Shamed and Embarrassed

Through my sleepwalking periods...

“You may have spent a season sleepwalking through your life.”

~Dr. Thelma Bryant

I sure have. I was thinking about and sitting with this quote today.

This describes me.

After Dad died, then after the miscarriage, Mom dying and Jeremie’s suicide three month trilogy of death, I walked around in a bit of a fog.

I remember my former partner and I walking around Florida, the Keys, before COVID hit, just in a complete mental haze.

It wasn’t all sleep deprivation.

I felt like I existed in a dream-like world. It felt surreal, not like real life.

I kept thinking how ridiculous it was that Jeremie was dead from his own hand, five years after Dad had died the same way.

My mind could not quite comprehend that. It couldn’t take it in all at once.

I don’t believe in repressing or shutting down the grief. But I seemed to have no free will or conscious choice in the matter.

Instead, my mind was trying to save me. It would only allow me to process things a bit at a time.

The tricky part of this is that I still find that I am trying to process pieces of my journey and the losses.

This is what is meant by complex grief and complex PTSD.

It is my experience and it is why I work so hard to trying to heal, to get my mind and body to absorb what has happened, somatically, to be able to free myself from the trauma. (In this way/definition, trauma to mean that the mind/body cannot accept or process all the megashit that has happened…a very scientific and proper definition.

I also sit with the above definition because I now think back on the mistreatment and abuse that I endured by my former partner, the emotional manipulation, gaslighting, deflecting/projecting/blame, and I think—what was I doing? Was I sleepwalking?

I think I was in a sleepwalking state. I was trying to survive.

Did I love him? Absolutely? But love has its limits. And ultimately, when someone treats you in such a way that when his new love pursuit is appalled, you have to step back and wonder—why did I endure that?

I am self-reflective to realize that there was a significant amount of trauma-bonding that was happening. He capitalized on that.

After losing all my family so soon, he became all the more important to me. I saw him my family; I tried to make his family my family. I now realize that this was again something that could benefit him in many ways (as you have to learn to do, this reframing, when dealing with a narcissist or someone with narcissist tendencies—how did this benefit him?) I see he had affordances through my free childcare, relationships with his family, domestic help and emotional support that he enjoyed the benefits of but did not give.

But this post is not mean to be a bashing of him. I have moved past that. I have given him enough energy.

This post is meant to re-center myself and honestly ask myself: why didn’t expect/demand and think that I deserved better? He certainly did.

I do believe that we accept the love that we think that we deserve. I did not hold standards and criteria up with him. They were there initially, of course, through love bombing manipulation, but, over time, they dissolved and—through my love and care and devotion to him—I allowed him to also erode my sense of self worth.

This happens gradually, in such small increments that you don’t even realize that it is happening. That is how it can work, to succeed.

Narcissists are many things, but they’re not dumb, especially in tactics of manipulation.

I can make sense of all that.

But I also have to take from this experience—like all the other losses in my life—and learn from it. So this will not happen again. (This will be what distinguishes him from me, in moving forward with future relationships.)

How do I avoid from sleep walking again?

I could apply some really dark humor as a coping mechanism here and say that, well, in part, it will not happen again because I don’t have anymore immediate family members left-hah-to go through complex grief and losses of that magnitude again.

But seriously, the issue is more of how do I not lose myself again?

How do I keep my standards and criteria high? Expecting and demanding more for myself? To accept the love that I deserve and will give, in a reciprocal way?

One of the ways that I am doing so is to work on myself, a lot.

I felt very lost with all the losses. This only makes sense.

But the lesson that my recent breakup/the betrayal and the losses has taught myself is this:

I both need to and can make myself my own safe person.

I am strong enough and resilient enough. I am self-sufficient and solvent.

In other words, I can take care of myself. I have. For many years.

Yes, I do require a lot of emotional and social support. But I have that. I make community where I go and I have made my friends my family. I rely on them and trust them and they on me; they reciprocate.

I no longer have room for people/relationships in my life that fair to do so.

I realize that some people are more interested in the support that they can gain from you, then in giving, especially through hard times and when it is not convenient to them.

I also realize that, unfortunately, it also happens to be the case that often times people who are shame-based and insecure and not happy with themselves take it out on others. That the problem is not me. It is not my fault.

I can only control me. I have done a lot of work on myself and finished a doctoral program while my dad died of a suicide and my mother had a breakdown. I continued gainful employment and therapy during COVID while living with a narcissist. I sought out healing and I left a toxic work environment even when my partner would not/could not come with me. And I moved across the country for (only guaranteed) one year position.

I am interviewing for positions now. I take care of myself. I am so much healthier and mentally stronger than I was even six months ago.

I am my own safe person.

I forgive myself for being in a relationship that was not what I survived because I was sleepwalking and in a mind fog because I had complex trauma and complex PTSD.

But I am rising. I have risen. I will continue to rise and thrive.

I read a post on facebook awhile back that said something along the lines of forgive yourself for your tactics and strategies that you used to survive, when in survival mode.

I am so thankful and happy that I am no longer in survival mode.

Because of that, I own my own confidence and power now. And because of that, in the future, with some more self growth and healing, I will also attract a much, much better mate.

In future years, friends will no longer say to me, why did you put up with that or with him?

Because I know that I deserve better. And I will expect and accept no less.

Brain fog and sleepwalking were my reality in the past, but they need not be my future.