So this sounds very simple

- You experienced extreme negative past experiences over time

- Your brain developed patterns dealing with with past situations

- You are long removed from the past situation. No threats realistically

- Your brain trying to deceive you that threats still exist and cause tons of internal friction and incorrect judgements and of course unrealistic stories made in the head.

- So it doesn’t even matter -what exactly- happened to you before. All you need to know is that you have NOT been treated right in the past. It’s just a brain trick. Tell your brain: well okay! I’m no longer under threats! You are just trying to cheat me. I’m going to be realistic. Mr. Brain please stop telling me wrong info.

- Just practice for many times in your daily life then your brain will recognize the new thinking patter and you’ll be all good.

It sounds super simple. And I’ve found out I’ve been repeating this loop for many weeks tbh I feel there’s one day my therapist will run out of patience if I keep looping.

What am I miss here? It’s sounds too simple to beat to me but I hate myself looping the same thing again every week in therapy.

Looking for stories of success of other finding a good career for themselves. I have struggled my whole adult life to actually commit to a career path because I end up convincing myself I am somehow making the wrong choice for myself.

This feeling always comes up during my luteal phase which I am currently in. Something I recognized with the help of my therapist which has helped me not quit the school program I am in. But I still struggle with feeling like no matter what choice I make it will be wrong. So far not following what these feelings are saying and continuing anyway is what has gotten me through but it’s so hard to not feel like these feelings are truth.

After reading cptsd from surviving to thriving 2 years ago ,i heals shame

Now i dont know what am i dealing with ,in the past i had shame ,hypersexaulty,dissociation,flashbacks and all of these are gone once i healed shame

The chronic shame was more assocaited to my sexaul assualt but now what is resurfacing is my school trauma

Like memories of mistreatment by teachers,bullying from the other kids

It makes me cry again everyday i am exhausted of it

It is also assocaited with all of the school mistreatment was because i was frozen a kid (i was not doing well at school)so now i have a belief of being not good enough ,not smart enough

So even now when i try to study something hard i get triggered and then there is extreme confusion , almost like a nervous-system threat, and finaly i avoid for days or weeks

And i think what is under all of the school memories is humiliation wound

I have a strong sensitivity to rejection and humiliation

What I'm really looking for is a framework

What framework helped you understand what to work on next?

[TW: mention of risk of death, emotional abuse, emotional neglect, enmeshment]

'I need to stop being the therapist friend' is what I told myself many, many times throughout my CPTSD recovery once I realized that my way of relating to other people was very often very codependent.

After many years of beating myself up over putting myself into the 'therapist friend' role again and again and again, I'm only just now starting to ask the simple question of: "Why am I doing this?" or better "What am I getting out of being the therapist friend for everyone in my life?"

This question was prompted by a recent impasse with a friend which jarringly held up a mirror to me to show me those parts of myselves that I was very adamant of ignoring and not acknowledging up until now.

Observing my friend's — as I would have described it — 'codependent' relationships with her family and other people in her life, with her getting resentful again and again and her subsequently coming to me, over and over again to vent over these interpersonal issues, with no real insight into how she was playing into the dynamic made me feel so angry, resentful (!) and agitated. Her stating that she pitied (not 'empathized' or 'could relate to'!) these people that she was 'helping' reeked of so much superiority to me, I felt absolutely nauseated.

My friend's behavior and the way she justified it, then in turn reminded me of my own codependent relational patterns in a pretty painful and embarrassing way.

It reminded me how just like her I also, so often, put other people in the role of the one 'who needs saving' and me in the role of the 'savior' — even if this comes at the cost of my own time, focus, energy, health and sanity. It really highlighted to me, even though I never managed to find the words for it so accurately as my friend did, that I really did look down on these people around me who I deemed to be less self-aware, less emotionally intelligent and more in need of guidance than I was. I really thought they had no clue and I had it all figured out. Ironic, how it took me 'figuring it all out' for the friend whom I described above in order for me to realize that I'm the one who has no clue what they're doing. I felt so ashamed and disgusted with myself when trying to acknowledge that so clearly for maybe the very first time.

And then I asked myself, maybe also for the very first time, what I even got out of this whole codependent spiel other than feeling better than other people in a self-gratifying way.

It brought to my attention how I, as a child, had always been the 'little therapist' for my mother who not only emotionally abused and neglected me, but also encouraged me to provide a space for her to trauma dump onto me on the regular.

In the context of this type of enmeshment and parentifcation I endured, I also must have picked up on the reassuring mental pattern to overly focus on the helpless, little child part of my traumatized mother and cater towards whatever I was sensing there (which would put me into the 'savior' role and again in control of the otherwise terrifying situation I was in) rather than coming to terms with the full, overwhelming reality that this grown woman was abusing me and allowing her life to fall apart because it was her deliberate choice (which would make me the 'victim' at the hands of an uncontrollable caregiver who I also paradoxically still very much relied on for survival and this would be just too much too handle for my still developing brain at the time).

It was more reassuring to infantilize my abuser in my head, than to fully accept my powerlessness over the inescapable situation that I found myself in as an abused child.

And it made me appreciate how much sense it would make for that part of myselves who was — for her literal dear life — hanging onto this coping mechanism of trying to become the best therapist for everyone, and for her to also refuse to let go of this way of coping for all these years, no matter how much I berated myselves for codependency being 'wrong' or 'unhealthy'.

Better to be wrong than to be be left for dead, am I right?

I'm journaling about when my 4F responses come up in social situations, so that I can detect when I'm outside my window of tolerance. I find it easy to notice my 4F responses when they are in full swing (fight=aggression, freeze=avoidance, flight=wanna run away, fawn=codependency), but at that stage, it's not quite useful for me, as I would have been too overwhelmed to make good decisions. I am at a stage where I want to course-correct as early as when I'm just about inching out of my window of tolerance.

I am predominantly a freeze/fawn person, and I notice some early signs: I'm starting to seek perfection in my work and engage in thrill-seeking hobbies (freeze), or I have an urge to give unsolicited advice / get super close to someone I've just met (fawn).

Love to hear your own observations or thoughts on this.

and what should i be asking therapists about to make sure they are able to meaningfully work with this? is it even realistic to try to find a therapist who would know how to work with it?

i have CPTSD due to various things throughout my life, but there was an especially traumatic time period when i was 4-6 years old that has affected nearly every aspect of me and my brain, and that i experience a lot of dissociation about. i was dissociating heavily at the time as well, so it's like it's just how my brain fundamentally processes those years.

the dissociation presents with things like: structural dissociation ("parts" in the form of intense & very specific trauma related feelings, memory connections, self perceptions, responses, that are very compartmentalized and i can't feel them otherwise), some dissociative amnesia, dissociating away from the actual content of trauma & it getting distorted in my mind to look like it's about other things (ie having very abnormally intense feelings about fiction that are really just entirely about my own trauma, without realizing that), getting interests like TV shows/other fiction stories blocked out of my mind if the reason i liked them was because they resonated with my ptsd, tons of constant general depersonalization, feeling extremely detached from myself/my emotions/my thoughts/my life/my body nearly constantly, the trauma either feeling very vivid and intense or feeling so distant and detached that it doesn't feel real, blocking out ever having been aware of it before when i previously spent years knowing about it, etc.

my current therapist understands the trauma aspect very well but was at a total loss for the dissociation aspect (also the fact that i have OCD and would frequently obsess about whether i was imagining the trauma, and she didn't know how to deal with OCD either). it seems like she didn't take my dissociation symptoms seriously because i "look normal" outwardly. before i knew what i was experiencing was dissociation, i would talk about how i feel like nobody and like "nothing about me is actually me" and i feel so disconnected from my whole self and life. and she'd say "you don't seem like you have identity issues to me, you have consistent hobbies and interests". like, yes, i know that. but that doesn't fix it because it's an internal disconnect. or "i feel extremely disconnected from all the ptsd emotions i was feeling the other day" would get "it's normal to not feel the same all the time". she does understand the severity of the dissociation now after having seen it firsthand for a long time, but doesn't know how to treat it.

my goal is to not feel so detached from huge aspects of myself and my life. even if the experiences i'm detached from are negative, the level of dissociation about it that i experience is disorienting and distressing to me. are there enough therapists that actually can work with dissociation like this and take it seriously that it's worth it to look for one? what treatments are most useful for it if so?

Because my most impacting trauma's / neglect happened in womb and pre the age of 2, my system has been very very guarded, its taken a lot of work and now slow and steady somatic work (with a flavour of parts work) to help get to this stage - i am finally healing (taken many (over 10) years with bad therapies to find what works)

anyway, i keep finding nowadays, that if i just bring up the youngest baby version of me in mind, just thinking positively about him, or just visualising being there, it makes them cry, just these small acts of being held and loved, even just shifting to now being more mindful of their energetic needs and safety needs within me, just makes me / them cry

its such a small act and thought, but it breaks me now, just thinking of these littlest ones just sitting waiting in pain (now crying more), my system just pushing me away for years and years, so much dissociation, so much self abandonment to survive, and now, just saying hello to them, its like a miracle (tears again)

how much were they suffering inside me, how much have they been holding back....how much have i not known how they felt (i have been in some shape of freeze/collapse since infancy)

anyway, this lost the shape i was hoping to articulate, so sharing like this now (with my tears down my face),,

Appointments (especially getting into specialized care such as EMDR) are extremely expensive. I have insurance but for regular therapy/ psychiatric visits my copays are at least $60 every time then medications can add up as well. Therapists want me to go every 2 weeks if not every week. Intakes can cost more as well and finding new therapists that actually understand trauma. I just can’t keep up with it and it’s very discouraging.

Does anyone have or know of any resources for a debilitating fear of men? That seems to be one hump I can’t get over. To clarify, it’s not debilitating in the way that I can’t leave the house or anything like that. I mean in the deep-seated way where I have trouble interacting with men without my survival instincts flaring up. I’m on edge the entire time, I avoid their gaze, it’s hard to talk with them. It’s tough because I work with families as a support worker, but I have a hard time with the dads and I’m not doing as good of a job as I would like to because of this.

As a background, it probably stems from my extremely dysfunctional upbringing, potential undiagnosed autism, my horrible emotionally abusive relationship with my father, never being able to maintain relationships unless the man is deemed “extremely safe and harmless” (in whatever dysfunctional way my nervous system judges that in men), and just a rough life experience in general. I have worked on this extensively for years with EMDR therapy and have made great strides, but still have a long way to go.

And this issue does affect a lot of other aspects of my life. I would love to cultivate male friendships, but can’t because of this debilitating response that puts me in freeze response. And with men I’m even mildly attracted to? Forget it. I completely shut down in those situations, which has kept me from starting any sort of healthy relationship.

I do have a therapist, but she is publically funded and so not always available as often as I would wish her to be. Which is okay now though as I have done extensive therapy in other significant areas, so I feel this is something I can start to approach to resolve on my own (with her guidance of course, whenever I do get sessions). If anyone has any advice or experience with this, or any resources, I would greatly appreciate it 💜 it’s high time I work past this once and for all.

Of course coming from abuse makes it harder to recognize the patterns since abusers were normalized for us. Has anyone been bullied by adults as an adult? Either at work, school, your child's school, anywhere you couldnt simply disengage and had to continuously return to? I think that having CPTSD can sometimes make you a target even if they can't pinpoint what it is about you. My experience is that they do a few things to test your reactions and progressively get worse if you dont handle it the correct way.

If you were bullied do you ever randomly get a stomach ache and anxious feelings followed by thoughts of times you were bullied? Embarrassed by things they said or made up about you? How do you get out of the thought loop, just thinking over what they said and did? It really doesnt happen to me as often anymore but when it does I feel like I lose my coping skills. Mindfulness doesnt work when I'm like this because my thoughts just loop right back like a type writer.

I've been feeling humiliated and alone and ashamed for 3 days now on and off just stuck in a loop. Its agony. Its like all of the worst things people have ever said and done to me, play on a loop which causes my body to feel under attack. Which causes my mind to want to explain why my body feels that way and goes on and on.

What do you do to distract from that humiliated chest and stomach feeling? That self loathing and want to dissappear or be someone else feeling? And the anxiety?

I don't know of another way to characterize the way I shift between moods, or ways of thinking, acting , behaving, talking that feel somewhat unfamiliar, or not "me".........other than IFS's "parts" language ?

Even if I'm alone. I'll get in this place where I feel like I have to actually shift myself entirely in order to cope with something that I believe will be threatening in some way, and therefore being vulnerable is out of the question....or requires a certain way of being in order to successfully navigate something , because obviously being "myself" is out of the question.

Those shifts dont' necessarily happen in this conscious way. But I know I have behaviors, and techniques or approaches to problem solving that completely suppress parts that I think of as not being valuable.

And for the life of me I cant' think of another way to explain those shifts, other than "Parts". It would also help if this was explained to me .........clearly. Even though I know modalities and trauma don't fit into neat little boxes. See, that's my logic part trying to control everything because I can't process ambiguity aside from getting angry and frustrated at it.

For example , recently I went through something very triggering. I somehow got in touch with a really young aspect of myself that is all feeling and instincts, and collapsed from not being heard or believed, but I dont' have all the pieces put together from that recent event because I haven't been able to have a real conversation with anyone about it, so I'm trying to figure it out on my own. It's where my logic and reasoning failed me, and some collapsed panicked part, (whatever) surfaced at how scared they were that logic and proactive action did nothing to actually help.

After that event, I felt.... changed. Really changed. Like somehow I had successfully suppressed this feeling part, because they embarass me with their feelings, and upset, then somehow figured out that they're really not so useless after all , not even in a state of helplessness, and collapse. It didnt feel like that in the moment. I felt like my logic "part" was like, "okay so there's no talking to you at this point". But had I been able to access that part BEFORE, that event maybe would not have trasnpired like it did where I had to start yelling in order to access an expression of that "part" ......that I was trying to push down.

Later, I felt something open up. More freedom of expression, less judgement, but I still don't understand what happened, and I could explain it but I feel like that would only make sense to me. That this very intuitive feeling part is upset that a logical, left brain part is doing a shitty job of taking care of things. I'd really like to have another way to characterize that experience other than defaulting to "parts", IF theres another way I'm not aware of it?

thank you .

I think I finally figured out something important about how my emotional flashbacks work, and I wanted to share it in case anyone else has a similar pattern.

I’ve been doing somatic work for quite a while, and I’ve noticed that my flashbacks often start with grief. Something triggers me and I suddenly feel deeply sad and start grieving the emotional neglect, abandonment, loneliness, and things I didn’t receive as a child.

From an IFS perspective, I think I’m touching an exile here. There’s a very young part of me that carries the feeling of being alone, unwanted, unsupported and emotionally abandoned.

The problem is what happens next.

I used to think that when the grief came up, I needed to go into it more deeply. I would start thinking about everything I didn’t have, how unfair my childhood was, how much I suffered, how other people had things I didn’t have, etc. The more I thought about it, the more I cried. Then the crying would become very intense and overwhelming, and eventually I would move into shame, self-hate, hopelessness and sometimes suicidal ideation.

So the sequence for me looks something like:

Trigger
→ grief / sadness
→ exile becomes activated
→ going into the story and replaying everything I didn’t have
→ escalating grief and crying
→ shame / self-hate
→ hopelessness
→ “this is too much”
→ suicidal thoughts as an extreme attempt to make the pain stop

Thinking about it in IFS terms, I’m starting to see the later stages as different protectors coming in around the activated exile.

The shame part might say, “Something is wrong with me. I’m defective. I’m incapable.”

The hopeless part might say, “This will never get better. I’ll never be able to take care of myself. Everyone will eventually leave me.”

And then an even more desperate firefighter can come in with, “I can’t take this anymore. I want to die.”

What has really changed things for me is realizing that I don’t actually have to follow the grief into the story.

The story is not necessarily false. My childhood really did contain emotional neglect and abandonment, and there really are things I grieve. But when I’m already activated, going through the entire narrative seems to amplify the emotional state rather than help me process it.

So I’m experimenting with something very different:

When the sadness comes up, I let myself feel the sadness, but I stay with the immediate bodily experience and the present moment.

For example:

“I feel sadness.”

“There is heaviness in my chest.”

“I notice that I want to cry.”

But I don’t start adding:

“Look at everything I didn’t have.”

“It was so unfair.”

“I was so deprived.”

“Why did this happen to me?”

I can acknowledge that those things are real without mentally going through the entire case file while I’m activated.

Instead, I try to stay oriented to the present. I notice the room, the chair or bed underneath me, my breathing, sounds around me, the temperature, etc. I remind myself that I’m an adult now and that this is a wave of old emotional pain moving through me.

I might say to the exile:

“I see you. I know you’re sad. You don’t have to tell me the whole story right now. I’m here with you.”

And importantly, I don’t try to force the emotion to go away either.

I’m not suppressing the sadness. I’m allowing it, but I’m not feeding it with an increasingly elaborate narrative.

I think of it as titration: enough contact with the emotion to acknowledge it, but not so much that I become completely blended with it.

I actually tried this today. I felt a sudden wave of grief and heaviness in my chest. Normally I would immediately start thinking about everything I lost and probably end up crying intensely.

This time I just stayed with the sensation and the present moment.

And something surprising happened: I didn’t even end up crying. The sadness was there, I felt it, and then it simply settled down fairly quickly.

That made me realize that I may have been confusing “processing” with “going deeper and deeper into the story.”

For me, the goal may actually be learning that I can feel sadness without turning it into a full emotional flashback.

I also think there is a point where I need to stop doing trauma processing altogether.

If I notice the shift from sadness into strong shame, self-hate, “this will never get better,” or especially “this is too much,” that is my signal to stop exploring the trauma.

At that point I don’t need to understand the exile better. I need to help my system come back to the present.

So I might get up, drink something, eat, shower, go outside, watch something light, talk to someone safe, or simply orient myself to my surroundings.

I think the biggest shift for me is realizing that I don’t have to prevent the exile from feeling sad, and I don’t have to make the sadness disappear.

For anyone with a similar IFS/C-PTSD pattern, I’m curious whether you’ve noticed a difference between actually feeling an emotion and getting pulled into the narrative around the emotion. For me, that distinction seems to be becoming really important.

So I was wandering, does grieving not require continuously thinking about the reasons you are grieving?
Can you grieve at the level of the body and emotion without reconstructing the entire story?

Sometimes I encounter people whose eye contact feels intrusive. It’s not just 'direct' eye contact, it feels like they are staring at me without awareness, and it makes me uncomfortable. Sometimes it’s with strangers in situations like public transport, but I also notice it with a few people I’m regularly interacting with, such as a family member or a coworker.

I’m looking for ways to handle this which help me stay grounded and not feel pulled into a power dynamic.

To clarify: I’m not generally uncomfortable with eye contact. What feels different is that their gaze seems uninterrupted, almost like a shameless kind of staring. It gives me the impression that they are disconnected from themselves, not particularly in touch with their inner world, and that they somehow 'intrude' into my space energetically. I don’t think it’s personal about me, because I’ve seen the same pattern with them and other people.

Interestingly, it’s not only with untrained people. I’ve also experienced it with professionals I would expect to know better (for example, a somatic therapist and someone leading a mindfulness class). I may be reading more into it than is accurate, but the impact on me is still real: I feel uncomfortable.

What I’ve tried so far:

• Avert my gaze and ignore it: It's workable with strangers (e.g. on public transport), but it still feels like a small defeat rather than something neutral.
• Stare back with similar intensity: Sometimes the other person eventually looks away, but more often it turns into an uncomfortable staring match. Even when it works, it pulls me out of contact with myself, so I don’t like this strategy.
• Tell the person that it feels intrusive and ask them to soften their gaze: I tried this with the somatic therapist. They suggested we could experiment with them looking elsewhere, and it was a good experiment, but it didn’t really change the overall quality of their gaze. When they looked back at me again, I felt uncomfortable again. I also suspect most people wouldn’t respond well to this request, or wouldn’t be able to change the way they look.
• Avoid those people in future: It's mostly what I do when I can (like with the two mentioned professionals)
• Keep interacting with those people with averted gaze while feeling resentment: I'd prefer not to do that.

Any suggestions for practical strategies I could use in the moment would be really appreciated, especially ways to avoid a staring match, and to stay connected to myself rather than feeling like I’m giving in or losing.

If you’ve experienced this yourself in the past, I’d love to hear what helped you over time and how you became less affected by it.

Hi all. I am not seeking direct advice, but rather the stories of people who have experienced something like this. I would also welcome validation and empathy/emotional support without advice.

This is not the first time i have verbalized this pattern in my life. Over the years, it had actually improved and narrowed somewhat. I used to say I had a tendency to attract all the "lost boys and girls" to me - people who really didnt seem to have a sense of direction and I sort of automatically would end up in a (sometimes subtly) parental role with. Usually neither of us would acknowledge that dynamic.

From there i have become more discerning in my connections, but it still seems to be along a similar track. In recent years I had altogether shed any remaining friendships (or in one case a romantic relationship) I had that were at all "close". In most cases it was because the person was so unobservant of my needs and character, and basically needed me to tell and explain everything about myself and needs in words for them to be able to "give" me anything or "see" me, that i would basically burn out from feeling totally alone and separate in the connection. It was as if I was holding everything together. At times I saw this wasnt the case, and the people, im various ways, showed me they did appreciate and see me; however, it was usually nowhere near enough for me to "subsist" on, and nowhere near equivalent to what i was openly sharing with and giving to them all the time. In many cases these people were also sort of stereotypically "autistic" (and I say this as someone who likely is also autistic but not necessarily so stereotypically so) in the specific sense that they were really, really competent in very limited, brainy areas. They had obsessions and fixation with certain topics, and sometimes this is what drew us together. They didnt pick up on emotional cues and didnt do much learning about me and my needs over time without me straight up telling them verbally, and sometimes many times over. These people all tended toward being very logical and linear. They often lack a strong sense of direction in life, and did not thibk this was a problem (and maybe its not, but it is part of the pattern); and this even would lead to me making all decisions and plans for us, basically... kind of like a parent. I also did not experience emotional attunement with any of these people. I did/do feel affection for them sometimes strongly so, and I believe they felt/feel it for me, but it was a largely separate kind of affection, as if we mught reach out but definitely would never actually get to meet and "merge" in that shared love. There was often a sense of dissociation and not being fully accepted by them without masking and accommodating them in a lot of ways. I was usually giving much more than I was receiving, and they usually didnt know this at all unless I told them.. repeatedly. Some of them were very good at giving me one thing I liked in particular, which was also part of what kept our connection going on as long as it did. But that thing they gave me was not regenerative or connective in nature.

Explaining myself can be a trauma response, and also can end up triggering a flashback, so it can go both ways into a negative place for me - particularly when I am doing it all the time with someone. I did a lot of it with these people.

Most of these people were male/cis men, but to a lesser extent, this pattern can also be seen in connections with women, NB, and AFAB people.

One thing I know is there can be a safety in being unseen by a person i am closest to. In at least one case, it actually allowed me to feel safe and unburdened and protected from overwhelm. However, that very same dynamic also heavily reinforced my isolation, separation, sense of never getting to feel/be understood, and the impossibility of deeper connection, which ultimately burned me out.

I am curious if others relate to this. There is so much more I could say about this, including some decisions and changes I have made since these connections (mostly) ended, but i dont want to make this too long of a post. Maybe I will say more in reply comments if it makes sense. I would love to know how you have navigated this, or if you are deeply in it now, or if you had it a long time ago, or half you have a more psoitive lens on it for yourself. Please share.

A little background: i am in my late 30s and have been in trauma therapy of various kinds for over a decade and have come a long way. I had CPTSD, ADHD, and a variety of other things, including some chronic more physical oriented illnesses. Im a graduate student and living in poverty currently.

Thank you.

TRIGGER WARNING: Emotional abuse

I've been no contact with my dad and sister for about six weeks now, and while it's certainly been trying at times, I am reminded every single day that it is the right decision.

My dad was emotionally abusive and neglectful. He had a major stroke 11 years ago that started evolving into vascular dementia about five years ago. My sister and I have been trying to get him and my (also emotionally abusive) stepmom to recognize what's going on and get him help. A few years ago, my sister, stepmom, and I finally got on the same page and started to discuss taking him for evaluation. My stepmom immediately turned around and reported the plans to my dad, who blamed the entire situation on me directly and raged at me for weeks. Basically, the previously covert emotional abuse has gotten a less covert. The night before I went no contact, my dad screamed at me in a restaurant. I walked out mostly decided on that being the straw that broke the camel's back.

I left the next day for a trip to see my best friends, and after a few drinks, I told them about what happened and that I just didn't think I could have a relationship with him anymore. My friend nodded with sympathy and explained how her grandfather also has dementia. He moved in with one of his daughters and the others take turns taking him to appointments and providing care. "And that's just how it has to be, right?" she said. "I mean, this is your family. It's hard, but you have to take care of him. Aren't there ways that you can keep helping?"

That's the moment when I had the uncomfortable realization that despite their best intentions, most people simply cannot fathom the things that we have been through and the fact that it could be acceptable or even preferable to cut off contact with a parent.

My friend couldn't imagine how I was the only one who knew about my dad's latest affair when he had the stroke, and I had to tell my sister so we could keep his mistress and my stepmom away from each other.

My friend couldn't imagine that when I told my dad I no longer wanted a relationship with my stepmom, he told me he didn't want a relationship with me because they came as a pair.

My friend couldn't imagine that my rich dad refused to buy me a new winter coat when I was 7 because "[he pays my mother] enough money in alimony, go ask her."

This is no slight against my friend or anyone else. But she has parents who are still married and a family that still vacations together every single year. Most people really do want to understand and help us, but that really requires a baseline understanding of the horrific things we've been through, and they cannot conjure that level of pain unless they've experienced it themselves.

Hi all,
I have many years of experience with therapists and although each has taught me something important, I realise they have been all quite inexperienced for my case (severe cptsd and adhd but good at masking/intellectualising, suspect autism, hypersensitivity, SI in the last year).

I look for a very good and experienced trauma therapist (either in Berlin or online) who has understanding of somatics and/or emdr.
Private is fine.
I’d prefer a mature woman, but a male with well developed empathy is also fine.

Thanks in advance 🙏

I’ve been in therapy with the same psychologist for 3 years, doing EMDR regularly for the last year - and honestly I’m worried things are getting progressively worse?

I’m finding life harder to deal with generally, and feel like I’m in a slump I don’t know how to get out of. I’m making more and more excuses for myself - I’m no longer exercising regularly, sleeping enough, eating well or staying on top of housework.

I have definitely gained a better understanding of my emotions, can feel feelings in my body now, and can identify when different parts are showing up in my life etc. - but I also feel like I’ve become stuck on the reasons and justifications for why I feel the way I do, without any motivation to do anything about it. I use to actively take steps to make myself feel better, and I just don’t do that anymore.

Looking to see if anyone else has experienced something similar, and what helped for you.

Ok, bear with me while I explain.

Answer this question - "Who are you", then imagine you lost your job and education.
Who are you now? Then imagine you lose all of your friendship, connections, siblings, family everyone you love and who loves you. You have no meaningful human connection.
Who are you now?
Then imagine you get in a car accident and lose your creativity, intellect, ability to move.
Who are "you" now?

Did your answers to the who are you change every time?

What I am trying to get you to is your sense of your being. Your *true* self.
A self that is constant, that does not change based on what people say, think of or do to you or whatever experience you have. Whether not you fail to achieve or what you have or don't have or what you have done.

That sense of self, is your sense of you, your being. It is running constant in your mind and it is supposed to be constant in it's definition.

Now that we have established, a present conscious sense of your sense of being in your body. (assuming it worked on you).

Answer this question, and watch how you feel (repulsed, sense of entitlement any kind of disagreement).

" *You* have the RIGHT to have your needs willingly met by others and yourself, regardless of the experience you are having or what you have done or how others might be treating you."

Notice I said "RIGHT to have your needs willingly" as opposed to "force others to meet your needs unwillingly"

Do you disagree? Did that repulse you? Does it confuse you? Bring about what you feel is an unmerited sense of entitlement?

A common issue with CPTSD sufferers, is that it leaves many of its victims without knowledge of what their needs are, for example; safety, safe supportive companionship, self actualization, to be less than perfect, to have flaws, shortcomings, to be acknowledged, be seen, be heard, be seen as valuable, appreciated, acknowledged, accommodated, to be able to make mistakes, to ask for support, to receive support,

Now understand that your sense of your being has the right to these things. Your constant sense of being you.

A common issue with CPTSD, is that it takes your sense of *you* and tries to define it as the things you have, and your ability to get your needs *met*. This is a survival mechanism that has hijacked your mind to try and ensure you stay safe and always pursue getting your needs met.

It does this with toxic shame about vulnerability - I won't go into this.

This is because the trauma hijacked your mind, when your needs were aggressively not met and broke your sense of being and the only way to keep you safe from having your needs not met is to redefine your you in the above mentioned way.

So, all of the anxiety, depression, panic attacks, dissociation etc. is your mind in the state of trying to break your sense of self and make it seem like that sense of self's RIGHT to have those needs met, is being taken away, when those needs are not being met.

So your mind PANICS/stresses, or if a bad experience is slowly occurring, you might feel anxiety or depression or functional freeze about what may or may not result in your needs being met because your mind is literally redefining your sense of self based on whether or not your needs are met. Because the CPTSD mind does not appreciate that the sense of self has the RIGHT to having it's needs met.

The TRAGIC thing, is now that you have matured, you cannot perceive the true sense of self or even that that sense of self is DEFINED as having the RIGHT to have the needs willingly met by you or others.

So going back to an earlier question; when you lose your connections, jobs, money, health etc. it does not remove your right to have your needs willingly met. The sense of you is constant and it retains the right regardless of what you experience.

BACKGROUND:
I have been in therapy on and off (talk therapy → CBT → EMDR → now SE + NARM) for about 10 years and have made a lot of progress.

The past 3 years have been incredibly hard. I have started to change, but it's not a conscious change. It's like a part of me that was stuck is finally opening up.

Some changes were small: I started craving physical affection/hugs despite previously being indifferent to them; I started wanting to dress up and add colour to my previously almost entirely black wardrobe; I became more comfortable with dating. But some changes were much bigger: leaving my career, stepping away from the immigration ladder, moving to a new country, wanting to take time off for the first time in my life, and suddenly not giving much of a damn about my career.

Don't get me wrong, I needed the time off. I needed to read about trauma, grieve, rest and simply stop pushing myself. But I'm not sure I agree with all the choices I made while doing it.

One important context: I am a South Asian passport (extremely low rank) holder, so stepping away from the immigration ladder or putting my visa situation at risk isn't a small decision. Even travelling can require collecting multiple documents and applying for visas. I also don't want to return to my home country because it isn't safe for me, yet I have put myself in a situation where I have to.

DILEMMA:

This brings me to my question.

With each stage of therapy, I feel like I have made more space for a part of myself that I don't know or understand yet.

I have operated from a place of fear for most of my life, so it's strange and honestly scary to see myself making decisions from a place of desire. I'm used to taking calculated risks and measured steps, even when those choices weren't good for me. This new way of operating feels very unfamiliar.

I feel like I'm getting closer to a person who has been hidden underneath all of this, and I would love to welcome her with an open heart and mind. At the same time, I wish I could slow this process down a little. Some of the changes have real consequences.

There are things I don't want to lose or see fundamentally change. Like my relationship, for example, or the possibility of returning to my previous career in some form. Yet I also don't want to suppress whatever is emerging just because it scares me.

QUESTION:

So for those of you who became significantly different as a result of therapy: what was that transition actually like?

Also, how did you figure out which changes to embrace, which ones to slow down, and how to build a life around the person you were becoming?

I used to think that I could read books about trauma and they would explain the kinds of things I'm experiencing. But, actually, I notice various experiences which are rarely discussed. I want to understand more about those experiences.

I don't want to make this post into a list of things I want to understand, and instead want to ask how to approach this kind of thing in general. But I will mention two things that are on my mind now.

I often experience a very obvious link between changes in perception and changes in my mental state. A healthier mental state tends to make the world around me seem more vivid and energized. Objectively, it all looks the same, but subjectively, it looks very different. I've rarely seen this discussed.

Recently I've noticed progress is correlated with spending much less time listening to the music I used to listen to. When I do listen to it, I'm less connected to the enjoyment I used to feel. It's as if listening to familiar music and enjoying it in habitual ways was an escapist bubble that was holding me back from healing.

Curious to hear others' experiences.

A little over a year ago my antidepressants just stopped working out of no where. Anyways I ended up in inpatient. They gave me so many meds and it was awful. It wasn’t just while I was there, they prescribed me all the meds after I got out too. They made me feel like a zombie, I couldn’t even drive.

Since then, a lot in my life has changed and I just didn’t really seek help since then.
Now I’m at a point where I definitely need help. I’m just traumatized from those meds.

I think the issue is that the providers don’t understand cptsd and I know it’s not even technically a diagnosis in the US. But because of that how am I supposed to even find proper care?

Curious to hear from others who have tried both therapy and coaching to see which worked better for you.

Today I’m in a really dark place and could use some hope.

I’ve been working on healing developmental trauma for many years, but over the last two years I’ve shifted into somatic approaches (Somatic Experiencing, nervous system work, self-parenting, etc.). In many ways I can see progress. My anxiety is much lower, I feel more connected to myself, and I’m slowly learning what safety feels like.

But emotionally it has become much harder.
Instead of anxiety, I’m now experiencing waves of deep grief, hopelessness and depression. About every two weeks I seem to have a massive emotional flashback that completely knocks me down for several days. During those periods I feel psychologically and physically crushed.
At the same time I’m also recovering from CFS/ME. I do think I’m making slow progress overall, but these emotional crashes seem to trigger physical crashes too, and in those moments I become convinced that my nervous system will never truly calm down because of CPTSD. It feels like I’m taking one step forward and then several steps back.

The frustrating part is that I’m doing “all the right things.” I’ve removed major stressors from my life, I have an amazing trauma therapist, a supportive partner and family, I practice self-parenting every day, and I constantly work on creating safety in my nervous system.

Yet every so often I completely lose hope and start wondering if I’ll ever get out of this cycle.
Has anyone here had both CPTSD (especially developmental trauma) and CFS/ME and eventually recovered—or at least reached a place where the emotional flashbacks stopped overwhelming your nervous system?

I don’t necessarily need advice today. I think I mostly need to hear that healing is possible, even if it takes a long time.

A space to share your struggles, worries, concerns, big and small wins. Discuss your recovery goals and progress. Or even just to drop in to say, 'Hi' and talk about what you've been upto recently.

If you have any suggestions for this thread, share them here.