Today I spoke with my best friend about the difficulties I am having with my aunt, and he reassured me that everyone has difficulty and loses patience with their loved ones. Sometimes I forget what it was like or is like being with a toxic person. I have spent a month inside of that thinking that I am with a sweet elderly woman and forgetting that she doesn’t know how to function healthy with people.
I find myself getting upset and looking crazy. I find myself questioning my reality and situations. I forget that liars and manipulators mess with your mind and you start to forget that you are a person. My aunt may be going deaf. and she may be having some dementia, but she also uses that to her advantage. She acts like she only hears what she wants to hear, and she acts like she only understands what she wants to understand. When she does it, she can do whatever she wants. She can control the people around her.
For me, when people try to control and manipulate me, I feel frustration and anger because of what my mother did to me. The longer it goes on, the worse my PTSD symptoms get. I start to feel that feeling of fight or flight all the time. I feel stressed out like someone is constantly jabbing me in the side and every time another manipulation takes place it is just another jab in my side. I have been feeling more and more symptoms. I feel like I want to run away. I feel like I want to cry and scream. I feel like brushing my teeth more and more just so I can have some control over something in my life. The worst part is that just like with my mom, the whole thing makes me look like the crazy person. Except I’m not the crazy person, I’m just someone having a perfect normal reaction to an abnormal situation. I was abused for years and years. I have PTSD. I don’t want someone coming into my home and deciding how I am going to live. It isn’t unreasonable for me to take control of simple things in my house like when the dishes get washed.
So, once again, and I am sure I will be writing this prayer quite a lot. I ask God for serenity and wisdom. Please help me to know what parts of my life and my house I can control and what parts I can’t. Give me the wisdom to know the difference, the courage to assert myself, and the serenity to accept what I can’t change.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
