I’ve been watching more youtube videos.  This time, they’re about narcissism and CPTSD.  There’s a lot of gaslighting and crazymaking involved.  See, I have a history.  I’d love to say that my childhood was wonderful and nothing bad happened, but, I can’t.  I can’t because I have emotional flashbacks.  Figuring out the triggers is a bit difficult.

I never feel safe.  Not ever.  The safest I ever felt, was in the vacuum chamber of a particle accelerator, all alone.  Seriously.  MRI tubes are terrifically safe places for me, because there’s nobody in the room that can hurt me.  This means I can admit that I have social anxiety.  Crowds are scary.  I can admit that I have certain kinds of performance anxiety, though not others.  For the most part, I cope by suppressing the feelings.

Why, though?  Why is feeling trapped in a social situation much more frightening than being trapped and all alone?  Why would I rather be squished in a box than be stuck on an airplane with all of those passengers?  Why would I rather write a 500 page essay than give a 5 minute speech about a topic I’m passionate about?  I don’t have good answers that are easy to find.

My parents were not narcissists.  Yet, I can recall abusive episodes in my childhood which shaped me.  I think, but I’m not sure, my first sexual experience occurred when I was four years old.  #Metoo gets old, and no, it wasn’t my parents.  I told them, and they put a stop to it, well, at least for that person.  Still, it is the sort of thing that made me want to know for sure what the moral code was, and made me thirsty to know more information in general.  I hate it when people keep secrets from me.

Ah, but that was just the beginning.  See, I have lived by the moral code I’ve developed.  It’s an unwritten rule, set up young, that I should not be a bad person, that I should not hurt others.  It is a rule which, as an adult, I have found difficulty coping with.  It needs to be broken, and rewritten.  I’m tired of living with the heartache of being a doormat all because I have to be a good person and please my parents, even after all these years.

The old crones I’m facebook friends with have shown by example, that I need to develop my inner asshole.  I need to be able to be cruel and selfish, from time to time.  I need to be a bitchy witch at times, and I need practice at it.  That’s the source of the social anxiety: I’m still trying to please other people more than myself.  That plays out in a lot of different contexts.  A simple one is how much I should weigh.  Do I please my doctors and weigh within the normal BMI?  Do I please my husband and weigh what he wants me to weigh?  Do I please myself, and weigh what I want to weigh?  Will I feel safer if I’m more muscular?  Will I feel safer if I’m skinny or invisible or ugly?

To ground myself means to feel safe and comfortable in my own skin.  I feel like fading out, like curling up into a ball, whenever I remember the times I messed up, I made a mistake, and people were counting on me.  My memory is good, and I remember the emotions well.  Yes, I did mess up, and my mistakes impacted other people.  I wanted to make sure that never happened again, so I shun all responsibility over other people’s actions.  However, looking at that now, that’s not a mature response to the pain I still feel.

Perhaps you can suggest a healthier response?