Too scared to seek therapy
I know something’s wrong with me or something went wrong in my childhood, and it’s changed me for the worse, I can see it in my daily life, I’ve never been able to relate to others, to feel safe, every time I saw someone else’s family I used to get so confused and sad over why they got to be normal.
After getting older I started repressing these emotions, telling myself that things were normal and that I was being dramatic, but it’s becoming too much for me to hold back. Carrying this all is stressful, it’s tiring, I’ve lost weeks or months of my memory and it’s become a complete blur because of all this tar I’m holding in me.
It isn’t like I don’t want help, I just don’t know how to even start. Do I go and tell a therapist “I think something screwed me up” and hope for the best, I don’t even know specifics, they’d be having to try and figure that out with me too, that would be so much trouble, and it’s been years. It’s been long enough that any normal person would have gotten over it, I don’t know why I have to dwell on everything so much and have it affect me this badly. And I don’t want questions on everything, I don’t know what brought me in exactly, I don’t know how it made me feel, I barely remember what happened, I don’t know why I didn’t speak up earlier, I don’t know if I want to report it, I don’t know if I’m okay, I don’t know if I’m safe, I don’t know, I don’t know, I’m scared
I’m scared I’ll never be able to figure out what has ruined me.
Has anyone seeked help for deep rooted trauma they don’t even remember? How do you even start? How do you answer everything they ask?
@5haruhi5
Seeking help is a strength.
Yes scary.
But healing.
The first step is always the hardest but you've suffered for way too long already 💜
@5haruhi5 I deeply resonate with everything you've said here. Unfortunately I can't give you any easy answers, my own journey from where you are now has been long and difficult and in places pretty ugly. I can tell you that it's possible to find your way out, though. I can also tell you that you're not ruined or broken or any of those things. You've been through something awful that you can't remember details of, that you are struggling to understand and you're looking for answers. For me the sense of always being unsafe came from severe neglect (mostly emotional, some physical) in my childhood. If you don't remember or feel that there were overt acts of abuse, you could be suffering the results of neglect. It's so hard to unravel when you get older because the damage comes from things that were absent, not things that were present. How do you know what's absent if you've never seen it or experienced it? I didn't know, I was groping in the dark for a very long time.
Though I see the similarities between our struggles, I don't want to assume your experience was the same as mine. I will share with you some resources though, if that's okay, because I know what a gruelling search it can be online to find things that genuinely help and aren't just spewing the same toxic positivity and empty platitudes in almost identical words to everyone else. There's a therapist on YouTube called Patrick Teahan, who explores childhood trauma and the many and varied circumstances in which it happens, so he doesn't just talk about neglect, or just about narcissistic parents, there's a whole bunch of stuff he covers. He is a survivor of childhood trauma himself, and shows a lot of genuine understanding and compassion for his viewers.
The first video of Patrick's I saw was called 11 Oddly Specific Childhood Trauma Issues - it highlighted some reactions/behaviours we might have to things as adults that hint at what may have happened to us growing up. It was an eye-opener for me, and I resonated with a lot of it. The other I want to recommend, because you mentioned missing memories, is called When You Can't Remember Childhood Trauma. Among other things, he talks about looking at how your parents behave now (or when you most recently saw them), and how those behaviours were very likely the same when you were small. Anyway, those videos are really good for making sense of the past by looking at what's happening in the present.
One last resource I want to recommend is the book Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay Gibson. The author did a couple of interviews (also free on YouTube) with a guy called Forrest Hanson, which is a great way to connect with her work if you don't have access to the book or want a feel for the content before you commit money to it. She's done a bunch of other interviews, but those are the ones I've seen and know for sure are worth watching. The book talks a lot about parents who are self-absorbed and oblivious to the emotional needs of their children, and the impact that can have later in life. It really cleared up some things that I'd never been able to make sense of about my parents. Again, it covers a range of scenarios and types of parenting gone wrong, not just my specific scenario.
I hope these resources help, and give you somewhere to start with unravelling why you feel unsafe and what even happened to make you feel that way. If you don't feel safe to see a therapist, or can't access one, that's okay. You can still make progress. I did. Though please try and make an inventory of things you can do that make you feel safer or calmer and have them accessible while using the resources. It can be triggering when you find the things that resonate.