Self compassion and inner child work feel impossible
I tried doing some self-care activities like baking, reading, taking photos, going to visit parks, visiting museums, taking photos, doing art and doing a couple of puzzles but while they have given me some relief and i have discovered that i am good at photography, these steps have not made me feel like i am on the road to healing. While i might not have been the most persistent in doing it and i did some of these activities only a few times, my dissociation- i am unable to feel emotions, to feel hungry, thirsty, sleep, relaxed or excited, makes it hard for me to feel like something is reaching me.I am a survivor of sexual abuse and grooming by the therapist who followed me from the age of 4 to 22 between the ages of 8 to 9. She groomed me all the time but the sexual abuse was between the age of 8 to 9. I was also subjected to enmenshment trauma by my parents who suffocated me and manipulated me during family arguments stemming from my father's parkinsons' induced psychosis into beating either of the parents. I have been sexually molested by several men. I am 30 now. I had basically no safe adult, except for arguably one of my uncles who acted as a cool uncle figure. Our teachers in high school used to basically bully us and belittle us.My history includes also stalking and animal abuse on my side. From 2019 to 2021 i stalked someone online after running a gossip campaign against him online when he and his wife made their dog's profile private and i used online apps to get around that. I had in 2023 and early 2024 a beautiful healing relationship with an office cat and when he died, i felt love for the first time. I could have healed but i chose to push back against that love out of a fear of vulnerability and i had two months later a dissociative breakdown where i lost contact with most of my emotions.I realized my trauma and i told my family and friends about it but my family and many of my childhood friends ( not everyone reacted that way but they were the ones i cared the most about because they saw me grow up) invalidated me and i decided to abuse my cat to prove i was beyond redemption and bad. I terrorized her by throwing small balls at her non-stop for her to run after and i hit her a few times with a small ball when she would not "play". There was also another incident in february this year where i stepped on her and i do not know to this day if this was an accident or unconscious abuse. While my cat has mostly recovered from the abuse, she still shows some signs of lingering trauma. While she had almost completely recovered from the abuse last summer, she shows more lingering signs after the incident in february. She did nothing to deserve that.After i had the dissociative breakdown she would use to sit not too far from me in my room but i wanted to push her away. Not long after abusing my cat last summer i repressed my remaining emotions to punish myself for abusing my cat and to counteract the anxiety i felt over small flickers of emotions resurfacing. I keep sabotaging and beating myself all the time. Among all the invalidation last summer i chose to give up on a meaningful life and to just exist and i have not really changed my mind.Words like inner child work and self-compassion seem incredibly challenging, abstract or straight up impossible for me to meet. I know in the abstract that i have a need to be loved, seen, cared for, nurtured but i do not know what to do about it especially when self-care activities do not seem to resonate. Another therapist told me that i am never going to move forward with my life after i left her. I think she was cruel but that she is right, i have invested too much energy in destroying myself for me to come back from this. I am currently no longer with that therapist if you want to know that.What makes it worse is that i could have healed after i felt love for the first time and i chose to throw it all away. As a child i had so much potential and was kind and sensitive. There is a part of me that still believes healing is possible and this is why i am still on there but my brain keeps rejecting any suggestions as impossible or not enough. My breakdown also felt very permanent. A couple of days before it happened it is like i felt it coming and i told a part of me that she was dying and she had nothing to reproach herself for .