I'm glad it helped someone more than me. I'm very analytical and making sense of things - even the most awful things - makes them enormously less scary for me.
What I have already identified about my CPTSD:
1. It's likely multigenerational, my mother remembers being traumatized by her mother's insane behaviors, her mother was a very sensitive person who survived WWII in Warsaw. I don't know if it has even deeper roots but with the history of wars, revolutions, deportations and plagues this branch of the family has been through - very likely.
2. I am very sensitive, with sensory issues and it is very likely that this exactly triggered my mother's own traumas, reminding her of her own unstable mother.
3. "Inner Machiavelli" - a term I found in a book about highly sensitive persons. Ability to precisely spot weak points of your opponent and exploit them. It's not in line with my mother's family morality but they all have it, denied and completely uncontrolled, exploding meltdown-style.
4. There is a common in my mother's family way of dealing with problems by denying existence of the problems. Of many other applications, you can imagine this routinely applied to sensory issues.
5. Masking (my mother was masking, likely her own CPTSD) and denial did not help me form a reasonably strong sense of self. However, I became an expert in masking.
6. To survive regular sensory torture with no way out, I became detached from my own feelings and focused on acting to minimize further problems, including showing emotions I thought were expected from me instead of the real ones.
7. Math and science were my safe haven of predictability where anything true could be proven and anything false could be disproven, anything not-yet-proven-or-disproven remained openly discussed.
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Let's not confuse being normal with being mentally healthy.
<not moderating PPR stuff concerning East Europe>
01 Feb 2020, 4:13 am
