u/Ok-Wheel9071

Something I have noticed with people who behave abusively, especially in group dynamics, is that when they feel exposed, there is often a split second where the mask slips.

It can be a flash of panic, discomfort, a hard glare, or a moment where you can tell they know you have seen through them. Then almost immediately, the performance returns.

They may smirk, act calm, pretend you are invisible, look amused, or speak in a controlled voice. Suddenly they become the “reasonable” one, especially if other people are watching.

Sometimes the fake smile they give to the person they are talking to looks almost stretched, like a performance. You can tell they are still listening to you while pretending to be deep in conversation with someone else.

I think this serves a few purposes. It lets them spin your reaction as instability. It helps them save face. And it turns the interaction into social theatre, where the truth matters less than who looks calm, who has social backing, and who controls the narrative.

When you have lived through scapegoating, bullying, group rejection or emotional abuse, you become extremely observant. You notice micro-expressions, tone shifts and the split second before someone puts the mask back on.
But because they perform so well in front of others, you can end up feeling like you are the only person who saw it.

The smirk is not always confidence. Sometimes it is a mask. The calmness is not always innocence. Sometimes it is strategy. And the target’s reaction is not always “instability.” Sometimes it is the visible result of being pushed too far for too long.

One of the hardest things I have learned is that many people will provoke you, smear you, isolate you, and then act like you are the problem when you finally react or try to hold them accountable.

It is disturbing how easily groups of people can back each other, even when someone is being treated badly. Kindness takes bravery, and sometimes it feels like very few people are brave enough to step outside the clique, tell the truth, or care about someone who has been made into the outsider.

I feel for the next generation, honestly. The world feels colder when basic human decency becomes rare.

But I am glad I found this space, because it reminds me that I am not entirely alone. Sometimes just being believed, understood, or heard is what keeps you going.

I don’t mean people who are simply happy or light-hearted. I mean the kind of people who seem completely asleep to what others go through. The ones who can only cope with bubbly, fun, easy people and act like anyone with depth or trauma is a burden. But then they will virtue signal diversity. “Look, I have an ND friend, I’m so open-minded.” Yeah, mate, and then you proceed to gossip about someone the second they do not perform social normality properly.

Sometimes being around that kind of social performance physically gives me a headache. I see them as bland performers, and they all perform for each other. It’s like inside I am screaming just be genuine is that so hard. Just say what you think. Everyone needs to be entertained now because we live in a social media world. There is always one loud, obnoxious person in the group and everyone laughs at their bad jokes because that is the script.

The fake laughs, the bad jokes, the small talk, the pretending everything is fine, the way people reward each other for being shallow and palatable. It is exhausting.

It feels like society only likes people if we hide it well enough and perform being fun. Like we have to make ourselves cute, passive, funny, and entertaining so we are not seen as too much. If people are editing their faces this much, they are definitely photoshopping their personalities too.

I think what repulses me is not normal people existing. It is the ignorance and inauthenticity. The way some people can float through life completely unaware of what others are carrying, then judge us for not being light enough.

I am not bitter. I feel alienated from sheep people who have never had to survive anything serious or grow as people. It makes me feel like I am living in a completely different reality.

I’m writing this because today I made a wrong assumption, acted on it while triggered, and someone innocent and kind ended up affected by my reaction. I apologised straight away and they were understanding, but I still feel mortified.

It made me think about what can happen in the CPTSD brain when we wrongly conclude someone is targeting us.

Sometimes it is not because we are stupid, dramatic, or “looking for problems.” It is because the brain has gone into threat mode.

The amygdala, the brain’s alarm system, can fire before the logical part has had time to properly assess what is happening.

So instead of:
“Something odd has happened. I need more information.”

The brain goes:
“Danger. This is the worst-case scenario. I need to protect myself now.”

Then the nervous system starts scanning for clues: a look, a strange coincidence, someone acting awkward, something happening when no camera caught it, or a person being nearby at the wrong time.

Because the body is full of adrenaline, tiny pieces of information can start to feel much bigger than they are.

This is where CPTSD can trick us.

The emotional brain starts connecting dots too quickly. The body feels unsafe, so the mind tries to create certainty: who did it, why they did it, what it means about you and how they see you, and how you need to respond.

But sometimes what feels like “proof” is actually a trauma response.

If you have been scapegoated, bullied, abused, gaslit, dismissed, or left unprotected multiple times throughout your life, your brain can pull old experiences and unpleasant feelings into the present moment.

So the present situation becomes:
“This is happening again.”
“This person is like the others.”
“No one will help me.”
“I have to act now or I’ll be powerless.”
“I feel like I did in the past”
“I don’t know why but I’ve got to stop feeling this feeling by acting on it NOW”

That is why something small or unclear can suddenly feel massive. It is not just about what happened today. It is about what the nervous system remembers.

CPTSD may explain why we reach conclusions too fast, but it does not mean every conclusion is correct. A triggered brain can mistake the worst-case scenario for factual certainty.

A useful rule is:

- If I feel completely certain while I am activated, I need to pause. Not because my feelings are invalid. Not because my trauma is fake. Not because I should ignore my instincts. But because my nervous system might be filling in the blanks with old danger.
Suspicion, rage and fear is allowed privately.
But accusation and Action need proof.

Sometimes the real strength is saying:
“This feels obvious, but I do not have enough evidence yet.”
“My body feels sure, but my body is not the whole investigation.”
“I can feel the rage without handing it the steering wheel.”

I’m sharing this because I don’t want other trauma survivors to let one triggered moment become something they regret like I did.

The work is not to shame ourselves for having a threat response.

The work is learning to put a pause between what our trauma tells us is happening and what we do next.

One of the hardest parts of CPTSD is how ordinary sounds can become unbearable when they are attached to people who have hurt, intimidated, or disrespected you.

Hearing neighbours socialising, laughing, singing, or playing music loudly might sound harmless to someone else. But when those same people have been part of situations where you felt targeted, humiliated, or unsafe, it doesn’t feel like “just noise.”

It can feel like being trapped in your own home while the people who hurt you carry on happily, loudly, socially, as if nothing happened. As if your distress means nothing. As if they get community and ease, while you are left alone trying to regulate the aftermath.

And there is another layer to it: the disgust of realising that some people have no respect for those they think are beneath them. They behave opportunistically, take liberties, and then retreat back into their little social circle where they get to feel normal, respectable, even superior.

That is what makes it so triggering. It is not just the piano, the singing, or the laughter. It is the sense of entitlement. The lack of accountability. The way people can act badly towards you, then sit around warmly with their “clan” as if they are decent people, while you are left carrying the emotional impact alone.

CPTSD does not only react to the event itself. It reacts to reminders, powerlessness, unfairness, social exclusion, and the feeling that the people who caused harm are completely untouched by it.
Sometimes the trigger is not the noise.
Sometimes the trigger is hearing other people feel safe, connected, and smug after they made you feel unsafe and alone.

Not just loneliness, but that deep nervous-system belief that you are outside of safety, outside of care, outside of the group.

Like everyone else got some invisible manual on how to be socially accepted, protected and included, and you were just left alone with no clue how healthy relationships form or how to keep them going.

I think complex trauma can make belonging feel almost impossible, because the body learns early that people are not safe, groups are not safe, and needing anyone is dangerous.

I’m curious if others relate to this. Did your trauma teach you that you don’t belong and has anything helped you start to challenge that message?

It is horrible enough reading about the injustice system and how victims, especially women and minority groups, are treated.

But living it first hand is something else entirely.

You can report what happened, provide medical evidence, photographs, messages, witnesses to the aftermath, a clear timeline, everything you possibly can, and still watch the focus shift onto you.

Your trauma history. Your neurodivergence. Your mental health history. Your social status. Whether the person who harmed you appears more credible to the system because they have capital, property, legal backing, or the outward appearance of a “normal” life.

Suddenly it becomes less about what happened and more about whether you can perform the “perfect credible victim”: someone free from discrimination, trauma history, poverty, emotional distress or any past that can be used against them — even when you have evidence and the defence has none.

Meanwhile, the person who harmed you can appear respectable, composed, legally backed due to wealth, or simply more convenient to believe, and their unsupported version is treated as though it is equal to your evidence.

Complex trauma does not make someone unreliable.

Neurodivergence does not make someone unreliable.

A mental health history is not evidence that someone is lying.

Sometimes it is evidence that someone has survived things other people never had to survive. Sometimes distress is a sign that a person has been harmed, failed, dismissed, and pushed beyond what their nervous system can carry.

And yet families, workplaces, institutions and even the law can use those very signs of harm as a reason not to believe the person harmed.

That is what feels so rotten.

The original incident is bad enough. The second injury is being disbelieved, minimised, picked apart, and forced to keep proving your reality while people use the fact you are human and affected as an excuse to call you unreliable. This is what in many cases causes complex trauma. Rather than support we get attacked and learn not to open up nor trust others and the society we live in from a young age.

Victims should not have to perform the perfect version of credibility to be believed.

Especially not when they already have evidence.

Obviously victims are not responsible for background-checking the people who harm them, but apparently it matters afterwards.

If the person who harms you is wealthy, respectable-looking, property-owning, famous, socially established, calm in public, lawyered-up or socially protected, you are not just fighting for the truth.

You are fighting their status.

And status wins far too often.

Their image.

Their ability to deny and lie and be believed.

And then somehow you become the issue.

Let’s be real, more often than not they get away with it, especially in the ordinary cases you never hear about.

There is this disgusting two-tier system where people with money, property, lawyers and social protection get endless benefit of the doubt, while vulnerable people are expected to prove everything perfectly with a spotless history, a calm tone, and a nervous system that has apparently never experienced complex trauma.

Plus, conveniently the judge is cut from the same social cloth as your wealthy perpetrator.

Maybe it has always protected capital, property and respectable people before it protects ordinary victims.

But that is not what we are taught from a young age, is it?

We are raised on right and wrong. Truth and consequences. The idea that if someone harms you and you tell the truth, the system will care.

Then you grow up, unfortunately actually need that system, and realise the “justice” bit was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

You watch Netflix crime documentaries thinking what the actual fuck when every show has the same theme: absurd police incompetence.

They can deny.

They can deflect.

They can make vile claims with no evidence and somehow that gets treated as fact.

But if you advocate for yourself, suddenly you are “difficult”.

Your trauma history gets used against you.

Your vulnerability gets used against you.

Your disability gets used against you.

Your neurodivergence gets used against you.

You can even be accused of causing the injuries that were caused to you with no evidence.

Is this what people mean by justice?

Because it feels more like a credibility test for victims.

And I will always fail that test, because complex trauma makes you look less credible, even though the reason you have complex trauma is because no one protected you when they should have.

Trying to make a wealthy person accountable has for me been far more traumatising than the original incident.

Complex trauma already teaches you that you are not important.

Then institutions come along and spit on you metaphorically.

Forget evidence, you really need status to get far in the IN-justice system.

Poverty is not just “being broke”. It can feel like another abuse tool.

Most of our money goes on rent, bills and tax, and then we’re expected to be grateful we have somewhere to live. Like we should be thankful that someone is taking half our earnings every month for the basic human need of shelter, while stopping us from ever owning a home of our own.

It keeps people exhausted and ashamed. Especially when you already have complex trauma. You’re already trying to survive your own nervous system, then on top of that you’ve got food, rent, forms, appointments, sanctions, judgement, landlords, doctors and systems.

And everyone acts like it’s normal.

But it isn’t normal. It is control.

Funny how a lot of abusers are absolutely loaded. Almost like a system built on control, image, fear and exploitation rewards people who are good at exactly that.

There has to be someone at the bottom being made an example of. Someone poor, traumatised, sick, disabled, struggling. Someone people can point at and think, “at least I’m not them.”

That keeps everyone else scared too. They work harder, shut up more, cling to jobs they hate, and convince themselves poor people just made bad choices or lazy. Because the alternative is admitting they are much closer to poverty than they are to real wealth.

And sometimes when I walk past these massive houses that scream “no riff-raff here please”, all quiet and expensive with no soul, I wonder if that is what a lot of wealth actually is. Coldness. Silence. Space. Distance from everyone else.

Poverty is not just lack of money.

It is fear, shame, shackles, silence and control.

And when you have complex trauma, it does not feel like bad luck. It feels like another punishment for something you never chose.

Some people will take any opportunity to shift blame onto whoever is easiest, even when something is clearly someone else’s fault.

When dealing with certain dynamics, especially where past interactions have been difficult or stressful, it can lead to trying to quietly sort things yourself instead of escalating. Even when the issue was caused by someone else’s incompetence, there’s that instinct to just handle it and avoid the situation.

All that does is delay it.

Because you already know how it ends.

You’ll be blamed anyway.

No matter what you do, the responsibility somehow starts to shift.

And suddenly the people who actually caused the problem are nowhere to be found, and the focus turns to you instead. More work, more money, problem conveniently redirected.

Then there’s talk of “costs being incurred”, as if the original issue never existed.

What’s exhausting is it doesn’t even feel like it matters how carefully things are worded, how assertive someone is, or what evidence there is.

The outcome feels pre decided.

I’ll be blamed anyway.

Because some people are just the safest option to blame. Especially when there’s a power imbalance.

Another example of why I end up doing everything alone.

Today I had to carry about 10 really heavy bags into my house by myself in 25 degree heat. Not little shopping bags. Bags of concrete rocks and compost. Actual back-breaking garden stuff, some of it basically the size of a grown child.

My mum would not park outside my house so I could unload properly. Instead she parked in the middle of the road and screamed at me to hurry up while I was trying to carry everything in alone.

No concern for whether I was struggling. No “are you okay?” No “let me help.” Just hurry up. You’re causing a problem. You’re inconvenient.

Then a woman in a car got impatient, went over to my mum and started with “you know this is a public road,” while I’m clearly there, one woman, carrying massive heavy bags in the heat.

I came out and said, “there’s only one of me.”

She ignored me.

So I said most decent people would offer to help but no, everyone is up themselves.

She just got back in her car and smirked at me. She only had to wait around four minutes.

And this is the kind of thing people don’t understand about complex trauma.

It’s not always some huge dramatic event. Sometimes it’s years of nobody checking if you’re okay. Nobody helping. Nobody protecting you. Nobody noticing when you’re clearly at your limit. Nobody meeting you halfway.

You’re just expected to cope. Carry it. Hurry up. Don’t make a scene. Don’t inconvenience anyone. Don’t react. Don’t have a body. Don’t have limits.

Then when you finally snap, suddenly that’s the problem.

This is why I do so much alone.

Because relying on people usually means being rushed, shouted at, humiliated, judged, or left to struggle while everyone watches.

And then people wonder why some of us become hyper-independent.

Because no one offers a hand. Ever.

But you learn they’ll do it for others.

Just not you somehow.

It’s not because we want to be like this. It’s because depending on people has taught us, over and over again, that we’ll still end up carrying the bags alone anyway.

Everyone says people meet partners through “friends of friends” now, as if that is the easy part. But I’m autistic and have complex trauma, and friendships have often been traumatic for me.

For autistic people, “just meet someone through friends” can feel like saying “just naturally succeed at the exact social ecosystem you already struggle with.” And which I myself find very boring. It isn’t just about vetting people better. It’s about access.

Even when I did have friendships in the past, a lot of that was because I was masking as an autistic woman, which many autistic women do. Those friendships often still weren’t safe or easy routes into dating. I’d attract insecure or jealous people, especially women who seemed threatened around men, so I was excluded from parties unless I had a male friend who invited me.

When people say “just meet someone through friends,” it feels like being told love is now about who you know, the same way work and opportunities often are. It also feels like being told to re-traumatise myself socially and burn out my nervous system just so I might meet someone.
Dating apps are awful, but I miss when people spoke to each other more in real life. Now everything seems to need a social context first. Mutual friends, group approval, apps, parties, clubs, networks, soft launches. It makes romance feel less human and more like networking.

I don’t want to date someone just because they’re socially convenient or pre-approved by a group chat. I want actual chemistry. I want to meet someone I’m genuinely attracted to.

For people with trauma, autism, social anxiety, or a history of being excluded, this feels brutal. Popular extroverts still seem to get access to dating, sex, parties and introductions, while the rest of us are expected to build a perfect social network first just to experience one of the most natural things on earth.

I know the signs of unhealthy people now, and I’ve done a lot of work on myself. That isn’t the issue. The issue is meeting people in the first place when modern dating seems increasingly socially gatekept.

There’s nothing sexy about modern dating now. It’s all so cautious, networked and over-managed. Like being served bland porridge when you wanted spicy curry.

Honestly, it’s enough to turn the libido off.

The more I heal from complex trauma, the more I feel like society mirrors a dysfunctional family system.

Hierarchy. Image management. Scapegoating. Silence. Punishment for speaking up. Rewarding the people who protect the illusion.

There are always the “golden children” who never question the system, the enablers who stay quiet because it benefits them, and the scapegoats who get labelled difficult, unstable, too sensitive or “not a team player” for noticing what’s wrong.

Then the scapegoats end up isolated, pushed out, leaving jobs, or carrying the blame for problems that existed long before them.

When you grow up tolerating bullying, managing other people’s egos, and adapting to dysfunction just to survive, it’s exhausting realising adulthood often expects the same thing from you.

No thanks.

I’m not interested in adapting to systems that harmed me in the first place.

Does healing from narcissistic abuse make “normal” society harder to tolerate because you can recognise the dysfunction faster?

My neighbour’s 60-year-old son, who lives with his dad, has been making loud little jabs/comments about me sporadically for about a year now.

Not directly to my face, obviously, because that would require a spine, but loud enough that I can hear it when I’m outside in my own garden.

It usually happens when I’m just trying to exist in my own space. Early morning, tired, having breakfast, doing garden stuff, or just trying to enjoy being outside. Then I hear moaning or little digs, recently about my pets.

And it’s hard because I know I’m not really “allowed” to react. If I react, I become the problem. If I snap, they get to act shocked and injured. So I have to sit there pretending I haven’t heard it, while someone else gets to keep needling me from the sidelines.

There’s history with these neighbours. I took legal action before because of harassment, then discontinued it because I had to focus on a more pressing issue. The main harassment did mostly stop after that, but the son still makes these little comments and jabs, now about my pets.

Today I said something indirectly, just enough to make it clear I had heard them. They immediately went inside after making a loud pissed-off noise, which kind of says everything.

I have nothing to do with these people. I don’t speak to them, I don’t bother them, I don’t involve myself in their lives. But he still makes it clear that I’m on his radar. He also stares at my security camera, which is outside my own property and has every right to be there. I only installed it because of the behaviour I was dealing with from them and their little group in the first place.

It’s the cowardice of it that gets to me. If someone has an actual issue, speak to me directly like an adult. Don’t stand there making loud passive-aggressive remarks for an audience.

I’m exhausted by being watched, judged, talked about, and expected to never react. Because it’s not just them. The person who badly smeared me has moved out, but still comes back and seems to feed more fodder into the clique, so the scapegoating never fully dies.

I have a lot of evidence of the passive-aggressive mobbing and how it plays out, but living through it day to day is still exhausting.

Sometimes you just want to sit in your own garden without feeling like you’re the subject of a neighbourhood podcast nobody asked for, while you’re forced to do mindfulness because apparently reacting once to a year of little digs makes you the villain.

Honestly, it’s degrading. I just want peace in my own home and garden.

Why do people always jump to “they must be mentally ill” when someone kills people?

Like no. Some people are violent because they’re entitled, hateful, misogynistic, racist, radicalised, abusive, power-obsessed, or just dangerous.

And when violence is selective, that matters. A lot of killers target specific groups, like women, sex workers, children or marginalised people. If it was simply “mental illness made them do it,” why is the violence so often aimed at people they hate, objectify, or feel entitled to hurt?

Mentally ill people are usually the ones being harmed, ignored, mocked, failed, exploited or left to rot. Not the ones casually plotting mass murder.

And because of this stigma that people with mental health issues are “unstable” or likely to be violent, they get treated like trash the second they disclose it.

Which is bleakly funny, because a lot of people have mental health issues because of the cruel “normal” people who did things to them, then walked around with clean public images and respectable little lives.

I think people do this because it protects the idea that “normal” people are safe. It means they don’t have to look at entitlement, misogyny, racism, abuse, radicalisation, cruelty, or respectable people doing horrific things behind clean public images. They can just dump it all into “mental illness” and move on.

Not every murderer is “mad.” In a lot of cases they’re just cruel and externalise their anger. And blaming mental illness for every horrific act just makes life worse for people who are already struggling.

So much abuse gets hidden behind nice houses, money, job titles, middle-class accents, “respectable” close-knit families, and knowing how to act blandly normal in public.

Then there’s the little social club mentality: property, check. Children, check. Corporate job, check. Partner, check. Mortgage, check. Disdain for anyone different, check. Welcome to the club.

That kind of conformity gives me the creeps, because you never really know what people are like behind closed doors.

So if someone from that group starts targeting someone outside it, people instantly side with the “respectable” one. Because how could they be abusive? They have a patio set and a pension plan. Nah.

If someone looks respectable enough, people believe them. If the victim is poor, disabled, has no support network, traumatised, renting, unemployed, single, not white, gender non-conforming, neurodivergent, working class, visibly not coping, or assertive, suddenly they’re “unstable” and “the problem.”

It’s not just that abusers manipulate people. Society already gives them the perfect rigid little ranking system to hide behind.

Class gives some people instant credibility with police, councils and neighbours, while others have to fight just to be seen as human.

Abuse thrives where image matters more than truth. And class is basically one big image-management scam.

Marathons, royals, American politics, celebrity scandals, men in suits pretending everything is very serious.

I just look at it like… I’ve seen this shit 8,000 times before.

Same power games, machine, institutions people clap for even though they’d step over you if you collapsed in the street.

When you’ve lived through actual chaos, a lot of this stuff just feels like background noise. I do not have the energy to pretend I care about every little public circus.

Anyway. Yawn.

You go through the courts for something, and then somehow you are expected to become legally fluent, emotionally void and perfectly credible while the system puts you through delay after delay, paperwork, procedures, hearings, adjournments, technicalities, and the constant threat that one small mistake could be used against you.

The courts can move your case to a court miles from your home last-minute, list it really early in the morning, make you wait outside in the freezing cold for an hour, then put you in a small stuffy waiting room full of other people, solicitors and the defendant.

Then the defendant’s solicitor finds you in the waiting room trying to get your case squashed again, knowing you are representing yourself.

Then you go to the loo, and because there is only one toilet, the defendant is standing right outside your cubicle. You open the door and they are just there. No space. No privacy. No feeling of safety.

Then you finally go into the hearing, already exhausted and wind-beaten, ready for the hearing you have prepared weeks for, and the judge says they wanted to give you the courtesy of telling you both in person that the hearing is being adjourned.

You ask a question a moment too late and are told the hearing is over, if you can even call it a hearing. It feels less like justice and more like being reminded how little control you have in a system where everyone else knows the rules and you are just trying not to drown.

Then you leave with no clear instructions about what you are supposed to do next, or whether you need to respond to the defendant trying, once again, to squash your claim.

And just like that, you are back at square one.

This has been going on for over a year. The only reason I used the courts in the first place was because the police in this country are not just incompetent, they can be biased, dismissive and institutionally useless when you actually need protection.

It is torture.

Not dramatic internet torture. Actual nervous-system torture.

You are forced to relive things repeatedly, write them down, prove them, explain them, justify why they mattered, respond to people twisting them, and then sit there while the process moves at a pace that feels completely detached from the damage it is causing.

The person seeking accountability is often the one who has to stay the most composed. The person who was harmed has to become the administrator of their own harm.

People say “just take legal action” as if that is the clean, empowering bit.

It is not.

It can be exhausting, humiliating, destabilising and unbelievably lonely. Especially when you are already dealing with complex trauma and your nervous system is screaming that you are trapped, not important and being disbelieved all over again.

Sometimes the legal process does not feel like justice.

It feels like being asked to survive the original trauma in a suit, with deadlines.