u/Defiant_Annual_7486

I feel absolutely f#cked up in the head. Why do i feel so shitty and apathetic. I have tried so many things over the years. It is criminal how hard I have worked to still feel this shitty.

I do think inflamation is playing a role. There was a day or two about a year ago when I was on the carnivore diet and I felt motivation to go to the gym. My right tonsil, which is chronically inflamed, was finally shrunk down. I was also on lexapro at the time.

I thought that the positive effects were coming from carnivore, so i stopped lexapro. However, I slowly descended into despair again. I started lexapro again and never got back to the same place.

One year later, of trying many things, and I am genuinely desperate. Therapy, TRE, Yoga, changing jobs, exercise, you name it. I am now such a cynical and hopeless person that my therapist is asking me to go on anti-depressants again (which I'm against) or to find a new therapist.

Has anyone had success with carnivore? I really don't want to do it again, but I feel like I'm backed into a corner. I am desperate and will try anything, except probably antidepressants.

I was in a nasty mood this morning. The type of depression that is vigorously against life. That sees life as a melange of suffering and a container for all colorless, morbid, and cynical forms of passing the days by.

Then, as I was driving to therapy, I stretched my shoulders and pecs a little bit. The mood lifted. It came back when I stopped stretching and I had a really tough session, because I was basically “inoperable,” in the sense that my mood was so bad, that I dissociated and shut down. 

I came back home, tried to do some self care. Nothing was working. But then, I thought to stretch my shoulders and pecs again, and low and behold… the mood lifted a little bit! Now I’m thinking, this has happened before at least twice. I got some terrible mood, stretched my pecs, and my mood lifted.

My thought is that some tension in the region is pressing down on a nerve that stimulates depression. Does anyone have this experience? Don’t get me wrong, I totally have other things contributing to my depression, but holy heck if a part of it is as simple as keeping my pecs loose, that would be amazing.

For some background, I am doing SE, yin yoga therpy, and have been involved with TRE for about 8 months now. I think the tight pcs might be triggered by abandonment wounds, but also just by simple lack of stretching

I want to write a short reflection on my thoughts about mis-attunement, which I believe is fundamental to the concept of emotional neglect.

Mis-attunement is when I don't understand myself or another person, or vice versa.

How could a caretaker meet your emotional needs if they were mis-attuned to you? They couldn't. And that fundamental aspect of our childhood has created so much tragedy in our lives, even today.

For example, I'm a recovering people pleaser. I have a hard time saying "no," and trusting that I'm a good enough person even if I refuse to help other people.

But then it builds into resentment, especially after I've self-abandoned so many times instead of taking care of myself.

The catch-22 is that I don't really know how to take care of myself, because I mis-attune to what I want and need, and therefore don't tend to provide the care that will make me feel safe, loved, and cared for.

I keep falling into this trap. This morning, I agreed to help someone even though I felt resistance coming up to offering help. There's many reasonable reasons for me to have said "no." But then I thought about what I'd be doing instead, and I couldn't think of anything that would be beneficial.

So, even if I said, "no," to helping, even though I had some plans for how my day would go, I wasn't really having a good time anyway.

But now, I'm stuck in the middle of helping someone and resentful for the plans (or the optimistic version of how my day would have gone) if I hadn't offered help.

This is a deep wound for me. Offering help for other people and not knowing how to care for myself.

Does anyone relate?

It's like I'm the parent to a child that has desires that change like the weather, is extremely defiant, and is difficult to please. A child, I might add, that I didn't ask to be responsible for and that I don't really like.

I posted this in r/cptsd as well, but I think this might be a better fit here.

Ya know how they say that you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with? Well, I think I had a subconscious barrier to that belief. Because I thought I could heal myself in the same environment that I’ve been stuck in for the past 5 years.

I noticed that this past winter when my housemates were gone, I had more access to my own creativity and emotions. But now, I’m struggling to even feel sad or happy at all. I was so frustrated, "grieve, goddamnit!” 

But then I thought the obvious- none of my housemates are emotionally fluent/ liberated/ whatever you want to call it. I would say none of them are emotionally healthy, but I don’t want to be too arrogant about it. Let’s just say that none of them share my goal of “feeling more.” they’re all either stuck in their own way of thinking, more worried about making the next $10,000, or in the belief that emotions shouldn't exist in relationships.

Gosh darned! I knew this two years ago! I talked to one of them about it and he basically denied the importance of emotions. How could I be so silly to think that I could heal around these people.

I noticed it this morning. I was sad about mother’s day tomorrow. Because my relationship with my mom is rocky and I won’t be seeing her this year. I was gonna cry, but the thought came in my head, “what if x sees me or hears me?” Previously I would of had self blame, thinking that that’s my limiting belief and that I should feel safe to cry in front of the people I call friends. 

But then it clicked, I clearly don't feel safe because they have literally told me that they don’t believe in the importance of emotions. They’ve held my sharing emotions against me int the past. And times I’ve been vulnerable, they’ve joked at my expense! 

Or, even more importantly is the fact that they just don't share my goals in life. This morning I was thinking about my emotions and my body and feelings and how to feel more. How to get in touch with myself. I was going to walk to the store, and my housemate came along. He took my thoughts away from my feelings and my body and we talked about how he’s planning to make his next dollar (he’s already rich). I couldn't bring up my emotions. He doesn't have that as a goal. We speak two different languages. And that’s a real cost. I could have had a friend I am able to talk about these thighs with, but now my friends are just taking my attention away from what I care about and inviting me to play their own game. Which is fine, but friends who share the same goals feed off of each other. He will be happier with a friend who is thinking about the same problems as him (money) because that friend will have something valuable to contribute to the goal he has identified as meaningful.

aHHHHHHHHH!!!! I gotta get out of this place. It feels so good to realize that this protector part thats numbing me and suppressing my emotions isn't just stuck in my childhood trauma of emotional neglect/ emotional suppression. That it’s truly a protector for me right now, and that if I can just listen to it and act accordingly (get away from these unhealthy nervous systems around me) then the protector will be relieved to not have to suppress me anymore.

Now I just gotta find a way to get the f out. I just want to feel safe enough to cry again. To feel my joys and share them with the world again. I will learn from this. I will never call myself friends with someone I don't feel safe enough to cry with and to feel joy and all the other emotions that make life wort living.

It’s also worth noting, I have done a lot to learn boundaries and find safe people in my life. But, I have to have some grace for myself. If I’m spending three hours a day or more around emotionally suppressed people, my body is going to have a hard time opening up for the 1 hour a week I spend at therapy. My hypothesis, one I’m confident about, is that once I can get away from these bad role models, then I will start making way more progress in therapy.

I want to stay close to this feeling of being trapped. This feeling of being trapped in an unhealthy environment. It feels like the air I breathe is the very thing suppressing me. Judging me for my emotions. I think the feeling is anxiousness and sadness for my current place I call home. But the flip side of that, that’s the eagerness and drive for something better. And so, the closer I can stay to the trapped feeling, the more motivation I have to escape. It’s like when I feel anxious how dirty my room is, then if I can have the capacity to hold that anxiousness without it crippling me, then I take action to clean my room and it feels wonderful.

Now, I will do the same thing to find a better place to live. But where? How? When?

Just have to vent for a minute, maybe some of y'all feel the same way... If you're not looking for some negative energy then maybe skip this one.

But gosh darn, 8 months in and I'm still having a really hard go at things, each day. I listened to a podcast on the "neurogenic integration," channel, and the interviewee said that if you just do it 6 months, you're gonna see so many positive changes in your life.

I guess that's true, I've seen improvement in some ways- I'm less frozen in complete collapse. I'm more consistent pursuing the things that will help me out of my severe and crippling depression.

But on the other hand, I know deep down that these gains are one swing into despair/depression away from being completely nullified. I've lived on that edge most of my life, and TRE hasn't changed that yet unfortunately.

It freaking sucks.

Plus, many of the things i care about regarding quality of life have continued to be struggles- I have some somatic symptoms of an overactive nervous system. Basically, I feel physically uncomfortable most of the time. I feel bloated and stiff, and tight and low mood/energy. I still wake up feeling crappy most days and still have money issues, and still have family issues, and still have posture issues. So, yeah, this is still the part of the long-term journey that sucks, and it's just astounding how much effort I've had to put in to still feel this bad.

I hope this is an appropriate post for this sub. Mostly, I’m curious why I have the reaction I do to a specific individual who likes to share stories about movies.

My perspective is that it is not a reciprocal conversation : where he shares input, I ask questions, I share input, he asks questions. Mostly, it’s him sharing his perspective on movies.

Tonight, it went something like-> I was downstairs in a shared space. I mentioned my plans to finish a movie tonight. He seemed upset that I got the movie rec from chatgpt rather than him. I asked, "what movie would you recommend?" And then it turned into 10 minutes of him telling me about some famous but obscure movie that didn’t really seem relevant at all to my interests other than me asking the question at the beginning, “what movie would you recommend?”

By the end, the sound of his voice was litterally having the effect of nails on a chalkboard for me.

On the surface, it seems obvious why I would be annoyed, insofar as I didn't really need to exist for this conversation to happen- the person may as well have been talking to a wall (there was no attunement to my relative interest in the subject nor back and forth). But, on the other hand I feel bad because on the surface, I should really jive with this person. In my younger years I kinda enjoyed obscure cinema and didn’t have anyone to talk with it about.

But, for some reason I would really not want to enter a conversation about movies with this person. Not only am I really bored listening to them, I don’t really respect their opinion either. Whether it’s true or not, they come off as wanting to have a controversial opinion on movies for no reason other than to be different.

For example, when I shared what movie I was watching, he said that he would not have recommended it, as it’s not really noteworthy or impressive. Well, I can say that it’s really moved me personally so far, and while not being life-changing, I have enjoyed it and it’s perfectly suited to me watching the rest of it tonight- I’m looking forward to it.

Internet parents--- can you shed some light here on what exactly is going on? I don’t know, maybe other people are better at ending conversations or steering them in an interesting way than I am? I don’t doubt that my reaction to this person is reasonable, but I’m kinda just surprised at how viscerally strong my desire to get out of the conversation is when he starts ranting. I feel bad, because clearly he loves talking about movies.

Do you ever feel like you're not real, and that your past never happened?

I mean like you don't identify as the person who existed? As if to say, "the person that did x,.y, z is not me. Who grew up in a family and has a family now. And friends. And used to have a job, I don't exist. That wasn't me, and there is no person here."

But not in the spiritual sense of no-self. More like in a, "I don't know that I'm alive," kind of way.

It applies to other people too. It's a sense of, "oh, that person who I haven't seen in a while is still alive, a real person and remembers me?" Or a sense of, "wait, I would have thought they stopped existing after I didn't see them for a while."

My life just doesn't feel... Alive? Is this a cptsd thing or do I have something more serious going on?

To paraphrase gabor mate, "when the mind can't say 'no,' the body says 'no' for us."

I've long heard about the connections between cptsd and autoimmune diseases. I've been diagnosed with celiacs disease for about 15 years, and just recently (past 6 months) realized that I do indeed have cptsd.

When I look back, there is a terrible sadness for my younger self who missed out on going over to friends houses for dinner, or out to eat with friends/family once I could drive. Still to this day, my relationship with food is not great, and I miss not being able to connect with people over their food. I have to explain every time that I would love to try their cooking, and share in that with them, but that I cannot risk it, and that even if they try to cook gluten free, I probably wouldn't trust it either after being screwed over so many times by, "gluten free," cooking (cross contamination or gluten ingredients slipping in).

Not to mention trying to date with celiacs, and having to explain on a first date that I'd prefer going for a walk or something than out to eat.

if you're here with celiacs, or some form of autoimmune disease, please share your story!