What’s something in your life you need to get rid of??

I can only think of one thing here, would love to say it’s a minor thing but it’s not, it’s bloody huge!! Well to me it’s huge anyway. So other than the obvious, anxiety, I would love to get rid of my fear of my ex, of living the life I want to have because of him. Sounds like more than one thing there doesn’t it, but it’s not. It all links back to him! I can’t go to certain places because I’m scared/worried/anxious (you name it, I’m that emotion – well other than the good ones anyway), the thought that he might be there, that I could see him, that keeps me away from those places. I live in a city but I am confined to only going to certain areas of that city, not because he’s told me I can’t go to them, but because of my fear of him, my worry that he’ll be round the next corner, that he’ll try and come back into our lives if he saw us. I saw him at the local supermarket a few months ago, first time I’ve seen him in about 4 years and I was a mess. He spoke to me as if nothing had happened, as if he has had no lasting effect on me. How dare he!!? How fucking dare he! My children were with me, my daughter (who has the unfortunate luck of having him as her father) was with me. She didn’t recognise him because 5 years ago she told him she didn’t want to see him anymore. I have never left a shop so fast, I chucked all my shopping into the trolley, didn’t pack it into bags, just wanted to get out of there before he was finished. Wanted to get in my car and drive away before he could see what car I drive now, before he could come over and try to come back into our lives. I was shaking, I was trying so hard not to cry as I chucked it all into the boot of the car and on the way home, whilst looking in my rear view mirror to see if he’d seen me leave the carpark, I cried. Thankfully I don’t live too far away from the shop we were in, so didn’t have far to drive in that state but I was a mess and having to try to keep it together in front of your children is bloody hard I can tell you that much. My daughter is old enough to know something was up, she knows bits about what things were like, she was 3 when we split up and vaguely remembers bits, but the main thing she knows is the effect it’s had on me since. She sees that a lot, I never slag him off to her, in front of her etc, but I can not hide the way he makes me, the white knuckles as I follow a sat nav and take a wrong turn, the sharpening of a kitchen knife, you know, the things you should be able to do like a ‘normal’ person. I hate that word, normal!! What even is that!!?

I do go on don’t I, I’ve come away from the point of the post……so what I really would love to get rid of in my life is my ex and the way he makes me feel/still controls me in some ways even after almost 10 years of not being together.

What is your biggest struggle with loving yourself??

One thing, there is no way I can pin point just the one thing here! Why is it so easy to put yourself down, I mean I could go on and on about things I could improve on, things I’m not happy with about me, things I’m not good at etc. But to actually think of positives, I struggle!! Why is that! You know the top of a CV where you’re meant to sell yourself, I get stuck on that bit, how do you sell yourself when you don’t believe what you’re actually writing!?
So anyway back to the question and point of this post……..I think my biggest struggle is I don’t see what others see. When I was having therapy for my PTSD and we were talking about the things I had done during the episode that was really bad for me, I just could not see what I had done as anything but something everyone else would have done in that situation. I’ll spread some light on that incident, so you can understand what I’m rambling on about. My ex put me through hell when I finally got the courage to end things with him, one of the times the police had to be called he’d phoned me and said I’d see what he’d done in the morning. I was scared shitless to go out of my front door (I live in a flat), I took my time as I didn’t know what to expect, him standing there ready to hurt me, a trap……I’d had many threats about this and how he’d kill me etc. So when I finally did go out of my front door, I was not expecting to see him there, hanging on a rope, from the banister outside my front door. My sister phoned the police/ambulance and with her partner at the time we cut him down whilst she got instructions on what to do on the phone. We saved his life that night and still to this day I don’t see what I done as any different to what anyone else would have done. But the therapist was trying to tell me that some would have gone back in and phoned the police and let them deal with it, especially after what he’d already done to me. I don’t know how true this is, I don’t know if I believe it! Surely most would do, if not all, would do what I done. Save a life?? I really don’t know. So anyway, she would sit there and after we’d spoken about it she’d ask how I felt about myself for doing that. So I would tell her that I done what anyone else would do, nothing special etc. When she asked how I would feel about someone else who had done the same, I was able to say that they were brave and strong, I’m sure there were other words I used but when she bought it back to me, she said so do you see yourself like that, no. No is my answer to that. So I think my biggest struggle with loving myself is me. The way I see myself. Now how the hell do you go about changing that when it’s been the same way for so long!?

Domestic Abuse

I’ve been on training for the last 2 days about domestic abuse. Although I expected it to be a bit upsetting I never expected to come home and have panic attacks. Domestic abuse takes such a long time to recover from, don’t even know if you ever fully recover. It’s scary how you can be in a situation and never realise how bad things have got until you try to leave that situation. Hate that it still has a hold over me, can still get to me but I’m determined that one day I can talk about it without becoming an emotional mess. If you know or suspect that someone is going through domestic abuse, don’t look away, be there when they need to talk, don’t tell them ‘well just leave then’ it’s not that easy! More importantly, be there for them after they make that decision because leaving that situation is possibly the hardest and scariest thing they will go through.