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One of the hallmarks of C-PTSD is the disturbed response to perceived threats. As a human or any other mammal for that matter we have four responses to threats: fight, flight, freeze or fawn.

It is only recently I found the page this post links to above and it has given me great insight into my own responses to situations I perceive as threatening.

At the moment I am awaiting news from my home country and the only thing holding up what could potentially change my life in a hugely positive way is one of people I left my home country for being my sister. It is a situation I tried to walk away from when I decided to go “no contact” with my entire family more than nine years ago.

I walked away from it again when I stupidly hoped to be able to maybe get to know my young adult niece and nephew via Facebook and that attempt served as a vehicle for more raging and hoovering from my family. It made me aware of how far removed their behavior had become and how incredibly damaging and hurtful it was and I became even more resolute in avoiding contact with my family. But that all came to nothing when the son of my mothers second husband ( a thoroughly decent man) contacted me because three years after my mother died it appeared she had left a will in which I was mentioned.

That was two months ago.

The situation I am finding myself in has been keeping me in a holding pattern for these last two months and I am feeling like the mice the cats bring in once in a while. I feel paralyzed in that “knowing that resistance is futile” kind of way and I have been feeling like this for the better part of these last two months.

I know it is useless to try to influence the situation unless I want to trigger a word storm or worse, a full on smear campaign (I found on another blog I write a 6 page rage letter from my sister once trying to “expose” me to my 300-600 daily readers totaling some 60.000 for merely using my family’s black sheep/golden child system to explain how a leading political party had managed to split a small but useful political party in two by selling the public the idea that one of the leaders was an “extremist” and the others two the good guys. I didn’t even know she knew my blog) so I try to sit back and wait it out.

The problem for me is that I never used to be a “waiting it out” kind of person. I used to be a “go getting” kind of person. I never used to be shy in trying to negotiate to fulfill my needs or those of my team when I ran a business. In fact my nickname used to be the Weasel because if any negotiating needed to be done it was I who did it.

I liked people. I liked the process and I always came out with a win-win. People liked helping me and I needed that help because we where solving difficult problems for people in the film industry when we (my husband and I) ran our company.

But here I am frozen, waiting, hoping to be able to keep my profile in this matter lower than that of my step family who let it slip, had triggered my sisters formidable raging skills and her battery of legal tools when they had the temerity to try for a reasonable settlement of my mothers will because her husband is still very much alive and needs, like my mother wanted and specified in her will, to be taken care of in his old age.

I know from experience that sometimes just pretending not to be shark food (narcissistic supply) is the best way to steer clear of more damaging interactions but I find it hard to walk away and let it all unfold as I know it must. I know the process has been  handed over to the professionals i.e. a notary who has experience  and the necessary emotional distance to deal with her. I know the will of my mother is clear and also done by a professional notary at the time and while I walked out of the relationship with my mother some 25 years ago she never saw fit to take me out of her will or diminish my part of the estate to a legal minimum so I know that she wanted me to be included and while I did not want to interact with her because it was just too damaging for me I know that in her own warped way she tried to love me as best she could.

But oh, I wish the waiting was over and the business settled and I could go back to being incognito in my little corner of the world far, blissfully far away from the dramatic typhoon that is my birth family.