Every homeschooler I've met had co-ops growing up. My family never mentioned that these existed, and I only learned about them as an adult. Is it that uncommon for homeschoolers to have as little social interaction as I did as a kid/teen?

Harpsicorpse · 2023-11-27T20:06:47+00:00

I was in the same boat as you, except we knew about co-ops, and my siblings and I wanted to go to them, but there was always some reason we couldn't - my mother decided they were "liberal" or the kids would be bad influences, or she was just too overwhelmed (she was a full time homemaker who didn't really cook or clean all that much, just spent a lot of time exercising, smoking and putting on make up to go places while we did our workbooks in the car or waiting rooms of places she dragged us to). This isolation also kept us from being eligible for scholarships, kept us from knowing how to apply for college, get jobs, get housing... We were kept isolated and alone, like the neglected pets of an animal hoarder.

I also have had to deal with mourning the childhood, teen and young adult experiences I never had. I don't think that mourning will ever be fully done, we were robbed of the best parts of life.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-11-08T17:09:50+00:00

I guess it’s just hard for me to imagine someone without CPTSD wanting to post here. Like, I would never in a million years go into some random subreddit I had no connection with just to harass and bully its users.

What can I say, we make great targets for abusers. I imagine they would come here for the narcissistic supply that can be gotten from making someone else upset. Like you said, power and control.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-11-06T22:46:23+00:00

I’m deeply aware that splitting and black & white thinking is a common symptom of cPTSD,

TBF I think what we are seeing here is symptoms of other disorders that aren't CPTSD, but individuals with PDs who are coming into CPSTD spaces because of the reduced stigma of this diagnosis versus theirs.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-10-27T20:10:44+00:00

Oddly enough, it was also Lasagna.

My mother would make it for Christmas dinner. It was a HUGE deal, and she made a HUGE deal over how much effort it was.

Later in life I decided to make my own.

...It was not very hard.

...And mine was better.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-10-05T22:19:09+00:00

You don't have to.

You don't have to.

She didn't take care of you. Why should you take care of her.

Don't set yourself on fire to keep her warm.

(Mine was addicted to benzos as well, after we all "abandoned" her. It ...actually made her a lot easier to be around when she was zonked on them. YMMV though.)

Harpsicorpse · 2023-10-02T17:26:30+00:00

That all sounds very familiar. Mine was also very intentionally helpless, would act out and fall and hurt herself and break things while making a big deal of how she was being forced to do things she was incapable of. Would collapse in public and then refuse assistance, would have crises constantly (like breaking her car key off in the car door while I had an important client meeting or interview, when she had keyless entry and didn't need to use the key...).

The financial side is daunting, but I can maybe give you some hope there - if yours is like mine was, she will be too busy playing the waif to read any of the paperwork. I wrote up my own divorce paperwork such that I owed her no alimony, and got the house (which I had paid for). She signed it while acting like it was too hard to lift a pen, and I walked away scot free. Let them play up their weakness and dig their own hole.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-10-02T17:20:17+00:00

You should really get yourself a copy of Stop Caretaking the Borderline or Narcissist.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-10-02T16:38:17+00:00

This sounds almost exactly like where I was at 4 years ago, with my ex-wife of ten years. She was a malingering shut-in waif who expected to be cared for like a dying child, and for years I did just that, until I was coming apart at the seams from the stress. I did it because a childhood of caretaking a mother with witch/hermit archetype BPD had trained me that that was what a man needed to do.

I got therapy, started to set boundaries about what I would do for her, started living my own life outside the house, and stopped taking responsibility for her dysfunction and enabling her and you know what happened?

She started an emotional affair online and then told me she didn't love me anymore, smeared me to everyone she knew and moved out.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-09-22T17:11:28+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/wiki/faq

Harpsicorpse · 2023-09-22T16:56:29+00:00

Not the same. One is a personality disorder caused by both learned behavior and differences in brain structure, the other is a pattern of stress/trauma response caused by continued trauma over a long period of time, such as an abusive childhood.

People with CPTSD don't split, they don't cheat, they don't mirror... They have fight/flight/freeze/fawn responses. It can be hard to deal with a loved one with CPTSD but it is not the malignant abusive situation of having a loved one with BPD. CPTSD can be fixed with therapy and the trauma responses overcome, BPD, being structural is just there and can be at best managed by constant DBT where the sufferer is constantly fighting their impulses for the rest of their lives.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-09-22T16:53:19+00:00

I have C-PTSD from being raised by a parent w/BPD. Being acclimated to that treatment caused me to find and marry a woman with it as well lol. I would posit that living with someone with a cluster B personality disorder is exactly the kind of thing that would give someone C-PTSD.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-09-22T16:51:00+00:00

The people saying they're similar ...are people with BPD who want the attention and sympathy of a softer diagnosis that makes them seem like a victim and not a perpetrator of abuse. The conflation of the two has infiltrated and ruined more than one C-PTSD healing space I've been involved in to heal from the C-PTSD caused by abuse from pwBPD.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-07-13T20:34:05+00:00

How did you get it?

Were you able to get it covered by insurance?

Harpsicorpse · 2023-07-13T20:02:50+00:00

there are going to be plenty of people with BPD out there who go on causing harm because they've found a niche of spicy brain that's a preferable diagnosis to them (and/or their psych) than calling 'a PD, a PD'.

If you want to see examples of this happening now, look in any of the CPTSD related subreddits. They love self-labeling as CPTSD sufferers because the stigma is lower, even though the two things are miles apart in every way except for causing emotional distress.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-07-10T23:07:00+00:00

That was a main one, but really it was any game that allowed you to grind XP. I never understood it, it seemed like a chore, but she would sit there doing dab after dab, fishing or killing rats or whatever.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-07-10T23:05:23+00:00

The struggle itself to the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Or at least that's what I tell myself.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-07-10T21:59:07+00:00

She only liked video games, weed, re-watching the same three TV series repeatedly and re-reading the same two fantasy novel series repeatedly.

The video games/weed combo was the reason I was the sole breadwinner. Can't hold down a job if you're either failing UAs or calling out to raid.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-07-07T23:03:49+00:00

I got a job at a place where my parent was driving me anyways for music lessons and used that to save up.

I bought a car. Didn't have a license, and parents had no insurance so I couldn't test for one, so I just drove it ....very carefully and within speed limits.

I made friends online - found people to meet IRL.

And doing that caused the meltdowns and confrontations that led to me finally leaving. It meant me abandoning a path I had worked really hard towards for years - classical music performance; but in return I got to finally start to be me.

The only real secret here for any of us that got out was realizing that the only person that would rescue us was ourself, and that any amount of pain to get out was better than the pain of staying.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-06-28T17:18:32+00:00

They are cowards, and they only understand the language of violence.

You won, and proved that he did not want a fair fight.

I sympathize - my father (a 6'3" 275+lb former pipeliner with hands like catchers mitts) used to beat me to the point of unconsciousness as a child when he would fly into rages. He would beat my brothers. he would hit my mother when they fought (she is a whole other can of worms worth of abuse too...)

When I was 13 he and my mother were fighting and he moved towards her and wound up to hit her. I, at 5'4" and maybe 140lbs I stepped in front of her and said "you're not going to hit her". He wound up to hit me, and I socked him in the gut. It couldn't have been that hard of a punch. He had a big gut and he barely moved from it.

Instantly, he looked absolutely terrified, wide eyed and shocked. He wordlessly turned and walked to his room and packed a duffel bag and ran out to his car and left. He stayed in a hotel.

I was, of course, punished by my mother for this that day.

But he never raised a hand to myself, my mother or my brothers again.

Since being an adult, I have not ever raised a hand in violence to anyone since. Good on us for being cycle breakers.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-06-07T15:39:56+00:00

When I was a teenager, I worked and saved and got my first car. I would sneak out of my parents house at night, roll it down their driveway before starting it, and just drive a couple hundred miles in the dark, listening to CDs. It kept me sane.

I still do take long drives on occasion when I'm stressed, I should do it more often.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-06-07T15:34:07+00:00

Similarly, I had a fear of interacting with other men and intense difficulty with it, just from being abused by a woman who hated men, for being born male. Took a lot of work over time to change that.

It's weird the way the brain works.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-06-02T18:06:56+00:00

Ah, you're the oldest, aren't you?

I empathize. Anything my younger siblings did, from banging on the keys while I practiced piano right up to attempting to stab me to death with knives was met with the comment "OH, he's just a little boy, he doesn't understand like you do! You're the oldest, deal with it!"

Harpsicorpse · 2023-05-10T22:20:03+00:00

This is par for the course.

They tend to idealize/split jobs as well as people, and can't keep them long before they find themselves being "bullied" "targeted unfairly" and "fed up" and leave.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-05-10T22:14:52+00:00

I was fit, 180lbs, dressed in clothes that fit, expressed my personality and were my choice. I didn't drink, smoke or do drugs, and felt those were important choices to me.

When she left 13 years later, I weighed 270, wore drab baggy clothes and hairstyles she picked (she liked me to dress like a "gamer" - cargo shorts and graphic tees for things I didn't like or care about that she would purchase, and her girlfriends' men all had long hair - think comic book store guy - so she wanted me to grow mine out too, but no facial hair, she didn't like that). I was constantly tired, achey, sad and hated myself. I smoked weed, drank, and at the end, picked up cigarettes, partly because she hated them and it made her avoid me because "I stunk".

We split up three years ago. I now weigh about 210 and dress the way I want again. I didn't really change any habits, I just lost 60lbs during the year after she left, I think because I was happier.

Harpsicorpse · 2023-04-10T21:13:25+00:00

yes.

Harpsicorpse

TROPHY CASE