u/Yoshi9105

bit of a rant about an experience I had tonight...

it's been 5 months since I've connected the dots and realised I was >!sexually abused / r*ped!< as a toddler and child. in those 5 months I've been depressed, miserable, anxious, isolated, scared, confused. I've not done anything or gone anywhere outside of my part time job as a dog walker.

tonight was supposed to be fun. my housemates asked if I wanted to go to a local pub to see some stand-up comedy. I decided to finally drag my ass out of bed and do something nice... to get my mind off all of this stuff.

we saw 3 comedians and the host/MC. between the four of them, they told no less than about 8-9 pedo jokes in under 1.5 hours.

one of them, I later found out, is even a survivor of CSA himself and apparently uses his comedy to "defy and mock abusers." but the jokes he told weren't empowering at all. they were cheap and tasteless, not even clever. it felt like it was just dropping the words or implications for shock and awe, and nothing else. about 6 of the pedo jokes came from him. I know people deal with trauma differently but that was just... idk. I get they're meant to be "harmless" jokes and on the surface I guess they were, but to me all this does is desensitise people to the words and implications and it really pissed me off.

I can't remember everything the others said but at least one other comedian also dropped jokes that implied CSA (or "confusion" about age / consent).

the worst part was, the audience loved it. they laughed so much. they thought it was hilarious. and I sat there in this room full of people who thought the thing that ruined my entire life from when I could barely walk was nothing but a funny punchline. it made me feel more isolated and alienated than ever.

and I know I am probably more sensitive to it than I maybe would have been 6 months ago, but I was so disappointed that people in general don't seem to see an issue with this, comedians and audience alike. it's a cheap laugh to them. ha ha pedophile funny lol are you sure she's 18 bro ha ha.

maybe I'm being too sensitive about this idk. I felt like a miserable buzz kill on the way home because I felt so "offended." but like. I just don't understand. even if I hadn't realised what I realised 5 months ago... I just simply don't think I'd find pedo jokes funny. how desensitised are we as a society, if half the comedians at a local pub comedy night can drop these jokes like it's nothing, and the audience cheers at every single one..?

meanwhile 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 5 boys are being sexually abused as we speak.

I feel sick.

not going into detail because it would be too long but I have a lifetime of behaviours and symptoms that are so obvious, it would be more of a stretch to assume I DIDN'T experience CSA between the ages of 2 and 11.

but I have no visual memories of anything explicit, no objective proof, the person who I'm 99.9% sure did it is dead, my parents compulsively rewrite history and have spent my whole life teaching me my feelings and emotions are wrong and I'm dramatic, so I definitely can't ask / talk to them. they likely didn't even ever notice it was happening despite me showing very clear signs of distress from age 2 onwards.

recently I had a massive breakthrough in realising what all the symptoms and behaviours mean. for the first time I put them all on paper. it took 3-4 months and the pattern is SO obvious.

I've always had random emotional flashbacks I didn't understand, and I would age regression in certain situations, but since that realisation I've had more visceral flashbacks and nightmares. for the first time I have these split seconds of actually losing connection to the here and now. no visuals. but a deep, deep sense of "it" happening to me.

it's been affecting me so much I really struggle to function. I barely eat. I've started to lose hair and weight. I struggle to shower and brush my teeth. I'm crying for hours every single day. I'm coming apart at the seams and the flashbacks keep coming, and keep getting more intense.

I've tried talking to doctors, I've tried talking to therapists. nobody believes me. everyone keeps saying "we don't know, we can't prove it, you can't remember." they keep talking about it as a hypothetical while my body is actively vibrating. the "cautious" and dismissive tone makes me viscerally angry and age regress because I'm not being heard. it makes me feel so small and deeply sad and scared. I know why they have to say these things but logic doesn't prevent my system from completely shutting down.

if they could feel what this feels like in my body and my brain, they wouldn't say I can't remember. I know it happened. and if someone would actually take the time to properly listen to me, they would realise I'm not making this up.

I feel so hopeless. I am at the end of my rope. I can't dissociate this away. I can't forget about it or move on. I can't distract myself. I am so unwell. it's not even a mental obsession, it's my body not letting this go. I can't rest, I'm constantly on edge and crying. I desperately need to talk about this and I desperately need help but nobody ACTUALLY believes me.

please can someone help manage my expectations. what will A&E actually do if I go there for MH issues? how does it work? do you just walk in and say you're sad and then wait hours to be seen? what happens when they do see you?

I've been really struggling with my mental health due to complex trauma and unpleasant details of my childhood bubbling up four months ago. I went to my GP a month ago, then had an assessment with SPA who discharged me back into my GP's care. I called him to ask for help and he basically said there's nothing else he can do if SPA decided I don't qualify for anything else.

I don't know where to go. I don't have active plans to end my life but I can't live like this. I'm crying every day, I spend every free minute in bed too exhausted and on edge to do anything else. I've become addicted to looping on AI because I don't have anyone to talk to and I know it's not healthy and making me feel worse but I can't stop.

I started seeing a new counsellor last week but 50mins a week is not enough right now. I'm not in a good place.

I don't know where else to go at this point. But I'm worried A&E won't care of I'm not actively suicidal. Everyone I've asked for help told me they can't help me. I'm too complex for my GP, but not bad enough for secondary care.

I can't afford to fully collapse before I get help because I'm self-employed working part time (only way I managed to hold down a job) and losing that would mean ending up homeless. I would lose everything.

I'm scared and don't know what to do.

(mild TW for mention of CSA at young age but no details)

sorry this ended up longer than I intended but the core question is basically what the title implies… how do I heal / do therapy if I can't prove that it happened?

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For the past four months I've been trapped in a trauma "loop" that's affecting my entire life and health and I desperately need help. But I don't know how to do therapy when I can't prove or remember that this happened to me. I mask heavily (which I can't control) in social and clinical settings, so doctors and therapists alike don't see how much I'm struggling when I'm alone. I also think no therapist REALLY believes me, despite having a lifetime of behaviours / symptoms / fears that point to CSA between age 2 and 10ish, and a sense of "knowing" I've had since I was like 12 that I'm someone who was r***d.

I don't know how to talk freely about the agony of the not knowing or the doubt or the impact without the therapist thinking I'm making it up or lying. I hate the "I believe you because you believe it" tactic because it makes me feel like they just decide to humour a delusion.

I find it SO difficult not being able to make other people understand how REAL it feels to me. I think everyone is just humouring me and I can't trust anyone to take this seriously.

How am I supposed to do therapy if I feel like this? If I can't prove this happened? Working with current symptoms is one thing, but… I think I dissociate so much that I can't even feel or trigger the symptoms or physical flashbacks all the time, especially not in a social or clinical setting. They seem to show up randomly at times when I'm tired or distracted and my brain forgets to hide them, and almost exclusively when I'm alone. I don't know.

I don't think I would have been this obsessed with this entire thing for four months straight if nothing happened. And I've had more intense "flashbacks" recently but only like… physical ones. Like they feel like memories but not visual ones. I don't know how to explain it. But I just don't know. I don't know how to access the grief or the anger or any other emotions when I can't prove it. It's eating me alive and nobody seems to be able or willing to help. And I can't trust anyone to believe me. :(

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Some Background:

I only recently (at age 35) managed to put the connect of my life and realised that there is a mountain of "evidence" – behaviours, symptoms, fears – starting around age 2 and continuing my entire life that strongly indicate I was sexually abused by my aunt's husband between 2 and 10.

I have absolutely no memories of anything explicit. But I know I stayed with my aunt and uncle several times on my own during that time (without my parents or younger brother), for several days at time. I have vague memories of my uncle being in the single bed with me where I slept, and at least one vague vibe/memory of being in that bed, lying on my back, my left side pressed against the wall, feeling frozen and terrified, waiting for something (to happen or finish, idk).

Other than that, I barely remember much from my childhood apart from the… uncomfortable things I did. There's an entire timeline of other obvious things I did or felt or avoided or was scared of that point towards this conclusion (not going into detail because… well, some of it is disturbing and I feel quite a bit of shame about it).

I made this connection about four months ago, and I desperately need help getting "over" or through it. The problem is that I don't know what I need. I think the main thing I'd need would be to get a proper diagnostic assessment… I know nobody can 100% prove what happened all those years ago, and that will ALWAYS haunt me, but if someone with the appropriate knowledge and qualifications could look at my timeline, behaviours, symptoms, etc. and tell me that it is consistent with CSA, I think that would help. But I don't have access to that.

I have a very very strong feeling that it did happen, but growing up with parents who constantly told me I was being dramatic when I voiced emotions or was struggling coping with life has caused an insane level of internal gaslighting – I can't trust my own intuition.

I'm in England and tried to get help through the NHS but they don't see how much I'm internally struggling. I suspect I have structural dissociation and involuntarily mask really heavily in social or clinical settings, to the point where I lose access to the despair, the fear, the sadness, etc. and can't really talk about any of it. They did an assessment, left most of the dissociation / cptsd symptoms I mentioned out of the report, and claimed I suffer from "low mood." They discharged me without any help whatsoever.

They don't know how much I break apart in silence / solitude. It's affecting my mental and physical health, and I'm worried it'll affect my business next. I'm a 1 on 1 dog walker (that was also a trauma response, long story, but it's the only job I've managed to do more than 1–2 years) and it took me 3 years to build this business. I'm so scared of losing everything because nobody will help me.

I've recently reached out to a local private counsellor who has a background in child protection and claims to know the longterm affects of child abuse (though idk if that includes CSA). I've only had one session so far and she didn't obviously not believe me but I still left feeling like an idiot for saying anything at all. And I know she is speaking in a perfectly neutral way when she asks what I "believe" happened, but somehow that still stings, even when I know she's perfectly right. It is just "believing."

I just… I don't know. I'm not sure what to do, and I'm worried nobody will ever be able to help me, and I'm worried that this will destroy me, my health, my life, because I just can't let it go. :(

I wish I could go back to before I connected everything… because now that I've seen the pattern, I literally can't stop obsessing over it...

(disclaimer: I'm not asking for advice, I'm just looking for people who have had the same or similar experiences with objectively false assessment reports.)

ETA because apparently it's necessary. I am not saying I am pouty because they didn't give me a diagnosis I demanded. That's not what happened and not what this post is about. This post is about the report (an official medical document) being filled with misinformation, misquotes, and a blatant misrepresentation of who I am and what my struggles are. That is unacceptable, and anyone who says otherwise... I don't know what to tell you. If the SPA is going to dismiss me, the least they can do is dismiss me based on the actual facts, not made up lies and misinformation.

TLDR – I had an assessment with SPA where they blatantly screened for depression and not the complex trauma and dissociative symptoms I requested. The report / discharge letter was full of misinformation and wrong quotes / claims, it downplayed my symptoms to fit the depression box ("low mood, fatigue"), and entirely left out everything that didn't fit into that box and would have forced them to refer me on. Now they're expecting me to accept this as a permanent document in my medical records.

I'm explaining more about my experience below in case anyone's interested. This feels entirely too deliberate for this to only have happened to me.

It feels like the service worked exactly as it was supposed to – they looked at someone presenting with complex symptoms and told them they would have an assessment to determine whether they "qualify" for secondary care to give them the illusion that they're being taken seriously. Then they deliberately used a primary care nurse (who has no idea what CPTSD / structural dissociation is and how it presents) as the gatekeeper to secondary care. Their entire job is to gaslight people into thinking they only have depression so they can discharge them back into primary care and trap them in years of useless standard counselling that won't touch the dissociation or trauma.

If this is a tactic to "protect limited resources" there are better ways to go about it... They don't just say "sorry we don't have space for you" and explain why resources are limited. They actively gaslight you into thinking your own perception of reality and your life is wrong. It's SO damaging.

Let me just say, it's incredibly telling that the only way they managed to justify discharging me back into primary care was by omitting 90% of my symptoms from the report because they didn't conveniently fit into the depression box.

I'm currently in the process of escalating to PALS and was wondering how common this specific issue really is.

My experience:

Recently I've had some childhood trauma come to the surface and I've been struggling for the past 4 months, it's really affecting me and has made my dissociation much worse. I desperately need help but standard talking therapy won't touch it because the part of me that sits across a therapist is not the part of me that needs the therapy.

A month ago I went to my GP and specifically requested an assessment for secondary care / CMHT for complex trauma and structural dissociation, providing him with lots of data (symptom list, completed self-screening forms, specific examples of my experiences, etc). My GP said any requests for secondary care have to go through our local SPA-PCLS team. He referred me and three weeks later I had an appointment for an assessment.

The assessment itself felt completely invalidating and just… wrong. I kept describing my symptoms and she boiled everything down to "low mood, fatigue." It was so blatantly obvious that they were only screening for depression, not the conditions / secondary care markers I ACTUALLY requested the assessment for.

I got the report one week later. To say I was appalled would be an understatement:

– A ridiculous amount of spelling errors and blatant misinformation

– A crisis "plan" that was literally just 2 pages of copy+paste community services, including completely inaccurate resources (CAHMS or domestic violence resources when I'm a 35yo looking for help about developmental trauma), not a single personalised sentence or plan

– Things I never said put in quotation marks

– Complete omission (or downplaying) of any and all symptoms / experiences I described (or showed) before and during the assessment that did not fit neatly into the "depression" box

– Inclusion of an inaccurate BPD label that was put on my record by an ADHD assessor who had no business adding that (I was never diagnosed with BPD) and using that label to dismiss me as overly emotional (my GP had explicitly told them in the referral that this was not a valid clinical diagnosis)

– Forced consent for community service referrals after I had previously stated I did not want them because I need medical help, not peer support, which the report framed as consent. (she essentially pressured me into accepting those useless referrals when time was almost up and I was crying and completely dissociated, now I'll have to navigate 2–4 different organisations reaching out when I'm already overwhelmed)

– Claiming I was seeking an ADHD medication review (I requested that 2 years ago, didn't follow up because I didn't want it anymore, which I clearly stated during the assessment)

There is SO much more. My (what I call the) Analytical Part has entirely taken the wheel and spent the past 2 days meticulously taking their report apart, line by line. I think in the entire report, there are like 10 sentences that are correct, or at least not actively wrong.

My GP has effectively abandoned me, claiming it's not his place to correct their opinion (I told him it is not about opinion, I have a recording and transcript of the call as proof, the report is objectively inaccurate), and suggesting I reach out to PALS. When I told him how counterproductive it is to leave someone to fend for themselves when they're already in crisis, all he said was, "I'm sorry you feel that way."

TLDR: I've been trying to get a referral for secondary care for CPTSD but being denied by primary care gatekeepers who don't know how to spot or screen for CPTSD. need advice on next steps.

I have recently been really really struggling with my CPTSD after finding out that, let's just say there was more to my childhood than just the emotional neglect I went through in my immediate family.

since this realisation, I've had a lot of "body" flashbacks and thought loops (although I currently have no visual memories because I was too young when it happened). I've been having extreme difficulty staying on top of every day life, I'm in a very bad place mentally.

I've reached out to my GP, explaining this to him. gave him a list of daily functional impairments and a filled in dissociation self-screening that hints at Secondary Structural Dissociation, and I explained to him how much I'm struggling with the accumulation of trauma and the realisation about my childhood.

I specifically asked to a referral to Secondary Care / CMHT for a diagnosis and treatment for CPTSD.

He sent a referral to my local Single Point Access team, saying I suffer from "low mood, lack of motivation" and that my job as a dog walker "understandably" makes me tired. he literally heard me say what happened to me as a child and that I can barely eat, and said "she's got low mood and is a bit tired."

Fast forward 3 weeks, I had my assessment with SPA on Monday, 6th July.

They blatantly screened only for depression, not CPTSD or dissociation like I explicitly asked.

I told the assessor about my history and she didn't even listen, just went on with the next generic questions for depression. she wouldn't give me a chance to explain anything properly, and when I tried, she kept misunderstanding me.

in the end she suggested I get blood work done and she'd recommend peer support.

I was completely dissociated and crying heavily by the end because she wasn't hearing me, and she abruptly ended the call because time had run out.

I'm stuck and don't know what to do. I've not had the report yet but she did not sound like she was going to refer me on. my GP won't do anything until the report is back, and in any case he said they value SPA's "professional opinion" so I doubt he'd believe me over them.

I have a LONG history of talking therapy and antidepressants, and nothing helped. now I am being denied access to someone who would understand my condition by people who don't understand my condition and therefore don't believe me I have the condition.

I can't afford private because my CPTSD is keeping me from working full time / a normal job.

any advice would be greatly appreciated. I really need support but the NHS keeps downplaying my experience.