Freedom recovery tools

[Iwon]

Well went to first session of recovery tools with womens aid. It’s been (Detail removed by moderator) years since my divorce now. He still tries everything to cause problems but I have read a lot and educatated myself and near enough zero contact.

I still panic and feel overwhelmed sometimes and know I am still quite fragile emotionally and tend to isolate myself.

It’s like a bird trapped in a cage…. the cage door is open but I still hide away. It is holding me back so much. I know I still carry a lot of emotional pain and old fear.

The two ladies who ran the course were amazing. So helpful and well done. Thanks womens aid. Wish I had known about this course.

I find myself crying or feeling on the edge of tears today. I came home and wrote a story about the last few months of my marriage. How scared I was he would kill me or hurt my little boy. How isolated and trapped I was in his world of lies that I believed I would never escape. I just feel like I have a million years trapped inside that I want to cry.

I want to go forward and thrive. Outgrow the story of my abuse but I think u got so numb in the end it became normal to be screamed at and so at at. I know this course is part of my journey of recovery…. but for the first hour I wanted to run out the door. I felt scared I would just break down crying. I wonder is this normal x

[freedomtochoose]

Thank you for your post today. Myself and my babes now are several years on, but I still get that ‘bird trapped in a cage kind of feeling’ occasionally and your post spoke to me today for that reason.

I have just seen my child off to school (now at secondary school which at the moment is going really well) and am trying this morning to feel moments of gratitude for this and saviour it.

Yes, I think what you are describing is ‘normal’. I am just getting used to a new ‘normal’. I managed to cry this week once (I dont’ do that much anymore think it was about having been ‘numb’ about some things for so long. Also think I had a back log of grief and loss feelings which I could only face a bit at a time. This week it was about members of my estranged family who sided with my ex and effectively betrayed me, as this might have meant I lost custody of my child. (I didn’t in the end – so I proved everyone wrong).

Some things surfaced over the past few weeks after having done a college/uni course for a number of years, after having fought for disability support to do it, having effectively been treated very badly (I feel) by one of my tutors who basically has never got what it means to have chronic ptsd and effectively set me up to fail – in that they kept creating impossible circumstances for me to work in. Finally I decided to make a complaint. It had been making me feel really bad (I think the way I was being treated reminded me so much of the way my ex treated me which was bullying) – and I got to the point with it, where I thought ‘this far, and no further’ and decided to drag it all out into the open.

It is strangely liberating. Sometimes I go along in everyday life and whlst often anxious there is also a strength there – along the lines of ‘well, I’ve already been through the worst that life could throw at me, what are such difficulties compared with that?’ I’m finding an unfamiliar strength in myself…

I do have my issues with the labels around ‘post traumatic’. How can anyone talk of a trauma being ‘post’ or ‘in the past’ whilst we still have to manage contact and whilst despite no contact, because we have children with our ex’s – they are still around, existing and given half a chance , make our lives so difficult at times.

Lately I have also felt incredibly cynical about the so-called ‘helping’ professions. This is ironic, because this is the training I have been trying to do. So many people in these professions think they know about domestic abuse, but there are not many who really do, and the assumptions about it sometimes really bother me. I know there are good people out there also.

I did domestic abuse recovery courses in the early days also, but I wish, in a way there were something for people who were several years out, as I believe that many of us have to focus so hard on building new lives for ourselves, and all the practical things that go with it – that it takes a number of years for us to deal with the trauma, bit by bit and that we go through different phases with it, a bit like the cycles of the moon, or the tides. Does that make sense to anyone?

I have just got a safety text from my child who has walked to school a few streets away. I am grateful for the new school, the new head, the place we live in, although the street downstairs is sometimes full of issues, I know that inside our home is so quiet you could hear a pin drop. I also know there are people who understand out there.

Maybe I too am currently still a bird in a cage. Or maybe I am the sparrowhawk I can see sitting on the electricity wires outside my window, maybe even I am the greenfinches nesting under the eaves.

I never thought I would be in this place, but over the weekend I heard my child saying ‘ everything is better now mummy’ and I know it is true.
All best
ftc
x

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