cw: contains mention of mental health issues, trauma, abuse, firearms, suicide/suicidal ideations.
I’m trying to get better about remembering to always put these at the beginning of every post!
I haven’t written about Complex PTSD in quite a while. This is in part because my trauma therapy is going really well and I haven’t had a lot to say. My therapist and I used to meet 2 times a week and did EMDR as well as talk therapy, but now we are down to once a week and are mostly doing talk therapy and Jungian work with occasional EMDR. I also haven’t written about C-PTSD in a while because, for a while I was writing about/along with a podcast that I really liked and even was a guest on a few times that talked about the subject, but as so many good things that humans are involved with do, it took a turn and I no longer feel it is a good representation of the condition or the healing process. And of course, writing about PTSD of any type is inherently writing about trauma (I mean, it’s in the name) and not only does that require a lot of spoons, which I am perpetually short on, but it’s also super personal and vulnerable and that’s just a whole different spoon drawer all together.
Since I’ve been seeing my therapist I have made some amazing progress getting my C-PTSD symptoms under control. My night terrors are gone (thanks to my antidepressant/PTSD med). My flashbacks, both classic and emotional, “typical” and somatic, are much more manageable, and my panic attacks are much fewer and further between! I don’t dissociate nearly as often as I used to, and my emotional regulation is far better and more stable. And what’s even better is that not only are these symptoms reduced, but I am gaining a deeper insight and compassion into my own mind and heart, so when triggers do happen I am able to address them and get through them more smoothly and graciously. It’s really quite beautiful. With the EMDR we have been addressing a lot of old memories, and have been healing them so they don’t create such a violent emotional response in the present. We’ve also been doing a lot of inner child work to help heal that feeling of being forever heartbroken and unlovable. And the progress is just grand.
But I do still have C-PTSD, and I always will. I do still get triggered by things, I do still have flashbacks of all sorts of varieties (both typical and emotional, and either can be as “simple” or somatic as it wants on that particular day), and I do still struggle with things like:
A deep fear of trust
Terminal aloneness
Emotional regulation issues
Hypervigilance, especially about people
Loss of faith/trust in others, self, and a higher being
A profoundly hurt inner child
Helplessness and toxic shame
Dissociation
Persistent sadness/depression (this also used to include suicidal thoughts, ideations, and tendencies, but not for a few years now. Hooray!)
Muscle armoring
Avoidance
Difficulty sleeping
Being easily startled
A negative self-view
I know this list seems super overwhelming and like maybe I’m not actually doing all that well after all, but that’s super not true! I mean, it is, it is an expansive list. But it’s way smaller than it used to be, and the degree to which I experience each of these things is much smaller than it used to be, which is incredible! I’m not going to talk about all of these (I don’t think), at least not in depth, because I’d be here for a year and a half and while there is still a pandemic going on, I suspect we all have other things to do than sit here and listen to me academically wax on about complex post traumatic stress disorder.
I’m not gonna go into the whole backstory of C-PTSD here because, again, we’d be here forever, but fortunately I’ve already gone over it all and if you need a rough 101 on it, you can find it here. But again, I no longer recommend this podcast that I was writing about at the time. That said, My complex trauma started super young. Like… immediately into the world. Therapy for conventional PTSD (which is usually caused by an acute trauma) focus a lot on trying to reconnect to who you were before the trauma. But what about if there isn’t anything to connect to before your trauma? What if you have been used, abused, broken down, spit on, and thrown away since literally the day you were born? There’s nothing to go back to. No good, healthy, whole place to reconnect to, to heal from. Fortunately my therapist is fucking amazing and knows a lot about complex PTSD, and we’ve done a ton of EMDR, going back to memories that haunted me, or that I had totally forgotten to heal the pain, to fight the demons, to regain some measure of control in my life, as well as doing a lot of inner child work. See, if there’s no past self to go back and reconnect to, we have to go back and try and heal and form a good relationship with that young, broken, damaged self. Which is really weird, but actually incredibly effective.
For me personally, I deal with a lot of abandonment issues. I was adopted, which is a whole abandonment thing in and of itself, but my adoptive parents didn’t really care for me. Not really. I mean, they provided all the physical things that were needed to not get the state involved (which was pretty easy for a middle to upper middle class couple), and they put on a really good show when out in public, but it was all very performative and superficial. They also made it very clear from an early age that I was bought and paid for and that I owed them a debt that I could never repay. Like… I’m not saying it was implied or that I picked up on things here and there or that’s how I felt… they told me so directly on a regular basis. That does something pretty weird to a kid’s psyche, lemme tell you. Especially when you couple it with violence and abuse. “You were wanted so much that we spent a whole lot of money to buy you… like a used dog! *frying pan comes flying across the room*” Yikes.
I spent so many sleepless nights laying awake in my little brass daybed listening to screaming and wailing and threats, wondering if this was the night he was going to kill my mother that he “loved” so and stayed with for 20 some odd years because of both of their deep devotion to Jesus. I spent so many mornings quietly sitting on the 3rd step down on the stairs, having tactfully dodged the squeaky one, listening to see if I could hear if there were the sounds of breaking dishes or cooking pancakes. What kind of day was it going to be? Constant hypervigilance. I would regularly scoop my baby sister up and hide her in my bedroom, furniture up against the door and one of the rifles hidden in my closet with a handful of ammunition in my little white Easter shoes, where no one was sure to look. I wasn’t a Boy Scout, but I was always prepared, because I learned early and fast that the people who are supposed to love you, who you have to rely on, are also the ones who will hurt you and who you have to be able to protect yourself from.
Believe it or not, getting out of there at 18 wasn’t the end of the bad brain patterns. It’s something that has stuck with me. It’s what I grew up with, it’s what my brain formed around, how the neuropathways solidified, and what was reinforced over and over for decades (long after I left). It took me until my mid-late 20’s to finally get good space and make breaks from my abusers, to find good therapists who understood what was going on inside my brainpan, and start actually getting some healing. But there’s more to the story.
I’m also a disabled person. A chronically ill, chronically in pain, person whose health is getting progressively worse. And that’s a lot to handle. But it seems that it’s also a lot of others to handle, as well. Over the years since I became symptomatic, when I was 19 or so, I have lost a lot of people. Friends (or “friends,” I suppose) who got tired of making plans with me and me having to reschedule or cancel last minute because my health changed, or having to not go to their fav inaccessible venues with me, or who just decided that I was really attention seeking, was “too much,” or something, and stopped calling, unfriended me, who I never heard from again. Partners who left me because my health impacted their future, their ability to do what they wanted, their convenience, their lack of desire to be seen with me with my mobility aids, their desire to want someone… better. I talked a while ago about being alone as a disabled/sick person, and what that’s like, and the truth is, I understand where they’re coming from. It’s really hard being me, and I imagine it can be frustrating trying to make plans with me. But I also truly believe that I don’t deserve to be alone. But so, so, so often, I do end up alone in the end.
And I’m not special in that. It’s a common issue that I hear from disabled and chronically ill people, which is super tragic. But it definitely hits home for me as I work through my own trauma stuff. But the funny thing is, you might suspect this makes me really slow to trust people. And you’d be right. I pay SUCH close attention to everything, every micro expression, every vocal inflection, every word choice, every word that isn’t used, how people hold themselves, the jewelry they wear, who they are friends with, who they aren’t friends with, how they engage with others, everything. I am always on guard (not on purpose, just hypervigilance hypervigilance-ing), and I am extremely slow to allow myself to trust others. But when I do, when someone has proven themselves, when someone loves me and loves me well and I trust them with all of me, something very interesting happens.
ABSOLUTE FUCKING PANIC. Like, I’m talking borderline if not full-blown panic attack. Why? Literally why? Things are so good! Why are you freaking out? Because now I’m dealing with an emotional flashback, going waaaaaaay back to people who “loved me,” who I trusted, and who hurt me over and over and over again. And while I intellectually know the difference between these two situations, my survival instinct can’t quite differentiate. “People who love you hurt you! PEOPLE WHO LOVE YOU HURT YOU, DON’T TRUST THEM RUN AWAY!” Which isn’t a great way to go through life. So we breathe through it. And we do inner child work, and Jungian shadow self work, and EMDR, and breathwork, and try to keep healing that old stuff so that I can relax into healthy relationships without panicking and packing my cat and my books onto my motorcycle and escaping into the night. Because it’s a process and it always will be. But man, I never thought I’d get to the point that my biggest problem would be that things are too good sometimes and it scares me.
But it’s not exclusively the “people who care for your hurt you” thing. It’s also the abandonment aspect. So that means there’s a chance that any little, inconspicuous thing comes up - I say something dumb, something inconvenient happens because of me, they go somewhere or hang out with someone who makes me feel uncomfortable for literally any reason, I have a bad health day(s) - and suddenly my brain tells me “HOLY HELL, THEY ARE GOING TO LEAVE YOU” and I went from having a nice day out to sitting on the verge of a panic attack. I’ve gotten and am continuing to get a lot better at managing it, thanks to therapy. But this week has been hard for that. These triggers have been coming up more than usual and I’ve been surfing those waves (as my therapist says) pretty fucking decently, but I’ve definitely caught myself dissociating pretty hard a few times, or just having to sit quietly, hoping no one notices that I’m about to cry as I fight some serious “run away and change your name, it’s best for everyone” instincts.
I tend to avoid situations and people who make me feel scared, shitty, unsafe, or who I get a “bad vibe” about. But I’m getting better at pushing myself some. Pushing my boundaries. But I’m also learning that I don’t always have to do that. Boundaries are beautiful things, and while yes, I can’t let my trauma control me, I also don’t need to live in a space of debilitating anxiety and nausea because I felt like I needed to “push my boundaries.” Sometimes it’s okay to say “no, I’m not going to go to that event because I don’t feel good around those people” or “no, I’m not going to maintain contact with this person because they make me feel unsafe and awful and continue to trigger me.” I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling like there’s something very wrong with me. Like I’m jealous, petty, selfish, shallow, unintelligent, overemotional, underemotional, bitchy, or just plain broken because weird little things bring up HUGE feelings (and sometimes reactions) in me that I didn’t fully understand and others certainly didn’t. But I’m getting a better grasp on things, and while I’m still triggered by stuff, at least I’m usually quicker at being able to trace it down and figure out what’s at the root, what’s unhealed, what’s causing the emotional irregulation, flashbacks, and whatever else in the moment.
And while it still sucks and I’ve still spent some time this week dissociating and having small panic attacks because of some ridiculous things that I know shouldn’t bother me, it’s still huge progress. And I don’t think that we give ourselves enough credit for the progress. When it comes to mental health, there’s really usually no “fixing” it, you know? It’s an endless progression of improvement (thought not always a smooth progression). So, for me at least, I think it’s healthy to stop more often and recognize how fucking far I’ve come, because I have worked so hard, I’ve put in the hours, the months, the years, the blood, sweat, and tears. I have a long way to go, no doubt. And yes, I spent part of this past week dealing with some anxiety and dissociations and some flashbacks and what have you. But never in my life did I think I would have made it this far, be this healthy, this happy. I mean, I didn’t even think I was going to live to 30, much less past it, and happily? Are you kidding me?! Here’s to therapy, therapists, and doing the work even though we may never “arrive.” It’s beautiful.