I’ve been struggling a lot to get past some things. People have burned me very badly and left me distrustful and timid in my approach of new social situations. I already had pretty severe agoraphobia and social anxiety. This has pitched me quite far past the edge of comfortable and has left me isolated, self-ostracized and community-impaired.

Aside from childhood trauma, I’ve been prone to self-harm and also have unfortunately fallen victim to harmful people. I know that there’s a large percentage chance of victims of childhood abuse falling into situations of abuse in their adult lives. This has held true for me, unfortunately, and it’s been tough to move past. I’ve done a lot of reading to try and understand the reason this statistic exists, and a lot of inner reflection and soul-searching. It makes sense when one considers that childhood victims of abuse have been conditioned into certain behaviors being seemingly normal, even if they’re painful.

I keep finding myself typing things out and then erasing them. I have so little trust in the world and the people in it that I don’t want to divulge any personal thoughts or feelings publicly, even if it’s “anonymous” in nature. My first time writing I didn’t think anyone would read it and that it would be easy to pass off as it having been “seen” without truly having anyone see it. Knowing that people might actually be reading what I write has put a stopper on my brain and given me intense fear of writing at all. It just feeds into the nature of my illness, and my extreme distrust of everything. I don’t even trust myself to write anymore.

My problem has been lately that if I don’t write, or at least attempt to talk to someone, about how I’ve been feeling, things well up inside me and I completely implode on myself. I have no one to talk to on the daily. I’m not currently working, so I don’t have a mandatory social aspect from that. My family is gone during the day, and they sleep at night. I’m isolated most of the time. What time I do have socializing is spent with a young child, and while it’s endearing and bonding and I treasure it, it’s not feeding the absence of companionship that adults (and I) need. My one local friend lives a ways away and has children and personal trouble, so my time speaking with them is sparse and sporadic.

A little under a decade ago, I was pretty much egged on and pushed into a very toxic, very physically and mentally abusive relationship with someone by my own family. I spent four years with this person being physically held down and bound, thrown around, punched, bitten, choked, screamed at and threatened with other unpleasant violence. He isolated me from my family and friends. He did this in the first week. Forced me to get rid of the phone plan I had with my family and put me on one with him so he could control me. Moved me out of the house with my family and into his house within 3 weeks of us “dating” each other. He was even still married, but had lied and told me it had been over and the proceedings of divorce were already actively in place. I was forced to drop a large number of friends, most of them online, and was left with maybe one or two close ones that I had to fight tooth and nail to keep.

I am still so angry at this person. Every day lately, in some form or fashion, I wish untoward ails on him. I feel like I’m still living my life as a victim, and not a survivor of abuse. And what’s worse than anything is feeling like every time I think about him or remember him (in any form or fashion) that I’m giving him the power in our relationship all over again. And for what? There is no relationship. It’s very clearly done and gone. My traumatized brain can’t separate the very real damage and fear it still feels and responds to from the fact that I’m no longer in danger, and that I’m in a safe place. He doesn’t deserve my time. He has no right to encroach on me and my current life. He’s still inflicting harm on me and now on my new family, and he probably has absolutely no idea that he’s still in my life in any semblance or regard. It doesn’t seem right that this actual physical embodiment of a walking turd gets to exist in some peaceful, meandering form of comfort while I continue to relive or suffer his abuses daily, if only through my own fucked up mind.

See, that’s the part about my OCD that sucks. I’ve always had trouble with obsessing over thoughts, and being unable to break the chain. It’s like a train track that was for some reason worked into a circle. This train is trying to get to the station but it keeps passing by the same fucking scenery, over and over again. The longer it passes, the more distorted things start to look because the train has picked up speed and is violently circling around the same thing again and again and again. This is the reason through my entire high school existence I never really slept. I went an entire week where I maybe slept a collective 5 hours in 5 days, and passed out for nearly 30 hours that weekend. I eventually learned to distract my brain in order to not obsess over the thoughts, but then I was stuck doing something else with the same compulsive and obsessive tenacity as before. It’s like putting duct tape on a crack in a dam. You know it’s not going to hold, but you do it anyway.

This person broke a lot of my trust in people. I was already a very anxious and scared individual before him, but I had never encountered physical abuse before. All of the abuses I suffered through childhood were mostly emotional and mental, with the occasional angry switch-spanking for good measure. I had never encountered someone willing to physically harm me to that extent, and I think I hadn’t believed I would ever encounter it. Who goes through life wondering if the person they may end up dating would be so angry they’d hold you down and bite your leg in 3 different places, leaving teeth marks and welts the size of soft balls?

He left me very broken, and for a while after I was just so glad to not be under daily harassment that I think I numbed to the abuses and the trauma I had endured. I just went through the motions in life. I had the few friends I was able to keep who kept me company, and eventually met my now-husband and moved past things. The abuse eventually catches up, though. It always does. It could be the day after you escape from it, or if could be five years down the line. Either way, it always finds you. Mine took a temporary vacation but has come back full force with a vengeance.

Unfortunately for me, what little peace I had found was rattled when my friend group was challenged by a particular predicament. All of these friends knew I came from an abusive background, but I never went out of my way to point it out or ask for special treatment. They put me in charge of handling a particularly nasty hang-up our friend group had, without thinking of what the stress and strain might cause. Needless to say, I was not successful at handling it the way they expected. No one had communicated succinctly or clearly what they wanted. Everyone was on a different page. And everyone used me as the middle-person to solve the crisis. None of them looked at or regarded me as human during this entire situation. I was there to tend to their hurt feelings, but acknowledgment of my own was unacceptable because, in their words, “This isn’t about you.” The people who were close to me in this situation were mishandled in a similar manner, and we were essentially shoved to the side and given the silent treatment until we gracelessly bowed out.

These are friends I had for years, even before my shitty ex. They got me through some of the worst moments when I was recovering. I never thought for a minute that they would betray my trust the way that they did. I never thought that they would be the type of people to overlook a person for who they are in lieu of some pedantic situation and their particular semantics in how to handle it. Friends are allowed to disagree, and we shouldn’t always have to see eye to eye. But I had always expected my friends to treat me with kindness and humanity. What I was essentially handed was a rotten sack of onions, and told to get packin’. They literally took the time to gaslight me in essentially the same manner my ex had always done. I always told myself if a person treated me or talked to me the way my ex did, I was out, and so I left. I could’ve tried to fight for my friendships, but when friends aren’t fighting equally as hard to keep me, why would I want to stay?

That was the end of everything. This happened last year, and I have been gradually declining ever since. Losing friends, and losing an outlet to speak to, bullshit to, or to enjoy doing things with has been the catalyst for my decline. My SO can’t take the burden of everything. My family are a big part of my trauma and aren’t safe to talk to. Trying to find any actual professional help has been nigh impossible.

So I sit around isolated, encased in my own mind, trying to stay sane. I don’t have any social interactions except with my children or my SO. The little bits and pieces I get from friends and family only trickle in. The few friends I do still maintain online never reach out to me; it’s always me reaching out to them. Like a placeholder friend, a token friend, one who just takes up space on a list or a roster. And even before this happened, I was still that kind of friend. The person that no one chooses first. My SO didn’t even choose me first; someone came before me. I wasn’t the first born child between me and my sibling, nor was I ever the first choice for both of my parents when it came to literally doing anything.

I’ve been struggling with a real existential crisis lately and it’s been tough. I want to branch out and make new friends but I just can’t bring myself to. I don’t trust anyone anymore. I don’t trust that I’ll like anyone, or that anyone will like me. And due to all of the compounding trauma, the second I notice anything that resembles a red flag, I pull a literal ghost on them and vanish. I’m skittish as all hell.

I don’t know if finding a way to overcome my obsessive train of thought over these situations will help. I don’t know if forgiveness is the first step in recovering. I do know that people say it’s important, even if the people you’re forgiving will never have any idea that you’ve done so. I feel like if I can’t grasp this concept and move on with my life, past these people who hurt me, I’m just going to continue to hurt others in turn. I’ve been on a downward mental slope that has gotten steeper as time has gone on, and I feel like I can’t stop this boulder from rolling anymore.

I know things have to change, and I’m willing to work to change them, but I also know this is 100% something I can’t successfully do on my own.