking up the stairs.

I never had broken bones. I never needed stitches. If i was ten and my father did those things to me today, he would be in jail.

I am not DID, but my punishments were bad. Leaving bruises and welts on your child is bad. When most of the touch you get from your parents is hurtful, that's bad. When you are not scooped up, hugged and told you are loved, that is bad.

I guess my point is, context is everything. You were bruised. You had welts. But that was not all of the damage. You may have been terrorized, you were most likely fearful, angry, and helpless. You and your sister may remember the details around your punishments, maybe you don't. If *you* feel your punishments were bad, they were.

In my opinion, It doesn't matter if corporal punishment was part of your societies norm. My ten year old self didn't know what kind of punishments were "normal" in my society. I popped out of my body anyway.

I was a sensitive child. I am a sensitive adult. My brother's experiences and memories of our childhoods are not the same. They were born with different temperaments.

But that doesn't discount how I experienced them or the effect they had on me.

If you are doing research, maybe look at some professional articles about child abuse and children's brain development. I read that the brain is not finished growing until age 18 to 21. If I remember correctly, there are articles that say child abuse at around age two and then again, around age 10-13ish are sensitive times and can affect how the child's brain is being wired.

I'm sorry your mother punished you leaving welts and bruises. Sometimes it can be confusing because you probably have had good experiences with her, as did your sister.... I had great experiences with my parents, too. It would be easier to judge these experiences if our parents were "all bad."

Sorry this is long. I hope it helps you and is not upsetting to read.