Experiencing complex grief

I'm using these forums as a place to write about my complex grief and have a space of my own where I can anonymously express whatever I feel like expressing. If anyone responds please understand you may not get a response because I'm just going through what I'm going through.

As isolated as as I feel, I also don't want to speak about my reasons for my grief to the world. As isolated as I feel I truly have no desire to reach out to anyone at all. I'm utterly exhausted. Besides that, most of the time the pain is so deep that I cannot even find the words. Rather than put myself under any pressure to find the words that I can't, I choose to remain quiet. I have a penchant for supporting everyone else but I'm no.longer doing that. I just don't have thee energy or inclination. I'm bone tired.

I go through the motions of grief. What The write about the typical grief process, yep it's all happening for me. Grief is complex no matter what type of grief I'm experiencing. I wish it was straight forward. Sometimes all the stages happening at once.

I wish that things are different but they are not. I wish that someone could just hold my pain without feeling like they need to fix it, suggest ways to deal with it, fix me,fix the situations and tell me how to deal with my pain. I just wish that would stop. It's not helpful to me. I just don't have the Energy to deal with people wanting to fix it. I truly wish people will just lete be and support me letting me be.

I'm very shut down emotionally right now. I don't care what doesn't get done or what needs to be done. There are times when I feel productive and times when I don't. There are times when I feel like smashing things to pieces and there are times when I feel like I wish someone would just hold me and let me sob without wanting to fix me or fix the situation.

No one has died but there is a death. A death of me,a death of hope, a death of what I have to try come to terms with of loss, a death of what I one day hoped for, the deaths I died a million times as a child and young adult, the pain and realisations of my severely abusive childhood and the realisation that my mother is unwell in herself.

I can't fix it and I can't fix her without falling into the abuse all over again. Boundaries can be laid but they cannot be respected by someone who isn't capable of honouring the boundaries and then getting so rageful at the co sequences of violated boundaries. I just don't have the energy for it.

Not only that but it retraumatises me to the point where I go into emotional meltdowns and get really I'll physically. I just don't have the energy to ma.sge it all.

Somewhere sits a deep sadness. The reality is I'm not safe around her. I'm not safe emotionally nor mentally. That makes me feel sad. Sad that I need to protect myself from her and sad that she doesn't even know I'm protecting myself from her.

I also have so much anger. Growing up the way I did was extremely confusing for me. On one hand and only on occassions my mother could be very nice. But oh she could turn viciously cruel.in an instant. She could say and do all the right things to make me feel somewhat safe to ask for a little help if I needed it but if I did ask for that help it would come with so much resentment for me asking and then I would be punished in some form for that. It was incredibly confusing. As a child and young adult I had no idea that this was wrong. Of course I blamed myself for her behaviour.

It too me till the age of 40 to realise I was horrifically abused as a child. So many people enabled it and even excused it. Not only was I abused horrifically by her but I was abused by my father as well. That too was enabled and often excused. I had no chance as a child to help myself or protect myself from either of them. When I say mother or father those words are incredibly hard to say because I don't regard either of them as my parents and I feel no direct relationship with them in that regard.

I cut him from my life when I was 30. I cut my mom from my life when I was 40. Cutting them from my life felt different for both of them. The grief came from loss of hope and when you have a loss of hope there is a death. I made the decision a long time ago that I do not desire to know when he has passed and I will not attend his funeral. My goodbyes got said a long time ago and I don't feel the need to go or know.

I don't talk much about any of this stuff as I grew tired of people's unsolicited and uninformed opinions. I grew tired of people that thought they had a right to tell me that therapy would be best for me. I grew tired of people telling me what to do instead of just supporting me and letting me decide what was right for me. I just grew tired of it all. I'd been controlled my entire life and did not need to be controlled anymore.

There is no justice for me. There is no sorry or care for the abuse I suffered. It feels like I paid a price that wasn't mine to pay and I'm.still paying prices.

My mother put me in the position of being a therapist, a best friend, a financial helper, someone to sit and dump all her problems on but I was also her physical and psychological.punching bag. 36 years of my life. It left me with very serious mental health issues and a lot of life problems.

Often I get those feelings return of the guilt that she may not be doing well or something has gone wrong in her life but I'm.learning why I'm feel like this and I'm.learning that it's not my problem. Be in mg bought up to believe that everything that went wrong for her was my problem and I had to fix and support her emotionally an mentally as well as fix the problems so she would be alright and finally I could be loved was put on me for 36 years. That conditioning and abuse is not easy to break.

She recently got in touch with me which I won't go.into right now but it did not end up well and opened up what I feel was retraumatising to me and it did not end up well. I'm.in.a lot of deep pain.

I have no desire to get help. I honestly just want to do me. That's a big enough job in itself.

Thank you for sharing.

You write well.

Welcome to MSF.

Thank you for sharing. I agree that you write well. Welcome to the forums!

fwiw I think I also am experiencing complex grief. I do not talk about it. (occasionally I talk about it to one or two people I'm close to...)

It’s ok to grieve. I bet it took a lot of energy to write all that you just shared.

Thank you everyone. As mentioned I feel that I'm just not able to express myself at the moment. I'm just numb, shocked and overwhelmed.

A continuation from my entries regarding this thread. It's been a painful day. I have cried because it hurts deeply. It's not just the loss that hurts so badly, it's that the people I lost do not care nor are none the wiser to my pain. I cannot speak about my pain to those I lost. They are and always have been in a world of their own and there self absorbed nature's could not and would not allow them to see nor feel my pain. If anything they added to it by Judy being who they were. The realisation that I am not able to reach out to them has put me into a further stare of grief and unimaginable pain. They cannot see their own dysfunction and I loved them in that dysfunction for a very long time until I could no.longer love them in that dysfunction as it was causing me pain.

How they remember me I imagine is the pictures they painted of me but not who I was. They had an incredible innate ability to put the focus and blame on me of why it was acceptable to treat me badly, abuse me and hurt me. Yet, they never wanted to face any truths about themselves.

Their attitudes were and I imagine still are, is the world revolves around me and God help anyone who takes any attention away from me no matter how badly I have behaved in order to get the attention. God help anyone that points out my behaviour. How dare they make me look at me. I'll do whatever it takes to punish them. I tried for many years but one day I realised that I needed to stop trying. I realised that I wasn't helping at all and that I couldn't fix them. Refreshing some would say but in that lay as horrible choice for me and that was to leave them behind for my own wellbeing and safety.

It's never a decision that is made lightly. It was an incredibly painful decision. I left them all. I cut them all from my life. I often have doubted my choice. I grieve the relationships I wanted to have and couldn't. I realised that to have the relationships I wanted meant that they were going to have to face themselves and work on themselves to have a healthy relationship. I left to take myself out of the equation so they would no longer have their target to take their stuff out on.

For me, I'm still left in a world of pain and hurt from my life. For me, I'm not sure a d have many doubts of how to have healthy friendships let alone a relationship.

I have so many fears that I'm not going to see red flags. This is why I stay alone but in that I'm not benefitting from breaking out of my own isolation. It's like a double edged sword. I'm incredibly lonely but I also know that right now I'm incredibly vulnerable and to trust people around me is incredibly hard. I'm frightened most of the time.

Aside from everything I've been through, I see the incredible damage it had done to me and it's a constant where I need to reassure myself that it's ok to focus on me. In various ways and methods focusing on me was worthy of punishment. That is psychologically so damaging. I wasn't allowed to have a good time or feel good about anything. My birthday's were a source of them feeling good about them not necessarily about being my birthday.

There's just so much I cannot forgive. Their dramas and issues got in the way of everything they wanted and I always paid the price.

What crushed my heart millions of times over was the very fact that they just could not look at themselves and consider that it was them that had to decide to change. It was never my place to tell them that as that would have been ignored. I do not know if they will ever see that the need to change but for now my heartache and grief lies in the place of not being able to have anything to do with them because they haven't done any work on themselves and I can no longer be the target of their abuse. I did it for 36 years and could do it no more.

I’m going through complex grief. It involves death and a myriad of family issues. I struggled to open up because I am afraid of fallout from family, but as soon as I’ve opened up I feel better because it’s just messed up and too much for anyone to bear.

Take your time in how you open up.

I'm.sorry that you are experiencing so much grief right now. I understand the complexities, and emotional and mental turmoil. It's really hard to open up. It also can be really scary. For me it's been a defender mechanism and also because my mother always said to me do not talk to people about me. It took me a really long time and painful work to understand that she said those things because she didn't want them be called out for her behaviour towards me and she felt her own guilt and denial of the abuse. Yet, she would openly do it in front of people then get upset when called out for it which only resulted in more abuse towards me. It was because of this that I shut down and didn't open up to anyone. I lived in a constant state of fear of the consequences. Cognitively and logically I know it was abuse and it was very very very wrong. I'm still trying to heal that part of my abuse and learning when it feels safe for me to open up and when it isn't safe. It's hell. I still hear her voice some of the time when I go to talk about something. For me to really open up, I have to trust someone first. If I see signs that it would not be good for me to open up in certain cases then I keep my mouth shut. My personal life is not an open door for everyone and anyone

I am the O.P. I am going to step out of these forums for a while. I have said enough I feel and I have determined that speaking about it all as much as I have in this thread and one other has been enough. I need a huge break from talking about it all as I can feel myself just getting more and more stressed and unwell. I was hoping that by talking about it, it would help but it hasn't. I also have no energy to offer support to those going through their own tough times. I truly just need to give myself a break and move on in life.

Understood. take care.