Hello all. I've been in treatment for CPTSD for eight years. I decided to start a YouTube channel to talk about some of the alternative ways I deal with my symptoms by staying active. If this resonates with any of you, give me a look-see. Thanks.
Healing isn't this clean process of becoming someone new.
It is the raw, shaking moment you realize you are running from yourself. Running from the silence. From the grief.
You want to know what healing looks like? It’s sitting with the ache instead of performing over it.
It’s not needing to explain your sadness to people who never asked how you really are. It’s no longer decorating your wounds just to make your pain more understandable for others. And when you stop running you don’t become someone else.
You come home. To the parts of you that have been waiting for you to finally choose you.
Hi all,
I'm a reddit lurker generally but I've been very appreciative of this and similar communities. I was floating through life, barely existent (I lean very freeze-type) until I came across the concepts of C-PTSD, trauma, narcissism, and the things that eerily fit my own life.
Since that point about two years ago, I've blown up my life (divorce, moved across the country, limited family contact, multiple job switches) and have struggled to find my way. FWIW, I'm a 34-year old male, and I tend to isolate quite a bit because of the baseline fear and hypervigilance. I've consumed all of the amazing resources out there (Pete Walker's book, Alice Miller's books, Healing the Shame that Binds You, attachment theory books, Heidi Priebe on YouTube, Crappy Childhood fairy, Dr. Ramani on YouTube, countless others). I've done talk therapy, meditation (I've liked the Open app), lots of journaling.
Anyway, shit is still pretty hard. I find things that work but it's temporary. A combination of writing, meditating, somatics, and consuming positive resources tends to help me a lot when I can stay consistent. It helps me feel like I'm supported in a world where I've never really had any close connections.
I've found that one of the biggest problems for me is the pit of emotional flashback. I can't remember the life-changing insights, the helpful practices, the feeling of not having fog filling my brain. So I made a little tool that I've been using everyday and I wanted to share here. It integrates a lot of these practices and does something that I've found particularly valuable for me - tracking patterns. It helps me understand the things I'm doing that are keeping me in flashback and the things that always help. It's almost like a little version of me there to be like "hey dude, you hate yourself when you do these things".
It's at https://bluebonsai.life. It's free, no data selling, AI training, nothing like that. You can use it on your phone if you just hit Share > Add to Home Screen (if you have an iPhone).
I hope it helps someone - thank you all for sharing your experiences, it's helped me tremendously.
One thing that's happened for me recently is that I realized that I don't need to ENDURE much of anything. Old me never felt like I had a choice, felt like everything was a mandate & I just needed to go along with it.
I'm not sure what clicked but now I realize how much more choice I have in my life experiences. IE my commute sucks. Old me just kind of grin and bear it. New me knows that I do have choices: I can get a new job, I can move, I can figure something out that works better for me.
I also realize that no one needs to endure me, that some relationships ended because people didn't enjoy me (in part because I didn't enjoy myself). Not a fun realization, but a good realization. So now I'm working on trying to make choices that make me happier, and actually enjoy my life. I truly never saw that as an option before & wasn't sure where to post it.
I was curious if others had the same moment of realizing that you don't need to ENDURE? That any past survival mechanism was just that: survival. Super eye-opening to me after a lifetime of endurance. I finally understand what they mean by thriving vs surviving, even if I don't always feel like I'm thriving, I can finally sense the difference & that feels like a step in the right direction.
I’ve been on a long healing journey and I feel like I have made a serious breakthrough today that I wanted to share in the hopes that it might help someone else who feels stuck.
I began my 'healing journey’ when I was around 17 and it is continuing to this day, I’m 30 now. There have been ups and downs, including some re-traumatisation and a psychotic break along the way. So it has been rough. I have in large part recovered from this.
But until literally today, I have had a pain I just couldn’t get rid of or deal with in any constructive way. It was this tortured kind of feeling that I ‘should be x’ or ‘wish I could achieve y’. It was longing mixed up with just not wanting to do anything at all really.
It would lead to indecision about hobbies, interests, and the future. I felt torn into a million different directions, some of them pretty ‘fantastical’ - I want to be a published author who wins the Nobel Prize, or I want to take up a serious photography hobby, or I want to learn to ice skate, or I want to get another degree in physics etc etc. But I would start something and then stall.
This all led to serious paralysis. I couldn’t decide what to do. I couldn’t even concentrate for long before a part of me changed their mind on who they want me to ‘be’. And I couldn’t really tell anyone about this - I mean it sounds silly talking about dreaming about winning the Nobel Prize :’)
But here’s the thing - I realised today it’s just that, dreaming. I never really allowed myself to … dream. And just accept that they were just that … dreams. And that that’s ok. And that it’s wonderful to have such a vivid imagination and be drawn to all these different parts of life. And I started to let myself just indulge in the day dream, without having to judge myself or even to act on it.
And it’s led to this bizarre feeling of relief. Like ok, I wish I could do this. I wish my life could play out in this magical way. And it feels good to let myself wish. It doesn’t have to mean anything. And after so long feeling numb and trapped and despairing, it felt good to just …love myself.
It’s hard to explain, but I guess what I’m getting at is that I’m learning to love the parts of myself that aren’t purposeful. Day dreaming is something that I stopped doing at one point. From a very young age, I was very goal-oriented because it was how I had to survive. When my re-traumatisation occurred age 20, I lost all capacity to dream. I shut down completely. It feels good to relax now and let my mind relax too.
I know that maladaptive daydreaming is a thing, and this doesn’t feel like that. Nor do I see it developing into it. I’m not trying to escape from anything, as my present life is peaceful for the first time in a long time. It’s not perfect, but my external circumstances are pretty stable compared to what I’m used to.
So yeah … I guess what I wanted to share is that is ok to love the parts of yourself that don’t serve a purpose. Parts that might be weird, unlikely or don’t make sense. It’s ok to love a million different things in this weird world, and to feel like they don’t always add up to a coherent Self. It’s ok to love all the different pieces of that Self, that might resemble a kaleidoscope. Having trauma means we often feel like this about the bad stuff, but I’ve found that the good stuff can be ‘fractured’ into a million pieces too, and that the point of healing isn’t to makes all these pieces make sense, but to love them as they are.
Anyway, that’s where I’m at in this crazy journey. Hope it helps someone out there.
Hello everyone.
Over the last few months myself and a few others have been working on building a discord server for people with ptsd/cptsd.
This space is a work in progress, it's purpose is to provide a more real time peer support platform for people. Understand this isn't a crisis intervention platform. We have areas for different kinds of support, hobbies. A Neurodivergence town for our family with different forms of Nerospicy, a resource Bot that can help with finding resources (Yes there is a small resource section) and much more.
I have been given mod permission to post the link here and would like to invite anyone who is interested to come join us.
A few things, you must read and follow the rules and have two factor authentication on your discord account in order to be able to join. You'll need to be 18+ and have 2fa (two factor authentication)
I wanna personally thank the mods of the CPTSD next steps subreddit for their willingness to allow me to help people find a place.
Much love and lots of respect.
(For the people who have had issues with the verification process, We've been made aware of the issue. Once I am aware of a fix, I will leave a message here to inform everyone.
This is something I have wanted to write for the past 2 years and has been gnawing at me. So, I have returned to one of the most helpful subreddits along my Complex PTSD journey.
If you don't want to read all this text, then would love you to know one thing - it is that full healing is possible. I have gone through in the past 9 years the healing arc of CPTSD and now know it to be true.
This is meant as a positive story for those suffering. I hope you understand there is a path out of CPTSD and it is a complete one and not a dead end and not a mandate on how your life will go nor a rest-of-your-life battle.
I have also seen other wonderful journey stories along the way, and haven't been in this sub in a minute (a few years probably), so if it hasn't been yet said, I just want to add to that and reiterate that it is far more possible and I wish for nothing but for anyone to get to that point if they seek it.
Throughout my journey, I just remember wishing the whole time to know whether or not it was possible at all to get better - not cured of some symptoms, not 'that it's a maintenance', but fully, completely better, where no symptoms of any of the bullet points under a CPTSD symptom list show up. And how! And if someone could just give me a map!
Back then when I started, there were very mixed answers. Discouragingly, there were mentions that it’s a lifelong condition stated from various books and blogs, experts and individuals. But no one outright said if it was fully possible and to what extent and how and if it was for the rest of my life. That’s what I want to talk about.
I guess I started pretty early, but it was rather do-or-die for me. There was enough abuse and pain and traumatic experiences leading up to when I first got into therapy around 21, originally first for depression. For the most part, I still lived through dissociation. After therapy again later on, I understood dissociation more and much of the work was just building a mental landscape beyond dissociation and clearing out dissociation, in which what showed up is a lot more symptoms. And also a realization that I didn’t have a sense of self or understanding of any of my emotions. I then got my diagnosis finally 2 years later - CPTSD. Worked through my history, and just the process of recognizing abuse and trauma for what it was instead of the norm, and a lot of dysregulation. Built up resourcing. Did trauma work. Then the process of healing. Wrapped up with all my trauma work. Then addressed other symptoms not exclusive to CPTSD, some mental limitations. Towards the end simultaneously, there's been a return to self and identity. For the past year, I no longer identify with any symptoms of CPTSD anymore nor many of the associated symptoms and mental conditions and instead have been instead growing beyond it.
TLDR, here’s what my journey looked like if I were to map it roughly in phases, though I'm probably missing some:
Simultaneously beyond the bigger landmarks, there were many other associated symptoms of CPTSD that are also relevant in those without but also things that I have healed and worked through:
Now, most of my mental work is different in nature because I think there's always more room to grow into who I want. The big difference is that it's more fun and with the skillset from battling the worst parts of my brain, the stakes don't feel overwhelming. They look like:
The journey is not linear. I spent time in between stages taking breaks or being in and out of therapy. Yet, in many ways it is exponential. What you've learned from working through one thing helps unraveling and dealing with the others. So this journey of healing makes you more aware, more internally in tune and that adds up, even if on most days it doesn't feel like it.
What life looks like now is… honestly peace. And presence. And the presence is fully comfortable. My nervous system is at rest when it needs to be at rest; and activated in a normal capacity when it needs to be. It doesn’t overshoot on things it doesn’t need to and most of the time runs calmly for me to get about my life. No panic attacks, no emotional flashbacks, no nightmares, no anxieties. I battle myself over minor things instead like "ah shit, I should do the dishes". There’s no noise of criticism or shame or guilt layered on top of that.
I know who I am. I know what I feel. I know my boundaries and limitations. Most days I feel great. After further work beyond CPTSD, with meditation, my monkey brain is also off. I sometimes feel spontaneous abundant joy and sudden moments of deep gratitude. And of course sometimes I feel sad. I feel disappointment. So then I forgive or move on and that passes too. But emotions come through in waves and pass and don’t seize the entire ship as they used to. I of course sometimes still have a bad day or a worse mood. Though throughout it, there's this underlying sense of peace that I wish I could have inherited from my childhood, but instead had to earn. And if anything the earning has made it more precious and I don’t take it for granted.
I would like to share as much as I can to help. There's so much I could write about: the many things tried, the many symptoms/mental states/mental habits/mental blocks I've worked through, what it was like to get through each of them, what helped most or didn't help at all.
Please let me know what would be helpful to write about or what interests you or what you have questions on!
Here is a list of things I have tackled, experienced and resolved in (somewhat) chronological order and can talk about:
And I have done and tried anything I could get my hands on the past near-decade and can address as well (not comprehensive either):
I started a community a couple weeks ago! The goal is to build a cozy, judgment-free sanctuary for people who want to share their personal experiences, heavy/complicated thoughts, and mental health struggles without any filters. This is a space dedicated to mutual support, healing, poetry/art, advice, affirmations/quotes, therapy tools, and meaningful connection. Philosophy and thoughts or struggles about finding who you are, especially after trauma, are welcome as well. New or anonymous accounts are always welcome!!! Everyone is seen and each and every user matters dearly to me and in this subreddit 💛
If you are interested, feel free to pay r/growfromtrauma a visit and join if what you see resonates with you!