…more than likely, you just want a place you can talk about what you’re facing and feel normal again. What could be better than a place where other such people congregate? It sounds like a good idea, right? Support groups really can be wonderful places when you just need to get out the things that are clogging up your thoughts and they’ve helped a lot of people! This post is not to discourage you from seeking refuse among fellow survivors, so please don’t take it that way. We’ve suggested support groups in articles before. However…

The problem with seeking out havens where abuse victims, survivors, and suffers congregate is that they end up attracting those people who are truly attention seekers as well. These groups tend to become locations for people who want to publicly measure their suffering penis length or play the Pain Olympics. You end up finding those people whom you find yourself questioning how genuine their experiences are as they constantly flip-flop the history of their story, trying to soak up any and all attention they can get. Their stories sound like everyone else with just a bit more drama and anyone who presents with the slightest skepticism or question for elaboration is met with hostility matching that of an active volcano. We’re talking about psychic vampires. Not the mythical creatures that you might find in a horror movie, but a specific type of person that seems to be a black hole of negativity no matter the situation. These kinds of people are not only the “Debbie Downers” of the group, but (like Hollywood vamps) can easily “turn” you if you don’t know to be on the lookout.

They’re Not As Easy To Spot As You Might Think

Identifying problematic people can be messy because there are always going to be times where we will have gone through similar experiences as another, but slightly worse. Because of this, we should be hesitant to be hypocritical and unsupportive of a fellow group member that is saying how they’re going through a rough patch…at least…most times. Sometimes, we even become afraid to share our own stories so we don’t come across as minimizing the suffering of someone else. There is truth in sharing can create empathy, and that is, in fact, what the groups are there for. There is also a fine line between sharing in solidarity and playing Pain Olympics.

In fact, that feeling of fear in regards to sharing our stories can often come out of interacting with a psychic vampire, knowing that this type of sharing can catch the attention of the type of person that will draw attention and sympathy to themselves while minimizing your experiences. Those that seem ready to jump on any post with how much their suffering is so much more extreme that you should be grateful that you don’t have their life.

This all has the potential to create a further feeling of isolation because in a group of what was expected to be similar minded peers, you again start to feel like the odd sheep out. Instead of finding support, we start questioning whether we should feel as if we’re struggling in the first place compared to those that loudly cry about how they’re suffering so much they are useless. Instead of finding encouragement, we find ourselves surrounded by those loudly cry how we shouldn’t do anything or how our accomplishments make them feel bad about themselves.

Making a Psychic Vampire

It’s not as nefarious as it sounds. Often, those of us that are living through invisible illnesses…we lack validation for what we’re going through. You see it in those that have been recently diagnosed. It’s talked about often as they go through the intense journey of processing what their diagnosis means to the rest of their life and even their past experiences. They ask 5,000 questions about what is normal and abnormal and common and if anyone else has suffered like they have. This is completely normal and it was touched on in a past post how a diagnosis can be a curse and a blessing at the same time. It is nothing to be ashamed of, hide, or shoot holes in if you’re on the outside looking in. It’s an important part of learning to travel the road of coping.

The problem comes about when that feeling of validation and support is too good to ever let go of so we can progress above it. The idea is no longer finding support. It is no longer showing empathy. It is simply to commiserate and continue the attention that has been lacking for so long. Psychic vampires don’t want to progress into feeling better because that means they no longer get the sympathy and attention they feel they need. Therefore, they don’t want you to feel better or focus on positive either because that means they’re more likely to be outed for what they are. They’re good at a sneaky kind of manipulation, that may not even be a conscious effort. They’ll respond in a heart beat to a post about how things suck to compete in Pain Olympics, but they’ll ignore more general or informative posts. They’ll constantly ask for encouragement on bad days but refuse in angry fashions when advice is suggested. And this is not a rare occurrence, it is all the time. In this way, unless you’re conscious of this process, you may start to find yourself interacting with these groups simply to complain and whinge rather than continue on a path that may bring you relief of any measure. Why? Because they’ve shown you that you get more attention and sympathy if you play Pain Olympics with them than you do if you choose to be hopeful towards the future. You get more “likes” and comments if you continually go over rough moments than if you share happier times.

There is also a type of awareness that one can sometimes gain from living through trauma of any sort; how to hurt people. We learn by watching and experiencing it first hand. It is one of those things that tends to be overlooked and ignored. yet a large number abuse victims and chronic illness patients we’ve met have “teeth and claws”. A morbid sense of humor or a quick wit. And yeah, this is part of how we survive and also part of how those cycles continue. There is this moment and feeling of power that comes with the moment we realize we can use what was once used against us. Not saying it is a good feeling or a liked feeling, but that moment when you have been through the pain and later someone provokes you…you find that perfect way to lash out at them that leaves them stunned? You suddenly go from helpless to powerful. It is a dangerous cycle and in a way it gives suffering a life of it’s own, after all that is almost a form of procreation in an abstract way of thinking about it. But unless we are careful to be aware of that potential within ourselves, we can easily find ourselves lashing out at support group members that have rubbed us the wrong way for a variety of reasons. They have a lesser version of our illness, so lashing out and making them feel small brings satisfaction that our pain is bigger and worth more.

It’s easy for anyone to slip into that has experienced long-term suffering. These actions lay between a security blanket of support and the power control brings. As said above, it’s not that most of these people are consciously making a decision to do this, and that’s the part that can make it difficult. They’re suffering, in more ways than one. but the scary part is the potential to be dragged down with it.

So What Do You Do?

The main thing is to be aware of it. Know that it is absolutely okay to reach out in times of need, but to not make it a way of life and to not engage those that are doing so. Don’t think you should go on a Psychic Vampire Crusade, for in truth, these people are just suffering and have decided that they’re not able to look for the light at the end anymore. You don’t need to point out their pain to them, just as you don’t need people to twist the knife in yours. Don’t spend your time hunting them or trying to fix them. As with all of us, people can only be helped if they are truly ready to step out into the sunlight on their own. You know that old adage how you can lead a horse to water? It works for people too.

If you find yourself getting down and drained when interacting, take a step back and interact with people or things that bring you joy. If not joy, at least comfort that doesn’t surround living in negative moments. Watch your favorite Netflix series, read a book, sleep, find a friend you’ve gotten out of touch with and reconnect. If you don’t have anything like that? Find something new you’d like to try. Give embroidery a shot and see what you can accomplish. Have fun with finger paints. Go to a coffee shop with live music. Accomplish something, no matter how small it is, and celebrate.

As said earlier, every one of us will have bad days, bad weeks, bad years. It’s not about never having them or never showing that they’re suffocating you in this moment. We can’t always be superheroes and push ahead full steam with a smiling passion that rivals a manic pixie. We need to face those times, and we need to reach out in those times. But we can’t afford to live there or let others drag us down to revisit that place any more than needed.

…is that it is surprisingly isolating. In an odd way it gives one some sense of what it is like to live in the closet in earlier years. We, as a culture, don’t even like to talk about trauma in an abstract sense let alone in a productive way for those that have gone through it. Actually, George Carlin had a bit about this on the topic of Shellshock/PTSD that very much relates to this. Just remember that comedy works because by and large it is a truth, an uncomfortable truth that we have a cathartic laugh about to feel better.

Hearing it put this way really seems to suck the humanity out of painful experiences, or at least what is deemed “negative” from those on the outside. Changing the words we use to even discuss trauma, to make them more comfortable to speak aloud, also has the effect of pushing those that have gone through it further away from those bringing it up. Making the terms to discuss trauma more polite, eventually we come to view the effects of trauma as being less severe to mirror the terms that have been used. We rely a lot on our words, so while Shell Shock sounds as terrible as it really is, Battle Fatigue sounds like all they need to do is take a rest and they’ll be fine.

There is an element of human nature in this. We want to fix people. We want them to be better and not in pain. When they’re in a type of pain we can’t fix, it makes us VERY uncomfortable. What’s the next step? If we can’t fix their problem, at least we can fix how uncomfortable it makes US to acknowledge it. Our brains can be so overwhelmed by our own discomfort, that we forget to remember those suffering and keep them within our own spectrum of empathy. But in doing that, we inadvertently are saying to those people “stay away from us while you’re like that” or “I can only deal with you when you can pretend to be okay”. So…to not be so alone…we adapt and learn to have a variety of social masks at our disposal.

When Pretending to Be “Normal” Becomes Second Nature

There is this point where you have been in a bad way for so long that you’ve normalized some of the tragic things that have happened to you and that you have seen, such as being abused as a child. Then one day you find yourself in a group of people and you mention “yeah my mother use to do X” and all of a sudden people begin reacting with a display of sympathy or thinking you are attention seeking. This can be as shocking as it is isolating because sometimes, we just want to talk about our past like everyone else seems to. To talk with someone who has been there just to banter about it and feel like it was normal. We’ve already gone over it in our minds enough that we’re a bit desensitized to the experience, or maybe we’ve managed to convince ourselves that everyone has gone through similar experiences.

The reaction from our peers, jolt us back (often very unexpectedly) to just how different our experiences really were. It mentally launches us out of whatever group we happen to be interacting with at warp speed complete with barbed wire barrier and nothing but a tin can telephone. The mask has slipped down unintentionally and, even if we quickly put it back up with some crafty application of gallows humor and a new mask that has a convincing smile, our secret is out and there’s no going back. Or…at least that’s how it feels. That only increases if we perceive that our circle of peers begin to treat us differently. “Perceive” is the important part of that statement because it could be actually being treated differently or we’re expecting it so much we see it when it’s not there.

Isolation and Our Relationships

This one aspect (of many) is why some abuse victims remain with their abusers for so long. They decide that the isolation of the outside world is too great and maybe, just maybe, staying with the one person who understands and seems accepts your damage is not so bad after all. It can be easy to blind oneself to the terms of that perceived acceptance. After all, they think to themselves, a little gaslighting and scapegoating is not so bad when compared to being out alone in the world that doesn’t understand you, is it? At least with the abuser you can put on your choice of masks to get through the day to day while still having some measure of a twisted form of acceptance to go home to. They make knowing what mask you have to put on predictable, and again, comfortable. Still though…ever see those pictures of what happens when you wear tight shoes or corsets the wrong way for too long? We are shaped by the masks we wear.

Similar to the tight shoes and improperly worn corset, if they’re worn for an extended period, it can become a hazard to then take them off. Our masks are no different, we start to rely on them instead of being able to realize when it is something that needs our attention. We don’t know how to function without using them. It makes it increasingly difficult to associate with “normal” people. Hiding behind the masks becomes our new normal and comfortable way of life and the thought of leaving that behind is (or at least can be) paralyzing. It means facing all of those horrible fears of isolation head on and risking what little we’ve gotten accustomed to as a security blanket. The longer it goes on, the scarier the monster is to face.

But That Isn’t The End of Hope

It’s never too late to reach out and combat these feelings of isolation. The important thing is to do act with compassion towards yourself and a healthy, stubborn ambition. Deciding that you are willing to approach the proverbial monster in the shadows is a major step that should never be underestimated or underappreciated. Don’t beat yourself up over the time it will take to make significant improvements. Remember that it is generally thought that the amount of time that you endured the trauma AND avoided working on it…will be close to the amount of time it takes to work on it as well. This isn’t meant to frighten or intimidate, but rather as merely a reminder to be kind to yourself through your process.

One of the biggest steps after this is in this is gaining a high level of self awareness of these things. Make a safe space to allow yourself time to process whatever traumatic events or memories that have come up in your life. This may be the office of a trained psychologist or simply a quiet, isolated space to freely process your emotions without fear of being approached. To learn that while masks are important to everyone in daily life, to limit their use to healthy amounts rather than a base state of being in public.

Search for a few friends who have the right amount of damage and awareness. That’s not to say ONLY have friends that have experienced similar trauma, because that defeats the purpose because the goal is to find ways not to live within your trauma. However, there is a type of validation that comes with being able to casually talk about your life that most people take for granted. Sometimes…we really DO just need to talk with someone who has been where we were and can see the world through a familiar lens. To not feel so alone in the world does wonders for one’s state of being. Find support groups and share stories from those that have been there and, ideally, with those that have worked past at least some of it.

The hardest steps are always the hardest, but we can do amazing things if we do it together.

First there is considerable research on the topic and anyone who has delved into said research may be wondering if the term ADHD is a catch all term used for a whole spectrum of closely related conditions and the brain imaging studies have found some interesting things. For the sake of discussion let us assume that ADHD is a somewhat understood thing that is still under study, which is all fine and dandy but how does that help us in the here and now?

Two Major Issues of ADHD

Now I’m going to be talking from the perspective of someone with ADHD (currently unmedicated, you are welcome and I’m sorry) and the first major problem with ADHD is first the person who has it is not the real sufferer of the condition. (Ask Coyote in Zebra Clothing about that sometime)

We will take today for instance, I decided to take the car real quick to get rent money. While I’m proud of myself for staying on task for an event that took more than two physical steps of my feet…I neglected to recall that I have almost no perception of time and ended up making my brother late because it didn’t dawn on me that things like morning rush hour might produce things such as traffic jams and police stops that ended up leaving me stuck in my parking space for many more minutes than planned because some random person decided to park and block me in while getting their ticket, or that the clerk checking me out because I decided to get a sandwich and coffee might have decided to see how big of a line they could make before someone came to help them. So…. I’m making spaghetti to say sorry, **apology gestures are a thing, Do The Thing**.

The second major problem is it is doing life on a cognitive expert mode. Imagine playing a game where you decide to use only the sub-optimal strategies where you took points out of things such as judgement, impulse and emotional control, long term and working memory…and decided to add them to the “hold my beer” skill. While that sounds like a fun Mod of the Sims to play and an interesting person to have at a party, I’m not sure I would want to be that person…..oh wait….I am that person. Introspective self deprecating gallows humor is good at articulating your issues, **self deprecating humor is a thing,Do The Thing**.

Acknowledging Focus & Distractions Hurdles

Now to get on topic, As I’ve just demonstrated the mind of those poor people with ADHD is filled to the brim with distractions. It is not to say that we can’t focus, I give everything I see 1000% focus…until there is something else to see. And even if I manage to find a place where there are no other physical distractions it is entirely possible that some mental distraction will come along and I might just sit there for three hours while I work on a story for some random subreddit to post or brainstorm some random social experiment. But this is where the making the most out of sub-optimal strategies part comes in.

Thankfully for me I learned early on that this way the way I was. I think that was the 2nd grade while I was standing in the corner with my arms spread and my fingers on each of the discipline marks on the wall. I’m not sure what the full list of things I did to get me there was, but failure to do school work and some highly unfiltered words from my mouth may have had something to do with it. It dawned to me that maybe there was a mechanic I could use to mitigate the attention drift problems I have and I began to read ahead. Now I’m not going to say there was not challenges, but I discovered that I could ‘write’ papers in my head in those moments of drift and occasionally I could recycle that material that mattered. This was a huge successes for me or for most people it would be just a success but work with what you got!

Productive First Steps

I learned that the key to getting things done was inner and external environmental control, this way even if I got distracted I still did something that needed done….a very useful thing. Now as a child my focus room was the little bathroom at 2 am when everyone was asleep and while this was by far a less than ideal strategy, it still got things done for me. There was no TV sounds, no distractions from parents or siblings and a deadline.

Next was mastering preemptive damage control. Keep in mind the tune of the day is making the most out of the sub-optimal strategy available to me. Each assignment I would plan out the moment I got it. If I could give it a credible attempt at finishing it in 5 minutes, than it was done in the next class in the first few minutes. Classes that generated assignments that could take an hour or more were broken down into chunks and I would squeeze them in (when I remembered) a few at a time in lunch, on the bus, in the start or stops of other classes, anywhere but home.

Putting It All Together

So, thus far this seems fairly simple. Find your quiet time to do your thing, keep your potential distractions to be something synergistic to some main project or whatever. Now it is time to discuss an external means of distraction that can be problematic.

That aspect came up in a Learning Disabled program and while it was a good way to be introduced to quite the spectrum of personality enhancements, I think the two major things I learned from it was to pick yourself up off of the ground when you fail, and fails are going to happen. Anyone with ADHD is going to have those moments, it is just like a diet, yeah you are going to have your lapses, just don’t define your life with them.

And the second thing is to own it. Traffic did not make me late, I was late the moment I went out the door. Yes I get distracted but the moment I blame it on the outside world is the moment I am at the mercy of the outside world. So if the choice is to be the world’s pawn or be my own faulty self well…I’ll take the latter. With accountability comes power.