#recovering from cptsd

[performing-personhood]

I learned a kind of funny thing and I need to tell you bc it's important, cmere. Lean in so the others can't hear okay?

Ok so like

I know that the reason we are the way we are is because at some point we took up some space - as people do - and someone turned to us and went "whoa, excuse you! What do you think you're doing" or something, right? And they were, like, surprised and offended that we took up space and told us to stay real small and subservient? And we were pretty young, you and me, and we didn't really grok Peopling yet and so we assumed that everyone else was going to have that expectation too?

Okay I just learned: that isn't true at all, that person was just an asshole.

Babe. BABE. This is big.

Ok do you realize ??? that most people when they're around someone - anyone, this is important, it's an unconscious reflex and happens rather automatically - and that person is like "I have an opinion and desires and also some needs and I am going to express them openly" Did you realize, because I didn't, that most people completely intuitively go "oh! There's another person here! Lemme just scootch over so they fit better :)" PEOPLE MAKE ROOM FOR YOU.

People don't ignore us, when we're silently having wants and needs and waiting our turn to be noticed, they just have similar very loud brains and have no idea because beung corporeal is Distracting™️. Not only do people just need a reminder that you're there, they're totally happy to accomodate. In a distinctly "ope! My bad, lemme just- here-" sort of way.

My spouse has a loud brain and drowns it out with Mario Kart. I've spent most of my life quietly entertaining myself in all of these instances, because at some point someone told me I was supposed to "go play" and nobody wanted to play with me so I entertained myself right? Okay. Well I recently had a sea change and decided I was gonna pop my headphones in and watch TV on my tablet when he was doing his Mario Karting. Because the boy will easily go for four hours and I just spontaneously realized that it would actually be ridiculous if he got butthurt at me for putting some quiet tv on for myself instead of watching a grown man play the same video game for hours.

You know what happened? Not only did nobody's feelings get hurt, but I have never made it more than twenty minutes into a show before he ends a match and switches the console off. And I have never asked him to do so. When I'm over there doing my own thing with my own TV show like a person instead of just scrolling on my phone trying real hard not to exist, somewhere in his unconscious he goes "there's a whole other human being on the other end of the sofa from me. I want to turn this off and engage with that person!"

Okay do you understand what I am telling you??

When you behave like a human person and treat yourself like a human person, other people also instinctively treat you like a human person and they're happy to be reminded that they get to engage with you. The person in our past that reacted differently and got mad at us for being a person, plainly and simply: they were just being an asshole to us.

The people we love want to engage with us. Almost all of them!!! And not only that?? Most other human beings feel the same way.

Huge. Big huge.

Don't take my word for it baby cakes okay, take a sec and muster up the courage (it'll be scary the first time, but the thinking about it is always scarier than doing it I swear) and then get back out there and practice being your very own human person occupying human people space, around someone who loves you, and just... watch what happens. The first time someone warmly, graciously, voluntarily accommodates you is the greatest feeling a corporeal being can experience, and you deserve it too.

[heartworkforlove]

Even if I were to regularly feel grief and sadness for the rest of my life, it still beats being disconnected from my feelings and my self.

[backstabber128]

" Places, places

Get in your places

Throw on your dress and put on your doll faces

Everyone thinks that we're perfect

Please don't let them look through the curtains

Picture, picture, smile for the picture

Pose with your brother, won't you be a good sister?

Everyone thinks that we're perfect

Please don't let them look through the curtains

D-O-L-L-H-O-U-S-E

I see things that nobody else sees "

--------

[furiousgoldfish]

Do you ever experience stress so long term, that when it gets released, you struggle to function without it?

Your body is washed with relief but it's so intense it actually hurts; you can't breathe, your limbs go limp, you can't force yourself to do anything anymore, you need to lie down, you can't get up, and you can't focus. It's almost like you go from stress right to grief, there is no time for joy, the waves that hit make you feel that you were suffering for so long, that it was so awful it forced your body on edge for weeks or months, you can finally acknowledge how bad it was, now that you survived it. The release of suffering is so painful it makes an actual negative impact.

[aurosoul]

being 30 so far is just like ‘you will go through the most cataclysmic mental anguish of your life but you actually heal from it this time. also you have hip dysplasia. go to the doctor more often.’

[diaryofanenchantedprincess]

I was thinking about the “grass is greener on the other side” metaphor and it led me to this thought that we’re all just empty fields.

We start out with fertile ground. We have parents that might plant different seeds. They might have planted seeds of a secure attachment style. They might have planted seeds of an interest and an appreciation for the arts and culture. Seeds that fill our ground with various skills.

On the other hand, you have parents who plant weeds that refuse to let anything else grow to fruition. So now you go out and find different seeds that you want and even though you work so hard to tend to them, you still end up with these weeds that pop up and take up space. Valuable space that needs to be filled with plants that sustain you and flowers of hobbies that bring you joy.

Now you spend all your time plucking out weeds and barely surviving with the few plants that you do have. By the time you clear the field at the end of the day, new ones pop up the next day because sometimes the roots have gotten really deep over the years.

You can use weed killers. They take out the weeds, but they take away nourishment from the soil too. That piece of fertile land is barely holding on. It can barely sustain itself, let alone a whole garden.

You watch other people’s gardens thrive and some of them will even go as far as to say “just plant new seeds!”

But where will the energy come from? You’ve already spent so much of it killing the weeds. You’ve spent so much of it trying to keep the soil alive. You’ve spent so much of it trying to keep yourself alive.

More than that, those people had an advantage over you. They never had their fields overrun with weeds. While you were spending all your energy adapting and surviving, they spent all theirs growing and developing and flourishing with so much more left over.

So now you’re sitting there in an empty field, finding the energy to start over while others are harvesting theirs. You may feel behind but remember that you were doing your best to survive.

[mizusjawline]

The amount of money it takes to buy your freedom

I've been researching child abuse for over half a year now and I've seen posts on almost every aspect of the topic. However, so far I have yet to see a post discussing the financial problems we face. Escaping from an abusive family is goddarn expensive:

Bad financial role models. Coming from an abusive family, our parents views on many things were warped af! You can bet their views on finances were also warped and unrealistic! So we need to learn our financial skills from scratch. Learning is only if possible if you can allow for trial and error. Financial errors can sometimes be very, very expensive.

Moving into your own apartment. Escaping from an abusive family is nigh on impossible if you're still living with said family. However, living spaces are expensive! And for some of us, escaping our abusive family situation comes at the price of homelessness.

No financial safety net. Maybe our parents were too ill or addicted to work a steady job. Maybe our parents have the means to financially support us but choose not to in order to 'punish' us for escaping. Maybe our parents actively used money as a means to control us. Either way, when things get tough, we cannot rely on them for financial aid. This sorta feeds back into the first point about expensive trial and error learning. Sure, we can learn by trial and error. But when we make an error, there is no safety net to support us.

Being able to afford nice things is a necessity for survival. I have yet to meet a child abuse survivor who is not a hedonist. I think that being able to fill your life with nice things is vital for surviving the torturous emotional rollercoaster that is escaping from an abusive family. And sometimes, having a vase of flowers on the table can spell the difference between an emotional breakdown and an Emotional Breakdown. However how are you gonna afford these things if your paycheck only covers the bare minimum for survival (roof over your head, food, ect.)?

Some of us can't work a job. We are all severely disabled by mental health problems as a consequence of our parent's abuse. And sometimes that hinders us from working a job and earning a steady income. What happens if we have no financial buffer to fall back on during those times? Also, again, our parents did not serve as reliable rolemodels. Learning to work a steady job is, again, trial and error learning for most of us.

Therapy, medical attention and diagnoses are expensive. Some of us are lucky enough to live in countries where this is less of an issue. And some of us are unfortunate and live in countries where this is a big issue. A full escape from an abusive family is nigh on impossible without therapy.

Sometimes escaping from an abusive family strikes me as a privilege for the upper class. And this pisses me off to no end. For us child abuse victims, freedom comes with a price tag attached and it is BIG. I live in a society where slavery is illegal and a human life is not supposed to have a monetary value. And yet here I am, watching my bank account balance and wondering if it'll be enough to buy myself my freedom.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

[rolling-wavves]

My therapist I've been seeing for over 2 years diagnosed me with complex ptsd and I feel so weird about it because I'm like me ?? Trauma?? Don't know her !!!! Never happened!!

She's said she's thought this for a while and after I saw a psych who diagnosed me it just settled it for her like "ok finally". She's also already been telling me I've been through trauma even if I don't believe it.

Still!! Really having a hard time accepting this like...what. what. My life has been Totally Fine don't know what she's talking about!!!

Anyway I feel so weird and I'm rambling but idk what else to do with these feelings tbh

[performing-personhood]

Oh. Okay. So we're attacking me today. I see.

[heartworkforlove]

I experienced emotional dysregulation (difficulty calming myself) and asked for what I needed, despite feeling like I am too much, embarrassed to have/voice needs, and fearing rejection.

[atickandacricket]

wild to me just how many people would not understand this. i can tell you i have ptsd, you can see me jump when it’s triggered, i can ask you not to slam doors, but you’ll still scare me when you take your anger out near/on me. that is where the ptsd comes from!!! anger!!! why can most of that get to your head but not the last most important part???

can’t emphasize enough how when you grew up in a toxic environment, being in the room with someone who’s angry or frustrated - even if it has nothing to do with you - is absolutely terrifying cuz you’ve been 1000% conditioned to assume frustration = all hell is going to break lose and be aimed directly at you

[furiousgoldfish]

I need to write this down, because I keep forgetting, and then struggle to empathize properly with this issue.

When you're a kid who's being groomed, brainwashed or exploited by someone, you don't feel it as a manipulation or harm; instead it feels like a fair exchange. You feel as if you've found a person, who is offering you some sort of security, empathy, companionship, understanding, safety, protection, even love. It makes you feel special, like you're a part of something important, or even something sacred, irreplaceable, something you will never get a chance to be a part of again. It feels safe, it feels like something you never want to lose, or even something you couldn't go on without. If you're of such bad luck that your groomer was the only person you could rely on for attention or love, then for you they were the only person who kept you from being completely neglected and alone. Children would give almost anything to not be neglected and alone.

And in return, you just have to give them something they need from you, and it doesn't feel like you're losing something important to them, it feels like this is normal, like you're lucky they actually need you back. You'd give them anything, as long as they stay with you, keep giving you purpose and importance and positive self-perception. You don't know what you're giving, you don't understand that you're losing something, or getting hurt or traumatized. You feel like you know what you're doing and you chose this, you need this. Like you need them.

A lot of grooming situations end with the abuser abandoning, or emotionally discarding the child, and this doesn't feel like relief that the exploitation is over, more often than not, it feels absolutely devastating, it fees like you're losing something important, something you depended upon or held onto for dear life. Being discarded after doing so much to try and keep this person wanting you, is crushing and heartbreaking. And then it can take years to re-contextualize the situation and to realize that it wasn't love, that it wasn't a positive bond, or something special, or something fair, that you were in fact, hurt so badly you now have trauma symptoms and see the world in a twisted, self-deprecating way because of what they did to you. That's another layer of unbearable pain, to understand that a person who you believed loved you, maybe even the only person to ever love you, did not in fact care for you at all. That they used you in the worst possible way and then got rid of you like you were nothing. A person who loves you wouldn't do that. They would never do that to you.

It's almost too painful to face this, and preferable to keep believing that it was love, but the person didn't know what they were doing or how it would affect you or was in some sort of dark past situation themselves so they couldn't' do better, so you could live with it somehow. Because to acknowledge that you were a defenseless child and that your vulnerability of inexperience and lack of protection was exploited in the worst possible way, by someone you loved so dearly you'd do anything for them, that is unbearable.

Grieving for what you had with the abuser, how it made you feel, missing them, needing more of what you got from them, wanting their attention, understanding, acknowledgment, apology, wanting to see that they can change and love you - that is normal after an event of abuse and grooming. That is normal for someone who didn't receive normal types of love that they didn't have to earn or deserve or give something in return for. That is not something to be ashamed for - you did not create this situation, and it's not your fault a predator found you and did this to you. You're allowed to grieve what you felt was love. You're allowed to grieve even the illusion you thought was true and built your life upon, it's a real loss, and a big loss.

The anger and the hatred might take a long time to come, or even never, because it's difficult to change how you felt towards someone your whole entire life, to such extreme level. It makes you feel like you were wrong, like you were cheated and tricked, and that's humiliating, unjust and makes you feel helpless, and that's the last thing you want to feel about your life. It's normal to just be sad and confused for a long time, and to take your time figuring out what actually happened, what part of it was intentional, how could a person do that to you and why would they. It's normal to want to cling to every last bit of hope before acknowledging that what happened was traumatic, undeserved and lead by the intentions of cruelty and personal gain. Your little heart did not deserve that, and it doesn't deserve it now. You deserve to take your time processing it.

[mizusjawline]

I wish I had a time machine and I could go back and give my childhood self a hug and tell them everything is going to be ok and that they're going to grow into such a powerful person and that I am SO PROUD OF THEM for staying alive so that I could have the opportunity to heal.

That my parents don't love me is one of my life's greatest tragedies. But that I can't use a time machine to give my childhood self a hug comes a close second.

[returning-to-her]

A note to all therapists, please don't do this to trauma survivors ever

Never have an agenda No matter how wonderful your intention is, never enforce it, even subtly. Also, never let your client in a trauma spiral make decisions that will harm them irreparably. This is a tough battle to dance but if you can’t do it, don’t be a therapist. Seriously. You are dealing with the most harmed people on the planet so if you can’t navigate this terrain, don’t go there.…

[dhampir-dyke]

.

[lassieposting]

Been thinking a lot lately about romanced Astarion post-spawn ending.

Because like. The Funnest™ thing about cptsd is how much of it gets delayed. When you're trapped in a lengthy, ongoing traumatic situation, you do not have the ability to process and start healing your mental wounds. Your brain and body go into survival mode, and all that matters in the moment is that you somehow cope with the horrors. He wouldn't have been able to even begin dealing with the physical, mental and emotional toll of two hundred years of torture, brutalization and dehumanization while he was under Cazador's control; he is in constant danger, surrounded by sharks in the water, and survival means not letting them smell blood. He can't afford to fall apart, to show weakness. He is shockingly functional and competent in-game, partly because he has to be to work as a game character, but also partly because...it do be like that, to some degree. When death, for whatever reason, is not an option, you just have to shut down and keep going. People adapt in order to survive, and when we learn that showing an "injury" (physical or psychological) only gets us punished, we learn to hide it.

Early-game Astarion is terrified - of Cazador, of Godey, of being hunted down by his siblings, of being staked or sold off at the first opportunity by Tav and the other companions, of turning into a mindflayer, of another painful transformation, of losing himself when he's only just regained his autonomy after two centuries, of what Cazador will do to him if he ever finds him - the man is overwhelmed by fear. He's on thin ice as a vampire, and he's not going to give them any more reason to want him gone. Survival instinct is still in control, and in this new situation, crafting some fragile safety for himself means not only selling his body for protection, but also being useful. Clear-headed. Good in a fight.

Endgame Astarion finds himself in a completely different situation. The time-sensitive overarching threats - Cazador and impending ceremorphosis - have been dealt with. He has a loving, supportive partner he's really starting to feel safe with - Tav/Durge has proved that they're on his side, that their affection is genuine, that they don't just want him for the one thing he's been told he's good for. They've told him they're going to help him find a workaround for his sun allergy. He's getting fed regularly. He has time to stop, and breathe, and just. Recuperate.

For the first time in 200 years, he is safe.

And it will probably take a while to catch up, during which time he will seem to be coping really well, but at some point, his brain is going to realise that he's safe, and it's going to finally start processing the sheer fucking horror he's been through. Since I haven't seen anyone talking about this particular fun aspect of cptsd, allow me to offer u some thoughts on issues Astarion and Tav might end up dealing with in the months/years postgame, during the

✨ Delayed Trauma Response ✨

Memory Gaps: Astarion realising, as he opens up to Tav, that there are entire years or decades of his life from which he has only a handful of memories. Great big blank stretches where he has no idea where he was, who he was with, what was happening to him. Some of the gaps cover years at a time where he was so dissociated and shut down that he just didn't retain any memories of what was going on around him. Some are shorter periods of particularly horrific torture that his brain has deliberately blocked out to protect him.

Recovered Memories: At some point, years into the future when he's done A Lot of healing, he might find that every now and then, a fragment of those lost memories will unexpectedly come back to him. He'll catch a particular scent on the breeze, or overhear a specific phrase in the street, or cross paths with someone whose face is oddly familiar, and he'll get a glimpse of an acute horror he'd filed neatly away where it couldn't hurt him anymore. He very rarely remembers all the context to those flashes of his past. He might recall that he was punished, but not what he was punished for, or he might remember words spoken by a greedy conquest, but be unable to recall the man's face.

Dissociation: Tav knows going into this relationship that Astarion has basically made an art out of dissociating during sex. They also know, from their shared encounter with the drow twins, that he's not great at enforcing his own boundaries - he'll always say he'll speak up and back out if he stops having fun, but in practice he rarely does; he's not used to having the option of saying no to his partner, and being punished if he tries. So they know there's going to be some practice and experimentation and negotiation necessary there, to figure out the rough limits of his comfort zone. But once he starts really processing, there may be days where he just checks out completely. Tav will touch his shoulder, and he'll startle and apologise - "Terribly sorry, darling, I was miles away for a moment there." And Tav will gently point out that he's been sat in the same spot vacantly staring into the middle distance for hours. They've been checking in on him occasionally and this is the first time he's responded. It's unsettling, to say the least.

Lost Time: Astarion was very young when he was turned, physically mature but emotionally juvenile. He was basically an overgrown teenager, in the phase of life where elves are just starting to learn who they are and what they want, and figure out their place in the world. But he never got to do that, because he spent his formative young adult years in a world where everyone became an abuser, where his only means of surviving was to smile and charm and obey while even his basic human dignity was stripped away. He learned that communication is based on manipulation. He learned that the powerful can do whatever they like to the weak. He learned an incredibly toxic, abusive way of life, and that was his family dynamic, his everyday life, for as long as he can remember. Now that he's free and safe, he's realising that the world doesn't actually work that way and that he's now far behind even shorter-lived races in social/emotional development. He's grieving for the person he could've been. He's grieving for the life he could've lived. He's grieving for all the years he already lost, and the ones he'll lose in the future as he flounders to catch up. A decent chunk of his life was stolen from him, and that's time he will never get back.

Flashbacks & Night Terrors: Specifically the kind where your brain convinces you that an injury you had a long time ago is actually an injury you have (or are receiving) right now. There are nights where he'll wake Tav in a panic, because his back feels like it's on fire, he can feel every freshly-carved wound dripping blood and he's in so much pain he doesn't know what else to do. If Tav looks, they see nothing out of the ordinary - old, long-healed scars, same as always. But the pain and the fear and the distress are all very real to him, and all they can do is try to comfort him, cover his back with cool damp cloths or healing salves, remind him he's safe now and they're not leaving him.

Boundary Shifting: Sometimes, Tav can come up and hug him from behind, and he'll melt into them a little bit and go all soft and happy. Other times, he might flinch away or go rigid at the same gesture. A lot of the time, it really depends on how he's feeling on the day, but at least a little bit of it is deliberate - he's pushing to find the limit of just how much autonomy Tav is willing to give him. He wants to know at what point they'll stop respecting his "no". Will they accept it if he doesn't want a hug? If he wants to sleep in his own room tonight? At what point will understanding turn to anger at being rejected? From the drow twins four/fivesome, we also know he's got a tendency to push his own boundaries, and jump into things he's actually not ready for, and Tav would be the one holding his hand through the fallout as he tries to figure out what his own boundaries even are.

Frustration! So, so much frustration. He wants to be Over It already. He wants to move past everything that ever happened to him and never think about it again. He hates that Cazador still has a grip on him, even in death - he doesn't want to give the bastard the satisfaction of dwelling on all his punishments, his cruelties. Sometimes, that frustration is going to explode outwards at Tav - he'll get angry at them for coddling him, or find something small to start a fight over, or he'll set an unreasonable boundary and try to defend it because he's still learning what healthy boundaries look like. Sometimes, it will implode inwards, and that won't be about Tav at all, but they'll get the brunt of it all the same - it might come out as self-loathing or self-punishment, and he'll react by doing something stupid, like trying to drive them away, because having a secure, relatively healthy relationship is terrifying and the instinct is to destroy it before Tav can. There will be yelling and angry tears and deeply unhealthy coping mechanisms, and they'd have to work through that. Trauma is ugly, and Astarion is right at the beginning of a very long journey towards healing.

Abandonment Issues: Astarion wants the relationship to be one between equals, but he's kind of got Tav on a pedestal all the same. They saved him. They helped him get rid of Cazador for good. They chose him and love him despite a wealth of better (in his eyes) options, and all his baggage. They stayed with him even when he has very little to offer them. We know his vanity and obnoxious self-absorption is a fragile attempt to obscure the fact that his self-esteem is in the dirt and he has virtually no self-worth, and there are a couple of occasions in-game where it becomes clear that he's afraid of losing the one person who somehow considers him lovable. After seeing Sebastian and all the other conquests, he begs Tav not to hate him, saying that he did what he had to. If he has a rival for Tav's affections, and Tav informs him that they broke up with the rival to be with Astarion, he's shocked and the first thing out of his mouth is, "You ended things with them for me? Why?" And if Durge tries to break up with him for his own safety, his facade drops and he immediately asks if he did something wrong. So while he's not afraid to argue with Tav, if something happens - like an angry outburst - that upsets or angers them, and he thinks he's at risk of losing that one steady, stable person in his life, he might well cling and overcompensate to try and repair what he thinks is a fracture in their relationship. He'll fawn or beg or crawl into Tav's bed to "apologise" and "make it up to them" because, well, very occasionally it worked on Cazador. With patience and good communication and lots of repeatedly driving the lesson home to overcome 200 years of education to the contrary, he will eventually start to believe that "I'm really pissed off at you right now," does not equate to, "You are the worst mistake I've ever made and I am leaving you."

Panic Attacks: I feel like honestly he'd get some symptoms of these on a fairly regular basis, but he's never been given any option other than just trying to power through them. He's used to realising he's shaking, he's used to feeling like he's watching himself from outside his body, or like he can't breathe even though he doesn't need to. He's very familiar with the sickening fear in his gut, so intense it makes his head spin. He's not used to being comforted or reassured about them - he thinks they're normal. Tav disagrees.

Anyway, cptsd is messy and complicated and often looks very different from person to person so these will not represent everyone's but these are just some ideas for what the ongoing recovery process might make them work through, based on the aspects I'm most familiar with.

Projecting? Who's projecting? I'm not projecting. Shut up.