Hi Worndown,
I appreciate your thoughtful response.
Yes, I'm VERY familiar with my triggers and how they relate to my rage.
I have several triggers but a main one, the one that happened when texting my mother, was that she (or anyone one else in my family) never listened to me. When I was a child, if you had a problem, you WERE the problem. My parents and two older siblings have been ignoring me and silencing and shunning me for my entire life.
For clarification, there was an abuse event that I can't remember when I was 7. In flashbacks I've witnessed myself (at age 7) begging for the perpetrators to "please just kill me." My family was emotionally neglectful, and I was chosen for the role of the loser, outsider, stupid one, crazy person who shouldn't be listened to. So the terrible abuse event was just followed by a lifetime of neglect - being made to be the scapegoat.
This got terribly compounded when I got sick at age 35 but my family and my friends didn't listen to me and didn't believe me. It took 15 years to get a diagnosis - even doctors didn't believe me. The stark reality is that for 15 years there wasn't even one person who asked me how I was and actually listened for even 5 minutes. That breaks my heart. It exacerabated an already bad trigger. To this day, they won't ask me how I am. They don't know about my sysmptoms. I'm disabled with this neuro-imune illness, I've lost all my friends and I'm alone.
I've worked on the PTSD for 35 years and spent all the money I had on it. Nothing has helped.
It would certainly help if I had a loving relationship and felt heard, but that seems impossible at this point. Trauma repeats itself so I had a lifetime of sudden destruction to jobs, homes, relationships and cars... really out of the blue. It's so weird. All I can say is trauma repeats itself and I've taken each destructive moment, and each PTSD bout (some last for years and do terrible lasting damage to my health) and I've studied them all for clues.
Sorry - more than you bargained for. Thanks for allowing me to explain.
Thanks. I wish I had friends who would listen. Unfortunately I've lost all my friends since I became disabled, and they wouldn't listen anyway. The toxic positivity modeled by my family seems to haunt me - mirrored in every surrounding. People only want to hear happy things. Just my existence seems to make people uncomfortable.
Thank you for your kind offer to DM and listen. Since you are here on SS I imagine you have your own troubles - as you say, you can't promise anything. I may try that, if that's okay.
Even therapists whose job is to listen and acknowledge haven't done so for me. It's like my personal existence is Dorothy walking through the poppy field in Oz- the witch's curse makes them fall asleep in the poppies. It's like that - people go brain dead around me and change the subject. the degree to which this occurs is very strange.
Your ideas are thoughtful thank you. I took a creative writing college course just to write memoirs about the mysterious abuse event and the bad family dynamics and the PTSD to help sort it out. But really, I just wanted someone, anyone to hear my stories. I just wanted to be heard! It didn't help other than that I have about 8 essays to leave behind after I ctb to explain what I've been through (that nobody knows about in my family becasue they won't listen.) I have really mixed feelings about leaving the stories for my family. They're pretty harsh. But in these rare rage moments I think, "good! They deserve to know the damage they've inflicted on me."
Once the rage has passed, I'll be back to feeling guilty about leaving the essays behind.