In case you're wondering - I ended up losing both. Despite fighting so hard not to lose either.
This blog is intended now as a place to capture the experiences I have struggled to resolve during all of the years since.
I am, and have been since at least 2012, haunted daily by flashbacks and intrusive memories that I can't seem to shake. The past is ever present.
Not all of the past. Not the neutral or more banal parts. Lots of the parts of my life over the last 5-1/2 years have neatly and properly stored themselves in my brain as increasingly distant memories, the way experiences and moments in life are supposed to do.
But the memories of the relationship I was in for 8-1/2 years, starting in 2005, simply won't file themselves or let me file them away. They persist. It's called Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, CPTSD for short. It's called My Own Personal Hell. It's called being entirely stuck in life, unable to figure out how to move forward. It's been slowly, steadily, excruciatingly wrecking me. I am absolutely certain it has already shortened my life. Most days since 2012, I have wished for my life to be over, the pain has been so overwhelming.
My brain seems to keep telling me daily that I need to share these stories. Though they aren't "stories" - they're my lived experiences.
They are experiences of psychological warfare at the hands of the man who claimed to love me. They are experiences of narcissistic abuse. They are experiences of regular gaslighting, coercion, manipulation, deceit, anger and rage, love-bombing, isolation, control, and more.
I haven't been able to figure out how to move on. I've suffered 5 years of near constant flashbacks and intrusive memories. It took 4 years to find a qualified therapist to help me start to process the trauma. I've been at that for just over a year now (January 2018). My anxiety symptoms are better than they were. I can go to work now and mostly not be interrupted by constant flashback memories.
But I'm still haunted almost every moment outside of work. It's been painful for over 5 years just to be myself. To be me inside of my own skin. Everything I used to love and find joy in became a trigger. It's been like walking through life with my skin burned off, all of my nerves raw. It's painful just to be myself, to do anything I used to love to do, even just to cook a meal for myself.
In the past 5-1/2 years as I've struggled to rebuild myself and my world (yet again), there's been so much that's happened that has reinforced my sense of a lack of safety in this world.
Nothing makes sense to me in life anymore. I don't know what to do, what to try, to make things different. My life derailed in 2012, on a train that was headed into the darkest reaches of Siberia. I've been wandering like the walking dead ever since.
I'm hoping that if I write, that telling what happened will help. I've been simply too overwhelmed by it all until now, so that I've been mostly unable to write. But I'm going to try to start. I'll probably tell some things in narrative format, while others I'll write as though talking to my abuser to tell him the things I never was allowed to say.
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