Complex PTSD

[Backseat Driver]

8. Also helps that I'm still breathing and the perps are mostly all not!

though I did not wish for that eventuality. It's quite a shock to learn one's childhood and younger adulthood was all about religious "duty" and not love or kindness, but it sure explained a lot of the secrets, scapegoating, gaslighting, mixed messages inflicted--the family crappola that finally hit the fan of toxic permanent estrangement that my mother requested. I'm certainly not perfect, but I was always worthy of love, recognition, and support of my/our choices as a couple that she could only recognize as abandonment that deserved unjust discipline and punishment, just as we were and are at this moment in the natural order or need. None of us still breathing in my FoO need apologize; that ship sailed long ago.