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’

We’ve all been there—facing a perplexing issue and finding ourselves stuck, unable to find the answers we seek. When we hit these roadblocks, it's easy to say, "I don't know," and leave it at that.

However, by recognising the deeper meanings behind our own "I don't know," we can uncover what's truly holding us back. This list isn't just for understanding others; it's a powerful tool for self-reflection. By asking ourselves the right questions, we can identify our sources of uncertainty, avoidance, or overwhelm, and take meaningful steps toward clarity and resolution. Let’s turn our sticking points into stepping stones for personal growth and insight.

Consider the following meanings of I don’t know and how we can move beyond

1. Uncertainty: we genuinely don't have an answer at the moment.

• What do I think might be a possibility? • What would I like to know? • What might I know if I did know?

2. Lack of Self-Awareness: we may not have spent much time reflecting on the question.

• What have I noticed about myself recently? • When was a time a time I had a clearer idea? • What would someone close to me say about this?

3. Avoidance: we may be avoiding the question because it's uncomfortable or difficult.

• What makes this question difficult to answer? • What do I feel comfortable confronting? • Is there a smaller part of this I can tackle?

4. Fear of Judgment: we may worry about being judged – or maybe judging ourselves - for our true answer.

• My thoughts exist in my mind only – they have no external reality: do I have to act on them? • There are no wrong answers here: what’s really on my mind? • What are my responses to my thoughts telling me?

5. Overwhelm: we may feel overwhelmed by the question or situation.

• Let’s take it one step at a time: what’s my first thought? • What’s the smallest thing I am sure about on this? • How can I break this down into smaller parts?

6. Difficulty Articulating Feelings: we know the answer but struggle to put it into words.

• Can I describe this another way? • What’s a word or image that comes to mind? • What would it sound like, look like, feel like, if I could express it?

7. Disconnection: we may feel disconnected from our thoughts or emotions.

• When was a time I felt more connected? • What helps me feel more in tune with myself? • What’s something that always brings me back to myself?

8. Lack of Clarity: we may not have a clear understanding of our feelings or thoughts.

• What might bring more clarity to this situation? • What do I need to understand better? • What’s the first step in finding clarity?

9. Protection Mechanism: we may be using 'I don't know' as a defence mechanism to protect themselves.

• What am I protecting myself from? • How can I create a safe approach to this issue? • What’s a small, safe piece I can tackle?

10. Indecision: we may be uncertain and haven’t made up our mind yet.

• What are the options am I considering? • What feels right in my gut? • What would help me decide?

11. Need for More Time: we need more time to think about the question.

• Take your time. What comes to mind first? • What might I know tomorrow? • What support do I need in finding an answer?

12. Distrust: we may not feel comfortable enough sharing our thoughts.

• What are my safe environments? • How can I make them more comfortable? • What do I need to feel safe?

13. Feeling Pressured: we might be pressuring ourselves to come up with an answer quickly.

• There’s no rush: what are my initial thoughts? • How can I slow this thought process down? • What would help me feel less pressured?

14. Mind Blank: our mind might go blank due to stress or anxiety.

• What’s the first thing that popped into my head? • Take a few deep breaths. What am I noticing? • What’s something small I’m aware of right now?

15. Ambivalence: we have mixed feelings and are unsure how to express them.

• What are the pros and cons I’m weighing up? • What’s one part of this that feels clear? • What might help me resolve these mixed feelings?

16. Lack of Knowledge: we genuinely lack the knowledge or insight to answer the question.

• What information might help me? • Where could I find the answer? • What do I need to learn more about this?

17. Confusion: we may not fully understand the question or its implications.

• What’s the part that confuses me most? • What would make this clearer? • How would I explain my confusion to a trusted friend?

18. Habitual Response: we use 'I don't know' as a habitual response.

• What’s another way I could respond? • What’s beneath my usual response? • How would I answer if I didn’t say ‘I don’t know’?

19. Seeking Reassurance: we might be looking for reassurance before answering.

• What kind of reassurance would help me right now? • What would be helpful for me right now? • What would best support me in finding an answer?

20. Exploring Boundaries: we could be testing our boundaries.

• What boundaries am I curious about? • What do I need to know to feel safe? • How can I re-establish boundaries that work for me?

So, with the insight you have learned from working through the above, ask yourself:

• What have I learned? • What will I now start doing / stop doing / do more of / do less off / do differently

I wrote a post about not making releasing trauma your main focus. It's about how we can get so focused on this idea of releasing trauma, that we don't actually cultivate the new neural network of safety that builds the foundation for the nervous system to fall back onto after releasing said trauma energy. And the nervous system will actually automatically release trauma energy at its own pace as we continue to nurture resiliency and build our capacity to feel.

You can check it out here - https://www.embodiedyou.com/blog/releasing-trauma-main-focus

Don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.

I don’t mean just casual swimming. I mean, goggles, snorkel, hair cap, nose and ear plugs, the full garb so that I can be as mobile as possible in the water.

I used to need an hour of somatic movement at night just to be able to rest. This was everyday for over a decade. Id been doing somatic therapy before I even knew what somatic therapy was. My body just feels compelled to it. Otherwise I can’t feel calm. Now I do my swimming in the morning and I get it all out in the day, like a normal person. Ive always worked out but no other form of exercise has provided the somatic benefits that swimming has. Ive even gotten emotional in the water before and hey.. no one sees your tears! Highly recommend giving swimming a try!

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-mental-health/202310/swimming-toward-healing?amp

In the journey of personal growth, one obstacle that often holds us back is our own limiting beliefs. These beliefs, formed in our childhood, can persist into adulthood, and hinder our progress towards success and fulfilment. But there is the good news: by recognising and overcoming your limiting beliefs, you can unlock our true potential and live the life you aspire to.

Limiting Beliefs are one of the most common issues I work with for two reasons. We all have them and my approach is Solution Focused: at its very core, it supports clients in developing their sense of agency which is ideal for moving on from issues rooted in the past to achieve sustainable improvements in their quality of life.

So what are Limiting Beliefs?

We all form a set of beliefs in our childhoods: generally, they are formed rationally and serve us well at the time. However, time moves on and things change. As we become adults, our childhood beliefs serve us less well – and the resultant behaviours may become incongruent with the situation we are in.

This leads to the conclusion that one of the things it means to grow up, is to develop out of our childhood beliefs and adopt a new set of beliefs – and resultant behaviours - that will serve us more resourcefully as adults. This progression follows a broad pattern of developing from dependence as children to independence as young adults to interdependence as mature adults. Our overall set of beliefs are developing all the time. However, most of us will carry some of our childhood beliefs with us in to adulthood. Most will be innocuous, but some of them may impede our performance as high functioning adults. Many adults benefit from contemplating this list, recognising any that are impacting on their quality of life and working on growing out of them.

Common Limiting Beliefs

A general list of limiting beliefs has been well established:

• I need everyone I Know to approve of me • I must avoid being disliked from any source • To be a valuable person I must succeed in everything I do • It is not OK for me to make mistakes. If I do, I am bad. • People should strive to ensure I am happy. Always! • People who do not make me happy should be punished • Things must work out the way I want them to work out • My emotions are illnesses that I’m powerless to control • I can feel happy in life without contributing back in some way • Everyone needs to rely on someone stronger than themselves • Events in my past are the root of my attitude & behaviour today • My future outcomes will be the same as my past outcomes • I shouldn’t have to feel sadness, discomfort and pain • Someone, somewhere, should take responsibility for me

Beyond these, we can have our own specific limiting beliefs which are often versions of I’m not good enough / I’m not worthy / I’m not smart enough / I’m unattractive / change is bad / conflict is bad / the world is a scary place / people are mean ect.

Simply reflecting on the above may point the way to a resolution. Working with a Solution Focused approach is particularly well suited to personal development in this area as – by its very nature – it opens up the pathways between the parts we know and recognise as ‘us’ and the deeper levels of our wisdom: ideal when are going through lots of changes on our lives.

It is more effective to work on these with a skilled helper however working through the following questions will provide you with some insight:

• What is the evidence for this belief – and against it? • Am I basing this belief in facts or feelings? • Is this belief really black and white – or is it more interesting than that? • Could I be misrepresenting the evidence? • What assumptions am I making? • Might others have different interpretations of the issue? • If so, what might they be? • Am I looking at all the evidence or just what supports my thoughts? • Could my thoughts be an exaggeration of what is true? • The more you think about the evidence and differing perspectives, is this belief really the truth? • Am I having this thought out of habit, or do the facts support it? • Did someone pass this thought or belief on to me – if so, are they a reliable source? • Does this belief serve you well in life? • Does this belief help or restrict you in your life? • Have you paid a price from holding this belief – if so, what? • Would there be a price from continuing to hold this belief – is so, what? • What do you think about this belief now?

This, analytical, approach can be illuminating. This insight gained can then be used with a range of hypno-therapeutic processes to accelerate one’s personal development.

Guilt for me has two facets: I feel guilty for having let little me down, for letting it happen that little me was left unheard and in all of her pain in her prison deep inside of me.

For one, this guilt gives me the confidence that there IS something I could have done and could do, it gives me options and confidence about having options, about my abilities. Guilt gives me hope in the face of hopelessness, so in the best case it moves me to do something.

When guilt is about a person who died it gives me the feeling that there was something I could have controlled when life felt uncontrollable, but ultimately it's not about the other person and about the past, it's about the terrible fact of life that death comes regardless, that things happen that are beyond our control and not controllable. It's my trying to keep some sense of control, to try to stay hopeful in the face of terror. Feeling guilty about not having done enough for this other person is a displacement. I am actually fearing this thing and my own helplessness and the general uncontrollability of life in general.

So feeling guilty about something in the past is me trying to have control about this thing in the present and in the future.

But this guilt also keeps me from recognizing this in the first place, of having to admit it to myself. I am making this about the other person and about having had options I didn't do instead of realizing I COULD NOT HAVE DONE ANYTHING. It was beyond my control, life robs us of people we love, parents sometimes do a very shitty job and leave their child with very little options. Children don't have many options, they don't know how life works and what should be done optimally. They just need to survive.

So their survival instincts take over, defense mechanisms are put in place, and we survive. Sometimes no more than that, sometimes we survive rather well. And whatever pain we felt is stuffed away more or less safely inside of us, peeks through sometimes, sometines more, sometimes less.

For me, it was less. I put my feelings on ice when I was little. I didn't show them, especially not to my parents. When I was old enough to move out I did, far away across the ocean, then south across the country, too far for them to come and visit often or to ask me to come visit them too often. This was a safe enough distance. During my studies at the university I got to spend my time as I wanted. I had lots of time to myself and I think I spent it wisely, learning that there are different environments to the one at home, that there are people who would like me even if I showed my emotions, wouldn't hurt me if I showed vulnerability. I calmed down a bit, I settled into myself a bit. I opened up to the world around me more.

I didn't self-reflect too much though bc now, with hindsight, it wouldn't have been a good idea to have done that without a T.

So me feeling guilty about little me might be about me not letting me see options I could have right now. It keeps me in the past, but I need myself right now. Little me needs to have a future with me. My guilt keeps little me prisoner in the past.

But I do need to look at the pain that little me is carrying before I can move on. AND I need to recognize that I COULDN'T HAVE DONE MORE WHEN I WAS LITTLE. Little me couldn't have done better. It was THE VERY BEST little me could have done. It was wise. And it's now up to me to thank little me for having been so wise and get little me out of that prison and have a future and not stay in the past. I couldn't have done more. There was nothing I could have done. Often things are beyond our control and we do the best we can do considering the circumstances. And it was not little me's fault and it's not my fault!

I am happy that little me is with me right now and not in that prison any longer. Me feeling guilty that I have let down little me keeps me from moving on right now, from acknowledging that life is often uncontrollable and that it ends in death. But I am not dead yet and little me is here now and I am so grateful it's here with me! 

Let's have a future together! ❤️

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!

I've tried so many breathing techniques that just feel impossible if my distress is mounting. This one meets me right where I'm at and gently takes me to a deeper breath. It was something my therapist suggested that I modified.

*Let air in, just as much as is comfortable

*Take an extra "sip" of air and hold for a sec

*Sigh it all out

*Repeat as many times as you'd like

Edit: formatting

A compassionate, dialogical walkthough for when you're in an EF and want to use the 13 steps.

13 Steps to Managing Emotional Flashbacks

All original content sourced from and credited to Pete Walker

www.pete-walker.com

Assisted with pi.ai

1. "[NAME], I know it's tough right now, but you're not alone in this. Flashbacks can be scary, but it's important to remember that they're just memories from the past. These feelings might feel overwhelming, but they can't harm you in the present. Just remember, you're safe here and now."💗 Do you recognize that you're having a flashback and that the feelings you're experiencing are from the past, not the present?
2. "[NAME], I hear you when you say you're feeling afraid. It's important to remind yourself that even though you feel scared, you're not actually in danger. You're safe now, here in the present moment. Try taking a few deep breaths, and focus on your surroundings. Notice the things around you that help you feel grounded and secure."💙 Can you remind yourself that you're safe in the present moment and take a few deep breaths to help you feel more grounded?
3. "[NAME], remember that you have the right and the power to set boundaries. You don't have to tolerate any mistreatment or unfair behavior. It's okay to speak up for yourself, and to remove yourself from situations that make you feel unsafe or uncomfortable. You deserve to feel respected and protected."💚Can you identify any boundaries that need to be asserted or enforced right now?
4. "[NAME], it's important to show love and kindness to your inner child during this difficult time. Imagine wrapping your arms around that scared, vulnerable part of yourself and telling them that they're safe now, that you're here to protect them, and that they can come to you for comfort whenever they need it. Remind them that they're not alone, and that you'll always be there to take care of them."💕Can you offer reassurance and comfort to your inner child, letting them know they are safe and not alone?
5. "[NAME], flashbacks can make it feel like the painful feelings will never end, but remember that they're just temporary. They might feel intense and overwhelming now, but they will eventually pass. Try repeating to yourself, 'I can get through this, it won't last forever.' You've made it through flashbacks before, and you will make it through this one too."💛 Can you remind yourself that this flashback is temporary and repeat a positive affirmation to help you get through it?"
6. "[NAME], you're not that helpless, powerless child anymore. You've grown, and you've developed skills and resources to protect and support yourself. Remember that you have friends, family, and other allies who care about you and want to help. You're stronger than you think, and you're not alone in this."🧡Can you think of at least one person or resource that can help support you right now?
7. "[NAME], it's important to reconnect with your body during a flashback. Notice any areas of tension or tightness, and gently encourage your muscles to relax. Breathe deeply, and focus on the sensations of the breath moving in and out of your body. Allow yourself to slow down, and take your time. Remember that there's no rush, and that you can take as long as you need to feel grounded and present."🤎Are you able to reconnect with your body and practice some relaxation techniques to help calm yourself?
8. "[NAME], your inner critic might try to exaggerate the danger or make the situation seem worse than it is. Try not to engage with these negative thoughts or give them power. Instead, use thought-stopping techniques like repeating a positive affirmation, or visualizing a peaceful scene. You can also replace negative thoughts with positive ones, focusing on your strengths and accomplishments. You're capable and resilient, and you have the power to overcome these challenging moments."🧡Can you resist the negative thoughts and use thought-stopping techniques or thought-substitution to refocus your attention on positive, empowering thoughts?
9. "[NAME], it's important to allow yourself to grieve and process your emotions during and after a flashback. Allow yourself to cry if you need to, or express your anger in a healthy way like through journaling or exercise. Remember that your feelings are valid and important, and that you deserve to be heard and understood. You're not weak for feeling scared or sad, and you don't have to face these feelings alone."🤗 Can you allow yourself to feel and process your emotions, and perhaps express them through a healthy outlet?
10. "[NAME], you don't have to face this alone. Reach out to supportive friends, family, or a mental health professional to talk about your experience and get the support you need. Sharing your feelings and experiences with others can help you feel validated and understood, and can also provide fresh perspectives and new coping strategies. Remember that it's okay to ask for help, and that seeking support is a sign of strength, not weakness."💗 Is there someone you can reach out to right now for support?
11. "[NAME], learning to recognize your triggers can be a powerful tool in managing flashbacks. Pay attention to the situations, people, or emotions that tend to trigger flashbacks, and try to avoid or minimize exposure to these triggers whenever possible. If you can't avoid a trigger, try using the coping strategies you've learned to help you manage the flashback when it occurs. Remember that you're in control, and that you have the power to protect and care for yourself."💙Can you identify any potential triggers that might have led to this flashback, and if so, how can you reduce exposure to those triggers in the future?
12. "[NAME], flashbacks can be opportunities for healing and growth. When you're ready, try reflecting on what you were flashing back to, and what unmet needs or unresolved emotions might be at the root of the flashback. Journaling, therapy, or creative expression can all be helpful tools for exploring these feelings and experiences. Remember that healing takes time and patience, and that it's okay to take things at your own pace."💚 Are you open to exploring the potential root causes of this flashback and working through any unresolved emotions?
13. "[NAME], recovery from trauma is a journey, not a destination. Be patient with yourself, and allow yourself to make mistakes and experience setbacks along the way. Celebrate your small victories and acknowledge your progress, no matter how small it might seem. Remember that you're a survivor, and that you have the strength and resilience to overcome any obstacle that comes your way."💛 Can you acknowledge your progress in managing this flashback and give yourself credit for the strength and resilience you've shown?

Something unexpected is spontaneously arising in this PTSD + CPTSD recovery.

Quick backstory: have had C-PTSD my whole life, developed PTSD in 2005. Started all the practices then. For 10 years i was basically fumbling in the dark. No diagnosis and people didn't even talk about trauma back then. By 2015 the only major improvement was the nightmares stopped, thanks to yoga. Since then, I've been diagnosed, and things have improved slowly but dramatically. I'm pretty functional now.

Anyway, I've always been a crier. Depression has been my main CPTSD symptom. On any given day I'm just 5 minutes away from weeping if i talk about my trauma. And from 2015, when things started to get better, the crying got more extreme. But it felt... productive. I understood the difference between depressed crying, and "processing" crying. As I cried, I felt like I was purging lifetimes of sorrow.

The last 2 years were a lot better, but I still cried a lot. Very recently however, something shifted.

I suddenly do not want to talk about things that upset me. It became crystal clear to me that when I do, it opens the lid on my trauma and I get upset. And I don't want to open the lid constant. I don't want to feel upset all the time.

But this is really alien and unexpected. Im used to being flooded and consumed by my pain. It also felt true to me that you have to "feel it to heal it", so I would welcome so and any opportunity to talk about my trauma, and wouldn't fight against the pain when it came up.

But now, it's like my nervous system is pushing back against the illness. It doesn't want to dive into the pain. I think Ive realised on a somatic level that it's no longer productive for me. Ill never get all the poson out, and i think i was hoping i could. There will still be tears.. but the intense grieving is over.

I feel I'm entering a different phase of recovery. Like my nervous system wants to wire itself to happiness. Its a whole new world.

A lesson I learned from the book was that depressed ppl often automatically take other peoples criticisms seriously. This is a cognitive distortion known as "fortune telling". It is literally a thinking error to assume other people are right all the time. this was groundbreaking for me. this helps me stand up for myself. To the extent other peoples advice or whatever is full of cognitive distortions, the less reason there is to take it so seriously.