Money was used as a control mechanism by my father to cushion his dysfunctional processing about being a parent / having a child / which is a separate human in need of care. Me and my siblings were required to produce budgets for whatever plan or object we sought to acquire, such as higher education. If agreed then he would begin undermining the plan or removing the object. This was described as showing seriousness on his part about money.

I recall dentists remonstrating my mother about the state of our tooth brushing. It felt like an onslaught of cavitities for how much she reacted - emotionally - and the amount of pain involved in a tooth repair at that time - more. When someone helping a kid brush his teeth and also less sugar in everything - maybe cut out the sodas - woulda been ok.

That money is "stressful" or anything for that matter seems to me like a massive societal gaslighting about the fact of what it feels to not have a basic good or basic skill, abstracting the experience out of space and time, and lablleing it "stress". Then let the helping industry loose with its helping helpers, or maybe "just relax".

Nice post, thanks. I have flip flopped along this topic my whole life until I came to accept that all the explanations were probably valid - since I was thinking of them all the time - but missing a conclusion - because I kept trying to decide or solve for what it would take to be comfortable, at last. When in fact what I needed was to accept that the disarray and doubts, alongside a certain imperviousness and dering do, are in combination very much "me". Though the depths and highs are exhausting and - as I became older - nothing more than this.

It can be startling to recognize that these extremes may be what other more "well-adjusted" people (?) experience in a minor spectrum, while feeling coherent and competent enough. Well, I adjusted as best I could. And I sought out experiences and situations that required me to keep on adjusting. And then "adjusting" became me, one could say, as an identify itself: existing in order to adjust. I guess it feels safer than some alternatives. The punishments from overworking are seldom direct and can be less feared, as a result, especially when combined with a disassociative habit. Yet, the body does keep score. I now feel as though a crumpled up empty can.

I think that the trajectory has given me insights in some ways to other people's psychologies or make up, or even certain phenomenon. I claim no special insights! I do know that I resisted (and feared, as a child) the person who takes outright prerogatives and gives directives and peforms as though authoritative. Whoever that person - I did not trust him. It was usually "him". He would sound like my father, whoever he was, and my father sounded as though many people, as he was mentally unwell. Giving me nothing in terms of guidance or example, I only knew him to be someone I did not wish to replicate, to the extent that I am his replication (trauma thinking does not pause on this point). So, I have not been a demonstratively masculine male man person in the manner that was modelled to me in the 1970s and 80s in western PA, which can feel also like a lack of love. That this has had a lasting effect on me is annoying, but so is being angry all the time.

I am upset by risk. I don't understand people who play with risk. I don't know what they think that they are doing, or why it is so important, or what is the point of withholding information and fucking with people, or finding ways to cut them out, or trying to "win" and profit from every interaction, or seeing how to extract value from any context or environment. I don't understand exchanging time for money. I don't undrestand how money "works" because it is not alive.

These minor sentiments of mine are so persistent that they are also me. I recall that my father as lacking a sense of reality and not having judgement. This was not true, though it seemed that way from the outside. More deeply, he had taken the insecurity which surrounded his experience of self - sadly, caused by his own father and mother in direct ways - and blown it out to an entire world in which there was no risk, because of him being in the middle of it. As long as both are true, he was stable. But it could never be true, because it is impossible. His lack of awareness meant that we as kids were recruited for all manner of activities and tasks that were ludicrous at times and unsafe. Digging ditches, moving rocks, hauling lumber, hitching wagons, gathering leaves and sticks, cutting grass, piling up debris, handing him tools, helping with projects, keeping him company: while his OCD drove him to ever more elaborate works and projects.

Not experiencing risk and only understanding his unique competence, unique in categorical isolated manner, he saw no difficult in flying three children and his spouse in a small twin engine plane from PA to FL. He navigated by sight when the radar instrument went poorly. It smelled of fuel, and had deafening engine noise. A small plane fully loaded, it bumped and dipped along air streams making for constant nauseau. No one got out of that plane better feeling than before. No one was not troubled by it. It just kept repeating forms for the subsequent 30 years.

So, I didn't want to be that person. But I did wish to be a confident and happy person. I even have good opportunities for that. But I have to be the person who I am also, and learning to accept how that can work for me - it's not easy. I wish it could be like I imagined still: I am independent, separate, impervious, and as a result happy. Not in the cards.

I have found that daily and regular rolling of the bottom of my feet - with a lacrosse or golf ball - is a way to release tensions that go up the chain: ankle, knee, hip, and ribcage to diaphram (less directly). Sometimes jaw, too. The pelvic floor connection benefits from these releases, I find.

That's quite an intense peirod that you are describing! I hope that the benefits are staying with you. Reteaching oneself how to walk pretty much sums it up. I have had the same. Since you mention sustainment - I have found that having a regular practice like yoga, walking, or something similiar - where I show up regularly for the same physical exercise - has been really important. It has helped me with staying together in my thoughts and body and with good information coming back (one day, I can't move my left ankle; in a year, I can.) Good luck!

I was a "reader" as a child - someone who likes to read. Why that resulted in my labelling says more about the adults, I expect.

I was told frighening things about "just working in a bookstore" or "living alone and just reading books".

I lived for years also with an interior monologue about writing and when I would write a novel. It was always in the future, but sounded like a great relief to be doing it, when I imagined it.

I hated how showing up for therapy entailed me recognizing the above and having to put it into another category of behavior, so to speak. It felt like dying. And that I was so stupid and naive - I had only the worst conclusions about me. People were right to label me, etc!

It's just reading and writing and being into books, one could say.

On the other hand, it's my innner life and mind, hopes, and feelings.

I couldn't give up the argument, it had such an emotional charge.

These are interesting reflections on your therapy process - how you perceive it; how it feels; how you respond; and the idea of surface and core. There's a lot there, it seems to me!

For me, there have been long stretches - what seem like weeks - that become months - and then a year - that seems like me in therapy speaking only at a certain superficial level, going in circles; then me speaking in some angry way at the therapist; me insisting on the details of my experience; me trying to be amused or amusing (ugh); me doing anything except the thing that I will not want to do until all other routes have been exhausted - to change.

You sound like you are leaning into the "work" and asking where it is going. Maybe this is a good topic to hear from your therapist about their own sense of the same question. While it may nor may not be common to persons with CPTSD, it was true for me - the last thing I ever imagine to do in therapy is to ask the therapist a question.

You mention "exactness" in language. Is this something that you run into elsewhere in your life? One of my early jobs was working as a proofreader and copyeditor. Now, I work in an enviroment sort of like a law office - close attention to language and communication is valued. I used to think that I am attracted to this area of work / applied communication because of a facility with languages over math, which I thought was reflected in my childhood and school grades, etc. The other side of this, I later understood, was that exactitude in language was a substitute in some ways for me being in touch with myself - my voice, my feelings, my thoughts, my interior world, and their combination as me, full stop. An attraction to language and expression has had an a sort of "tool box" quality for me - I can control what I am sharing, precisely; I can relate to others with the same expectation; I can outmaneuver other people. I'm not sure the age of this element of myself but he is probably in the range of 12 to 18 years old. Some time has passed since, but sometimes I sound like this, as an adult. It's not helped me as much as I probably hoped and feared it would circa 1987.

Maybe there is in addition to "work" an element in therapy which is "play" - when a person gets to be inexact, imprecise, illogical, and inconclusive.

Best of luck with your process and your good questions too.

I have found that my father's deteriorating health while he resides in a memory care facility to be a source of comfort. I suppose that I mean his departure from the world, more generically, and not his medical suffering. Ever since he was diagnosed with Parkinson's I've had difficulty with the realness of my relief - it is his voice yelling at me in my head my whole life, after all.

Still, it can make a person feel as though guilty. I have also felt shame over the fact of this guilt: as if I should not be so compromised nor so available for his maninpulation. Both would mean that I have "failed"! Living with this concept of me having failed or being failure itself has been harmful to me. I have felt like less than a real person and indeed - man - as a result. I'm 50 years old.

The caring part of me will probably not be at peace until he is gone, I expect.

This sounds like me.

Hi. Thanks for the references - I'll take a look. I like to think that I am in a place where these resources can matter. I'm curious to try the AI tool.

You mention being preoccupied with mental health and not being able to find work. Maybe the first is calling for your attention and the second - the same - but you care about it less. How to support oneself and earn money in US society while also healing in the way that is necessary can be a major challenge.

Good luck and best wishes.

That's quite a ride. You refer to some experiences that sound intense. The word "electrocution" got my attention. I was hit by lightning when I was 17. I had in my heart the wish you mention - that my Dad loved me. The apparent impossibility of him to do so but also control of me as a child has achieved the quality of fundamentally affecting me. I have hated that idea and experience and it's kept me pretty "stuck" though good enough fortune - aka me being scared within middle class anxieties - allows me to be a functional employee.

My father later informed the family that he has a second self who is a she. I was in my late 20s when this news appeared. I thought that this might put him at peace and my mind at rest, on the idea that his choice to be a father and husband was miscasting, perhaps tragically. The ease of this story was too neat. I suffered another ten years during which I worked a lot and got into running (of course). I did not become happier. Then, my professional aspirations and total inner confusion led me to a new assignment in my work, where I had the misfortune of experiencing exposure to an incident that set me into a trauma spiral (it connected with things in my childhood). The spiral was worsened by the fact that I elected to visit an analyst to help me with my problems, versus a therapist (of course). I also elected to treat my back pain with THC in a strong manner that I think was a strain on my psyche: another great move by me (of course). The combination of analyst plus too potent strains of THC? I was fairly unwell. Another ten years go by (of course).

I'm 50 years old. I've been in therapy for 8 years. The 12 years before that: I should have been in therapy and could have done it, given how I considered it. The 10 years before that: I needed therapy but would have not considered it. The 20 years before that: I was just trying to survive so I don't even understand the question.

Every morning of my life the past ten years I wake up with the misery of these kind of numbers and how they erase my self into a life of over determined effects by another person, my father, who was himself abused by at least one other person, his father. I am sad and in pain and hurt and feel confused, the whole time. And this is because I started to take care of myself.

It's difficult to keep up the equanimity which "health" "wellness" and "taking care of yourself" seem to assume as a baseline good for everyone to achieve. I can do so by distancing and disassociation tactics, and having favored them, I lack other modes of being.

I ended up writing more here than I was expecting. Your comment connected with me. I appreciated your candidness. I hope that the events you describe are not weighing heavily, today.

Good luck.

What is healing vs bypassing? Difficult to know from the outside, tricky to spot from the inside. One day's healing is another day's bypassing, though the content would be different in quality - less energized, more neutral, and greater assigment its causes to others, probably. One day's bypassing is another day's healing, when the pattern is felt, held, experienced and maybe named before letting it go. Maybe because of the weather that day or how a smell conjured a memory .

Sure. I hope it is helpful to hear about other people's experiences.

When it comes to cannabis, that becomes even more important I think as there are still lots of judgements and prohibitions. These are beyond what would make sense for a plant, I think. Even with a goodly awareness some shame and guilt can creap into usage, just from the ambient disapprovals - sometimes I think that this is a basic function in the mind relating to us as social animals, and can be enjoyed even if one comes to wait for its humor (cannabis will make you dumb! well, it actually returned to me an ability to slow down, breath, and think in peace). That said, I have been taken aback at popularity of super potent strains. I guess that the "strongest" will always enjoy attraction, but it will not always be the "best" - especially if a person is feeling a bit fragile emotionally already.

Go easy on that brain bean when you are looking for relief from muscular-skeletal pain! It sounds like you are not in a place where a lot of selections or choices are your difficulty, but it's always possible to just enjoy half. I might sound like this because of a sense that I was distracted sometimes by cannabis in ways I did not appreciate entirely, also. It's "just" a plant but when it connects with one's organism then it becomes more - I think - and other relationships to it begin.

Good luck!

Original post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/flexibility/comments/lqov36/intense_fascia_release/ 

Someone told me to check out this guy. Seems like similar territory but with more of a vision-quest / beast master vibe: @ theflowwolf on TikTok.

I must have taken 1000 yoga classes since I came to very similar realizations of the kind you are describing, and as a direct result of the "lighting up" effect from cannabis on my neuro-muscular system. It brought to the surface and continues to bring to the surface a lifetime of maladaptations in my posture, breath, and - I have come to believe - being.

I posted in this subreddit a while back on this experience - when it was more fresh to me - and the occasional comment still appears. The topic seems to connect with some people's experiences and when it does - it seems to sometimes cause surprise. I think that it is because that the experience of "unwinding" can go deep into the sense of self and its coherence. It has all but "forced" me to work with things that I would have otherwise avoided, as they relate to somatic areas, fears, and anxieties. When it feels like my rib cage has never not pressed on my stomach, and I recognize for the first time that after 40 years that this has been making me cranky and I can rotate into a new position of relief: it is fucking big deal for me.

This can also summon feelings of confusion about why no one cared enough when I was speaking about fascitis so painful that I could not walk, ages 11-14 or so. I was growing a lot then (I'm tall). But I also know that there is a hip hike and pelvic rotation that has been with me since early memory (I can see it in photos, and summon its effect in memory, too). I also know that in my deepest somatic recollection that the "soft" spot on top of my cranium - a presence since birth, it would seem, a slight depression - is the inner whirl of a ribbon of fascial wrapping that I can feel from head to toe. So, maybe someone dropped me or held me by a toe for too long.

The physio reworking for me has affected my sense of sight (less pressure behind eyeballs); taste (more awareness for what is also nutritional, along with fresh); hearing (my ear canals have opened up and a certain noise now reduced); touch (my finger tips were numb or disconnected at times); and also quality of thought. I was not getting enough oxygen.

I think that you have a great opportunity in noticing these things. If I can share a few ideass, I hope you will not be put off. What I learned is that this bodily experience can be disorienting and upsetting even (maybe my age amplifies this because of the unfamiliarity!). Having any kind of regular practice - for me yoga was idea - that is one involving a physical regime of any kind (e.g. walking) is really important. It can help to ground a person and provide a place for reference when other changes feel like too many emotions. A therapist who starts from this standpoint is one to appreciate, though there is also the route which I took - having a difficult therapeutic relationship - in which I was regularly expresing my anger - and showing it too. Whichever way to go, keep in mind that in this state of being it may be challeging to vocalize about internal experiences, for the simple reason that their validity may not be familiar. It can be scary trying to rework that situation, especially if one's body is already super tense and unfamiliar.

On cannabis, I had to figure out the ways that it can help, and that included mistakes which I think I could have avoided (a few uncomfortable dosages from edibles, panic ensues, etc). It's good to talk about usage sometimes with a trusted person who might also enjoy cannabis, or just learn about how to go slow, go low, and be gentle with yourself. Our society tends to encourage the opposite, and the promise of relief is itself very appealing.

On flexibility, you have a great opportunity to develop a practice of some kind and to use the awareness that you are building, for applied purpose. It can organize one's efforts and reward attention and training - which may be something that is missing from your current experiences, too, if you are like me. I have been long aware that my abilities to learn are no less and often more than other people's, though I avoid some things that are too much involving numbers, budgets, and technical aspects. I experienced stress and even fear on these topics as a child, though I also know that I can be logical and clear minded. I was always confused by the disconnection - whose way of interference was itself confusing - until I started to appreciate that thinking and concentration are muscle work. My muscles and skeleton only loosly relate to each other; I am literally disjointed at time. So is my thinking. In other words, the qualities hat resulted in me being ignored as a maybe gifted kid but maybe only dumb, quiet and fearful kid - who cares - in western PA in the 1970s - is the one that would probably have me medicated in the 1980s and 90s (Ritalin, Prozac) or amplifed in the 2000s (Ambien, study drugs), etc. I'm neither of those kids! I'm pretty "regular" as they go. However, I had a difficult physical experience already at that time - which I felt in my body - and which showed in different ways - which in their sum became heavier and worse over the next decades of lifetime. You are good to pay attention now. Best of luck.

Physical injury to the brain and body compounded by and compounded with emotional deterioration, to the point of no distinction. Pre adolescent roots of it are deep and difficult to separate from self. Shame turns any insights or progress into commentary to the effect that by having them I am too late, too dumb, and too sensitive to matter, anyway ("idiot"). Weariness in body and spirit reminds me to quit. Repeat.

These are some real feelings that you are stating directly. Can your mother hear them entirely without implicating herself in being as bad as you might be saying?

You ask if this qualifies as C-PTSD. It is a question that a therapist could help you answer. I found out later in life that a person can go to a therapist with a specific question, such as you as asking, and discuss only that question, to the extent that it is useful. Perhaps it would help you figure out what you are asking here.

I relate to your sentiments as I was circumsized but incompletely in that the foreskin required a re-circumsision later, I suppose on the same logic that it must (?) be achieved, and with reference to sanitariness (why would the human body evolve to produce a dangerous source of unsanitation upon itself, to be improved by surgical removal?). Well, you get what you get, I guess. In my case it involved several subsequent visits to a doctor with him "checking" on me - in my mother's concerned presence - and the subsequent adjustments which I mention. I am maybe 10 or 11 years old. It is humilating. I am receiving a weird kind of private attention, with my mother alongside. My psyche.

The anger is real, and I have destroyed that doctor's office in numerous ways over the years in my imagination.

You are good to pay attention to the emotions and you have a great opportunity to manage them and not be burdened. Good luck.

I relate to a lot of what you describe as mindset and experiencing. It led me at age 20 to leave the country with the goal of learning the language. Doing so did not help my overintellectualizing but allowed me to continue it with more words and cultural references. After twenty more years I understood that there was an emotional transfer as well as the internalization of "others" imagined and real, as a result of learning another language. It was a genuine satisfaction and not one which I had chased. Hope this helps.

The feeling of those years being a cause for hearbreak is real. Everday I wake up after having woken up several times in the night with this exact feeling in body and person, and the same feeling again. The morning hours are the shaking from it.

Because it is real, it is also not the totality of your person. It is an experience. Unfortunately for those of us inside of the experience, though, it can be foggy and disorienting. The self tries with its own intuition to find an equilibrium, and naturally so, but what if it cannot recognize the feelings of what that equilibrium might be? What if the idea of being "balanced" sounds like "be happy" or something that was insisted to you, or "love me, or else." ll of this in one nervous system, at the same time, can be noisy.

You were always there in the years that are causing you hearbreak and you were doing your very best, probably in ways that you may later come to appreciate as ingenious or adaptive beyond reason, yet successful in their own way. They might even be skills that you developed through an overcompensation which, if adjusted downward a bit to a more sustainable manner, could be a real strength in your person. You might become curious about a lot of things in this process - your family history, neurobiology, phylogeny and ontogeny, who knows. Some concepts will be helpful and others can be discarded, and none need to be so important. (Keep that in mind if someone is telling your otherwise about his or her specific kind of "solution" or even "therapy"; she or he probably intends to be your helper and wants to be helping, but is overestimating how much this can be true, or at least how fast.)

Checking in on this subreddit can be good at times, as a way to gather reports of others' experiences, and through that - some understanding of your own. In order to deal with that kind of information from others "about me" (the exageration of a traumatized sense of self, there), I related to the sub as though it was a compilation of commentaries on an experience. The way that individual posts can be wildly elsewhere to one reader, and not another, is some testament to the difficulty of our experiences, and their effects, but also not unique to such environments, either. There is at least here a regard for the general maintenance of the positive intentions of the discussion and appreciation for the necessity - honestly, not just the "correctness" - of re-balancing each other, at times. Or so I have detected in what sees to be a lot of instances. Perhaps it is the awareness for being "safe" that informs the general tone.

Hope you will not be feeling alone. Good luck.

If you are like me - here in CPTSD land - then there is a part of self that hears "you are being regulated". For me, that sits closeby to another part that is an expert about the distance between words and action, statements and care, and appearances and "reality" (getting more and more loaded, there). In fact, I find these differences constantly and, in my life, have favored these findings in order to keep myself in a semi-energized rage, (though while keeping a job; I am afraid enough to be without one).

"Regulation" is an unfortunate word in many usages and maybe a better one could be found, particularly when the audience will include persons who react strongly, based on personal experience.

Congratulations on the progress! It's really enjoyable to hear about these kind of gains and encouraging that they get shared like you are doing. I was not diagnosed so extensively as you mention for yourself but I was someone in search of a diagnosis who is afraid of doctors and diagnoses. It kept me unnecessary frozen in half fear - something doesn't feel well, but any explanation must be scary (my mindset being one which was half frozen in fear). You mention going deep and accelerating: yeah it can be like that! Yet the effort needs sustaining over years, too (I think you are also saying this; me too). How to do both is an interesting "challenge" while for instance working at a job that one needs for survival ... I am looking forward to your story in the future!

I like to think that all children are socialists. My then boyhood interests grew along those lines! I enjoyed public works and construction; the public library; public television; and public parks. I assumed that their conditions and content were because they were valuable or priorities of the adults - in keeping with the thinking of a child who enjoys enough care to imagine his benefit being congruent with actions by adults.

None of these goods were provided by my parents, my mother being distracted by stress, and my father unwell in his mind, self, and body (putting things nicely here). For a while my neglect was benign, but it must be in sixth grade (a switch to the middle grades) when I realize that school and schoolmates can be terrifyingly horrible. My father became more malignant, impatient, and frustrated in his attitude and manner toward me, which had never included the quality of care, but more me needing to play games where he would compete. My adolescence brought along in me a wish to be speaking adultly and to be heard, somehow, and cared for like I needed (vs. school life). I was finding out that "public" school was not like the other things and also cruel (maybe someone will tell me that this is the truth about socialism! I hope so). And so are parents and parenting and families, in general.

Like many who find themselves in positions of relative weakness, I became interested in concepts of fairness, consistency, history, communication, and even justice. I don't mean this as true with any significance, but these notions started to matter to me as I consumed whatever comics, books, magazines, or cassettes that could be scavenged out of the general banality of consumer offerings in late 1970s and early 1980s of western Pennsylvania. Scarcity mindset was such a part of me as a teenager. I find the switch to as though everything is available/ all the time by means of the Internet to be astonishing still sometimes, at least in my knowledge that my childhood would have been different under these conditions and me along with it, somehow.

It seems to me that there are issues and experiences around the serving and apportionment of care, food, and comfort; intra familial dynamics; how the family relates to neighbors; what is said about them; how news of the world is received and processed and spoken about, or not; what amibitions are acknoweldged or validated; how behaviors are corrected or rewarded; which opportunities or achievements are celebrated or discouraged; whether the child can exist on his or her own without adjustment, criticism, or altering by others, for example. These affect "socialization" someone might say. So do the effects of societal dynamics under the decriptions of "left" and "right" and political party orientation. Histories tend to be discarded quickly in these matters, in flight from ambiguity it seems to me, i.e. "the Republican Party" under Nixon in favor of generous public health care provisions, "the Democratic Party" under Clinton in favor of welfare restrictions and military interventions.

How a person attaches to these orientations, labels and parties seems as much a function of how much he or she earns per week and enjoys the respect of others, though no rule exists. My father unsurprisingly became enamored with Fox News and then Donald Trump - forces which I think objectively exploited his anxiety-ridden isolation and fearful world view informed not only by scarcity but outright deprivation and abuse in his own childhood. His demise into dementia over the past years was colored by paranoia and reactionary anger. He sounds like and sometimes quotes Trump. Who is speaking, and who did what to whom?

I know that I was attracted in childhood stories to those which featured disparate individuals (and/or animals) that by means of some mildly inspired ingenuity and pluck removed obstacles from their path and when forced ultimately dethroned the malign authority figure. I am still game.

That sounds very uncomfortable to have those sinus issues! I have suffered pressure in my front of face for years and while it did not amount to clogging, it was a real pressing between my eyes and somehow above/behind my palate. It has eased with the face/neck muscles; my skull sits more easily on my neck; and breathing is much helped. In my case, I came to feel that this is one where body-repositioning became quite stuck, and I felt difficulty for a long time. Have you considered other forms of cannabis, not smokeable, if it helps by not activating sinus reaction?

My head hangs to one side and it correlates with my weak vision in one eye only. I can feel the extra pressure behind that eye; I wonder if my vision might even improve if this pressure eases. It's quite a stunner for me to consider how my eyesight imbalance is part of imbalance - thanks for sharing the mention of Hallinan, I'll be watching more of those.

Good luck and best wishes.

It sounds like unlocking a wrist has had a lot of effect and that the "time travel" aspect is getting your attention!

I found it interesting to notice to what degree was I being reminded of the injury, as restoration of nerve connections and blood flow proceeded (this to me suggests the long-term nature of impacts on the body); and to what degree was I being reminded of being injured and/or injury writ large, of less determinate origin (is it the loneliness of pain, or the way that pain is isolating, that contributes here?) . As both occur, I wonder how or where physical bruising and emotional hurt overlap or are nearby in the processes of the nervous system.

Thanks for sharing your experience and contributing here to the validation which I sometimes am seeking, too.

Good luck!

I'm sorry to hear about the worsening circumstances and overall enviroment that you are facing. Life with a partner for whom something has made the prospect of love equate to terror, and with a partner who has put this truth into the couple and relationship as she would conceive them, and where there are constant threats - to her health, to your intentions, to the couple's present and future. It is a serious scenario and you are asking good questions.

My partner and I have been together for 30 years. We are not married. I am M49, she is F50.

Love might be the act of acceptance and care in the present. For her, when triggered, there is terror in this fact, as love in this form cannot be true. She does have a self about which one can or should or could care, and hearing otherwise will cause distress. How to react? Is this a test? Is love going away? But how to keep it? She'll say that she hates you. You saying "love" is lies, deception, falsity or fakeness. You will be accused of being not only incorrect but wrong or worse.

You hearing this will cause you to doubt your self and your reality. It might harm you. It might make you frustrated and angry and cause you confusion and pain.

You mention a lot of stress like job loss and life changes and maybe your hopes to have a family are in there too. Mental health does not improve over time on its own. A person might white-knuckle their way forward but the costs for that go up, I think, over time.

I miss my partner who was once kinder. I miss me who was once more patient. These qualities are tested when the couple is experiencing the kinds of things that you are describing but cannot speak of them honestly or directly. What that speaking looks like in your situation is not known to me, but it sound like it is not in scope of what can happen, at least as you describe things now.

What happens if you tell her that you miss her? In my case, it can be a blank stare, a sense of me being confusing in my remarks, or her showing resentment at the suggestion of comparision to another time. I'm referring to ineffable qualities which she denies. It make me doubt my reality and the fact of my needs. It is a part of my life with the person whom I care about. It can be very difficult.

Good luck.

Yes, this sense of wastage can hit very strongly sometimes. If it helps, the proportion of emotion around this realization is worth paying attention to, if at all possible, as it can change overtime and even lessen.

Disassociation is very common behavior.

My personal experience is that disassociation x trauma = paralyzing life-obscuring fog. Yet, I have also found that the loud voice in my head - telling me to be ashamed all the time - is the one most invested in this equation. It may feel absolute but is not the only thing (after all, we are talking about it from the outside).

Good luck!

I never say anything good about myself. But I think that after eight years of therapy, developing a competency with yoga, different attempts at further help like Feldenkrais therapy, and steady efforts toward greater trust, communication, and care, I am beginning to see combined and mutually aiding effects. I might not be depressed at all times, like for most of my life. I might be well.