"PTSD"

In the 1980s everything hit me at once. I was 37, my mother decided to divorce my father, she ended up in ill health and I ended up looking after her. I was trying to hold down an extremely stressful job and I was assaulted. There had been several traumatic events in my childhood that I thought I'd dealt with but the assault in the 80s seemed to bring everything up and experienced what I now believe to be Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I had flashbacks during the day and night whether I was asleep or awake. I slept on the floor in the living room for about 10 years, I couldn't take care of or relate to my children and so I lived apart from them. I became increasingly more terrified, hyper vigilant, hypersensitive and I slept during the day when I felt safer and at night I sat up and kept watch.

I eventually attempted suicide and my mother's reaction to that was firstly to refuse to come and see me, and secondly when the psychiatrist phoned her she came into the ward all smiles but the minute we were alone she told me my hair was an absolute mess and that she wished she'd never given birth to me. Somewhere deep down I'd known that all along and my Mother's lack of love for me is, I believe, at the root of my problems I and the relationships I've made with people who really don't care for or about me. I had nearly just died and that was all my mother could say to me. And I was even more devastated than before. But I think the problem for people like me is - even though we're not loved by a parent or parents, we desperately want to be loved and so we keep on trying harder and harder instead of walking away and ending what is essentially an abusive relationship between mother and child.

I wore myself out trying to please my mother. When she passed away in 2004 I can honestly say what I felt was relief. I no longer needed to keep trying to make her love me. She pushed me away at the end too, so nothing changed. What I want to point out here is that when I was going through the most awful emotional and mental pain during those years, I felt so ashamed of myself, so unlovable and so loyal to my mother that I could not bring myself to talk about it to my GP or psychiatrists. Who wants to admit to anyone that even their own mother doesn't love them? I'd rather people just thought I was mad.

Today I am still struggling with the PTSD due to the assault and the depression due to being told I was not wanted. I've got 'better' and I've slid back down into depression and been suicidal again and I really hate being like this. I don't want to end my life, I just want to end this situation and the sadness and loneliness that I carry around with me on a daily basis and I want to live a happy life. I have children who I've been unable to relate to for the past decade or so, and I have grandchildren who I love dearly and who have kept me going because I really love them all and I really wanted them all. And now I want a happy life with them and to let the past go - but I just don't know how to rid myself of this heavy heartedness where my mother is concerned.

I don't hate my mother, I loved her and always will but I know she was incapable of loving me and in her own way she just used me as her emotional punch bag. I even know the reasons why - but none of that helps. No amount of insight into the why's and wherefore's makes one bit of difference to the fact that a child was unloved and unwanted. No amount of self love makes up for being wanted by that other all important person - our mother. And it's really a grieving process I suppose but I'm mourning more for someone I didn’t have than someone I did have. Hope that makes sense and thank you for allowing me to have my say.