In this space, you are free to share a story, ask for emotional support, talk about something challenging you, or share a recent victory. You can go a little more off-topic, but try to stay in the realm of the purpose of the subreddit.

And if you have any feedback on this thread or the subreddit itself, this is a good place to share it.

If you're looking for a support community focused on recovery work, check out /r/CPTSD_NSCommunity!

When i realised this, my perception of other people changed. I always felt like people were watching me, judging me, i gaslit myself to believe that being authentic=pain. My inner critic categorised and labeled people all the time. The cognitive dissonance between this aspect and the belief that i was a good person brought me a lot of pain. See, everytime i expressed any emotions as a child, i was always told that i didn't know what i was talking about, i was even told how i was supposed to feel. My father was constantly observing me, criticising me for every thing i did. Couple that with his violent and rageful tendencies, it makes sense that i used to think that way.

Amazingly helpful book (to me). Slightly different angle on complex trauma and what some call “stockholm syndrome”. Trauma bonding through being betrayed, when our trust is broken, abused, and we emerge forever changed by this experience.

It also had a v useful table on intersection of high/low intention and high/low warmth, ie. seduction is high warmth low intention. Friendship is high warmth high intention. Violent abuse is low warmth low intention. Professional relations are low warmth high intentions.

Smth like that. Was helpful to me when recovering from knee-jerk responses to any kindness whatsoever and lowering my defenses out of desperation and/or being trained to do so as a child.

Interesting concepts to consider and own behaviours/compulsions to reflect on, ie. as someone summarised:

“Here are some of the signs that it is a betrayal trauma bond:

• When you obsess about people who have hurt you though they are long gone from your life (to obsess means to be preoccupied, fantasize about, and wonder about something/someone even though you do not want to)

• When you continue to seek contact with people whom you know will cause you further pain.

• When you go "overboard" to help people who have been destructive to you.

• When you continue to be a "team" member when obviously things are becoming destructive.

• When you continue attempts to get people who are clearly using you to like you.

• When you again and again trust people who have proved to be unreliable.

• When you are unable to distance yourself from unhealthy relationships.

• When you want to be understood by those who clearly do not care.

• When you choose to stay in conflict with others when it would cost you nothing to walk away.

• When you persist in trying to convince people that there is a problem and they are not willing to listen.

• When you are loyal to people who have betrayed you.

• When you are attached to untrustworthy people.

• When you keep damaging secrets about exploitation or abuse.

• When you continue contact with an abuser who acknowledges no responsibility.”

I have recently found Alisa Zipursky's book Healing Honestly really helpful and validating. I came across it because of a trauma podcast; I don't know the author or have any reason to share this except for to pass along something deeply validating. It bills itself as "the least retraumatizing book for adult CSA survivors" and I really appreciate the respect and survivor-led care that makes the book feel safe and validating to read. It is structured by untrue stories we tell ourselves and what to replace them with. The chapter on memory is absolutely a must read. Even if you are not or are not sure if you are a CSA survivor, this is great for all of us surviving CPTSD and/or any form of SV.

If you liked Stephanie Foo you'll like this, and it has an even more guidebook-y vibe as well as a jokey, friendly tone that is such a fabulous antidote to how "unspeakable" the daily reality of our lives can sometimes feel. Also, like Foo's book, it explicitly connects the abuse we are surviving to the oppression in the world at large that fostered, enabled, and perpetuated it which I love! Context is key. If you have also found this book useful I would love to connect, even just by a high five in this space.

I have been applying IFS therapy and having conversations with my different "parts", sometimes i write conversations between my authentic self and protector parts, i haven't dissociated for several days now. During my last therapy session, my therapist asked to talk to my inner critic, the words that came out of me was kind of scary and very self defeating. The whole thing felt awkward because she asked "him" to work with me vs against me, that part of me doesn't like to be challenged in such a way. I don't lose stuff anymore, i'm more present, ive been able to regulate my emotions and "feel" when my other parts want to take over. I am less addicted to substances now and I am more motivated despite my recent failures. This feels legit and helpful.

I've been taking their meditation class and it's great. I look forward to joining the yoga and book club! https://cptsdfoundation.org/

I found this cool app called “How we feel” that helps you get better at emotional regulation. You can set notifications to do emotional wellness checks for yourself and explore your current state. There’s also a bunch of tools and educational videos. Its available on apple and android Im pretty sure.

I have found an amazing video to regulate and calm down the nervous system.

I suffer from chronic nervous system disregulation due to trauma and anxiety. I have tried several other breathing exercises (Wim how, dragon breath ...) and found that the positive effects were short lived.

This video is a game changer for me! I tend to experience morning anxiety and a freeze state when I wake up. I watch it every morning once I wake up and it gives me so much energy, I feel completely safe in my body and grounded. It works well during the day too if I'm feeling an anxiety attack. And I also watch it at night to fall asleep. I highly recommend it !

VIdeo: https://youtu.be/r_YsC3n8jjo?si=VMwb1u7XAxUGjOWj

I just wanted to share this, maybe it will help you too. I bought a yoga bolster for yin yoga. I love getting into child's pose, hugging the bolster and just lying there. It helps me feel safe and calms me down. I always do this when I need a safe place. Also, the pillow helps me to get into poses where I can breathe deeply, so it helps me to ground myself. Even on days when I don't feel like doing yoga, I just lie down in child's pose and hug my cushion to feel better.

I flared this Sharingt a resource. Actually it's Seeking a resource. Is this contrary to rule 3?

I'm looking for resources for people who's reaction to trauma has been to turn inward, become isolated, over regulated emotionally, unable/unwilling to form connections to other people.

Fisher's examples are all peple who are overwhelmed by flashbacks, who blend readily, and who have easy communicationo with their parts.

A smaller number of us found that if we blunted emotions, denied them, were ashamed of them that we could behave in an acceptable manner.

We are the functional trauma folk.

Yes this can be a win. I have had several careers. Most people who meet me would say that I'm a bit eccentric, but otherwise unremarkable.

But it has it's price:

• I don't know what love is. Closest I can come is "strong like" Never fallen in love.
• I don't fully trust. Not much really matters to me, but for those things that do, I do not trust you to not harm them.
• I live in my head not in my heart. Some escape in fiction. Some escape playing and composing music. Some escape in things like trampoline, canoeing, ridge walking in the rockies. So most of the time I'm only half alive.

In general my response to triggers that I feel as betrayal or rejection is to run away often literally. Failing that, then becoming distant, dismissive.

I posted something similar a few months back in NSCommunity. Got some good exchanges, but no resources.

I have been working on my own roadmap to healing. Here is a framework that I come up when trying to make sense of how different treatment modalities or 'advice' fit within the process of healing. This is not new concept, rather bits and pieces that I gather from reading about CBT, DBT, EMDR, IFS, Peter Levine, Pete Walker, Bassel van de Kolk, Heidi Priebe, and many others who spoke in depth of the relevant subjects.

1. The negative cycle of emotional dysfunction

My understanding of how emotional dysfunction manifests in a person with CPTSD is as follows.

• First, we get exposed to some external trigger e.g. interaction with someone, a change in our living environment, a stressful condition.

• This triggers a bodily sensation, which our brain interprets as some kind of genuine negative emotion.

• We then respond to this negative emotion by having a secondary emotion, which can be anger, shame, fear, anxiety, etc. That secondary emotion is the automatic response of our brain after years of being conditioned by our caregiver in our childhood to not express any emotional pain.

• This is when our inner critic is conjured up. They equate the current event with a similar situation in our childhood, and as a way of protecting us, insist on us on reaching into our usual "toolkit" to make that negative emotion go away.

• If we abide by the inner critic, we start to engage in the unhealthy 4F responses (aggression, obsession-compulsion, dissociation, codependency). This usually will provide a temporary relief from the emotional pain, but in the medium term, will lead to more dysfunctions in our lives, which then creates another set of external triggers, and a negative cycle ensues. Meanwhile, the initial root cause remains unsolved, and continues to trigger us.

2. How different treatment modalities address different stages of the negatige cycle

A. The first responder

• Relaxation techniques help us calm down the nervous system so that we don't get panic and reactive when an emotion comes up. This allows time for other teams to start working their magic.

B. The short-term reaction team

• Somatic training allows us to notice the somatic component of our response (i.e. our bodily sensation)

• Mindfulness allows us to notice the cognitive component of our response (i.e. our thought patterns).

• Cognitive techniques such as CBT or DBT provide us with the knowledge to identfy our neurotic thought processes (the fantasy picture our brain is trying to conjure up to explain away the emotions we feel).

• Part work / shadow work, combined with awareness of our childhood abandonment, allows us to distinguish perceived dangers due to CPTSD flashbacks from real dangers, thereby allowing us to take appropriate actions. If it's real danger, we remove ourselves from the danger. If it's a flashback, we remind ourselves (and our inner critic) that we are safe in the present.

• Having all these techniques allows us to stay separate from our neurotic thought process and stay present in reality long enough without taking rash action. With sufficient time examining the reality, we can then identify the root cause and take the correct steps to resolve that trigger, thereby restoring our emotional balance.

C. The long-term action team

• EMDR is the emotional/somatic approach to dealing with triggers. EMDR's bimodal technique breaks the link between a triggering event and our habitual emotional reaction to it. Therefore, our bodily sensations and emotions become less intense when we face a triggering event.

• IFS is the cognitive approach to dealing with triggers. We learn to work with the inner critic so that the critic voice is not so loud anymore whenever we feel a negative emotion. Therefore, our tolerance of emotional discomfort increases.

D. Further self-work at the other end of the bridge

• All those above are simply toolkits to curb our unhealthy responses. Another aspect of healing that is not "treatment" per se, is the various self-work that we need to undertake during recovery to cultivate healthy responses in place of those unhealthy responses.

• Once the damage caused by our childhood experience has been repaired, there leaves a void that needs to be filled by self-rediscovery. Rediscovery of self means being curious about and honoring our values, habits, likes and dislikes, dreams, comfort limits. By doing this, we reconstruct a new self based on which we can cultivate self-trust, self-respect and set boundaries.

• Cultivating self-trust and seld-respect involves acting in accordance with our values and our preferences, one decision after another. That encompasses self-care, creating discipline and structure in our life, choosing ourselves when making decision, etc. Consistent acts to build self-trust and self-respect will "convince" the inner critic to trust our ego and let go of its control over our life.

• Even if we have perfected a heathier response to external triggers, we also need to learn how to remove ourselves from triggers (people, situations, activities) that add no value to our life. Learning how to set boundaries allows us to achieve this.

At first I was overwhelmed by the multitude of "things that help" out there. Having organised these things into a framework gives me a clearer idea on which process I am doing well, and skills I need to focus on at different stages of the journey.

Happy to hear any thoughts on this.

In this space, you are free to share a story, ask for emotional support, talk about something challenging you, or share a recent victory. You can go a little more off-topic, but try to stay in the realm of the purpose of the subreddit.

And if you have any feedback on this thread or the subreddit itself, this is a good place to share it.

If you're looking for a support community focused on recovery work, check out /r/CPTSD_NSCommunity!

Kind of felt the need to write something out to celebrate and look back on my progress. I have been through a lot and am proud of myself. I don't usually post things and typing this all on my phone so hopefully it turns out ok.

It started with a lot of self help books.

Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, The Body Keeps the Score, Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Atlas of the Heart, and What My Bones Know are ones that stuck with me the most.

First. The self awareness was a lot once things really started to click after listening to all of these audio books.

Heidi Priebe has a video called "The 4 stages of attachment healing" that really helped me. It includes:

1. Unconscious incompetence
2. Conscious incompetence
3. Conscious competence
4. Unconscious competence

I go back and forth between 2 and 3. Hopefully down the road I will be able to reach stage 4.

One thing I've noticed is that I have black and white thinking. A very common trauma response. I've definitely seen change with this though! That's a big step for me. When you're healing it's never gonna be all or nothing.

My first HUGE sign of progress was when I was triggered and had space in between the stimulus and response. Did I still respond in a not so great way? Absolutely! BUT I NOTICED IT!!! It was such an odd feeling when it happened.

As time goes by I catch myself more and more. I like to view my brain in the same way I would my muscles. I go to the gym consistently and eventually my muscles get bigger and stronger.

If I consistently work towards making more space in between the stimulus and response then it will get easier. Neuroplasticity and all that.

One thing that really blew my mind was when I found out about Structural Dissociation. I actually geeked out pretty hard with my therapist over it.

Knowing that I have my core Self and that my brain is fragmented with all of these parts from childhood. That when I am triggered a part that is doing its best to protect me blends with my Self. It makes it so much easier to not hate myself you know? I actually don't think I hate myself anymore. Which is something I never thought would happen. With understanding comes empathy and compassion. It's a shift in the right direction.

I've read about IFS off and on for awhile but honestly it didn't really hit until I read about Structural Dissociation. I brought IFS up to my therapist months ago and nothing really came of it. We've actually started to slowly get into it over the past few sessions. I think she knew I wasn't initially ready for it back then but I feel like I am now.

The way I'm viewing things is that I have my Self and then I have all of these parts. I'm very disconnected from these parts so I'm slowly starting to build pathways towards each one. The more I connect with each given part then the easier it will be to walk down the pathway.

I have spent my entire life burying my emotions and there has been a huge war within because of that. I was always waiting for someone to save me. Now I realize the person I've been waiting for is myself.

I am currently trying to figure out my sense of self. Slowly creating boundaries and speaking up when I don't agree with something. Practicing self compassion and not beating myself up when I am unsuccessful.

Honestly I feel a lot worse. Which I have been told is a sign of healing. I am EXTREMELY high masking. So it's been hard to navigate that.

As I heal I don't really want to be around most people anymore. My social anxiety has amplified. I can really feel a specific part whenever this happens. This is something I'm currently working with. Honestly I want to focus on myself more and other people less. I know I need to heal my attachment trauma through others but feel that working with myself seems more important right now.

I also want to work towards not having my entire life revolve around my trauma. Like oh I'm having this reaction because this happened to me when I was a child. I want to heal in a way that's moving me forward without exhausting me and holding onto all that anger. But also not shaming any parts in the process.

I am looking forward to seeing what progress I will have a year from now. Grateful for this journey I'm on and to have this community that has taught me so much and made me feel not so alone.

Happy Halloween 🎃

i'm about a year into IFS work with my therapist and am currently reading Schwartz's "You are the one you've been waiting for." i'm about halfway thru and from that and my work in therapy this NPR article seems like a good short summary on the model.

I want to share a video that helped me lower my anxiety and descalate a panic attack

https://youtu.be/vXZ5l7G6T2I?si=VIVv8Q0YH-VLGqDN

Try to relax the body as much as possible and stay grounded in the body to signal to your brain that you are in fact not in danger. Try to breathe as calmly as possible from the belly and focus on the visual in the video to distract yourself from the anxious thoughts.

The color blue is very soothing for the nervous system so try to play the video on full screen. Remove any extra layers of clothing if possible. If possible, go outside in a park to watch the video. Once the anxiety stopped and you've calmed down, drink some water as anxiety can cause sweating which leads to dehydration.

Medication and tools can help temporarily but it's good to get to the root cause and deal with it once and for all. Please consider finding a mental health professional to help you. Good luck!

Edit: wow mama I’m famous overnight (no seriously this post is short and I didn’t go into full detail about how exactly I do it step by step - if anyone wants more in depth info, can comment I’ll answer.)

I never understood self-compassion, thought of it as weird and cringe-worthy.

Now, whenever I am scared of something, instead of blaming myself, I tell myself I am brave. Somehow, that makes me take the extra step and takes away the fear I had before. Even if it's small, little things. I stop judging myself for any of my feelings. I welcome them, accept them, and control them by choosing to do x DESPITE being terrified (for example social situations).

Afterwards, it allows me to be proud of myself, and I can feel bigger than I was before. I know this is a very basic step that many here may have overcome, but it translates to many areas.

I don't need emotional support from others as much anymore. I don't need to "trauma dump" anymore because I understand my trauma. I don't need my boyfriend to listen to me endlessly talk about my past anymore because I can acknowledge my pain without his presence. I can acknowledge myself, I don't need anyone else to do that for me anymore. Sometimes, like today, I would even cry next to my boyfriend imagining what I'd tell my past self when I was younger, and I could soothe myself and didn't need him anymore. I cry, but it's a good cry. I am grieving. I am not vulnerable anymore, I am strong.

As I go through my childhood, I can understand situations in a new light with insights to how I felt and why I did or didn't do certain things. The adult perspective (I'm 22) makes such a huge difference. Every time I struggle now, I use self-compassion. Whenever I feel the need to trauma dumb or talk, I ask myself if I can find my way back to safety without the other person, and with self-compassion, I can. I occassionally talk about that journey, yes, but I don't rely on someone else to make my pain feel heard and soothed anymore.

So I have this theory recently, I wanted to hear others input on this. If it doesn’t belong here, please let me know and I will move it to cptsd_ns or something.

So, as I posted a while ago, in the CPTSD forum, I feel like our society is very shame-based, research tells us the strong connection between shame and violence for example, so shame is very relevant when it comes to cptsd.

Shame is the debilitating sort of state where people are unable to change a bad behavior, because they have an underlying belief that there is something wrong with THEM, and not what they do, which means, their actions are who they are, and not separate from them. If their actions are bad=they are bad. And this is just too much to handle, like- if I realize I am completely through and through ”bad”, worthless- why go on living? Also- then I need to face ALL the built up pain from my actions and this could be a lifetime of pain. Like everytime I yelled at someone, I was being despicable. So to avoid this, we avoid feeling the painful shame, and there bad habits are created. Which can be anything from screaming at your child to porn addiction….

Anyways. Recently I have been sitting with some very intense feelings or ”sensations” even, of pure loneliness, emptiness and isolation. Just observing them. I feel hopeful that I am getting closer to actually being fully healed of my cptsd (if there is such a thing, we’ll see), partly because of reading about ”abandonment depression” in Pete Walkers book CPTSD, where he says it may be the final step in the healing process. But also because my intuition kind of telling me lately I am very close to feeling whole and complete within myself. When sitting with my feelings of pure abandonment and emptiness (I admit, sometimes I fall back into old thought patterns of suicidal ideation, but I seem to recover from them quicker), I have realised for one, that most of these empty feelings, that I used to think was purely mine and who ”I am” at the core of my being, do in fact stem from how my parents (esp my dad) treated me, and not because I or humans are inherently a dark void inside, much like the shameful notion that if I hurt someone I am bad, if I feel lonely, I am forever abandoned, and nobody loves me, cause who can love an empty void? (Buddhists and others might argue though that we are in fact empty inside, cause everything is emptiness, but in a non dual sense, everything is also wholeness, fullness, complete).

I realize more and more, as I remember my childhood and also because I still have contact with my dad, that everytime I felt or feel truly abandoned, is either when I am 1. Hanging out with someone who is emotionally neglecting themselves and others, or 2. When i am in some way neglecting myself or even others (btw I also believe humanity is one, in a spiritual sense). And when i observe this ”void” paired with these realisations, I 1. Remove the shameful feeling that I ”am” that void, like a lonely ghost wandering earth and repelling all human contact… And 2. How incredibly hard it is to NOT be as emotionally and physically attuned and present for myself to the point where I actually feel satisfied, warm, complete. And why is that? I think, here is my theory, because almost no one is. Because our society is built from stress, performance, doing and saying things to get validation, to ”be good”. And this goes way beyond cptsd. I know my idea is not new or revolutionary, but it helps me release the burden of carrying this void, or feeling helpless or alone about it. It is not my fault, it is not my dads fault either even, that he pushed away, ignored, denied, minimized my emotions AND his own. Or why it is so so hard to find a therapist who I actually feel safe with, or a friend even.

Cause most people are not fully emotionally present. How can they be when society dont want us to be? When we all prioritize feeling ”good” in the moment instead of deeply connecting to ourselves and others around us.

I have learned, that my biggest, most important need of all is full loving presence. So now I might have to be alone for a while longer to fully sit with this void until it is not a void anymore.

Trauma podcasts. Trauma books. Therapy, therapy, therapy. Journaling. Crying. Raging.

One of the most healing things we can do is to sometimes stop doing the work. Remembering and nourishing who we are beyond our trauma. Having fun. Being kids.

Running in leaves. Cycling down hills. Dancing around your house. Getting glitter all over your pants because you were too busy collaging to notice.

Getting inside yourself; your body and joy right here and now.

Rest and play is the way to healing. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of overly focusing on our trauma and thinking that means we’re healing.

Take half a day or a day a week for a “rest and play day.” No chores, no shopping, no work. Just a day filled of things that bring you joy, love and calm.

This is one of the first days in a while I’ve not thought about my trauma.

I think scheduling these days are necessary for healing and we need to talk more about them in healing circles

❤️🌈☀️

Yo yo friends - i had this lightbulb moment over the last month and want to share in case it can help someone else.

First: Why does having a dx of cPTSD make everything the survivors responsibility? Stuck in freeze? You have learned helplessness. Complaining your nervous system cant downshift to a calmer state? You need more expensive therapy. Still traumatized after a decade of 'healing?' Try harder.

For those of us who have done all the things and still are having this very physiological response to the world - it's called autonomic nervous system dysfunction AKA: dysautonimia. And it's a condition with specific meds that helps smooth out the system all the healing/lifestyle changes/therapy actually work.

I learned a few years ago that i am genetically primed for a severe version of this due to ehlers-danlos syndrome, a genetic defect in collagen. My system was hypersensitive from the beginning and through childhood abuse just grew funny. And now as an adult it is so hypersensitive to norepinephrine, acetylcholine and cortisol that anything outside this very small window sets it off.

That very small window is lying in bed doing nothing.

That is not the life i was destined to live. I didn't do all this healing to sit in bed all day.

So, if any of this resonates, I encourage you to look into more about autonomic nervous system dysfunction / dysautonomia. I thought this was all on me as a trauma survivor but IT TURNS OUT that, for some of us, growing up with never ending oxidative stress and abuse fucks up the physical structure of the central nervous system.

Hairpin stress response > triggers TOO MUCH adrenaline > the body throws the parasympathetic brake on (dumps acetyl choline) > now there's NOT ENOUGH cortisol > the process repeats and repeats and repeats.

And that stress response can be to doing nothing more than standing up from sitting down.

https://www.jpain.org/article/S1526-5900(24)00277-3/abstract

They have medication to help mediate this response ya'll.

Since i connected A to B here i just want to shout this from the rooftops to help anyone who has been like me and watching their lives keep slipping away even though they did all the healing things.

It's not my fault my nervous system is structurally screwed up. And i love myself enough now to fight to fox it because dang it - i did not walk through the depths of hell to rot away in bed.

✌️💕

EDIT: thanks for all your comments! Wanted to pop in and drop this link for anyone who suspects this for themselves. You can get some decent data with a fitness tracker to evaluate if it might be a dysautonimia issue. Its called the poor mans tilt table test. They use this to primarily diagnose POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia). https://chronicallyridicilous.wordpress.com/2016/03/30/what-is-a-poor-mans-tilt-table-test/

And just a warning this is an exploratory tool. You can fail this test and still have autonomic issues so it's worth taking to a doc either way!

Here's a post I wrote about processing rage. This was a huge component of my healing journey, and something I'm grateful to empathize with clients on. The post approaches it from the cognitive element of not identifying with your rage thoughts and stories, while also doing the somatic work of nurturing safety and building capacity to allow the rage to organically move when it is ready, rather than trying to force it out.

Here is the link: https://www.embodiedyou.com/blog/healing-rage-cognitive-somatic

Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or reflections.

Hi, I've been doing CBT for 1 year. I started from a really bad place, I felt like I want to die, every time I needed to journaling it feels like a torture, I did self harm, and so on.

Now I could say that I'm not 100% healed, but I do notice there are tremendous changes on how I perceived myself, my triggers, and my environment. Qualitatively, my anxiety level of triggering event goes down from 10 to 4, and happened lot less often than before.

Along this journey I realized there are lots of layers I need to peel and lots of works I need to put, and somehow I feel so alone even though I have good support system. So maybe sharing what works for me here would help other people and ease some loneliness feelings in this lifelong battle.

So here's what I think works the best for me:

1. Find good enough therapist, and listen to them. This might sounds so basic, but there are lots of time I feel like my therapist's suggestion was bullshit or just a common knowledge. Every time I feel like that, I take a step back and try to be an open mind and accept his suggestion or opinion. I try to always have mindset that he knows something better than me so I need to be humble and let his suggestion help me.

2. When you are in your acute emotions, find your routine that eventually leads you to writing your own feelings. I often find it hard to do journaling when I was overwhelmed. So I usually had my distraction first, long enough until I talk to myself that I'm ready to face it. If it's not enough, if the emotions still overwhelming, I imagined my emotions shape and movement then I draw them on my book, just let me know that they are actually not that big and cannot rule over me.

3. If possible, strategize your risk of triggering exposure. I always try to do things one at a time, and calculate how much triggering things I could face. For example if your triggers is talking to new people/environment, find a new place but make sure that any other factors is relatively easy for you to navigate (topic is familiar, set a timeline, etc)

4. Write a reminder that you can easily read or grab. When I was on triggering phase, life was so difficult. Everything that has been said by my therapist just gone poof out of my head. I feel like the world is crumbling down and I need to die. But then, when I was not overwhelmed anymore, I try to make a piece of paper that has step by step of what should I do during that time. It has reminder to breathe, validating my emotion, make sure I get distraction that I need, then ready to write my feelings, and at the last part I have some love notes to myself like a value reminder of all amazing things about me if I feel like I'm in the safe place.

I also write some small reminder on my phone wallpaper like "you are safe" to remind me there is no need to be guarded.

5. Be brave on meeting your newly found needs. For all my life I feel like I don't need friends and I am indeed has difficulty in maintaining ones. After I talk to my therapists, I found out that I am indeed needed connection in my life. I also do validation and experiments by do a quick writing down my main emotions every day for 2 months and I noticed that I am most happy when I meet friends or at least having a good connection with somebody. That's really new to me and also scary. But then I decided to be brave and learn how to be friends and how to maintain ones.

6. Have a good night sleep. I know it sounds cliche. But everyday is a battle for me during that time. I always on my fight or flight mode and I was so tired during the day. I don't feel like insomnia or not be able to sleep will help me anyway in this battle so I take melatonin or tea or anything that could just makes me sleep when I wide awake of overthinking, and I sleep. I don't care if I need to take that everyday, I just need to make sure that whatever I took is not toxic or bad for my health.

7. Slowly reshare your trauma and story or even your ongoing journey to someone you trust. I had this trauma for 8 years, and the first time I ever talk about this is 3 years ago, just once and never again until 1 year ago when I started my CBT. During those 1 year I feel like talking about that make the problem seems small and not that matter for me, so I slowly be open about this problem but only with someone I trust. But please beware that you need to be prepared of feeling rejected or invalidate because not everyone will understand. And now I can just casually bring that to just anybody, regardless how they will perceived that because it's no longer taboo topic for me and it's just part of who I am, like the color of my hair.

I think that's all that I could remember. It's so long, I don't know if there is somebody that reached this part, but I hope that these tips will help whoever needed. Also sorry for many grammar mistakes, I don't know why Reddit text editor doesn't show my grammar corrections app and I'm so lazy to copy paste this post to only correct that so yeah. Hope this helps!

This study answered my lifelong question about why I had the thought in childhood that I wouldn't live past 18. I knew that my sense of the future had been altered in childhood and that I had lost faith in the world when my CPTSD symptoms started at 11. I'm grateful to learn exactly why it happened, so I thought I would share in case others had a similar experience. It's rather long reading, with some parts seeming to take away from the flow, so I included what was most impactful to read for me. The full study can be found at the link below.

What is a “sense of foreshortened future?” A phenomenological study of trauma, trust, and time

One of the symptoms of trauma is said to be a “sense of foreshortened future.” Without further qualification, it is not clear how to interpret this. In this paper, we offer a phenomenological account of what the experience consists of […] We describe how traumatic events, especially those that are deliberately inflicted by other people, can lead to a loss of “trust” or “confidence” in the world. This undermines the intelligibility of one’s projects, cares, and commitments, in a way that amounts to a change in the structure of temporal experience. 

The experience we seek to characterize might be associated with a diagnosis of PTSD, major depression or both, but is not a prerequisite for either. It is better captured by the ICD-10 subcategory of “enduring personality change after catastrophic experience,” the symptoms of which include “a hostile or mistrustful attitude toward the world,” “social withdrawal,” “feelings of emptiness of hopelessness,” “a chronic feeling of being ‘on the edge’, as if constantly threatened,” and “estrangement” (ICD-10, p. 209). And it is also consistent with Judith Herman’s account of what she calls “complex PTSD” or “disorders of extreme stress not otherwise specified” (Herman, 1992/1997; Ford, 1999). However, given that (a) the experience is not specific to any one psychiatric diagnosis, (b) many of the relevant diagnostic categories are contested, and (c) all of these categories are also compatible with other – often subtly different – kinds of experience, we do not tie our subject matter to one or another diagnosis. Instead, we focus on a certain kind of traumatic event, one where extreme suffering is deliberately inflicted upon a person by others. 

So the kind of experience addressed here does not inevitably follow interpersonal trauma and it is not exclusive to interpersonal trauma. Nevertheless, there is something distinctive about the psychological effects of harm inflicted by others. As Janoff-Bulman (1992, p. 77) observes, being “singled out for injury […] by another person […] presents particular challenges to the victim’s assumptive world.” We consider the nature of these “challenges” to one’s “assumptions.” We will first describe a pervasive shift in how the person relates to others that can follow interpersonal trauma, something that is often described as a “loss of trust.” We will suggest that this centrally involves a pervasive alteration in how events are anticipated, which – in the most extreme cases – renders a purposive orientation toward a meaningful future unintelligible to the person. This, we will further show, amounts to a profound shift in the experience of time.

Loss of Trust

A sense that the future is bereft of positive, meaningful life events is equally a sense that one’s meaningful life is in the past, finished. So remarks to the effect that the future has nothing to offer are sometimes accompanied by the claim that one has died, that part of one has died, or that one persists but no longer “lives:” “I felt as though I’d somehow outlived myself” (Brison, 2002, p. 9). This corresponds to a wider phenomenon that Freeman (2000, p. 90) has called “narrative foreclosure,” defined as “the premature conviction that one’s life story has effectively ended: there is no more to tell; there is no more that can be told.” It is not simply that the person believes she does not have much time left; the traumatic event somehow disrupts her ongoing life story such that the story ceases to be sustainable. (A “life story,” for current purposes, is a meaningful, coherent interpretation of past activities, relationships, achievements, and failures, which also includes a sense of where one is heading – what one’s cares, commitments, and projects currently consist of, and what one seeks to achieve.) Even if something like this is right – and we think it is – it does not tell us why a life story has collapsed. Let us consider three scenarios:

(1) Loss of a life narrative is constitutive of a sense of foreshortened future.

(2) Loss of a life narrative is symptomatic of a loss of projects, cares, and commitments upon which that narrative is founded.

(3) Both (1) and (2) are symptomatic of losing something that is presupposed by the intelligibility of life narratives and life projects.

In at least some such cases, we will argue, what is lost is not just (1) and/or (2) but also (3). In the type of case Lear describes, an open and meaningful future remains; what is lacking is a more determinate sense of which meaningful possibilities that future includes. However, for some, even this much is lost. There is an alteration in how time is experienced, such that the possibility of “moving on” in any kind of purposive, meaningful way can no longer be entertained. We will describe this by first turning to the theme of “trust.”

“Having trust” might be construed as a non-phenomenological disposition to adopt certain attitudes and have certain kinds of experience. But it also has a phenomenology in its own right; “losing trust” involves losing a habitual confidence that more usually permeates all experience, thought, and activity. It is sometimes described in terms of finding oneself in a different world, a world where people in general seem somehow different: “the entire world of people becomes suspect” (Janoff-Bulman, 1992, p. 79)7. Traumatic events are often said to “shatter” a way of experiencing the world and other people that was previously taken for granted:

[…] we experience a fundamental assault on our right to live, on our personal sense of worth, and further, on our sense that the world (including people) basically supports human life. Our relationship with existence itself is shattered. Existence in this sense includes all the meaning structures that tell us we are a valued and viable part of the fabric of life (Greening, 1990, p. 323).

What, exactly, does this “shattering” involve? It could be that experiencing significant suffering at the hands of another person leads to a negation of ingrained beliefs such as “people do not hurt each other for the sake of causing pain,” “people will help me if I am suffering,” and so on. Then again, through our constant exposure to news stories and other sources, most of us are well aware that people seriously harm each other in all manner of ways. One option is to maintain that we do not truly “believe” such things until we endure them ourselves, and various references to loss of trust as the overturning of deeply held “assumptions” lend themselves to that view. For example, Herman (1992/1997, p. 51) states that “traumatic events destroy the victim’s fundamental assumptions about the safety of the world,” and Brison (2002, p. 26) describes how interpersonal trauma “undermined my most fundamental assumptions about the world.” An explicitly cognitive approach, which construes these assumptions as “cognitive schemas” or fundamental beliefs, is adopted by Janoff-Bulman (1992, pp. 5–6), who identifies three such beliefs as central: “the world is benevolent;” “the world is meaningful;” and “the self is worthy.”

Many of us anticipate most things with habitual confidence. It does not occur to us that we will be deliberately struck by a car as we walk to the shop to buy milk or that we will be assaulted by the stranger we sit next to on a train. There is a sense of security so ingrained that we are oblivious to it. Indeed, the more at home we are in the world, the less aware we are that “feeling at home in the world” is even part of our experience (Baier, 1986; Bernstein, 2011). 

[…] we suggest that human experience also has a more enveloping “overall style” of anticipation. This view is developed in some depth by the phenomenologist Husserl (1991). According to Husserl, all of our experiences and activities incorporate anticipation. He uses the term “protention” to refer to an anticipatory structure that is integral to our sense of the present. It is not “added on” to an independently constituted sense of what is present; our experience of an entity as present includes anticipation. Husserl adds that a sense of the immediate past is likewise inseparable from the present. When something happens, we do not experience it as “present,” after which it is “gone” or somehow “fades.” Experience includes “retentions,” present experiences of events as having just passed. The experienced “flow” or “passage” of time involves a structured interplay between protention and retention. An oft used example is that of listening to a melody, where how one experiences a present note is inseparable from a sense of what preceded it, of where it has “come from,” as well as from some sense of what is coming next.

Were this style of anticipation to break down completely, we could not anticipate localized conflicts in the modes of problematic uncertainty or doubt, given that things appear potentially or actually anomalous in these ways insofar as they are at odds with a wider framework of coherent anticipation. Hence the result would be a loss of experiential structure. What, though, if it were altered in some distinctive way, rather than altogether lost? This, we propose, is what loss of […] trust involves. A confident style of anticipation gives way to pervasive and non-localized uncertainty and doubt, and a sense of danger predominates. We can thus see why someone might describe herself as living in a “different world.” Recalling the example of the musical note, how we experience what is present is shaped by what we anticipate. The point can be applied more specifically to the affective aspects of anticipation. When the realization of some indeterminate threat is anticipated, things can “look” foreboding. And when the overall style of anticipation takes this form, a sense of being confidently immersed in the world, “at home” in it, is lost. One feels “uprooted;” the world as a whole appears strangely and disturbingly different.

Interpersonal Trust as a Source of Possibility

[…] we will now suggest that having trust in other people has a kind of primacy over others forms of […] trust. This is because its loss also entails a more general loss of confidence in oneself, one’s abilities, and one’s surroundings. Furthermore, where trust in some other domain is eroded, interpersonal trust more usually has an important role to play in its restoration. In the absence of interpersonal trust, other losses of trust are experienced as irrevocable rather than contingent.

Relations with other people serve to shape and re-shape our experiences and attitudes. Even mundane and short-lived interpersonal interactions can be self-affecting. Whether an expression, gesture, or comment is met with a smile or a dismissive sneer can have a subtle but wide-ranging effect on experience of oneself, the other person, and the surrounding environment. For this reason, Løgstrup (1956/1997, p. 18) proposes that all interpersonal relations involve unavoidable responsibility for others; we cannot interact with someone without somehow affecting his “world:”

By our very attitude to one another we help to shape one another’s world. By our attitude to the other person we help to determine the scope and hue of his or her world; we make it large or small, bright or drab, rich or dull, threatening, or secure. We help to shape his or her world not by theories and views but by our very attitude toward him or her. Here lies the unarticulated and one might say anonymous demand that we take care of the life which trust has placed in our hands.

According to Løgstrup, entering into any kind of interpersonal relationship involves a balance of trust and vulnerability. To relate to someone in a distinctively personal way is to be open to her potential influence on one’s world and thus vulnerable to harm. In doing so, one trusts the other person not to do harm – one’s life is “placed in her hands 11.” Although that might sound rather dramatic, the relevant phenomenon is familiar and commonplace. Gallagher (2009) discusses how, as well as making sense of others through our interactions with them, we make sense of the world more generally. What we attend to is regulated by others, and there is empirical evidence suggesting that their presence alone serves to influence what we take to be salient, how we evaluate it, and how we respond to it. This applies from a very young age: “we learn to see things, and to see them as significant in practices of shared attention” (Gallagher, 2009, p. 303) 12. What we take to be “salient” and “significant” is inseparable from what we anticipate – from what we think is likely to happen and how it matters. Hence interactions with others can shape the content, mode, and affective style of anticipation, in relation to however many features of the environment.

Given that what and how we anticipate is inextricable from our experience of what is present, our surroundings can “look” different depending on whether we are interacting with others and on what form the interaction takes. It is not so much a matter of what the other person says; she need not say anything. It is largely attributable to styles of interaction, to patterns of shared attention, to how gestures and expressions are elicited and followed up (although it can also involve the construction, elaboration, and revision of self-narratives). van den Berg (1972, p. 65) offers the following description: “We all know people in whose company we would prefer not to go shopping, not to visit a museum, not to look at a landscape, because we would like to keep these things undamaged. Just as we all know people in whose company it is pleasant to take a walk because the objects encountered come to no harm. These people we call friends, good companions, loved ones” 13.

Interactions with others can thus facilitate changes in perspective, which are often subtle but occasionally quite profound. After interacting for a prolonged period with a particular person, the world might seem strangely impoverished or, alternatively, alive with new possibilities. Hence the interpersonal serves to imbue things with a sense of contingency. The anticipation of entering into certain kinds of relation with others amounts to a sense that “this is not all the world has to offer,” an appreciation that there are other possibilities, however indeterminate those possibilities might be.

Traumatic events can elicit a shift in the overall style of interpersonal anticipation, in the balance between vulnerability and trust. What makes interpersonal trauma distinctive is the subversion of interpersonal trust that it involves. The other person recognizes one’s vulnerability and responds to it not with care but by deliberately inflicting harm. The aim of torture has been described as the complete psychological destruction of a person: “the torturer attempts to destroy a victim’s sense of being grounded in a family and society as a human being with dreams, hopes and aspirations for the future” (Istanbul Protocol, 1999, p. 45). It is a “calculated assault on human dignity,” more so than an attempt to extract information (Amnesty International, 1986, p. 172)14. The victim is confronted by a kind of interpersonal relation that exploits her vulnerability in an extreme way. Améry (1999, p. 29) describes how, when one is hurt, there is ordinarily an “expectation of help” from others, something that is engrained from early childhood. Hence torture involves a radical conflict with habitual styles of interpersonal anticipation. It is not just that others fail to offer help; they are themselves the agents of harm and there is nobody else to intervene on one’s behalf. Furthermore, many forms of torture involve taking familiar, homely items that would more usually be encountered in a confident, purposive way, and using them to cause harm. For instance, household utensils are sometimes used to inflict pain (Scarry, 1985, pp. 40–41). So it is not just that an interpersonal situation fails to offer what is habitually anticipated; it offers something utterly opposed to it 15.

Such experiences can lead to a shift in the vulnerability–trust dynamic described by Løgstrup, whereby anticipation of harm becomes a salient aspect of interpersonal experience, shaping all interpersonal relations […] interpersonal trust is eroded or lost 16. Exactly how this comes about is debatable (and our aim here is to describe the resulting experience rather than the mechanisms through which it arises). The victim might well form explicit judgments to the effect that “the interpersonal world is not as I took it to be,” which in turn influences her overall style of anticipation. However, it is unlikely that the change in anticipatory style occurs solely via this route. In many other contexts, conflicts between explicit evaluative judgments and anticipatory style are commonplace. For example, someone who is bitten by a dog may then experience dogs as menacing and unpredictable, despite “knowing full well” that the incident was anomalous. The point applies equally to the more profound and pervasive effects of interpersonal trauma.

Loss of interpersonal trust has wider effects. Without the assumption that others will offer assistance in moments of need, the impersonal environment also seems less safe. What was once anticipated with habitual confidence is now anticipated with uncertainty and dread:

When you think about everything on a deep level, […] you see that nothing in life follows any rules; you can’t rely on anything to be always true, ever. Nothing is constant and nothing is reliable, so nothing is “safe” to just simply believe in and be done with it. You are constantly looking at everything around you and re-assessing it, re-evaluating it as you get new information about it 17.

The point also applies to trust in one’s own abilities, even to the reliability of one’s own judgments and thought processes. More usually, where there is doubt we turn to others for reassurance and support. Importantly, when trust in the impersonal environment or in one’s own abilities is damaged, trusting relations with others can help one to negotiate what has happened and move on. They establish a sense of contingency, opening up new possibilities, and facilitating new interpretations. When interpersonal trust is lost, the prospect of entering into an interpersonal process that might otherwise have enabled a shift in anticipatory style is lost along with it. As Laub (2001, p. xv) observes “the survivor of torture feels completely alone. He – or she – no longer believes in the very possibility of human connection; he envisages no one who will be present to him and for him if he returns in his mind to the places of horror, humiliation, and grief from which he barely emerged and which continue to haunt him.”

Consequently, one’s predicament is not experienced as a contingent one; the world no longer offers anything else. The resultant experience can also involve a sense of revelation, as a confidence so deep-rooted that it was never questioned reveals itself as utterly misplaced 18. This further exacerbates the experience of alienation from others. Even when someone else is not encountered as threatening, he resides somewhere else, in a place where innocence remains and people go about their business in a confident – albeit naïve – way.

Loss of a Meaningful Future

Projects, cares, and concerns are sustained interpersonally. Almost all goal-directed activities implicate other people in some way – one is asked to do things by others and for others, and one does so in collaboration with others. The integrity of one’s projects therefore depends on the integrity of those relations. Where there is pervasive uncertainty, where others cease to be dependable, where the world is unsafe and one’s own abilities are in doubt, projects collapse. It is not just that the person lacks something that is presupposed by the possibility of a specific project. What is missing is something that the intelligibility of projects in general depends upon. One finds oneself in a world from which the possibility of meaningful, progressive, goal-directed activity is absent. Other kinds of concern are affected in other ways. For instance, care for certain other people may endure, but a pervasive sense of the world as unsafe and unpredictable renders it fragile and vulnerable. One inhabits a place that is inhospitable to human relationships. Interpersonal care is thus coupled with the anticipation of impending and inevitable loss, with dread, and anticipatory grief.

Such an experience has a profound effect upon one’s beliefs. Beliefs involving positive evaluations of future events in relation to ongoing projects cease to be intelligible,  given that such projects have collapsed. In addition, one ceases to anticipate the future with habitual confidence and no longer takes it to be the case […] everything seems less certain. There is also a more widespread effect upon one’s beliefs. Various factual beliefs that were once asserted with confidence may now seem hollow, irrelevant, and alien, given that their relevance and significance depended upon projects that have been lost. More generally, there is a change in the way one believes; things are no longer taken to “be the case” with a sense of confident certainty. That kind of certainty is gone from the world, and nothing stands firm in the way it once did. Furthermore, other people cannot be relied upon for testimony and correction of errors, and one’s own intellectual abilities are experienced as all the more suspect without their reassurance.

A person’s philosophical beliefs are not insulated from these phenomenological changes. Some of them, perhaps even the vast majority, presuppose a confidence that is “shattered” in trauma. When the confidence that one’s philosophical projects depend upon is lost, one can still utter various propositions and argue over them, but the activity takes on an air of absurdity. The seeming irrelevance of much philosophical discourse following traumatic experience is noted by Brison (2002, p. x), herself an academic philosopher: “When I was confronted with something strange and paradoxical, philosophy was of no use in making me feel at home in the world 19.” We suggest that, when that confidence is disturbed, one does not believe in quite the same way anymore.

A change in the style of anticipation and conviction, of the kind that renders projects unsustainable, also amounts to a change in the short-term and longer-term sense of time. In the case of short-term time, there is a shift in the structure of protention. One’s style of anticipation is bereft of certain kinds of possibility, such as that of something happening that matters in a good way, or – more specifically – something that builds upon what one has achieved up to now. Hence there is a change in the experience of what we might call temporal “flow” or “passage,” which no longer involves the anticipation and actualization of certain meaningful kinds of possibility. With this, the person is no longer “moving forward,” “heading somewhere,” and so there is also an altered sense of temporal direction. The longer-term sense of time is also very different. When the person looks ahead, the future lacks structure; it is not ordered in terms of meaningful projects, and so a coherent sense of long-term duration is absent. Hence the all-enveloping dread she feels before some inchoate threat is not situated in relation to a wider pattern of meaningful temporal events. There is nothing meaningful between now and its actualization, and so it seems imminent. A loss of interpersonal trust that is central to this form of experience is also what sets it in stone. Without the possibility of entering into trusting relations with others, the predicament seems unchangeable. There is no access to the process that might otherwise reveal its contingency and allow her to move beyond it. The person is isolated from others in a way that is incompatible with “moving forward in time;” her life story has been cut short.

This experience is not just future-oriented; it also affects how one’s past is experienced. Past activities and events are significant insofar as they relate to where one is going, insofar as they are further developed, compensated for, or left behind. The past is thus constantly renegotiated, reinterpreted: […] the future is the site of both anticipation and the unexpected, planning and the changing of plans. This predominant orientation toward a changing future also means a fluid or unfixed past, because the past is continually being reassessed as one moves into the future (Havens, 1986, p. 21).

When the possibility of moving forward in a purposive, progressive, structured way is absent, so is that of reinterpreting one’s past. So we can also see why traumatic memories might be experienced as vivid, intrusive flashbacks, why they are “relived” more so than “recalled” (e.g., Hunt, 2010, p. 70). The traumatic event is not contextualized or re-interpreted in relation to where one is heading, because the kind of trust required to move on has been lost. This is not to suggest that a traumatic memory endures as a wholly unadulterated record of how the traumatic event was experienced at the time. Our point is that it is not contextualized in the way that remembered events more usually are. This may also account for the intrusive nature of traumatic memories. As they are not integrated into a coherent life story, the person does not first recall another, related part of the story and – in the process – anticipate their coming. They are “triggered” or “cued” in a different manner and arise without prior context. To speculate further, difficulties in recalling traumatic memories may equally be attributable to this lack of contextualization. That they are not integrated into a structured life narrative makes them harder to actively recall or – alternatively – easier to avoid 21. Other memories of events prior to the trauma are interpreted and re-interpreted, but only up to that point. A life story therefore seems complete, cut short by something that the person continues to confront but cannot negotiate 22.

Hence a sense of foreshortened future is not a judgment to the effect that the remainder of one’s life will be short and that one has little or nothing to look forward to. It is a change in how time is experienced: an orientation toward the future that is inseparable from one’s experience of past and present, and also from the short- and long-term “passage” of time, is altered. It is not just that one will no longer get married, have children or have a successful career. One confronts a world that is incompatible with the possibility of an open and progressive life story 23. And so traumatized people sometimes describe themselves as having died or say that a part of them has died: “when trust is lost, traumatized people feel that they belong more to the dead than to the living” (Herman, 1992/1997, p. 52)

With regard to mitigation, successful therapy can involve changing the person’s sense of what others have to offer, in a way that facilitates re-integration into the public world. Herman (1992/1997) describes three broad stages of recovery: a localized sense of safety is first nurtured, after which the person can attempt to construct a narrative around what has happened, and finally there is reengagement with communal life. What we have said is consistent with this general approach. To begin with, certain possibilities may not even make sense to the person. So encouraging her to do various things, adopt certain attitudes, or change her perspective on life is analogous to encouraging her to swim to safety when she finds herself stranded on a desert planet with no prospect of escape. Given that trust is a precondition for even entertaining certain possibilities, a degree of trust first needs to be restored 27. This is not to suggest that a victim of interpersonal trauma can ultimately recover the same style of unreflective trust that previously permeated her world. But she can come to relate to others and to the world more generally in a way that is compatible with moving forward into an open future 2.

In this space, you are free to share a story, ask for emotional support, talk about something challenging you, or share a recent victory. You can go a little more off-topic, but try to stay in the realm of the purpose of the subreddit.

And if you have any feedback on this thread or the subreddit itself, this is a good place to share it.

If you're looking for a support community focused on recovery work, check out /r/CPTSD_NSCommunity!

The (I'd assume) universal human need to have people in your life does not mean you need to keep the people in your life that are currently there. That line of thought is rooted (in my case, at least, your experience may be a different one) in a profound fear of the pain that is caused by loss and rejection and the loneliness that follows it. However, that loneliness is as permanent as anything in life, which is to say, not at all. It is a transient and fleeting thing. Loss and rejection can, in fact, be a good thing, even if it can feel like the end of the world. Being rejected by people that are not willing to accept your authentic self, with all that entails, is not a loss. It is the opposite: you gain something - time and space that these people occupied in your life before, that you can now fill with people who appreciate and love your authentic self and, just by virtue of doing that, allow you to thrive and live a life that you can be content with, rather than a fake one. I feel like this realisation helps me take another step towards the type of radical authenticity and self-love I wish to aspire to, and hope it can inspire someone else to do the same.

This is a common premise I hear in therapy and I have to disagree with how it’s being phrased.

The second parts are true, but if you have done therapy work, you know it takes time, right therapist, modality to regulate and not be taken by your triggered state.

But the first part is just poor wording. Yes, people can make you feel things. In metallization-based therapy, you learn that what you do affects how others response to you because your state affects other people’s state along with your actions and words.

Narcissistic and manipulative people know this, they know how to manipulate your emotional state, to dysregulate you. When you are in therapy, the hope is that you develop skills and social support network that bring you up instead of keeping you down. And you keep practicing internalizing and feeling supported, respected, trusted; those under-developed pathways. Additionally, therapists are train to minimize the chance of them making people feel patronized, pathologized and maximize the chance the clients feel heard, understood. That’s one reason why they change the word ‘patients’ to “clients’, from shellshocked to ptsd…

Therapists would prefer it if you can remove yourself from a triggering, draining environment, because heavy emotions are easy to trigger and strengthen the imprints.

The irony is, therapists, to be inclusive of the lgbt community, would be supportive of the pronoun agenda, and how certain languages are triggering. So why would they self-censor and identify their pronouns in group setting if their pronouns ‘can’t make the others feel’?

So if the therapists are more mindful about this advice/premise, this premise can be worded as ‘everyone has their intents and strategies to make you feel certain ways. It’s on us to make sure we are captivated by the supportive people’