I feel like a fake

[Free Radical]

I'm losing traction. I spend a lot of time on MS, maybe too much. Relationships are so hard. I dont know how to make them work. I don't know how to proceed after a certain point. I feel like I hold everyone at arm's length, but I don't know how to do otherwise... I'm so desperately in need of people in my life, but somehow manage to crowd others out. Maybe it's the simple fact of my neediness that does it.

I feel like I'm left in the dust. Other people can move on, but I'm stuck. For some reason I feel like I'm a fake. Maybe this whole abuse thing is a fake in my life. It was 10 years after the abuse that I first called it sexual abuse, and I knew then that I was faking it, jus to get support. I don't know my insides. Do you guys find me fake? I feel hollow, like I'm not a real person. Inside there is nothing. Is this normal? Do I really have nothing to offer? How can I know?

This is just a meltdown. Don't feel like you have to respond. I'm sorry for posting this. I jus want someone else to know...

 

[Ceremony]

I'm losing traction. I spend a lot of time on MS, maybe too much. Relationships are so hard. I dont know how to make them work. I don't know how to proceed after a certain point. I feel like I hold everyone at arm's length, but I don't know how to do otherwise... I'm so desperately in need of people in my life, but somehow manage to crowd others out. Maybe it's the simple fact of my neediness that does it.

I feel like I'm left in the dust. Other people can move on, but I'm stuck. For some reason I feel like I'm a fake. Maybe this whole abuse thing is a fake in my life. It was 10 years after the abuse that I first called it sexual abuse, and I knew then that I was faking it, jus to get support. I don't know my insides. Do you guys find me fake? I feel hollow, like I'm not a real person. Inside there is nothing. Is this normal? Do I really have nothing to offer? How can I know?

This is just a meltdown. Don't feel like you have to respond. I'm sorry for posting this. I jus want someone else to know...

First this:

I don't know my insides. Do you guys find me fake? I feel hollow, like I'm not a real person. Inside there is nothing. Is this normal? Do I really have nothing to offer? How can I know?

First an emphatic yes! that's something, a thing, I have found quite a bit so far, and see it, I get that my brain is functioning without the processing connections that could be considered "normal". It's that my brain, probably yours, many if not all of us suffering from childhood and other trauma, have had changes to our brains. Most notably the child's brains stays in survival mode as a defense, "fight, flight, freeze and submit". So, I hope you see I'm trying to validate your fear and concern of where you are, and have the exact same experience, and too to give you hope. This thing is known and there are therapies to help. EMDR, EFT, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Mindfulness...

 

[Ceremony]

I feel like I'm left in the dust. Other people can move on, but I'm stuck.

Second, the above; To me, not recalling when you started, where you are is your truth and I acknowledge, accept you, and encourage you to keep going. So many try to espouse the "be kind to yourself" and it misses me all too often. I already don't love myself, so to make any effort to be kind to myself seems fake. So, to you, I relate completely.

 

[greenwizard]

I feel like a piece of nothing all the time, but others are always telling me different. We are our own worst critics. I know well what it is like to have trouble with relationships. I've always been a bit needy. That allowed me to be manipulated and controlled in my first relationship. It killed the second pretty quick. I still wonder why the hell my current girlfriend sticks around, although I did learn from the first two and try very hard to keep the neediness and insecurity in check.

 

[Free Radical]

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[Bluedogone]

When you have so many years in a pattern where others treat you as if you're a hollow nothing, constantly putting you down, saying there's nothing you do that's right, telling you over and over you're just faking it, it's very very hard to shake those familiar inner voices. It may seem impossible to blank them out and replace them with your own truth.

Those voices have found a comfortable place in your emotional makeup, and are convinced they run things in your mind set. But those voices are wrong. YOU decide how you will think of yourself.

I disagree a bit with Ceremony in that I think it's VITAL to your emotional well being to "Be Kind To Yourself." Who knows you better than you, and if you aren't kind to yourself you can't expect anyone else to be kind to you. I think this "kind to yourself" gradually grows into a love for yourself, and you soon find you actually enjoy being you. Otherwise it seems impossible to expect anyone else to be kind and accepting if you don't even believe it yourself.

Some time ago I had an assignment to make two lists, one of the things I didn't like about my father and the other a list of his positive traits. Since I had a very low opinion of him I was sure I knew what the results would be. Strangely enough when I compared the two lists, I saw in writing, black and white, that he wasn't such a bad guy after all. Perhaps such a list of your good features and your bad features would show you that you're actually not fake or hollow, that you have a whole lot to offer in a relationship.

Everyone is entitled to a meltdown now and then. But I hope they become less and less a part of your mood. Best wishes, and good luck.

 

[Free Radical]

I apologize for posting such an undignified mess. Thanks for your responses

FR

 

[newground]

hey FR I totally relate to where you are and I still feel fake so often. it is really hard for me to explain the feelings but I0 wrote this thing some time ago. its posted here but i went and looked it up so I could share it

How sad�. This thing seems to draw me into the pit and I am not sure why.
I am responsible for the feeling and yet it seems to come from without.
It is this longing to connect. It is diametrically opposed to the caution and fear I have known always. I know that as a rule people will hurt you. I suppose that is the first supposition to be challenged but how? I go to seek out the how and end up triggered and frightened but THEY didn't do anything it was ME. I supposed their reaction I read their thoughts, I,heard the silence.
What I didn't hear was the message. No one said to me you are less, no one said you don't belong. NO ONE said to me you are an odd little piece of shit why don't you go away. Strange, no one said it but that is what I heard.
As it stands this dichotomy makes me want to be alone. It makes me want to build a cocoon and wait. Wait a lifetime if necessary, incased in my sarcophagus where I could be dead to the issues, dead to the uncertainty and the noise, dead to the desire to fit. And there in my silken limbo I could lay waiting to become something. Waiting to morph into something stable and then finally I would break free and be something new, something of worth; but what would that be? I guess if I could know that I could move there from here. As yet that has not happened so what is the answer?
Do you suppose this IS the cocoon? Perhaps it is something very different than I supposed. Maybe inside the cocoon is where the flame tempers and the die is re-cast. Inside that silken coat the worm is completely redone! That cannot be without pain. To morph so completely must take all of a soul and a body. So perhaps to allow this to happen, to wrap myself in what safety there is and continue on in the process is all that is necessary. If that can be true then in the end just maybe I will fly.
I don't know if that helps at all but I hope you can see ...you are not alone

 

[Free Radical]

Thanks man. That more or less perfectly describes what I mean.

 

[DanielQ432]

Free Radical - I don't know you well enough to ascertain if you are "faking it" - in the sense that you somehow feel that your are. But gut instinct tells me, "no way" - I've read enough of what you've written to know your pain is very real - and that is enough to admit you into this fraternity.

It was explained to me once, almost 30 years ago, by a former therapist that there is no "relativity" when it comes to emotions, thoughts, and beliefs about ourselves and our condition. I was trying to explain to her that I felt like my problems/issues were trivial compared to "what other people went through" in the grand scheme of things. Here I was, after all, pouring out my feelings about the "terrible things I had endured" in my childhood. This was DECADES before I could even begin to bring up sexual abuse - Hell, back then, I didn't even cop to the physical abuse, I just used to say my father was hard on me and hard to get along with. But I also told her that I was "lucky" because I grew up in a "nice home, nice town, had material things I needed, etc". Which was all true.

So, I said to her something along these lines: look at the world, people suffer terrible things, Cancer and Lou Gehrig's Disease, millions of people were slaughtered in the Holocaust, millions in Cambodia in 1975-1979, people starve in Africa, people are kidnapped, raped, sold into the sex trade. How can "my problems" possibly compare?

Her answer was this - do they cause you pain? If they do, they are real to you, and that is the only criteria that matters.

I won't ever forget that comment. There have been many times when I have sunk into this feeling of "I am pathetic, I complain about X, Y, and Z, when the the world is full of horrific acts and immense suffering". Then I remember what she told me - 28 years ago, to be exact - and it's true.

Free Radical - you are the only one who is incapable of seeing who and what you truly are, and even more importantly, who and what you have the potential to be. We all suffer that same type of peculiar tunnel-vision -it's an effect of abuse. Being abused changes our brains, in ways that are literally visible with an MRI. And, we all seem to have the same types of problems with self-esteem, relationships, self-image, fear of no future.

Whenever you feel this way, and start to say negative things to yourself, stop yourself, and remind yourself these are all SYMPTOMS.

 

[traveler]

Great post, DanielQ432!

Free Radical - Listen to what he said!

Lee

 

[Ceremony]

3 days ago, I discovered I don't know shit about myself like I thought I did. And that I would NOT be finding the shit out about myself without some very talented therapist. My experiences about therapists has been a long standing negative. They're useless to me and will have no impact about my causes and my symptoms will go on being treated with drugs. Such as depression or anxiety. And that makes me very angry and I fight stupidly sometimes, I will not be their toy, to dispense some training from years past, which to me, has shown less than stellar toward giving me any cause relief.

See how I go to cause. I do NOT rewire my brain by myself, I am incapable. That's MY truth and no self affirmations day in and day out will change me that way. I'm a stubborn shit, who sees myself as a loser, and nothing has changed that. Not 17 years of 12 step sobriety (a success, I'm sober), not the most recent 3 therapist, nor years of them, not the 3 different marriage counseling tries, not the psychiatrists drugs, nope, the system has looked grim by my reckoning, And I stand alone it seems in my disdain at the old research, the likes of taking my living pain, but not seeing to my real life changing trauma?! That f'ing shit sitting in plain site, but never recognized by the world of therapy I paid to, and entertained for decades? Shit on me, and left me to this rotting brain. This disconnected, unwired brain. Fuckers!

So, yeah, whatever, I am not going to let my truth go unheard, while some have their go to self-will that gives them such good service? I don't know of that, never have.

I do have somethings going on, and without this new therapist, who is miles above all the others of my experience and her ability to draw out of me, things I never saw, new insights in 4 sessions?! It tells me the profession is far removed from stellar, and guys like me, clueless fucks, will stay clueless fucks until we're lucky enough to find the one!

This just happened to me, and my visceral response here is a direct need to validate my truths! I don't have it, whatever it is, and wouldn't without outside assistance. Period.

Now that I know I'm an idiot and spread it around like weeds, my angst is huge. No excuse to be such an ass. So, edit this or delete. You tell me?

 

[DanielQ432]

Ceremony, during my misadventures in psychiatry and psychology, I have arrived at several conclusions:

1) Victims of repeated trauma are generally misdiagnosed. Typically, they are classified as either bipolar or borderline personality disorder. The psychiatric profession, and to a somewhat lesser extent the psychology profession, takes forever to accept the notion of a "new" disease, even if it's plain to see to the lay person. In the 1970s and 1980s, veterans were dismissed when they described symptoms of PTSD. Now, trauma from a discrete incident, war, violent crime, natural disaster, horrific accidents such as plane crashes, is recognized. CPTSD isn't officially recognized - so, it isn't really "seen" by many clinicians - they would rather attribute the typical cluster of symptoms to something else "known to them."

2) And, if the professionals can't accurately diagnose the problem, then ... treatments fail - because they aren't the right treatments in the first place. A cardiologist would never treat a severely stenotic, compromised aortic valve with a balloon angioplasty and stent, but essentially we are treated with completely inappropriate treatments as well. When I was mis-diagnosed with bipolar disorder, they emphasized things like "tracking your mood" - it didn't seem to dawn on them that I only had ONE mood - despair. I think the most telling thing was how they decided my panic attacks and hypervigilance were "mania" - because hey, what's not fun about walking around Suburbia all night, crying and puking in people's bushes? It was like one big party 24/7/365!

It takes a lot of time, knowledge, and determination to find the right professional, who will recognize and then appropriately treat complex trauma, which is what most child sexual abuse causes.