Sometimes, it IS about me.

Sometimes I do not like myself very much.

He has ten years' worth of a gaping black hole that should have been filled with nurturing, security, innocence, and joy. It was filled with fear, abuse, more fear, insecurity about food, insecurity about housing, insecurity about truth and its purpose, more fear, more abuse, and more fear.

Slowly, we've been scooping out the muck. The fear and insecurity are at least partly gone... but the current good doesn't fill the void. It's not proportional. It's three months of good and ten years of bad, and I don't see how I'm ever going to catch up. It's unreasonable to expect a core shift, but I think I had expected him to be at least as cooperative as he was in his first and second week here.  Recognizing that he feels safe enough to test me is of little consolation.

I try to stretch myself to fill the gaps and make up the difference, and then I get so damned tired and frustrated when he is incapable of recognizing the gargantuan effort (there again is the whole "don't take it personally"thing).

I don't know how to get him past this.

My wife has taken both kids for most of the weekend. I am stuck between grateful that I had some time to finish some school work and beating my head against the wall because I can't seem to release the anxiety and tension enough to actually accomplish anything with the time that I've been given (which has led me to writing this entry in a flickering hope that I might be able to reset my brain and be productive so that I, too, can avoid acting like an ungrateful cur who is never happy about anything).

I cannot let go of the anxiety and the stress. I try to self soothe - epsom salt bath, time away from the house, food (that's a bucket of funk in itself), music... none of the things I usually do are working.

I know it's trauma, and that on some level he and I are the same. A huge burden was just lifted from my shoulders after nearly twenty years, and I am approaching full closure on something that has all but tortured me. I should be ecstatic, and was for the first hours after receiving the news... but it didn't stay.  I have a weight lifted knowing that person is safe now, but that's where it ends. I still have an anger that colors the way I see the world. I have tried for seven years to get rid of it, but it persists. I don't actively think about it, but that doesn't seem to matter at this point. I don't trust people. I look for hidden agendas. I stand guard over my children like a wounded bear stands over a cub, ready to make one desperate last stand. I see the bad first and then allow flickers of reflected light to point out little bits of good. I don't want to be this way. I hate being this way. Yet, here I am, and there he is, and the only thing I have learned more than he has is that it is possible to exist, push through, and be successful in spite of it.

For now, I am trying to create good. It works for a time but has a letdown afterward.

I'm going to keep reading and work on sorting myself so that I can continue to help him do the same. If you have any books that might be of assistance, please leave the title and author in the comments. Right now I'm wrapping up The Four Agreements and moving into The Untethered Soul. Both are about adjusting your worldview. I have a few trauma-specific books like The Body Keeps the Score that I may return to as well now that I'm in a different mindset than I was when I first read them.

When I see him, I see a traumatized kid. When I see myself, I see a rotten-attitude adult who should know better. Maybe this relentless flagellant attitude is where I need to start. Beating myself isn't getting the desired result.