(C-)PTSD Thread

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Sometimes I have moments in which I remember something from my past that makes things click together somehow (an “ah-ha moment”) and then everything kind of ebbs away and I only remember that ah-ha feeling - not the memories themselves. It’s hard to describe.

I have lots of memories, but there are certain gaps too.

I’m really finding it difficult to work and function. I experienced what I just mentioned while I was on lunch duty in a school cafeteria today. I had trouble feeling present in my body.

In my personal experience, trauma isn’t
something that gets better. I have good patches and bad ones.

People who say that one should “get over it” or “transcend it” have no clue…no clue at all.

I didn't "transcend it" nor "get over it" but I sorted out a lot of it and it helped - understanding what I was experiencing made me at least way less anxious about my "freaking out" moments themselves.

I've always found it a bit weird that NT's supposedly know what people are going through without going through it themselves. I have no idea what someone is going through apart from the obvious, I cannot put myself in their shoes unless I've gone through it myself, and even then there are variables and I can fake it with past scripts. I think this is not having cognitive empathy (although I'm a contradiction, as my emotional/affective empathy can be overwhelming). I feel people who dismiss trauma as something you can just get over have never had trauma and are lacking in cognitive empathy.

I think so too.

Some of my memories are like corrupted videos. Faces are blurry but irrelevant details like the texture of a desk or the grass under my feet are in HD quality.

I worked through my trauma, but I never overcame it - I accepted it. One of my absolute pet peeves is being told 'Oh, it's a good thing that (horrible thing) happened to you because it builds character!' NO. Absolutely not. Even if I developed as a person, in some ways positively but not in others, does not mean that it was a good thing. I'm not some inspirational story. The event was still bad.

^ That resonates with me. Sometimes that stuff gets to me more than other times to. Yeah, good patches, rough patches. Though I am thankful I seem to have more good ones these days than rough ones. That was not always the case. Ten years ago I would have laughed at the idea of me saying that. All I knew then were rough ones.

I spent the bulk of my 30s doing trauma work. Brutal couple of years there, but ultimately it was worth it. I'm much better off now than I was then, much more comfortable in my head and my skin. I'm not 100% okay though. It's not as though the work I did made me magically fine and erased all that I lived through. For me, it's more like the work made it so I had some skills to employ to help me live as comfortably alongside my past as possible, as often as possible. But it's always still there, impacting me. How could it not? This stuff was a huge part of my formative years and then into adulthood. I don't believe I'll ever shake this sh** completely. I think it's always going to be there.

I also have murky, memories that come and go. I think this is partly due to aphantasia, partly due to trauma.
It is, in my view, possible to heal from trauma. For me the healing I have achieved so far has largely been about accepting reality. Past experience is fixed as far as the reality of what happened goes. My relationship with those events, however, is something that is happening now in the present. It is something I have some control over.
For me, remembering the events in intricate detail has not been possible, in many cases. I believe that it's experiencing the feeling that is more important. I may not remember clearly, but I can recreate what it felt like to be an abused child. That feeling is with me, stored in my body, always.
I have found its possible to allow that feeling to be. To re-experience it as fully as I can, without pushing into retraumatising myself. I have done this while holding myself with compassion and accepting the reality that is unchangeable. Somehow this seems to bring all of the trauma up into the open. It's no longer sabotaging me from the dark. It's present in my world as part of me I have assimilated. It informs how I behave in a conscious, rather than unconscious way.

This has taken a very very long time. It has involved much gnashing of teeth and yelling in frustration. It hasn't been easy and I don't think there are any shortcuts. There have been several points where I nearly didn't make it. These are life and death issues.

I continue to work at this. It's become a practice. A thing I do constantly. I find that as I uncover and release a level of this dark stuff it naturally uncovers a new aspect of it that's been hiding underneath. And then I have this next thing to deal with. I'm not sure it ever ends, but there definitely is progress. And I have begun to be able to trust this process.

Fairly recently I realised that it's not the past experience that is the trauma. The trauma is actually the beliefs i have taken on about myself and my world as a result of those experiences. As such those beliefs are something that i hold in myself now, today. They are something i have kept reaffirming for myself over and over. So the trauma is not what was done to me...it is what I've done to myself. Not that I had a choice in the matter, but it's still something I did to me. This is the key to healing. Because what I do to me, I have some control over. I can change my beliefs about myself and my world. I can take ownership of what I did to myself, and stop doing it. Stop abusing myself.
I had heard and read this previously but once I understood in my gut (not just intellectually), things began to change.

Much love and care to all who are suffering.

Sometimes it's just like my body remembers and my mind doesn't.
I got much better once I realized what it was and started giving myself space to feel it.

I can't even speak right now but 100% know what you are going through

The advantage of feeling it, is that it is the thing as it actually is, without the story I'm attaching to it. It's reality, not the potentially faulty interpretation of reality.

I hate it when people say that too. It feels invalidating.

I think part of my problem is that I've not done a lot of trauma work. I'm not comfortable with telling a therapist, or anyone else, much of what happened. It's generally just a very vague allusion. I think I might try a different therapist/type of therapy.

Here's a video I like:




C-PTSD doesn't have to begin in childhood but at any point in a person's life when they are trapped in a traumatic situation from which they can't escape (sex trafficking, domestic violence, intimate partner violence, etc.)

People can have CPTSD and Acute PTSD simultaneously. They will each have different symptoms.

I didn't tell my therapist a lot of what happened to me, and what I did tell wasn't detailed or anything. I was really vague. I know that years ago, the tried and true method was having people 'tell their story' like it purged the crap from their system or something. Reality is, it did a lot more damage than good for a lot of survivors to go over it all again. There are tons of therapists out there who won't expect you to talk about what happened.

Mine was cool. She was more than okay with focusing on things like how to get grounded and centered when I was set off and not exactly solid in my head/skin. I learned a lot of coping skills that helped me deal with flashbacks, body memories, how to ground and center when things got tense in my daily life, and so on. I was dx'd with a dissociative disorder, and she spent a lot of time helping me with all that to. A lot of my time for the first few years was spent learning how to get myself grounded, centered, and stable enough so that when it came time to process what I'd lived through, I'd have the tools at my disposal to help me get through that. Besides, I wasn't close enough to being stable enough at the start to do any actual work. I was a wreck...too much of a wreck for therapy, if that makes any sense.

I'm rambling. Sorry. Point being, you don't have to say anything you don't want to say. A good t should be able to work with you on that front and respect that. It's not essential for progress, unless you want it to be. And some people do, and hey, more power to them. It just wouldn't have worked for me, because even if I had wanted to, there's still years of my life missing from my memory. I doubt I'll ever know what all happened to me, so discussing it in a thorough way would have been pointless.

I know that talking is not essential for everyone's progress, but I feel like it is for mine.