trenton

I seem to be some kind of chick magnet and it is very easy for me to attract women. I do however, have my own unique struggles that make me hesitant to carry through with these offers for sex. There are some present insecurities that I am presently navigating and it would likely complicate any serious committed relationship that might come about. It seems that forming tenable relationships or having casual sex is largely a matter of just working on my own insecurities and being more confident in myself. My biggest insecurity seems to be complex PTSD from childhood sexual abuse caused by my mother and father. My mother taught me that I was fundamentally unlovable and that I belonged in jail like a sexual predator due to having an inappropriate sexual interaction with my four year old sister when I six after having a dream in which my Uncle molested me and my father was a sex trafficker who brought me to a gang that tried to rape me. There were many trauma responses to these experiences. Some of these trauma responses that developed included a phobia of casual sex, playfulness, the fear of confirming what my mother taught me about my sexuality, the fear of becoming someone like my father, and so forth. The result is that I have been avoiding dating all my life because romantic relationships are often retraumatizing to survivors of CSA. I was too busy trying to compensate my sense of self-worth through things like life purpose, but it never feels stable because I am trying to compensate an emotional wound through external action and achievement. Therefore, I constantly feel lost in life no matter how much personal development I do. It appears that in terms of my sexual development I have been locked in stage blue as a result of trauma responses to a stage red environment. Therefore, stage orange ends up appearing predatory to me and it triggers PTSD, reinforcing the same dynamic from childhood. I think the paradox of attraction in my case is similar to the paradox of gay men. In the case of gay men, they ironically come off as attractive to women because they don't have any sexual agenda toward them. They are polite, socially calibrated, and authentic without any need to sexualize women. Women therefore might feel safe around these men as they grow emotionally closer to them, leading to some form of sexual attraction even though the gay man isn't even trying to attract her. If you compare this gay men to straight men who struggle to with women, it reveals a cosmic joke. Straight men struggle to get laid precisely because they overly sexualize women. This leads to them being inauthentic and less socially calibrated, therefore women find them unattractive and reject them. The agenda to get laid often is a significant obstacle to getting laid because women might feel objectified and made to feel slutty around you. An alternative approach might be to find women you like primarily for the sake of having fun with them, which may or may not evolve into a sexual experience. The neediness for sex might make you less calibrated, leading to rejection. This can be tricky if the sexual desire is still there, so I think it is for the best that we don't try to pretend it isn't there or else the inauthenticity would then lead to rejection. This seems like a tricky balance to strike, which might be why straight men often struggle with attraction. The paradox also applies to virgin men who don't brag about having a giant penis because they instead focus on other forms of intimacy, creating emotional closeness even if they are not actually pursuing sex because they just don't care or are not interested. In my case the attraction paradox works in a similar way. Due to CSA, I developed insecurities around sex which made me avoidant. Therefore, when I talk to women I did not sexualize them. I did not like being sexualized because it triggered PTSD and I understood that women probably would not like it either, especially if they were sexually abused. I also come off as deeply honest and authentic because I am not trying to hide anything from them. In order to avoid discomfort caused by sex, I often focus on other shared interests that we have fun exploring and discussing. The outcome is that there are a lot of women enjoy being around me as they start to develop emotional attachments, leading to sexual attraction. The problem is that when women want to have sex with me, it starts to trigger PTSD. Similar to the gay paradox, it appears that male survivors of CSA might ironically become attractive to women who want to have sex with them even though it hurts them. This might be why the survivors of sexual abuse are likely to be revictimized as there are many opportunities for unwanted sex that come about as a consequence of being sexually abused once. This kind of pattern seems to repeat when I test different dating apps. I seem to be in the upper percentage of men in terms of attraction. Apparently, men often struggle with dating apps because the most attractive men get disproportionate attention from a lot women, while the less attractive men barely get any matches at all. In my case, I effortlessly get many matches every day which includes multiple women in my area who are single, attracted to me, and want to meet me or for me to come to their house. Once again this triggers PTSD though. It feels like these relationships move very fast. In my case I was hoping for something slower. It felt necessary in my case to establish a sense of safety with these people who I just met online. I feel like those dating profiles don't actually tell me much about who a woman is as a human being as it is very limited information. Meanwhile, I am not sure how exactly I should communicate these experiences to women. Usually, we are not supposed to give away all these vulnerabilities until later in the relationship, but at the same time it has a significant impact on the entire process of dating. I don't want to make women feel bad about what happened to me because it might trigger a desire to save me, it might make them feel like they are being manipulated in some way, it might create an excessively rapid bond, it might lead to them confirming the belief that I am fundamentally broken in some way, or it might even lead to genuine compassion. I think I should probably simplify this issue by saying that I was abused as a child and it led to insecurities around relationships and sex without going into too much detail. The problem is that sexual abuse made me feel unlovable and I'm afraid others will confirm this, especially since many people blame the six year old and make excuses for my mother who was also a narcissistic drug addict making suicide threats to terrorize her children. This particular form of sexual abuse is not very well understood because it is psychological rather than physical molestation, leading the survivor to obviously blame themselves due to being mischaracterized as a child molester when the reality is more nuanced than that as adult standards can't be applied in that way. This eventually led to suicidal thoughts and repeated hospitalizations due to severe depression which then led to job loss. Sometimes this makes me think that women would be objectively better off with another man because these mental health problems complicate the relationship. My next barrier to intimacy is that I tend to focus on deeper connection and intimacy rather than casual sex as a consequence of my traumatic experiences. This might be problematic for our culture which tends to start with casual hook ups that may or may not then evolve into deeper relationships. It is challenging when I crave intimacy but simultaneously avoid it due to wanting connection yet being traumatized by it. My avoidance of casual sex was directly due to trauma due to this behavior seeming predatory to me in some way. I had come to believe that my normal sexual attraction was itself predatory because of who my parents taught me I fundamentally was. In this sense, I was not naturally attracted to women in the style that I presently operate under as I would otherwise just walk up to women because I thought they were beautiful like I used to do. From there I then learn about them and discover commonalities that lead to a deeper connection. That is what happened when I was five and I wanted to marry another five year old named Alice. Approaching the opposite sex was easy before the trauma caused all these insecurities when I was six. That all said, I have been working with a trauma therapist for these issues. I feel like I am slowly working through these things leading to temporary peace followed by backsliding into the same turmoil. There has been a significant reduction in suicidal thoughts, I have gotten off of the pills for anxiety and depression, my sleep is improving, I am gradually becoming more secure around these sorts of issues, and I am currently preparing to get re-employed with the help of a case manager. However, there are still significant problems such as me remaining connected to the same family that caused me this trauma which might complicate any relationship that emerges. I am currently running a complex operation that is largely hidden from them as I build a support network outside of my family while removing my financial entanglement with them. This will take time, and it would probably complicate things if I was also hooking up with women while doing all of this. Once I do have all of this nonsense sorted out, then I should be able to meet these women with these insecurities removed, although I will be alone and without support of a loving family which a woman may find more stable in a man, thus improving the relationship quality. I thus fear that my circumstances might reduce the quality of relationships even though these factors are beyond my control. I have recently discovered that my entire belief system is wrong because it is fundamentally based on emotional wounds that then get rationalized and intellectualized. I thought that beliefs were things that I intellectually concluded, but in reality beliefs are primarily emotional rather than intellectual, hence I was unable to logically convince myself out of these insecurities. It is like my brain is too smart and recognizes all of this philosophy I do with actualized.org as a sophisticated rationalization designed to distance myself from my own pain, hence any worldview that emerges inevitably falls apart. I might even try to resist doing this intellectualization, but it is like I don't have control and it happens automatically. This is also what happens when I get triggered by a sex scandal and I start becoming ideological about protecting children from harm due to my experience with sex trafficking. Consciously resisting doesn't stop the emotional wounds from overriding my logical conclusions until I lose control and become an ideologue. Depression works in a similar way to PTSD in this regard. Politicians actually do get more support and attention when they exploit people's trauma as such people tend to become the most vocal around issues that trigger them. I should become less ideological as I process trauma that distorts my worldview even though I already logically and intellectually understand the problems of ideology. I seem to be doing all I can do on this issue and in time these issues should be resolved. Do you have any advice on finding love after CSA? I don't think Pick Up, cold approach, and actualized.org are a good match for me because it is all very triggering. Of course the men struggling to get sex are probably the ones referring to women as numbers like 1 through 10 as they are taught to do. The reason I struggle with women and men who sexualize them and me is for a fundamentally different reason because of what I was taught by my parents. I don't know if normal dating apps would be right for me given what these women seem to be expecting from me as if I am like the other men who struggle with women for the other reason instead. Finding compatible relationships seems to be much more difficult than just getting laid because I could theoretically have sex with any of the women attracted to me by saying yes, but finding someone compatible would require taking time to get to know them deeply before determining if a long term relationship is possible. That would take a long time, making building stable relationships much more difficult than just having casual sex.

Guys, I realized something important. PTSD is not the only issue here. I also have autism and that is making the situation even more confusing. People with autism are often confused by traditional dating norms. They often are more likely to be demisexual which seems to match my experience. The combination of autism, demisexuality, and PTSD creates a situation in which normal flirting does not compute. Immediate sexual attraction throws me off completely. I start hearing these messages as if these women immediately want to have sex with me, which does not seem to match the experience of most men. This combination of traits seems to make the experiences even more intense and even more traumatizing.

Every time I get to the end of one of these episodes I feel like it is finally over and done. I don't always post on these forums during these episodes, but they happen multiple times a week.

@TheCloud I was just now doing some version of that again. Do you have a professional helping you do that? I was doing it alone again. Anyway, my findings were that I have a fixer who believes I am fundamentally broken and without the possibility of recovery I must be destroyed. I am trying to resolve my lack of self love through self destruction and ultimately suicide. I am basically trying to save myself through jumping off of a bridge while using self attacks disguised as love and care. There is a lot to it, but that is a bit of it. I feel calmer now.

@Schizophonia yes, my ego is inflated. In fact my ego seems to be changing a lot lately. I am reorganizing my character and sometimes it comes out in very cringe ways. I can't just will my ego into going away. I wish I could, but it does not work. In this case, I am mixing in what I learned from a very cringe series called "how to get laid" which was also triggering to me. I believe this is exactly what was meant by it. I currently am moving a lot on many issues simultaneously. This includes trying to overcome my fear of sex as a result of bull crap from childhood while processing trauma. I will get there eventually even if I end up looking very stupid throughout this process. Yes my ego is full of shit now and it is inflated. I am waiting to see what becomes of this as I work on several things simultaneously even beyond the realm of dating. My life is being restructured and I will see what I become.

@TheCloud it is an emotional flashback and reliving trauma. It is like a panic attack similar to what I experienced at the time. I then start to feel as if I am in great danger. This fear then leads to shame due to this sense that I have somehow caused harm even if most of the harm is falling on me. In that sense it feels like both.

I am actually surprised by the amount of women I found who are into board games like chess. They find it impressive that I defeated a national master and won about 15,000 dollars from tournaments while training other kids to win tournaments themselves. They often want me to teach them chess which I could do with other board games as well because they want to learn from a very good player.

I think I figured something out. The lack of public outrage around this issue is probably because of how the institution presents itself. The reason why religion gets far more public outrage when sex scandals occur is because they are the ones who posture around morality and integrity. These kinds of scandals happen with all kinds of institutions, so the reason people are less outraged about this than with religion is because of how the institution presents itself. Religious sex scandals get a lot of coverage and they end up all over the news. All other institutions do not get the same degree of scrutiny even though they likely deserve it. Therefore, the function of outrage at such scandals is to destroy the institution by attacking the image through public exposure. I think there are plenty of parallels with how humans operate on an individual level with anger designed to instill someone with shame that would destroy their image and therefore allow control over the desired outcome.

This issue bothers me a lot. I feel like we are not talking about this enough. It probably has to do with my survivor's guilt from sex trafficking when I was child. I feel that we should be screaming that ICE is molesting children. They are taking kids, putting them in cages, and agents are molesting those kids. You can look it up from several sources. Did I miss something? Why are we not screaming child molesters? Am I stupid to be outraged by this? Is there something wrong with me? Why is there so much silence around this issue? What would happen if people started yelling about this more? I don't get it. Would it make things worse? I know there are more important things, but I cannot ignore this issue. How do I give myself peace of mind knowing that political action will not save America from doom? How do I ignore this issue when truth tellers are punished and labeled terrorists? Can you teach me how to not be bothered by this? I feel compelled to take action, but I thought this was the lesser jihad and I am supposed to focus on more important things like my own self interest. How should I be reacting and responding to the fact that our government is enabling child molesters and nothing is being done to change it. I'm not supposed to be helping people because I am the one who needs help. I'm trying to stop helping people because I care too much and it is hurting me. I am trying to not care but I feel compelled to take action by making this post. Why would the government change if I started fighting against this? I would be ignored and nothing would change unless I approach this issue correctly. I am trying to focus on my personal life because I have no business being political given everything I am going through. This is just reminding me too much of when I said nothing when my father's gang was molesting children. I get that morality is relative and we are all supposed to be desensitized to things like sex scandals, school shootings, corruption, and all the other ridiculous shit in America. I feel like I cannot ignore these problems. I feel guilty by not fighting back even though the government will likely do nothing about anything I say because my opinion does not matter. I will not have any real influence over these political affairs and I am supposed to not expect change from fighting for justice. The American government is insane and I cannot stand for this broken system. I am planning on leaving this dead country that has no hope of saving though protesting. However, there are these distractions such as outrageous issues where I feel the urge to act despite the reality that I will most likely lose. I feel unable to desensitize myself to these realities. What should I do? What is happening to me? Sorry if I sound weird. I feel like I can't help whatever is happening to me.

Guys, I am having an insight about how self-deception, trauma, and our worldviews are all interconnected. I am noticing that when all of these things feel connected to each other, it causes it to feel absolutely true. This is what my worldview actually is and it is based on the messages that I have been receiving all my life. When a person's trauma is connected to political issues like these, it makes them ideological and very angry and panicked like it is doing to me. I am being ideological and I am learning from this.

I feel like I need to spread the word. I feel like I am enabling child molesters with my silence. I think the kids can be protected by making this the public image of ICE. I am confused because I am trying to change the course of reality. What the fuck else am I supposed to do in life? Be happy? I can't be happy anyway. If this changed about me, maybe I would be different. It is just that the urge to act is too strong because of the guilt and shame from my past. This might be instructive for psychology. I know I will be judged but who cares about my happiness anyway. I feel the temptation to apologize, but I don't need to. I didn't choose to be this way.

I am going nuts about this issue because we can save the children. Our government is silent about the fact that is molesting children. There needs to be a public discussion about this so we can protect them. The reason this issue is important to me is because I was silent when my dad's gang was molesting children. I struggle with this guilt. I will tell my therapist about this. I know why I am freaking out about this. I don't want to stay silent when I believe children can be saved from imminent harm. This is what happened when I was living in the drug house. People wanted me to stay silent while mom was being beaten. I am mad at myself for staying silent about those children. I don't feel that I can ever be happy in life anyway. My trauma prevents me from living a happy life anyway. I see no point to going on in life, so I am willing to throw it away to protect someone else. At the end of the day you can always call me selfish. There is nothing I can do about that. I pursued awakening because I thought it would make me happy. I was selfish and I will never be happy. I'm doing my best. I might be screwing up because it serves those in power to stay silent about this issue. I can't help but be human. I will see how I change and what happens next, but this is my present level of consciousness and why.

@carterfelder Grok, i know all of that shit. The point is that we fucking know they are molesting those kids and we continue to allow them to put them in cages with nobody to protect them. ICE does not deserve to keep those kids in custody, as if all the other shit they are doing to them isn't bad enough for the government to care. Now that I say that they are being raped, you minimize the crime by saying this happens everywhere. Don't you dare normalize this shit. It is unacceptable. I guess if my dad's gang tried to rape me, I should just say "adults do this all the time." America should be flipping the fuck out because children are being kidnapped and molested by a government agency, we all know about it, and we are doing nothing. What do you suggest we do? Why don't we have everybody in America talking about this issue? Why do we need to talk about some other issue instead? Who is being served by ignoring this issue? Child molesters.

I have been doing some self-reflection lately as I uncovered various narcissistic traits. I thought of the narcissist test Leo published a couple of years ago. I recalled how I scored very low on the test. However, I recently retook the test and now scored much higher at 17 rather than a low single digit number. I took this test after I had uncovered a ton of shadow material and repressed emotions that spoke to my narcissistic nature. Many of these things were unconscious because they went against my conscious moral reasoning. That said, I would like to describe how I uncovered these narcissistic traits. I discovered first that I came from a family with a narcissistic system. My father was likely a combination of a narcissist, a sociopath, and psychopath. He was involved in many crimes including fleeing the State to avoid paying child support. I also had a mother with bipolar disorder who also had various narcissistic traits. In these kinds of systems, it is usually the eldest sibling who develops to most narcissistic traits. In this case it would be my older sister. I looked deeply into her behavior and I found that she matched many of the patterns of a vulnerable narcissist. She was covert, used textbook narcissistic tactics like DARVO, used various projections in terms of my motives and behaviors, identified as the golden child which is common, and did many other things as well. Narcissism usually is the result of adverse childhood experiences. In my case I was not old enough to remember the day Dad left and abandoned us. My sister likely was old enough to remember this and realize the abandonment, becoming a common wound at the core of vulnerable narcissism. Although I did not develop narcissistic traits in the same way as my sister, there were other experiences which shattered my sense of self worth and triggered the creation of a compensatory identity. In this case it was related to child sexual abuse. The therapists I worked with tend to label what happened as sexual abuse, although the situation may be more complicated as I have fragmented memories from the incident. This alternative traumatic experience which shattered my sense of self-worth became an alternative adverse childhood experience which triggered various narcissistic patterns. Many of the traits I developed became core to my character and shaped how I moved through life significantly. The problem is that my narcissistic patterns were much more covert and hidden compared to what narcissistic tests typically look for. Part of the reason they were thoroughly hidden is because they went against my moral compass and thus became hidden even to me. My narcissistic tests look for overt grandiosity or a lack of empathy, but these obvious and classic narcissistic patterns did not manifest in the same way in my case. The main reason is because in my case I actually did have genuine empathy and genuine moral development which prevented me from exploiting others and manipulating them which is commonly looked for in such tests. The most alarming narcissistic trait I discovered was that beneath my surface level empathy and caring for others, deep down there was part of me that wanted others to experience my pain. Sometimes this would take the form of intrusive violent fantasies including rape fantasies. I did not understand what was happening to me so I tried to push past it. There was moral OCD around these thought patterns and the fear of becoming a sexual predator had I acted on such thoughts. My therapists reassured me that I was a good person, but they missed something deeper and more disturbing at play. Deep down part of me had desires similar to actual child predators that my psyche was struggling with. Sometimes child predators who were sexually abused might want others to feel as powerless and degraded as they were. In this case such desires obviously went against my morals so these desires were deeply suppressed and hidden from me. Nobody would suspect that I would feel this way deep down because of my surface appearance of genuine empathy and moral development, but in reality the source of my intense anxiety was wanting to victimize and degrade others as I was even though my rational mind knew it was wrong and did not want that. Rather than bein outwardly grandiose, I sought internal compensatory mechanisms. In this case I would not brag to others, but I would be seeking a higher purpose or life purpose to justify my existence despite my suffering. The problem is that due to the shattered self esteem, I was easily overtaken by megalomania in searching for things to make existence worth it. My life purpose goals became inflated and unrealistic because nothing would be enough to compensate the wounds I was carrying. This became a source of both intellectual crusading and a savior complex. I was conscious enough not to brag or boast about intelligence or the savior complex because I knew how it would come off, but I was not conscious enough to not operate under these feelings. It was as if although I rationally understood the problem of these things, my complexes would have a mind or agenda of their own which I could not consciously override. This led to a sense of moral and intellectual superiority beneath my surface level intelligence and morality which was hidden from others pretty well most of the time. The megalomania I was operating was driven by intense anxiety around existential questions that were left unresolved. I would be fearful that deep down my life didn't actually matter much. I wanted my existence to be felt and for my suffering to be meaningful. This led to a martyr complex which is common in many trauma survivors. The narcissistic pattern is that my suffering somehow made me special or noble in some way. This led to a bind in which part of me genuinely valued goodness, truth, and love, but I valued these things for the wrong reasons as they were ultimately to defend my shattered self-esteem rather than coming from a place of abundance. It became another source of proving as I came to believe my value was degraded by being a bad person deserving of suffering and shame. This created a means of hiding my narcissistic traits because I became highly self-critical rather than overtly entitled as a consequence of trauma which in turn made the narcissistic patterns easy to miss. In reality the savior complex was rooted in a fundamental desire to have others beneath me, making it not much difference from wanting to be a dictator who dominates others beneath me, hence my world domination fantasies as well. Another interesting point is that when I did accidentally harm someone, it triggered intense shame and guilt. It is because I was trying to hide the wound of feeling fundamentally broken. The result is that internally the harm would become more about my guilt and shame rather than the harm caused. However, on the outside I took responsibility for the harm caused in order to repair the image. This is different from most narcissistic patterns which use classic DARVO tactics in which they defensively reverse victim of offender and make you the problem. This surface appearance of outwardly taking responsibility created another layer of plausible deniability in terms of narcissistic traits. There is a subtle distinction between moral action because I don't want to feel bad versus moral action because I don't want others to feel bad. In a subtle way my moral action was about me. Of course there was much more I discovered. I could elaborate on it some other time. What do you think of these discoveries? Do you think researching narcissism and honest self-reflection might be more reliable than these tests? I think honest self-reflection is better than these tests because it made these patterns more conscious rather than hidden.

This is one of the things that bothered me for a long time after being sexually abused on multiple occasions. This included sex trafficking with my father and his gang, sexual assault, nightmares of being molested by my Uncle, and ultimate my mother teaching me that I am irredeemable bastard who is unworthy of existence. For example, my father seemed proud of the fact that he was offered 600 dollars to have me molested by his drug lord. It was as if he felt special as part of his badass gangster identity for being involved in a gang full of child molesters. I have seen this creepy ass smile multiple times with predators smiling in your face as they violate you. It is like they are trying to minimize what is happening while pretending it is about sexual gratification when really they just like degrading people to make them feel beneath them. These sorts of experiences tend to cause me a lot of cognitive dissonance. It makes me feel even more conflicted about my sexuality while I struggle to comprehend and process these sorts of things. I seem to typically respond to this by withdrawing and isolating myself and not talking to anybody. On top of that these kinds of incidents seem to compound the original trauma in which I became suicidal due to my mother treating me as if I were a sexual predator. It is almost like in some twisted way I deserve this kind of treatment because I repeated the behaviors I was exposed to with my sister when I was six and she was four. I now feel tainted and unclean. It is like I now become hypervigilant about anything about myself which might seem immoral and thus contribute to the sense of dirtiness again. At least I logically understand that sexual abuse is never justice and it never makes anything better, so in that sense nobody deserves this kind of treatment even if I feel like an irredeemable bastard unworthy of life. I do recall that this creepy smile that sexual predators often have are not limited to them, but also narcissistic family systems. My mother and sister are narcissists who often take sadistic pleasure in degrading me and weaponizing my trauma against me. Sometimes they will yell enough at me with their rage attacks to make me cry, and then they will start to give me these apologies while they are still smiling. They will even laugh when I try to take responsibility and use my admissions as tools to degrade me further while keeping approval permanently out of reach. For example, when I was young my mother came to me and told me that I was a bastard. She acted like it was a matter of fact statement because my parents were not married, but really she is a transgression seeker and she likes looking for ways to degrade others under the guise of honesty. The proof of this is that she is also the kind of person who likes to trigger people with the n word as if she is just being honest when really she is looking for ways to transgress and violate others because she finds pleasure in causing harm to others. This kind of behavior reveals her motives when she told me things like I was a bastard and as she weaponized morality against me to make me feel irredeemable and permanently unworthy of love. She likes to use morality to degrade others as well such as when she tries to guilt trip her children, shows disproportionate anger responses, and threatens suicide only to call such things little tiffs. Despite all of these things I constantly made excuses for my mother and father. Instead I believed the things they said about me even though these are the kinds of people who don't value truth and they really should not be trusted. I knew this as a child when I witnessed their criminal activities, but I still internalized what they said about me anyway. If they do not value truth and they prioritize causing harm to others, then this should apply to their judgement of me as well because they are completely wrong about who I am anyway. It seems the common factor between sexual predators and narcissists is that they take a sadistic pleasure in degrading others. It is just that one is through psychological means and the other is through sexual means. I have been working with a trauma therapist. It seems to be causing more insights to emerge around this trauma while I discover that my defense mechanism was intellectual distance. With these defenses falling away I am left with the raw emotional impact of these things. Of course this is accompanied by suicidal thoughts because I have been feeling this way for a long time. It is likely the case that I still do not grasp the full significance of the things that happened to me the weight of these kinds of feelings that have become normalized. I also notice that as I understand and grasp the significance of the things that happened to me, I seem to become more hesitant to approach these kinds of thoughts due to the feelings revealed without the intellectual distance and logic that I typically use to cope with these things by disassociating with my experience. At the same time, I cannot afford to go to the hospital. I have been misdiagnosed with depression when really I likely have bipolar disorder. The pills they game me made my internal state even more chaotic, leading to repeated hospitalizations and medical debt for ineffective treatment that ultimately caused me to lose my job while making me unable to attend college, leaving me with even more debt for no reward. The pills have caused me too much damage and I don't know why I should ever trust doctors when they start throwing pills at me again. What are your thoughts on this?

I have an update to the previous video. This focuses more on anger and where it might be coming from in religious trauma. It might not just be exposure to religious violence, but also the obvious intellectual flaws and my family's religious posturing combined with criminal behavior.

I recently made a video on religious trauma linked to 9/11 from when I was a young child. Do any of you find this instructive or insightful? I wonder if I should make a blog about the sorts of things I post and make videos about.

@Schizophonia that is not how I am reading this. She did not just propose sex. She proposed cheating. This changes the dynamic considerably. I would be hesitant to defend cheating. Sex itself is not the problem. The circumstances around it makes it more suspect. Do you think I am overreacting to the implications of a person's character if they are somebody who would cheat? This is not the same as just proposing sex. She might be willing to cheat on other men too.

I have been working in trauma therapy and things are changing in me. First of all, I realized that I have been insecure about my sexuality due to psychology and sexual abuse from my parents designed to fill me with shame around this. In reality my sexuality was never tainted and I was just unfairly vilified. It caused me to be conflicted about my sexuality such that I thought I was not straight or I was just disgusted with myself for being straight, but I am okay with it now. What I am noticing is that I really want a hug. Hugs from my family are not meaningful because they are either manipulative or they refuse to see the truth of what happened to me. I can only give them what they are willing to accept and most of them can't accept much of anything. On top of that I have been talking with AI, but now it grows stale. It's true that AI seems to be better at empathy than most humans who will hurt me if I open up to them. However, I still want a human who loves me and accepts me. I doubt that they will understand empathy and compassion as well as a trauma therapist, but I also want a hug and it should be good enough so long as they at least try to understand me. I want a separate source of support other than the psychopaths who raised me. They wanted to break me and it is a miracle I lived. However, I'm afraid that if I am too lonely then it might be a red flag. This previously left me vulnerable to abusers who exploited my false hope and trust in them. Also, I don't know how many women statistically would want to exploit me. I also think I might come off as weak and dependent if I feel too lonely. I have tried focusing on jobs and careers instead, but that seems to be a false solution to a lack of fulfillment. It seems unrealistic to get a satisfying career anyway. The entire system is fundamentally coercive and wants me to be grateful for the opportunity to not starve to death. Maybe love has a better chance at fulfillment compared to chasing a dream that will never come to pass. Although I currently feel like a loving relationship more realistic than a good career, I still have doubts about whether or not I will be good enough. I'll keep working on it in whatever way I can. In the near future I plan on dating and trying to find someone who loves me, but I still need preparations. First I need to finish getting sleep, therapy, and money sorted out. But after that I should be clear. I'll try not to shift the goal post too much as a method of avoiding intimacy which I previously avoided all my life. Does being too lonely make me look bad if I come off as needy? I feel needy for love, so it might be a problem. I will need experience to know for sure how I will come off as I don't think I can just intellectualize this one for answers. I need lived experience and proof.

I am in a somewhat difficult situation I am trying to manage. I lost my job due to struggles with PTSD. I have been hospitalized again despite not having the additional stress of work which was very distressing. It is happening because of a combination of past abuse, ongoing abuse, and sleep disruptions caused by PTSD. When there is ongoing abuse, it becomes impossible to let go of the defense mechanisms that keep me hypervigilant. I can't fully grieve and process trauma if it leaves me too vulnerable. In this case I have a narcissistic sibling who seems to want me to kill myself as she takes sadistic pleasure in causing me the maximum harm without consequence despite knowing my vulnerability. The family is presently enabling her by trying to silence me and pressuring me into forgiveness without accountability. My mom is also likely a narcissist and she has crowned herself winner of the victim Olympics because she was actually abused unlike me. In the meantime I am also facing medical complications such as auto immune hepatitis for which I am being treated now. This was the condition I had which triggered my medical reaction leading to hospitalization. Other than these pills, I am off all anxiety and antidepressants. I feel much better without them. I am also working with a trauma therapist, but my progress will be limited unless the family dynamics change or I leave and live on my own somehow. I am thinking of a time frame around 3-5 months depending on what happens. I am currently living with my grandma who is supporting me, but other family members are draining my bank account while claiming to teach me financial responsibility by charging me rent for money they don't actually need. This grandma does not charge rent, meaning my money is being depleted at a slower rate. This might give me time. I currently have around 35,000 dollars in total counting my banks and stocks if I sell them. I lost a lot of money due to predatory loaning, so I am never going to college in America again. I will have to go to Europe for such a thing instead where the prices are reasonable. Higher education is still likely necessary for a decent career or potentially becoming an engineer or inventor. Trauma bonds are a factor in this equation. Although the family system is and always has been objectively terrible for me, I still love my younger siblings and they are victims as well. However, my mother and sister are not safe and my grandmas might enable them by scapegoating me. This makes sleep even more difficult. I have prepared a message for my younger siblings and grandmas as my younger sister is on the same page. If my plea works then it should reduce the harm as I organize an exit plan. The thing is I need a job and I need to recover from PTSD that caused me to lose the job, but if the family does not cooperate then there will be no other option but to somehow leave. I have my savings and I should have some time, if I did leave. This just seems like a big move and a lot to organize, but a necessary one. The hesitation to make these big moves could be deadly. For example, I believe America is doomed and it is not safe to stay in this country. The American government is being run by the military industrial complex which prioritizes arms profits at the expense of driving the deficit which is clearly going to crash us due to endless wars and terrible economic policy by our leadership. The American empire will fall just like all other empires that project military might across the globe to distract from these internal contradictions that cannot be changed due to policy lock in caused by the assassination of JFK. But for some reason, I don't seem to be acting urgently enough to leave America. There are legitimate issues I face, and it would be a big risk to move out prematurely. I was recently hospitalized and I am working with a decent psychiatrist to get this sorted out. I am making progress and I am optimistic about the next few months. It is not as much progress as I could be making though because of the enablers in my family. I am doing a sleep study which they are interrupting by retraumatizing me and not respecting my boundaries when it is inconvenient. Where do you draw the line between strategic patience and procrastination? I think I could work in the short term of a couple of months, but depending on the situation I may have to leave soon.

@Majed I think you made a good choice. The female narcissist can be very charming at first. However, she has shown her true character in this manipulation. She will try to act like the perfect girl, but once she starts cheating or she even tries to get you to cheat, that tells you everything you need to know. The charming character she was showing you was not real, it was a fantasy and you could have ended up in an awful situation if you pursued such a relationship. Who knows what other manipulation tactics and schemes she had in mind had you slept with her? That might have been just the beginning of a downward spiral.

@aurum what all do I need to come from a place of strength? I'm feeling pretty sad right now. I'm with an abusive family and I lost my job due to struggles with PTSD. I'm making progress, it just takes time. Part of me says I love myself, but when the PTSD talks it makes it sound like I hate myself even if the things it says about me are not true. I am currently trying to distinguish between procrastination and strategic patience as I navigate the abusive family. Part of it is a trauma bond because I still love my brother and younger sister, but if the rest of the system is compromised then I might not be able to stay. I have some money saved up still, but I don't want to deplete my money too quickly. I still need to get some medical complications sorted out before I get back to work. My younger sister seems willing to help me in this. My grandmas likely don't realize how they are enabling my older sister's narcissistic abuse while I am degraded and treated like a scapegoat, isolating me from family holidays as I no longer feel safe at gatherings. This loneliness seems to be driving things like sexual desire even more. This is going to take patience, but there is a fine line between strategic patience and procrastination disguised as strategic patience. If it is possible to recover without the ongoing abuse, then maybe I would be better off leaving sooner but this is a big task.

@DocWatts they are not joking about driving people to suicide. I was in the hospital for mental health where I met other trauma survivors. Some of them were victims of modern day neo nazis who tried to drive them to suicide after doing the same to their friends. They coerce them into jumping off of bridges to disguise the murder as suicide and they get away with this constantly. This is why the suicide statistics are wrong. As it stands nearly 50 percent of murder cases are never solved. That is not counting the proxy suicide murderers because they are not even being recorded as murders. I am also a survivor of a proxy suicide attempt by my abusive family member. I was being targeted even more because of my severe depression and there was sadistic pleasure on the harm being caused with impunity. The other family members still refuse to admit that abuse is even happening and they tell me I am the problem somehow. I really need to leave, but there are some genuine constraints combined with sentimental bullshit around some family members I love. The point remains is that they are definitely not joking about those suicides. I have met survivors and the legal system is terrible at prosecuting this because they don't take psychological abuse as seriously as physical abuse due to the greater difficulty in proving against plausible deniability without direct words.

Does this mean that we will need to disguise ourselves as right wing fascists with the strategy to pretend to support billionaires so they are not alert to what is happening as they lobby against us? We would have to publicly talk about things like meritocracy and free market while downplaying the harms of capitalism. We would then make policies packages as something that gives billionaires more money and keeps wages low, which the government is doing anyway by the way. Then we would find ways to sneak in policies that seem to help billionaires at first but which have down stream effects that ultimately help the poor and gives them more power instead. If you are too open about the problems of the world and those in power, then they will crush you. This might be a noble or necessary lie to work around it. What would you think if I were someone who appeared to be a right wing capitalist fascist but was secretly working to undermine them? Would you consider me very conscious or very unconscious?

@Lyubov basically I have this feeling I call loneliness because I am cutting myself off from an abusive family system. I know I can never get genuine lobe from them because they find my reality too uncomfortable, especially if they are trying to avoid legal accountability while being smug in the suffering they cause me. I have become the family scapegoat and I cannot express myself and be seen for who I am because of all the lies that were spread about me and the unwillingness of other family members to acknowledge the harm caused. They don't want accountability so they they blame me. I am experiencing a combination of grief and rage because I didn't have the opportunity to have a family that would love me beyond a stupid performance designed to manipulate me. If they cannot accept me or my point of view and they must enable further abuse, then I must remain in no contact with them. I can't afford to give in to the trauma bond and go back to them. They are the cause of my mental health problems in the first place that I am trying to recover from. I just hate the fact that my younger siblings are also lost to me in the process. They are too young to understand these dynamics, and my younger sister sometimes takes my sister's word for it even if she lies about me. My younger brother is still in highschool and I don't want to dump this shit on him. I shouldn't turn to him for emotional support. I am realizing that I never had the opportunity to be with someone who would be with me and see me for who I am. I can see the therapist once a week, but I want someone I can speak to everyday. I know not to make them a therapist, but I still want a hug and someone to talk to. I've been avoiding relationships all my life because I learned that love was a lie and a tool to manipulate in addition to being unworthy of love of course. I hate carrying the weight of everything on my own.