r/CPTSD

I recently tried to talk with my mother about moving over to Pontiac but she said it wasn’t possible due to the fact that she and my dad about moving over to Naples, Florida at least for the time being, and I just don’t want to deal with them anymore after having to live with their dysfunctional lifestyle for 20 years. I’m so tired of having to be babied by them and they legitimately told me “Fuck no, get a job.” while suggesting I should live with my grandparents if I’m not going with them, all because of the fact that I wanted to live in an place that has an crime-level population yet I have an friend who has lived and managed to secure an place with his girlfriend and dog by saving and investing money.

Even after everything I’ve been through of being rejected out of school for an graduation, retrying but failing GED due to my parents moving around, and nearly being killed in an car accident, I still get the blunt of everything by my own parents and I don’t even have an inkling of understanding how financial stability or how to budget my own money.

I hate to say this, but maybe they are right… maybe I’m not ready as I think I am.

I deal with a lot of work stress. Unrealistic expectations at work and my response is anxiety and rushing. I start rushing, worried that if miss something at work I'll lose my job. During my therapy appointment today with the help of my therapist we realized I have a a fawn response when I am stressed. Have any of you found yourselves rushing as a fawn response?

Why do they put it all on the victims? Why do people believe them? Why is it so lonely to be a victim?
I hate it when people around them don't see them for who they really are. I hate that they seem like the perfect person, kind, working, talented... yet they're sick and harmful.

I had a week off work (PTO) and spent 80% of it lying in bed or sleeping for like 16 hours.

My bed is 100% my safe place. In the moment it feels amazing, but then after you realise how much time you have wasted doing literally nothing and now I feel disgusting and lazy. I have a lot of regret, but at the same time I don't want it to end. I am dreading going back to work, I just wanna stay hiding in my sheets.

I go back to work on Monday. When someone asks what I did with my time off, I think I am gonna have to make up a lie to not sound depressing or weird.

I have a history of doing this too, since childhood I remember being like this. I used to suffer with agoraphobia and thats when it was at its peak.

Anyway, I realised today I have spent majority of my life just rotting in my bed.

I haven't bought new clothes in years and now I remember why. Just trying to find a regular, medium, practical warm winter shirt is a joke. The men's versions are always normal, comfortably loose-fitting shirts made for adult human beings. They are functional and offer full coverage that's appropriate for cold weather. The women's version is either tightly body conforming or it's a crop top, because women don't need comfortable warm clothing, we always have to be slinky sylphs or we need to walk around like fucking toddlers with our widdle tummie-wummies sticking out. Don't tell me to just buy the men's versions because the shoulders and neck are always cut wrong. I want adult clothes for adult women.

One of the most triggering things about being raised by misogynists is that misogyny never stops playing out in every aspect of our culture, even in areas as innocuous as this. I fucking hate it. I hate that it's 2026 and this is normal. Women are human beings. We need to go out into cold weather and go to work just like real human beings.

People who do this only use the stigma of male SA victims only so they can shut women down. They do not actually ever care and love to make jokes about these issues they pretend to care about when not trying to be disingenuous. I am a victim of both harassment and SA from males and females and I know for a fact if I were to mention my experience and how it does not change that misogynistic violence is a huge epidemic (1 in 3 vs 1 in 6, still a gigantic problem but the numbers clearly skew one way) they would stop pretending to care about people who have had these experiences. I hate this so much.

I have this new co-worker. We're friendly and tend to chat and rant about work on breaks/lunch. I'm 30, single and objectively good looking. She's a bit older, married, and has three kids. Today we were having lunch together and I took out my meds before eating. I'm basically messed up mentally and physically but I'm working on it. Anyway, the meds are for IBS (irritable bowl syndrome) which is caused by chronic stress and a not very healthy lifestyle in my case. She recognized the meds and what they're for and then she asked "why would YOU of all people have stress?!"

It was in such a dismissive way I was actually speechless. I don't even remember what I answered. The conversation moved on.

A similar incident happened when I was in college. I got close to a classmate and he was telling me about his problems with his father, the bad neighbourhood he lived in, the gang that was after him... He was pretty depressed and my awkward ass tried to comfort him somehow and said "we all have problems" and he says "what problems could you possibly have?"

I've thought of that interaction for YEARS and now here it is again.

What could I have said? Explaining is pointless as we all know. It's too complicated and ugly and different. If anything, I guess that if my exterior looks solid then at least I got one thing going for me, right? At least I've managed to come across as a normal human being to some people.

So yeah, that happened today. I'm also coming down with a cold so I'm kinda miserable and would love a hug.

Sometimes when I spiral; I get the urge to block everyone in my contacts, delete my facebook/Messenger. Like I just want to hide and disappear. I dont know if this is a normal feeling or not. Then I just bedrot. I just hate social media, the posts of myself I put up being all happy/smiley aren't even real, especially because I'm 90% of the time not even like that. I also have my phone on DND 24/7.

I’ve always felt like I was difficult to love and my while I was angry in the past I’ve done a lot of healing since and I still feel that people don’t really like me as a person. My long-term close friends who have been my chosen family do, but I feel like most people don’t. It’s not necessarily that I do anything wrong and while I never voice this to others, it’s more that I don’t think I have a lot to offer people. I am more reserved and quiet. And I prefer to be in small groups or only like select people. But it does make me sad and I always feel like I never fit in anywhere.

Is this related to my CPTSD?

There's a huge drive at the moment to say that everyone is traumatised and there are some books I read that suggest that this has been caused by emotionally immature parents. And I seem to find it quite triggering because it's so vague and I feel like I could put my parents into that box of well-meaning but ill-equipped..and then I'm like i have an ACE score of 6, surely that was active abuse? I mean obviously they were emotionally immature too. But were some of these other parents immature but not actively abusive?

Any one else experience this? I recently blocked a guy I was SUPPPERRR into. I mean I was obsessing over him to the point of insanity on days we didn’t talk as much. It would make me spiral and trigger TF out of me. I’m talking full breakdowns and urges to block him.

I didn’t block because there was a time where I kept blocking him and unblocking him. He knew 😭 but he was as understanding as he could be. Naturally he pulled away. But when I had left him unlocked for an entire month I guess he took that as a green flag and we started talking again. I ended up obsessing once more. I told him how I was feeling, his response was “it’s okay to become attached and have feelings.” Like yes! With normal people! Then I begged him to block me. He didn’t block me because he didn’t think it was actually what I wanted.

24 hours later, after losing my mind over this man, I blocked him. At first that triggered a massive breakdown, but now 2 days later I am feeling GREAT lol 😭 after looking up why I get like this, apparently CPTSD and limerence is incredibly common!!

I still think he’s the most perfect thing to ever exist, and I don’t think I will ever meet someone as good as him again. But unfortunately, my mental health is too fucked to be normal when I really like someone 😂

I (33F) have been on a healing journey for 3+ years. I really thought I did everything right. Therapy, group, working through triggers, connecting to and emoting old repressed feelings, spending time on my own, finding new hobbies, consuming hundreds of hours of podcasts and books/readings and writing/journaling, building healthy friendships, improving family relationships (where not harmful).

However, I have been single this whole time (no dating, no sex). I thought with all the work I had done, I could finally handle my relationship with romantic love in a much healthier way. And I did at first. But, not too far along a very wounded childhood part has been coming out front and center, all impulse control gone, inhibitions extremely low. Like I'm watching her react to things and somewhere I'm like "oh that's crazy, don't do/say that" but then she sets my insides on fire and all caution is thrown to the wind. I didn't expect to be fully ready to run head on, but I thought I would at least be able to pause and work through my emotions in real time as I had been the last few years where everything else is concerned.

Obviously, there are unhealed parts of me still that need a lot more work. It just genuinely shocked and continues to shock me that these parts were lying dormant somewhere within me, completely undetected. That I was able to heal all of these surrounding parts, whereas these others were neglected (by unconscious avoidance). It's honestly knocked me on my ass and put me in a pretty bad place again- not gonna lie.

So, the phrase "healing in a vacuum" keeps rattling around my head in my quiet times. But goddamn is it scary and painful at this point in my progress to be feeling this way. I've broken it off and I just feel broken in a way that feels like a long lost friend- but one you spent a little too much time away from, one that feels foreign and out of place now.

Does anybody else on here still struggle with self harm as an adult? I’m 21, and everything gets so awful feeling for me that I still resort to scratching the fuck out of my arms and legs on a somewhat regular basis. This makes me feel extremely weird, since the average portrayal of a self harmer is a sad 13 year old. Do other adults with CPTSD use physical self harm to cope, too?

Maybe I’m the crazy one here, but I don’t care if I get ghosted. I’d forget about it in a few days. Maybe I’m just used to being neglected from my history. Maybe the people who hate ghosting are coping with that trauma differently, they hate ghosting because it brings up the old wound of abandonment.

Have you ever been stalked before? Had someone try to hunt down what your face looks like online? Have them threaten to find your address IRL if you block them? Creating multiple alt accounts to try and slide into your DMs? In your DMs telling you about how they dreamt of you last night, and want to meet you IRL next?

Yeah I ghost people when they give me creepy vibes. Early on, right off the bat. Because I’m not going through that again.

This is especially for those who have gone "far" in professional care (therapy) for CPTSD, specifically those who are past the phase where memories were unblocked and are now integrating them, or already did that.

I've been in therapy for 10 years, I'm highly functional, and I have functional relationships. But ever since I became "unblocked," I've had this unbearable feeling of hopelessness. It started when I became fully aware of what happened to me and my siblings and the weight of it and of what prospects we have, or don't have, in life. It also started when I began to see how hard everyday life is for me (I spent years of therapy in compensation and so-called structural dissociation). I literally tell myself that I don't want to live. I don't want to die, but this life is too hard - all the memories, feelings, dissociations, struggles and just knowing it affected people I love, my siblings, as much or maybe even more than me...

Has anyone experienced something similar? Please share how you coped with it, and whether it got better afterward.

PS: English is my second language

TW for brief talk about food trauma (not body image related)

They didn’t mean it in a “CPTSD isn’t a real thing” kind of way. They meant it in a “oh well everyone has had imperfect parents and has shit to deal with now, everyone can relate to this” way.

And like it was so invalidating. Usually this stuff doesn’t get to me anymore but today it did. I’m not here to say that someone’s trauma is irrelevant or too small. But to call what happened to me “within the norm”? Fuck you.

I have been no contact with my parents (my abusers) for over two years. I have done a crap ton of recovery work, therapy, etc. Which has helped me immensely and I’ve come so far.

Yet I still struggle on a daily basis. And I fucking hate that she thought it was okay to dismiss that and to dismiss how incredibly hard I have fought against the odds just to survive the abuse my parents put me through.

I still frequently get nightmares. I wake up gasping or with bruises on my arms from me fighting against invisible monsters in my sleep. I struggle to trust women or to allow women to touch me/hug me. I still carry a lot of fear towards women because of things my mother did to me. I can’t handle loud or sudden noises, I have to set my phone to vibrate only because a text or a phone call sound will scare me.

My relationship with food is still incredibly damaged. Sometimes I get panic attacks when I try to eat because food was a privilege not a right and my mother used to scream at me that I was entitled for requiring to be fed and how I wasn’t worth the cost to her. How I’m selfish because I can technically survive off of extremely little food. I still get scared sometimes that I’m a bad person for having to eat and eating itself is anxiety provoking on a good day.

My mother used to look at my face and turn away shuddering dramatically. She called me “The freak”

This is not “imperfect parenting”.

Can someone just see me? Validate my struggle? Maybe say some kind words. Idk why I let this person get in my head 😭

My doordasher is currently doubledashing rn and my order is 70 minutes late and I'm trying not to cry bc like bro that was all I had my hopes up for today now it's gonna be cold as fuck💔😭

I hate feeling this way. There's one person I'm extremely jealous of. She's lived the life I wanted (family life, college, travelling, financial stability and freedom) while I am trapped broke, disabled due to mental issues in desperate need of therapy but not being able to afford therapy since I can't keep a job and life just feels miserable. I am stuck in a small shitty town with no friends since they all moved out... I have never been so miserable tbh.

I have ruined my life. I done IVF last year which resulted in me having a baby boy but now I realize I am in no position to be a mum. I went into this with rose tinted glasses thinking it’s some sort of game. I can’t live with myself. I feel sick to my stomach and I am suicidal almost every day.

Idk if this makes sense but I often feel like people just get the wrong end of the stick regarding what I’m saying/where I’m coming from and tend to assume the worst but then if I over explain it just doesn’t scone across well either..::

And I just keep trying to pick myself up and then feeling and and I don’t want to keep doing this. It’s exhausting. I don’t want to keep picking myself up over and over. This is draining. I feel empty and sad and this is just the most exhausting cycle.