Dear Ed:

June 29: “I am desperate for a judgement about my past, in the sense that I am desperate to know if I did wrong and deserved what I experienced or if I am allowed to free myself and move on“-

– this sentence motivated me to re-read your posts looking for (1) the core belief that you did wrong and deserve what you experienced, and (2) your desperate need for a judgment about your past: a Guilty or Not guilty verdict. A non-guilty verdict would mean freedom to move on.

Original post, June 18: “After the first year everything that was great turned bad, like her being empathetic, honest and understanding turning into anger, lies and emotional distance” –  you are in between two verdicts: guilty for causing her anger, lies and emotional distance, or not-guilty.

“I’m blaming myself for everything wrong in my life, especially my weakness in my relationship”- blaming yourself especially for your weakness in a relationship.

June 22: “When somebody treated me badly, it was at least a statement about me and so I would prefer that to being without any indication of my worth” – not knowing whether you are guilty or not guilty, feels worse than if you knew that you were indeed guilty.

June 23: “I am not really struggling with low self worth/ self-esteem (I don’t hate myself), it’s more like a constant state of confusion” – … this kind of confusion feels worse than if you knew one way or the other.

“my childhood was physically and emotionally abusive, just like the relationship before this last one”.

June 24: “Was I wrong to want to be with her? should I have broken up when these issues became clear?” – the prosecutor in the ongoing mental trial says or screams: Ed is guilty, it’s his fault!

June 25: “In some way I wish that I would be the one who f**** things up, so that I could recognize what I did wrong and be better and start again” –

– the confusion (the judge or jury not returning a Guilty or a Not-guilty verdict) is the problem. You want a verdict, one way or another. If the verdict is Not-guilty, you will be set FREE FROM GUILT. If the verdict is Guilty- you will be set FREE FROM CONFUSION. No longer confused, you’ll be able to start again: you will know how to start again.

“I still feel like I did everything wrong, like if I had been kinder or stronger” – again, blaming yourself for weakness in a relationship (“I’m blaming myself for… especially my weakness in my relationship”, June 18).

“In my life I have been and still am needed a lot by different people, my mother included”- your mother needed you, or so you believe.

June 26: “I guess one could see that as a push-pull dynamic? Which I guess made it even harder for you to think and feel straight. I’ve experienced some similar situations” – you experienced a person or persons in your life showing warmth/ interest in you and then showing coldness/ disinterest, and it caused you confusion: it became harder to think and feel straight.

“Criticism used to make me feel like trash, but later I discovered that if I would better myself, I could feel proud of myself for growing. After my recent experiences in the relationship I kind of lost connection with those values, them feeling burnt out in all the confusion about myself”-

-this fits with a Guilty verdict feeling better than the confusion of No verdict. At first, the Guilty verdict (criticism) felt terrible, but later, you discovered that it was an opportunity to better yourself.  The recent relationship took away that bit of  clarity, and you sunk deeper into confusion.

No verdict= no opportunity to better yourself= being stuck, not moving on.

June 28: “Your experience about being seen, used and treated in this isolated and ‘fragmented’ kind of way by your mother made me feel sick. I can also see correlations a lot of experiences of mine in that. I guess this process is what makes abuse what it is”- your abuser/s treated you as a fragment, a part-person.

“From the perspective of the abuser there have to be parts of a victim that make the abuse ‘worth it'” – I figure that this means that you think that your abuser thought that you deserve the abuse, and part of you believes that you indeed deserved it.

“I just see similarities to my life: my father screaming at me for hours for not being ‘good enough‘, my mother supporting this by not intervening and making me feel like he was right“- you wrote earlier that it was especially your mother who needed you, and yet, she supported the one who screamed at you for hours at a time.

“I have been diagnosed with ptsd and I have been suffering from diagnosed dissociations and depersonalisation for years as part of the ptsd complex of symptoms…  diagnosed with the icd”-

– pub med, org: “The World Health Organization (WHO) has included complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD) in the final draft of the 11th edition of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD-11), which was published in June, 2018.. Complex PTSD, or developmental PTSD as it is also called, refers to the constellation of symptoms that may result from prolonged, chronic exposure to traumatic experiences, especially in childhood”.

Wikipedia on C-PTSD: “The diagnosis of PTSD was originally developed for adults who had suffered from a single-event trauma, such as rape, or a traumatic experience during a war. However, the situation for many children is quite different. Children can suffer chronic trauma such as maltreatment, family violence, dysfunction, or a disruption in attachment to their primary caregiver. In many cases, it is the child’s caregiver who causes the trauma”.

Back to your words, June 29: “The situation I had with my last ex just woke up this life-long conflict in me and made my desperation real again after I thought that I had grown out of it“-

-your life-long confusion/conflict, and your desperation for clarity (for a Guilty or Not-guilty verdict), originated in your childhood in the context of your relationships with your parents. As an adult, this lifelong confusion awakens in the context relationships with women. There were times during the good parts of these relationships and in between relationships that you didn’t feel this confusion, at least not intensely, but clearly you had not grown out of it because is it impossible to …  just grow out of it.

* I read your recent posts about the ex-girlfriend’s hate list/ complaints. To me they indicate that she was indeed a-girlfriend-from-hell. The content of her complaints indicate no wrongdoings on your part.

* I’ve been familiar with C-PTSD for many years, read about it a lot and even though I was not diagnosed with it (I live in the U.S., where this proposed diagnosis was rejected by the American DSM, which is parallel to the European ICD), I have no doubt whatsoever that I fit this diagnosis.

My current understanding and possibilities: you (and I) suffer from C-PTSD, the T stands for multiple incidents of Trauma/ abuse for many years: a chronic trauma (chronic: recurring over the long-term, persisting). This chronic trauma/ abuse was inflicted on you by your father (screaming at you for hours, and more), and by your mother who supported his abuse of you by omission (saying/ doing nothing about it), if not by commission.

At one point on, a state of confusion-conflict occurred in your mind, stated simply: do I deserve it or not? If you deserve it, it is not abuse, but a natural or reasonable consequence for who or what you are. If you don’t deserve it, it is abuse. You got stuck in this state of confusion, a state that intensified during the bad parts of your relationships with women, and which kept you in those abusive relationships.

Being screamed at for hours (and being physically and emotionally abused otherwise) undoubtedly scared you and at times, made you feel very angry. I am guessing that you hated being the weak party to the interactions, being on the receiving end of abuse. I am guessing that the combination of your mother supporting you in some ways and expressing that she needs you and  then repeatedly withdrawing all support when you needed it most- not only added to your confusion, but for you, it was “a disruption in attachment to (your) primary caregiver”, Wikipedia.

Resolving this confusion is not possible- says I- if you are still in a relationship with any one of your parents while he/ she did not adequately acknowledge what they did to you, sincerely and clearly expressed great regret and did whatever possible to help you (ex., pay for your therapy, attend individual/couple therapy themselves, attend family therapy with you).

The confusion originated in your young brain as a child, in the context of your relationships with your father and mother. This triangle Father-Mother-Ed cannot possibly dissolve because you reach a certain age (you can’t grow out of it), or because you live on your own, or because you have a job, etc. Every interaction with them maintains the confusion because if you have not yet cut contact with them, you did not yet extricate yourself from this confusing triangle.

If your parents are invested in being Right as parents, then they are also  invested in keeping you away from the clarity you are desperate for, because your clarity=  they are Wrong.

You wrote today: “am allowed to free myself and move on“?- I wonder if you are waiting for your parents to give you clarity and allow you to move on (whether you are aware of it or not).

If you are in contact with them, I am guessing that if you have considered ending contact with them, you felt too guilty to do so. Maybe you feel that all the damage they’ve done to you was done in the past and is no longer occurring at the present time, because you feel okay in their presence, and at times you feel better when in their presence. But (without them adequately acknowledging what they did to you, etc.), you feel okay/ better, I figure, because you emotionally adjusted to them: you don’t feel the harm, while harm is still occurring, or while it is still being maintained.

Personally, I ended all contact with my mother 9 years ago. By ending contact with her, I finally stood up for myself (someone had to). I felt guilty before I ended contact with her and long after, but I persisted because it became more important, in my mind, to be on my side, than to be on her side. Over time, the confusion I had since early childhood in regard to who-harmed-whom was dispelled as I realized that in the context of my mother-myself, my guilt was 0%, and hers was 100%. In other words, the verdict in regard to my original, decades-long guilt and confusion was in: anita: Not Guilty!

anita