Hey etoilause,

I found a few articles about the choice not to forgive:

Why We Don't Always Have to Forgive | Psychology Today

Is Not Forgiving Someone OK? (verywellmind.com)

I think it's worth asking yourself if your parents are open or receptive to being told why it's okay not to forgive, because it sounds like it could potentially be not only a waste of your time and energy, but it could also be emotionally exhausting or retraumatizing. Perhaps it's more worthwhile to remind yourself that you can still heal and move forward without forgiveness. Sometimes the most healing thing to do is to acknowledge that someone is not worth forgiveness. The choice should ultimately be left up to you, and nobody should impose their forgiveness on your behalf or tell you how to feel. It's your experiences and your life. I don't forgive my abuser either and that's okay.

I hope I could help and please let us know if you need anything.

@ohfroot btw jdhdkd

how are you doing? at the end of the day i'm not sure there's much i can do but take this as s little "i care"

Aw hi etoilause, it's such a pleasure to hear from you.

I've honestly not been doing too great the past few weeks but today was a very good day. The house was cleaned, I showered, I had vietnamese with my mom, I had an interview to work as a case manager at a women's shelter, and just an hour ago I got a call back saying that I got the job! I'm so honored and excited. This will mean that my presence on @traumasurvivorshelpingsurvivors is probably going to take a major cut (but maybe it's for the best, I could use a break lol).

how do i know if i'm okay? i can't recognize if i'm struggling or just actively triggering myself, and even when i do feel bad it's always with a thick layer of numbness/lack of actual care. i don't know how to feel the full scope of my emotions. bad stuff happened to me and i know to some extent that they're bad but it's hard to not take them lightly. and my memory regarding my feelings is pretty much non existent. if i feel overwhelmed at some point, i can't tell 5 minutes later what it was like.

i feel like i'm always in this middle ground of being fine but a little bit affected in some way. but when i feel good for a few days it makes me feel guilty, like i created all my problems for no reason and now i have to trigger myself again, i have to feel worse because it's unfair to act like things are bad and then be okay the next day.

i think i felt really bad yesterday, i must have despite the emotional detachment because i remember feeling overwhelmed. but now i'm normal. how comes i'm so normal?

thank you for your time bun. i hope your day's okay!

Hey etoilause, it's good to hear from you.

I'm sorry to hear about what's been going on. I think it can be hard to get a sense of whether or not you're okay - it can be hard to concentrate on certain signs, especially when you're unsure what to look for.

I would say that, first of all, perhaps this "thick layer of numbness/lack of actual care" is dissociation. If you're going through a hard time emotionally or psychologically, dissociation can make you feel removed from all of that, whether that's feeling foggy, distant, numb, etc. When you're going through this, especially if this is emotional amnesia, it may not actually be possible for you to fully feel your emotions during this time. That's the point - to distance yourself from your emotions, especially if they are emotions being emitted from a traumatic memory.

I also totally relate to your next to last paragraph. I feel like that can just be the stage that you're at in terms of your healing. As for the self-triggering (this is something I'm actively trying to deal with) there's a more formal and scientific PDF explaining what self triggering looks like here, or there's a forum talking about it here.

I can understand how you feel like it's unfair to act like things are bad and then be okay the next day. But it may help to remember that healing isn't linear - sometimes you will have good days and sometimes you will have bad days, and neither really say anything about what you went through. Just because you have a good day doesn't necessarily mean that your trauma wasn't severe, in fact you deserve good things in spite of what you've been through.

But this can be hard to internalize when you're dealing with other things like emotional amnesia, self-triggering, or even internalized gaslighting (does that term resonate with you? internalized gaslighting often goes hand-in-hand with self-triggering).

but is it common that even with "first person" memories you still see a little bit of your own body and not just what your vision should allow? like the back of your own shoulders instead of just your arms for example?

Hey etoilause,

Thank you for your commentary.

- asking for normal reasons that are normal

tu parle de grave? c le seul cannibal french movie que je connais

I don't think what I experience is dissociation per say because the numbness appears at specific times but I think I'm always overall aware of my own body/thoughts.

As for emotional amnesia I do relate to that. It made it really hard to get anything from therapy because I simply wasn't able to tell how awful I felt a couple of days prior our sessions.

I'll look into the self gaslighting a bit more but from what I've seen, the thing that might make me resonate with it is the fact that I always have the feeling that whatever happened to me is okay because it either wasn't really that bad or because I was just made to handle it. While my abuse was still ongoing as a child I did not show any sign that something was wrong. I was not carrying the burden around all the time, I just dealt with it when it happened and *almost * completely ignored it the next day. Even when I actually told my parents what was happening and a therapist asked to see me I just refused (and didn't see her as a consequence). I just wanted it to be done and now it was so why talk about it?

And I'm not sure how "healing" applies to me. What am I supposed to heal from? I'm not mentally ill. I'm not always dealing with pain either. Even things I do that are considered unhealthy aren't actively impairing me. I feel like trying to "heal" will just be a slap in the face that nothin was ever bad. By that I mean I might "try" and figure out that I really did not have to try hard at all, it would just be easy because I was never truly struggling with anything to begin with. I feel like when people talk about healing they're trying to escape from something (be it symptoms of mental illness or self destructive behavior), like (excuse the metaphor lol) trying really hard not to drown and actively struggling to stay afloat, while maybe all I have to do is simply not move and let myself float around. And maybe I should simply do that, but it feels wrong

Hey etoilause,

Dissociation can be momentary or take different forms other than a disconnect from your body or thoughts, but of course it's up to you how to describe your experiences.

The thing about enduring trauma is that often times we as survivors will act "normal" while we're actively being abused, because it's a survival mechanism. Sometimes our line of logic is that if we show we're distressed by what's happening, that could only get us in more trouble or escalate the situation. When we're in an abusive situation we do not give ourselves the time psychologically to actually process what's happening, which is why this tends to only begin once we get to a place that we can subconsciously register as safe. Instead of processing, we're focused on just surviving. I wonder if any of these things resonate with you.

But I also understand refusing therapy because you wanted to just be done with it. Even 6 months after I reached safety, I was already tired of rehashing the details in my mind. 8 years later I'm still battling it. I think sometimes we believe it's more efficient (like with avoiding escalation) to just carry on as normal and try to live as if nothing happened. But when you have trauma, that's not really possible, at least without professional help.

About the use of the word healing, I do hear what could be that internalized gaslighting, in feeling like healing almost invalidates what you've been through. I will just say that you don't have to be mentally ill to heal (and mental illnesses tend to be more... chronic? i.e you can manage it but it will likely be there indefinitely, though the same goes for trauma), and that you don't have to be always in pain to heal either. Even if you got a paper cut you can heal, you know? But that's not to minimize your experiences. Suffice to say, your pain doesn't have to be constant or debilitating to need or deserve healing.

And tied into the healing and internalized gaslighting thing is perhaps that idea that healing is to escape something. On one hand, yes absolutely, and rightfully so. But on the other hand, I think there's a certain implication attached to the word escape or even escapism, because it insinuates that it's bad to escape (not necessarily trying to say you intended for this implication, just bear with me lol). And that's maybe where I see that internalized gaslighting coming back in, because it's almost like (correct me if wrong) you think, on some level, that it's worse to heal and better to stay in the pain, however severe that is.