Beneath The Bottle

Tag: CPTSD

  • Becoming The Mam I Never Had

    Becoming The Mam I Never Had

    How do you cope when you’re feeling down, when you’re beaten?

    It is not just emotional. It is biological. A lifetime of abuse by the people you should have been able to trust rewires the brain. It alters the body. It settles into your bones. It is not as easy as choosing positivity when your whole system has been taught danger before peace. My brain does not know how to rest. It knows how to survive. There is a difference.

    It is 6am. I have been lying here awake, trapped in a severe panic attack for two hours. I woke from a nightmare where I stood and watched myself being abused. It happens nightly, without fail. Uncontrollable nightmares. A fear of sleep. A fear of being awake. No real refuge in either. Daylight brings the exhaustion. Darkness brings the reliving. Some days it feels as though my own body is the place I am least safe.

    So I do what I always do. I throw myself into the kids.

    I keep moving. I keep answering. I keep showing up. I do things with them while my chest is tight and my breathing is shallow and my mind is somewhere between now and then. I keep going until I cannot anymore. Then I go to bed early, only to meet the part of the day I fear most. Because bed is not rest to me. It is not peace. It is the end of one battle and the beginning of another.

    Sleep does not come kindly. My brain will not switch off, as though it knows exactly what waits for me if it does. Vivid dreams. Violent memories. My body dragged back into moments it should never have known, when all it should be doing is recovering enough to face another day.

    I live for my kids. I simply do not have the energy to live for me. Every ounce of what I have, I pour into them. Every drop. It leaves the pot empty for myself, but to me that has always felt like the right choice. Because to have children is to hold a responsibility so enormous and so sacred that it should never be handled carelessly. Their needs matter. Their feelings matter. Their questions matter. And boy can they talk.

    They come to me as if I am a walking encyclopaedia, as if I hold the answers to everything. Their minds are curious and hungry and alive. They want to know, to talk, to be reassured, to be heard. And I give it. I give it all. Even when I am tired enough to disappear. Even when my own mind is screaming. Even when every part of me is running on empty.

    Perhaps I parent too much at times. Perhaps I hold myself to impossible standards. But the thought of not being that mam, even for a second, terrifies me. The thought of them ever feeling what I felt, of ever doubting they are safe, loved, heard, protected, is unbearable to me.

    Because I know exactly what it is to be a child and not have those things.

    I know what it is to grow up without softness. To live in a house where love was not something that wrapped around you, but something withheld, twisted, weaponised. I know what it is to be small and afraid and to learn, far too early, that home is not always where safety lives.

    So I made myself a promise somewhere along the way. My children would never have to earn warmth from me. They would never have to question whether they could come to me. They would never have to shrink themselves to survive my moods. They would never have to carry fear into bed at night because of me. I would become the parent I was never offered.

    And I have.

    But there is a cost to being everything for everyone when nobody ever taught you how to be anything for yourself.

    I give my all to them because they deserve it. I give myself nothing because somewhere deep down, some wounded part of me still believes I deserve that too.

    Yesterday was a hard day and it has bled into the early hours of today. That is the humiliating thing about complex PTSD. You can have a good day. A real one. Twenty four hours where the light feels possible again. And then suddenly it is gone, swallowed whole, as though it never belonged to you in the first place.

    On Tuesday I took two of my sons for a pub lunch. We laughed, played games, chatted. It was good, proper good. The kind of ordinary time that means everything. I told them how much I loved them, how amazing they are as people. I listened to them. Gave them space. Let them be seen. And while all of that was happening, while I was being the mam I so desperately want to be, I was also fighting an intense flashback rising in me like floodwater.

    I looked up and saw a light. An old fashioned light. I had seen one like it before, years ago. It hung in my parents dining room. The second my eyes landed on it, my body remembered before my mind had time to catch up.

    And just like that I was no longer sat at lunch with my boys. I was back there.

    Back in a room where my mam would burn me with her iron when she was feeling sadistic or angry. Back in a room where she would push me against her oak dresser. She loved heavy wooden furniture, the real solid kind, not the flimsy stuff. Furniture that bruised when your body met it. Furniture that held its place while I lost mine. Back in a room where she once made me sit for five hours while she told me how useless I was because my A level results had not been what they wanted. For five hours I listened to the same poison poured over me. That I was useless. A disgrace. A failure. A shameful daughter, she wished she didn’t have.

    I had not done brilliantly, no. But I had still passed. I could still go to university. It should have been enough. But those years at home were some of the hardest of my life. Abused almost daily by my dad. Abused several times a day by my mam. Every minute I spent at school was spent trying to work out how to run away, with very little hope of ever managing it. I did not know the world. I had been kept within my parents four walls for eighteen years, only ever allowed out for school. Running away was terrifying because I had nobody and knew nothing. I was naive in the way only imprisoned children are naive.

    The flashback did not loosen its grip. Words flew through my head. Images scorched behind my eyes. I drank faster to try to gain some kind of control, or perhaps to outrun what had already caught me. All the while I kept giving my children the opposite of what I had. Safety. Warmth. Attention. Regulation. Love that does not have to be earned. I will put on the brave face every single time if it means they get to feel secure. Even if I am falling apart inside, they will know steadiness. Even if it costs me dearly, they will know they are safe with me.

    That is the thing people do not always see. Survival does not always look like falling apart. Sometimes it looks like making the dinners, answering the questions, planning the days out, listening to every story, soothing every worry, all while your own body is screaming beneath the surface.

    Sometimes survival looks like becoming the exact parent you once needed, while grieving the fact nobody ever became that for you.

    And that grief is its own kind of exhaustion.

    So I ask again, how do you cope when the pain lives in your body as much as your mind?

  • Surviving March

    Surviving March

    Content warning: This post contains references to childhood abuse and trauma.

    The thing I wish most in the world is that people could understand how it feels.

    Not to judge. Not to dismiss. Not to offer easy solutions. Just to listen and understand.

    I wish my words and emotions could show people how hard it really is just to breathe sometimes.

    I wish I was not seen as inferior because of my “issues”. Above all I wish I did not feel like this at all. Because if I did not, there would be no need to explain why functioning in this world can be so difficult.

    It should not be about people needing to understand. It should be about me being able to cope and cope well.

    But we should also live in a world that recognises that not everyone is okay and that looking down on people or casting judgement is as unhelpful as it is cruel.

    The older I get, the harder my mental health becomes to manage.

    Perhaps youth has advantages. When you are young there is a resilience that keeps your head above water. There is energy that fades as age slowly creeps in. There are fewer expectations and responsibilities pressing down from every direction.

    Maybe with age that energy simply disappears. Maybe the strength it once took to suppress everything has finally exhausted itself.

    Or maybe being a mam to eight children and being the face of positivity, encouragement and strength has taken a toll on the parts of me that can no longer hide.

    Because for me, as long as my children have love, affection, warmth and hope, then I have done at least one thing right in this world.

    But the truth is I am struggling more now than ever.

    Breathing itself can feel difficult.

    It is anxiety that never stops. Twenty four hours a day. Seven days a week.

    A constant panic that never dulls or fades.

    Every breath can feel like it might be my last. Doctors might call it somatic OCD, but labels do not capture the reality of living with a constant sense of doom sitting in your chest and stomach. The physical symptoms often overpower any ability to simply push through.

    I am actually an easy going person by nature. Laid back. Accepting. I rarely complain about the everyday things people often become frustrated by.

    But trauma lives in places most people never see.

    The ping of a microwave can send panic through me.

    Standing near a cooker fills me with fear. Not because of the pain of burns, but because of the memories. As a child my mam would burn hidden parts of my body.

    Closed rooms frighten me, even in my own home.

    Baths terrify me because as a child my mam would hold my head under water until the very last moment. Until the fight drained out of me and only then would she release me and I would gasp desperately for air.

    Even drinking a simple glass of water is difficult. As soon as the cup reaches my lips my body panics for breath.

    I keep trying. I never give up trying. But my body feels stuck in trauma mode.

    All the understanding in the world cannot always break the chains of physical memory.

    And then there is the weather.

    The sky.

    The smell in the air.

    The subtle shift of seasons.

    Things most people barely notice can send waves of panic through me because they are tied to memories my body never forgot.

    And then there is March.

    March is a cruel month for me.

    One that traps me inside memories created by something horrific my mother did.

    My medical records even show it. Every year my mental health spirals during this time. I did not even realise the pattern myself until years later and saw it written clearly in my notes.

    I had always believed I was simply falling into random depressions. But with age, therapy and understanding comes painful realisation of how trauma stores itself inside the body.

    I hate saying what happened out loud. I have only managed to speak about it twice in therapy.

    But this blog is the only safe space I really have.

    And as March begins I can already feel the shift inside me. The fear building. My best friend worrying about how I will survive the next four weeks.

    Today I am lying in bed writing this while my children are at school or work. After the school run I had no strength left to remain up.

    The sky outside is the same sky from that memory.

    And I cannot bear to look at it.

    March 1996.

    I was fifteen.

    Naive. Not street wise. A child who already knew far more about pain than any child ever should.

    In our kitchen my mam kept a calendar. Each month she circled the day my period began. My initial sat inside the circle like some kind of trophy she had claimed.

    It filled me with shame just looking at it.

    But I never questioned it. Questioning her was dangerous.

    That March there was no circle.

    She was angry.

    After school she ordered me into her bedroom. Her room had a bay window and a full length mirror. The sky filled the glass. Soft clouds drifted across pale afternoon light.

    Even now that mirror and that sky remain fixed in my mind like a stain that cannot be removed.

    She told me to take my clothes off.

    This was not unusual. She often forced me to stand naked in front of the mirror while she mocked my body and humiliated me.

    But that afternoon something changed.

    Standing behind me she suddenly violated my body in a way that sent sharp pain through me. Tears filled my eyes but I could not scream. I could not cry. I had already learned those rules.

    You never question her.

    You never cry.

    You never talk back.

    By the time it ended I could barely stand.

    When I told her I was bleeding heavily she dismissed it as simply being late for my period.

    But something had changed in me forever.

    From that moment my fear of bleeding was born.

    It is not a trigger you can escape. Periods. Childbirth. Miscarriages. Medical procedures. Even conversations around women’s health can send waves of panic through my body.

    So every March my body remembers.

    Even when my mind tries to bury it.

    The pain in my abdomen returns.

    The anxiety doubles.

    Flashbacks arrive without warning.

    And the sky becomes a doorway back to that room.

    The pain of accepting that my own mother, the person who was meant to nurture and protect me, could inflict such horrific sexual and physical abuse sits on my chest like a life sentence. I have never once hurt my children. I have never even thought about raising a hand to them. Sometimes that makes the question even harder to carry. How can a mother look at her child and feel hatred instead of love? How can the one person who should celebrate your existence become the person who tries to break it?

    Right now it is 2.35pm and the school run is approaching.

    Soon I will have to open the door and step outside.

    I will look up at that same sky that holds so many secrets.

    I will collect my children from school.

    I will hold their hands.

    I will listen to their stories about ordinary things.

    Inside my chest the storm will still be there.

    But every year I do the same thing.

    I breathe.

    I step forward.

    I survive March.

    Again.

    And again.

    And again.

    Spring arrives for everyone else.

    For me, March is the month my body remembers.

  • I Learned To Sleep Facing The Door

    I Learned To Sleep Facing The Door

    Trust did not shatter.

    It eroded.

    A grain at a time

    carried away by hands

    that said stay

    while quietly teaching me why I shouldn’t.

    People imagine betrayal as violence.

    They picture shouting.

    They picture rage.

    But the worst harm I have known

    arrived softly.

    It knew my history.

    Spoke gently around it.

    Waited patiently

    until I stopped guarding the fragile parts.

    That is how doors open.

    Not by force.

    By relief.

    I remember the first time I exhaled around someone.

    How heavy my bones felt

    realising I did not have to stay awake inside my own life.

    I thought safety sounded like laughter.

    I did not know it could also sound like goodbye.

    Now my body keeps score.

    I notice pauses between words.

    The shift in temperature when affection cools.

    The moment interest turns into tolerance.

    I collect these things instinctively.

    Evidence.

    Proof that I am not imagining the ground moving again.

    They say I am distant.

    Careful.

    Hard to reach.

    They do not understand

    that once you have been loved as a doorway

    people expect to walk through you forever.

    So I became a wall instead.

    Loneliness has sharp edges

    but at least it does not pretend to be soft.

    Sometimes I watch strangers trust each other.

    Heads leaning together.

    Phones left unlocked on tables.

    Sleep shared without fear.

    It feels like watching another language spoken fluently

    after forgetting every word yourself.

    I do not hate people.

    I still want warmth.

    That might be the cruelest part.

    Because wanting it

    does not mean I can survive it.

    So I sleep lightly now.

    Back to the wall.

    Breath measured.

    Dreams unfinished.

    And if someone ever truly meant no harm….

    I wonder

    if I would recognise it.

    Or mistake safety for danger…

    and close the door

    just before it finally stayed.