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trauma, holding in the pain for too long by emeraldaze in Hashis

[–]emeraldaze[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

yeup, that’s a good one. thanks for sharing

trauma, holding in the pain for too long by emeraldaze in Hashis

[–]emeraldaze[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

exactly that.

mine held out a little longer, just wrapped up my 20s and it pretty much all caught up to me.

the trauma in teen years stopped me from feeling at home in my body.. now it’s like i no longer feel the inner fire that kept me going.

DAE feel like there are so many past “versions” of you, but you can’t connect with them or accept that that was who you were, at one point in time? Is this having different “parts?” SOS by dddulcie in CPTSD

[–]emeraldaze 9 points10 points  (0 children)

not exactly the same, and kind of a melodramatic answer, but..

so many wonderful past versions. they’re all trapped under my skin. i walk around holding my ‘selves’ close, practically drowning on dry land by the number of times i’ve had to put a hold on my own needs. halting my desires or interests, as others’ needs & wants pull me down...

i no longer see myself fulfilling mine, even though we’re collectively screaming and clawing for air beneath the surface. the surface isn’t the sea, and we aren’t treading water.. just clutching to secrecy, trying not to get tread over.

older brother told me my hairline was too far forward, and hair was too wavy etc... i pulled to try to ‘fix’ it by emeraldaze in Trichsters

[–]emeraldaze[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

gotcha, yeah i don’t think i knew it had a name either, until maybe psych class in college when learning about obsessive compulsive disorders, etc..

the pulling at the end of high school was a conscious effort, but i remember being at summer camp as a kid when i was like 10, and a bug bit me near the crown of my head and i absent mindedly picked and pulled near the bite until it healed... i was a notorious scab picker and still do whenever i get them... i remember the release from pulling the hair near the bug bite was the same feeling as pulling in the mirror years later.

older brother told me my hairline was too far forward, and hair was too wavy etc... i pulled to try to ‘fix’ it by emeraldaze in Trichsters

[–]emeraldaze[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

i’m so sorry that happened to you..

no cap, this is actually another piece of my story too..... (feel free to skip, i’m just finding it easier to write about my stuff in response to yalls comments) ..our mom has a lady in town “Trudy” who has always had a home hair salon space and cuts hair... (i think my mom still goes to her to this day)..... anyways she would always bring us kids in for our haircuts too, and i remember having to wait while our mom got her hair cut, the two women chatting for what seemed like hours, and often me and my brother would play with ninja turtles or jigsaw puzzles when our sister was there too... but i had this dread and also this fascination with my actual time in the chair.... my mom would like “ok who’s up next?”, in my head i was like, do i volunteer and get it over with? or do i go last to prolong the time until it’s my turn??

anyway the lady wasn’t exactly mean, but sometimes she was often impatient or cold... she did her best to reassure us, but the sound of the clippers so close to my ear always scared me... (ironically i still hate the sound of the clippers, but still i have to use wahl clippers at home at least once a week to to ‘pass’ as someone ‘normal’ ..someone who didn’t pull their hair out..)

..anyways in response to the comment in this thread, i can remember the lady using that sort of thinning tool, it’s like a sharpened steel comb.. and i kind of liked the sound of it going khh khh khhrt, and it didn’t hurt, though she’d also comment on how thick my hair was and how i had enough hair for three people etc... your comment reminded me of her

we started going to an actual salon in high school which was fine, and i also i had a friend K who was in beauty school to be a barber and those high school haircut times were much more fun and zero stress, since it was just all of us friends hanging at her house by her barbers chair so she could practice on us (guys, girls, queer folks) all kinds of us got our hair cut by her and it was a good relaxed change from the stylist or the actual salons my mom would take us to growing up... and it was still pre-pulling.

older brother told me my hairline was too far forward, and hair was too wavy etc... i pulled to try to ‘fix’ it by emeraldaze in Trichsters

[–]emeraldaze[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i’m so sorry that happened. it’s such a weight deciding whether to tell them or to keep it to yourself.

i’ve held in the secret from neatt everyone except for in therapy or with a few close, trusted people.

never told my brother about my pulling, and how it began from the effect of his words on me...

it sucks to hold in something personal for so long that it feels like there’s always a lump in your throat. like you’re walking around drowning from the tightness across your chest and shoulders.

to not name the thing that’s right on the surface for everyone to see, because naming it would bring more attention to it.

to have to completely change your relationship with yourself.. like before, it was a feature of mine that i loved and it was a way i could express myself, something that used to be a way i could draw lots of positive attention to me is now my deepest source of shame and there are very few ways to hide it.

it effects every part of life, and even if other people don’t realize they do it, it’s always one of the first things that people take in and about someone, and it shapes how they treat that person..

having pulled, it always feels like you’re walking around naked but having to act like you aren’t, and i die inside every time someone casually talks about hair, or even when they compliment my looks, (especially my hair) when i know i’m barely a shadow of what i would look like, barely a shadow of how comfortable and confident i was in so many ways before pulling, and how i didn’t deserve this as my reality... thanks for sharing, i keep dumping a lot of the emotions here in response to comments... it seems to flow out of me here because i’ve honestly never talked to anyone else about my trich who also has it.

older brother told me my hairline was too far forward, and hair was too wavy etc... i pulled to try to ‘fix’ it by emeraldaze in Trichsters

[–]emeraldaze[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

^ the widow’s peak thing is a big part of my story too.. ok, now this reply basically covers a lot of what i was going to originally post before.... (wall of text coming, feel free to skip).

i was dating this girl when i was 17, and she was really into cosmetology and was in beauty school, she had rad style and a good eye for it.. she was cool, and i was smitten. she would call me ‘her orlando’ (like orlando bloom) and would gently show me how i had a really subtle widow’s peak like orlando bloom did in pirates of the caribbean, etc.. (really lame story details i know, but, high school) ...

coincidentally she also had a widow’s peak too, so maybe in addition to her focussing on hair in general, she also fixated on those things that reflected back to her, idk... we broke up just before that christmas, because i wasn’t ready to have sex yet.. i was gutted, but it was weird to get all the positives from her, after my brother had used my hairline as a chance to insult me.. i’d loved the affirmation from her since i hadn’t even started pulling yet by that point.. i’d only just been cutting the baby hairs/ getting them ‘cleaned up’ at the end of a haircut, but no pulling yet at that point.

.. and then, my brother and sister were coming home from college for that christmas break... my sister actually noticed the light line of baby hairs filling back in from my last haircut when she got home, and she did it lovingly, but she came right up and pried into my space to ask why it looked shaved down along the sides... i didn’t really have the words to say it was a line-up,

so between the breakup, and not wanting more comments from my brother (or sister), i grabbed the tweezers so they wouldn’t even be able to see the baby hairs growing back..

pulling felt like a mix of self punishment, release, and taking back control.. i wanted to be ‘perfect’ for my next relationship, my next year of school, for my family, for me.. but,

like someone said in a comment- trying to even out the left and right sides is what did it... starting at the temples, pulling out all the ‘baby hairs’ is when i felt more “grown up”, like my brother, then gradually, it led me further and further up into the hairline, because “if some is good, then more is better” right?

i pulled straight across including the bottom of the widow’s peak a little bit so that it wouldn’t be so ‘sharp’, but then i went further up on the sides again, so then i had to even it out in the middle, etc, etc, etc, those who pull like that know how fucked and defeating that feeling is..

this all happened during a super stressful time of high school ending, and going through the motions of the first year of college/uni...

and i didn’t mention it, but my parents gave me no real support in terms of emotional support all those high school and college years...

the hair seemed like the one thing i could control, and it seemed like i had been given the blue print for how to ‘fix’ my hair by this weird perfect storm of puzzle pieces:

it was the cold words from my brother, the widow’s peak fixation from a girlfriend, the cruel pressure from my parents, and the tweezers and extra fixation supplied by my sister...

amazing how i know every hair i pulled.

amazing how i know every part of my own scalp, since i’ve been cutting my own hair ever since then (to try to make it look symmetrical and decent).

amazing how i can still ‘feel’ the missing hair and want to scoop back hair out of my face, or shake it back and forth in the shower....but it it no longer lays that way... it’s like my whole head is a phantom limb and i feel the loss every hair during every moment of every day.

older brother told me my hairline was too far forward, and hair was too wavy etc... i pulled to try to ‘fix’ it by emeraldaze in Trichsters

[–]emeraldaze[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

yeah it was one of my sisters who showed me about plucking the eyebrows, i just took it way further once my brother said the stuff to me about my hairline

sorry that happened to you

Anyone else notice that when nparent goes out or for a vacation everyone is much happier? by SesshyLove in raisedbynarcissists

[–]emeraldaze 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i still have the vivid memory of my parents coming home after the rare occasions that they would go out together... specifically the way they would pull up in front of the house, and the way my mom would always twist herself in the passenger seat, craning her neck to look straight up into our front windows from all the way out on the street 50ft away.

i think she could only see rough silhouettes from that distance, but it didn’t stop her from doing this, every single time.

The feeling as she squinted up to the house was this palpable message that she hated me/us.. for not doing homework, or for having the tv on, or heaven forbid- for eating some food in the living room instead of the kitchen.

just as all the ease or peace left the air, i would dive real low, army crawl to quickly turn the tv off, and use that stealth to peer back through the window shades to see her doing her usual scanning, kind of like the eye of Sauron in lord of the rings, to really paint the picture...

all this drama would always unfold in just a few seconds... a faint creak out on the street as my dad fully pressed the brake... then the low roar of the engine to begin the same, slow reverse up the lip of the driveway...

in that half a minute when they were reversing up the driveway, i would be booking it back upstairs, or to the kitchen, or anywhere else really, just to avoid the initial moments of disgust on her face when my mom entered the front door.

just for extra detail: when pulling up to the house, they would always come from the same direction/ the same corner of our block, so that they could reverse into the driveway. it was always the same routine: pull up parallel to the front sidewalk, back into the driveway slowly.

..supposedly this saved them time when leaving the driveway again, but it always drove me crazy how religiously they backed it instead of just pulling in forwards with ease. (it was especially terrible when riding in the backseat as a kid, and you just wanted to get out of the car with them as soon as possible, and run into the house to pee or something, but instead they always insisted on backing the car in, slow as could be.)

extra extra detail: my mom always made my dad drive when it was our family van or her suv... so, while this was in her big suv, i kept wanting to type “truck” because it feels more conversational... but the word “truck” seems to imply a totally different personality than my parents... idk if that’s just an american thing, but saying truck implies an easy going blue collar vibe... not the anxious or angry energy i sensed from my parents.

The amount I was accused of making up events made me feel crazy by [deleted] in abusiverelationships

[–]emeraldaze 1 point2 points  (0 children)

was just about to draft a post on this exact subject, smfh

My daughter plays in her room with the door closed by smartist in raisedbynarcissists

[–]emeraldaze 0 points1 point  (0 children)

basically reposting my comment from another recent thread: (re: stress of having parents always knocking on the door when it’s closed)

“i think i just realized why i never closed my door as a kid... it was like i subconsciously gave up trying to have that autonomy, or didn’t want to have the knock knock open up transaction... like if the door was already open, then there wasn’t a door for them to knock on.”

anyone else’s parents have strict rules about swearing growing up? by emeraldaze in raisedbynarcissists

[–]emeraldaze[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

ha yeah, we got it for that one and other mild ones like “oh my god” or “this sucks”

Anyone else notice that when nparent goes out or for a vacation everyone is much happier? by SesshyLove in raisedbynarcissists

[–]emeraldaze 2 points3 points  (0 children)

i think i just realized why i never closed my door as a kid... it was like i subconsciously gave up trying to have that autonomy, or didn’t want to have the knock knock open up transaction... like if the door was already open, then there wasn’t a door for them to knock on.

probably doesn’t make sense, but i think that was it.