[yuri]

If you find that this describes you or could help as a piece of the puzzle. Great. Otherwise god luck on your personal way out.

I think love is a way out. A love for yourself. If you are like me. Born with a feeling of personal responsibility. Empathy. Nativity. It is easy to believe that something is wrong with you, especially if you got bullied and parents didnt care. Then you push those experiences away and because you don't know why things happened you blame yourself. Start to hate yourself even. And you block even more, and bam DpDr. To get out you need to get those fragments of yourself, the child experience trauma, to feel love and safety. Not hate. So I started with this. If you find it interesting try meditating and think about every step until you feel that you belive in it. Some part took weeks for me.

1. You deserve better.

I have lived in my sofa for close to seven years. Around 40 with no job or higher education. Many friends left when I felt so bad I started to isolate. I started thinking I deserved better. I deserved better living this meaningless life, and on top of that hate me. And if you can feel this. That you deserve better, that is the first step to accepting and loving yourself. If you hate someone you dont go around wishing them a better life, do you? So if you can feel this you dont hate yourself.

2. Meet the pain.

Take it slow with this one. If you are like me and push absolutely everything away, you dont want all things coming back to you at the same time. Start with the everyday pain of DpDr if this is what you feel. You cant be totally of emotionally and feeling nothing like hunger or need for sleep. Your probably in your condition because you didn't know how to handle pain and your brain shut of your emotions. But hopefully it fluctuates like in my case. The pain you are feeling and trying to push away. You don't deserve the pain either. And then you start to feel empathy for the being feeling this strong negative emotion. That being is you.

Depending how much pain you pushed away you probably need to learn how to become friends with it. I have done a lot of self therapy with IFS. Maybe you need to do something similar. But hopefully you can feel empathy with you, the entity feeling pain, and the little innocent child who experienced the trauma. And that is the prefix to love.

3. I think this is a personal journey, translating the notion that you deserve a better life and empathy for the child and who the child grow up to become to love. But you have the start to take it there. Some parts. Like me seven years old getting picked on because I cried for my dead cat. This part I started loving right away. I felt sad for him getting bullied and everything that happened after and growing up to this life i live. Him I loved right away and wanted to take care of and help feeling better. Some parts are harder. And every person has done their far share of bad things. You need to forgive yourself for them. Or other things about you you feel shame about. You are just a person and you are therefore far from perfect and you deserve to love yourself.

For me this has been a piece of the puzzle. Hope I inspired or helped some of you. Send me a mail if you want, becouse I often cant see if someone responded to me. Im not in often but I will answer you when that happens. Good luck everybody, even if this helped or not. You deserve it.

 

[yuri]

You cant hide or run from your pain.

 

[yuri]

To feel for your traumatized child part it can help to watch old photos and remember how the little innocent child felt when the trauma/traumas occured. This little child didnt deserved what happened. But take it easy if you have a lot of negative experience from childhood. You dont want to meet more then you can handle. Start with a lesser trauma in that case. I have spent a lot of time watching old photos and some things it took months before I remembered. My brain controlled so I didnt have to face to much at a time. To really rub it in, you dont want to let all memories and feeling loose to fast.

 

[Saschasascha]

Those are some really really helpful tips and thoughts. Appreciate it!

 

[AnnaGiulia]

Hey Yuri, I agree with Saschasascha, and I also identify a lot with your experience. I would just like to add that in my case, the repeated childhood trauma fragmented my brain so much, that I was not able to integrate the traumatic memories on my own. It became something of a PTSD storm on steroids, and the moment I finally found the therapist for EMDR (after already being in CBT, and working a lot on my own, journaling etc.), I have been on the brink of hope, and I am otherwise a very hopeful person, all thing considered. So, I would just like to say to people struggling with trauma from childhood, that it is not your fault if you cannot deal with it on your own, because the architecture of trauma is such that it is below our rational brain, and sometimes we need someone else to bring us over that gap. It may seem insurmountable, but it is possible to integrate traumatic memories in EMDR, or with the help of other trauma therapy. After that, you will still have those memories, but as Yuri said, with the perspective of newly found compassion for your little self, and every other self, including the person that you have become, you can cope with all the emotions that these memories bring, because finally they will be your true emotions, and not the learned response of self-hatred.
Best,
A.