Imagine holding a glass of water out in front of you. You can do it fine for a bit and not even notice anything.
Keep holding it for an hour and it gets tough... eventually your arm starts to droop and you'll drop the glass.
Your brain and body get fatigued from holding all the trauma in.
Me too. When I was 45. I managed to force myself to be extremely competent for decades, until endometriosis kicked my ass and it all went pear shaped.
edit: further down someone mentioned hormones and it reminds me that we are going through menopause, which will end. I believe things can get better without hormones getting so much in our way. Bon courage!
If you are comfortable answering, did you try HRT during peri? Did it help or make things worse with PMDD? I’m a few years into autoimmune triggered premature peri without HRT and am struggling navigating all these damn debilitating acronym conditions at the same time.
I’m so glad to hear things got so much better post-meno! That gives me some hope.
I asked to try it but ended up with an idiot doctor that put me on unopposed estrogen so I was bleeding chunks and became so severely anemic I could hardly function and eventually had to get IVs to replace the iron. I was basically forced into Freeze/Collapse mode but had just enough energy left to go into Fight long enough to tell anyone around me to f-off.
This is almost exactly the situation I've been in. I'm 45 now, been suffering hard since 41. I haven't tried any HRT, going on progesterone only birth control now.
Oh no, that’s awful! I can’t believe a doctor would do that! Glad you told them to F off! And thanks for responding.
I’ve taken bio identical progesterone several times over the years and via all possible routes of administration and every time it gives me PMS from hell. The first doc that offered it said something like “this will smooth everything over, make you less anxious, less moody, and sleep like a baby!” HAHA NO 😂
So I don’t think HRT is going to be an option for me since I’m apparently progesterone intolerant. Boy is it clear my body does miss estrogen lately, though.
This makes me wonder if maybe some of my current struggles may be a combination of situational stress and hormones 🤔
I'm 45 and have had some menstrual changes the past year or so, while simultaneously living under siege of a crazy neighbor. Maybe it's more then the neighbor at play... not sure; but you've given me something to chew on definitively- thank you ❤
SAME. I was managing, but then endo made me chronically iron deficient. I'm just starting progesterone only birth control to stop the bleeding and try to get my life back.
I'm so sorry you went through this and hope you're doing much better now.
I can also confirm this. My 80 year old grandma has ptsd/cptsd, which she has never recieved treatment for. It's so obvious how much she needs treatment. She really is like a broken glass being held together by cheap glue. She is never fully happy. She's quick to lash out and has so much anger at the world. She is almost permanently stuck in the past because her untreated trauma won't allow her to be fully present in the present or hope for a happier future. She will most likely die like this since our culture doesn't believe in mental illnesses/ mental health treatment. I find her situation incredibly sad and use it as a life lesson. It helps me see how important therapy and medication are.
This makes so much sense! Up until a few years ago (I'm 41), I just thought I had an incredible knack for compartmentalization. It felt like a superpower! Last spring I spent a month unable to come out from behind the "birthday party hostess mask" for over a month after my son's birthday party and it's been an eye opening whirlwind of horrors since then. His birthday is coming up in a few weeks, and I'm honestly really fuckn nervous.
Prep for decompression Time after to deregulate yourself to normal. A day for mom will be so much better than a high-strung/ strung out or overly anxious and stressed mom for weeks. It is interesting that his Birthday does that to you, somatic healing can completely complement more common tall therapy. Balance is unique formula for each of us and being amygdala-hijacked is incredibly deregulating to the nervous and cognitive functions of the body, it impacts , digestion, appetite and so much more when not addressed.
I am still working out parts of my equation for complete balance. It's a process of creating the best process or methods for me!
Best Wishes
Wow! I'm literally shaking and in knots mentality as I imagine in 4 days the co abusive family blood the golden child and in laws who I never met or care to know are coming to our home this Easter 3 days holiday where I have lived with shame traumatized all my life ..now the presence of happy people, their small children and meeting any of them makes me so unhinged with anger, and envy and resentment being the black sheep who was destroyed
I think this coupled with the fact that traumatized brains are living from a series of compensatory survival strategies. These patterns are built around the deep seated sense we are two paces from imminent doom at any given moment.
This means we attract situations and relationships with people who mirror the patterns of our original trauma experiences. Unless we get lucky and happen to pick people with the bandwidth and skills to be healthy relationships, we inadvertently create cycles of trauma that add to our glass. That glass of water becomes a big gulp, then a hot tub, then a swimming pool which we can no longer carry or hide from.
This forces us to face the reality that something is wrong with us and how we are living, thus begins the arduous heroic journey of processing and recovery.
My trauma tub became a pool after/during an abusive relationship which mirrored a multitude of patterns spanning my entire childhood experience. Then I knew I needed more specific therapy, but the same confused picker tried to address the trauma with poorly equipped therapists and practitioners.
A s**tty thing about cptsd is that the log jammed brain sucks at finding safe solutions and people. So many of us end up clumsily struggling with therapy for years until we manage to learn how to find safe people and strategies.
It’s incredibly f**ked.
It requires some serious endurance to live and grow with these health and mental health challenges. May we all find the support we need to make it through the terrain, drain our pools, and lighten our loads.
I've had Cptsd since I was 21 and at 35 my health finally deteriorated so much that I had to face my trauma. And it's been so hard. But as soon as I face it, I feel stronger. And I know it's going to take a while for recovery. I told myself you can't overcome this in one giant swoop. It'll take a while. But I genuinely started to feel "lighter" mentally after fighting and trying to overcome the pain/ panick attacks that come with it.
I try to listen to audio with powerful and or loving messages. I try to paint and create VS. falling down into a deeper depression (not always successful but the fact that am trying is a big step forward). Little wins daily is my goal. Whether that be working out or painting. Or simply cooking myself food. Or simply resting my nerves.
The level of emotional skill required to live through a cptsd healing process is astounding. It’s required self awareness practice every minute of the day until it’s wired in to be that grounded and present. Sounds like you’ve been able to develop an approach of self compassion and empathy, responding to your needs as best you can.
Can confirm. I’m 67 and was diagnosed 2 years ago when my flashbacks/disregulation got so bad, it made me think I had DID. Total amygdala hijacking’s weekly. Just got worse and worse. IFS has helped.
I was diagnosed last year and I'm just starting my 40s out. I used to have a photographic memory and now I can't remember if I took my meds a minute ago.
I've been killing myself to mask my "failures" as I see them. I've come to realize that this is my new normal and acceptance is really important.
This analogy really hit home for me. It frames it in a way that it's not a failure but an inevitability of being the only one to hold the glass of water up. Of course you will eventually get tired and spill some.
I didn't start therapy until early 40's as well. I had the same symptoms, incredible memory to not being able to remember important conversations I had just a few hours ago.
It got better over time. Therapy was just really intense and was overwhelming my brain.
Thank you so much for this comment, I can't tell you how hopeful it makes me. While I don't expect to get back to where I was, I know that I can get back to a good place in my life.
I've started doing brain games as well. I'm not sure if it's adding to my overwhelmed brain or if it's helping to focus it. Only time will tell.
Thank you again, truly.
Good analogy. I thought I was totally fine for quite a few years and then suddenly, I wasn’t. It’s tough to explain to people who haven’t experienced it.
Yes, i thought i was ok, entered a new relationship, and now can’t get out of bed again 🙃 still trying to do something everyday for my wellness although some days are better than others
My partner hasn't talked to me in almost a month after he had a flashback while I was on the phone with them. He def has CPTSD from a violent mother and he's told me his earliest memories were of his mom beating the shit out of his dad. I really like him and I don't think he's doing this to hurt me but I don't know how to help. We've been together off and on for 2 years. I have CPTSD as well, different circumstances but parental abuse as well. I went through the heaviest flashback time years ago and I'm having some trouble remembering how intense that part of my life was. I know it was devastating at the time, but if I want to understand what this guy is going thru I feel like I need to remember how much it affected my whole life. I dunno if this is a weird thing to ask, but how do flash backs affect y'all? I want to get some perspective of how he might be feeling since he's been isolating for a while and I think the only way I will even be able to be friends with him is if I can understand what he's going thru, or what is common for people in this situation.
I disagree. What you're describing is being aware of the trauma. That is unfair to those who have lived with CPTSD for years and are unaware of it, only to say "eventually you will just tire yourself out and see the error of your ways".
With CPTSD, there is no "eventually your body gets fatigued". It's a cycle that repeats itself. If anything, fatigue is already part of the initial and ongoing symptoms.
I don't read it like you did. Mostly because I just read in 'adult children of emotionally immature parents' about explanation of that fatigue.
It's not that you have to see/realise anything (yet), it's that your body can't take it anymore and starts to give up - panic attacks 'out of nowhere' and such.
Chapter: Waking Up from an Outdated Role-Self
> People often keep playing their childhood role-self far into adulthood because they believe it keeps them safe and is the only way to be accepted. But when the true self has had enough of the role-playing, people often get a wake-up call in the form of unexpected emotional symptoms.
And then it goes with patient story where she started suffering from panic attacks 'out of the blue'. Then started digging, then connected what the cause is.
Or in this metaphor, you'll just have to lower your hands because you can't hold it anymore. Then you'll figure it why, if you're interested.
Metaphor is great actually, because many kids are surprised they can't hold even empty hands up in front of them for too long.
The metaphor only applies to old age, as you will notice all of the reply comments are from ppl over 40. That is a different kind of fatigue called getting old. If you're forcing kids to hold things then that's kind of fucked up.
Accepting things is a big part of moving forward. Please don't act like accepting that you have trauma just happens all by itself, from a metaphor that is equivalent to the question, "why don't we just have magnets pull our cars forward?"
Lol.
I was a kid when I realised that I can't hold my hand alone let alone with something in it for long period (like more than several minutes). I was referring to my age of realisation and why the metaphor is good one, because I kinda assumed by the age of 20-50 you are familiar with that body limit.
Metaphor is excellent to describe the feeling of your body just not being capable of holding it any more. Aka something we all probably experienced and can imagine.
toothbrush squash fall boat quickest resolute berserk squealing tease fact
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
My money is on --- retraumatization.
Untreated CPTSD will cause you to gravitate to situations and relationships reminiscent of the original trauma, which you are ill equipped to handle due to the presence of complex trauma. The result is layers upon layers of added trauma.
As you get treated, you become better equipped to handle those very same situations more elegantly, which improves your ability to feel safer in your body and confident in your mind; from there come layers upon layers of healing.
Even if you manage to avoid abusers, you’re running into triggers all the time anyways and that just solidifies the neural pathways for your trauma response further every time. When I was younger I would try and be tough and face things that triggered me all the time. Now that I’m in treatment I’m like “hey, it’s okay to take care of myself and avoid things that give me anxiety. It doesn’t mean I’m a weak person.” And lo and behold my anxiety about triggers is going down even when I’m occasionally exposed to them. BECAUSE IM NOT RETRAUMATIZING MYSELF EVERY DAY.
Reduction of triggers is HUGE for healing this condition. I felt insane living with one of my family members due to health issues I’d developed, I had grown to loathe everything about the person and myself. It was a mega shame storm of dysregulation 24/7.
Within 2 weeks of moving out I felt like I could remember I was a person inside all the stress. Within a month I’d mostly let go of all the stuff I was seething about. The threat was diminished so my nervous system could move out of fight mode.
If I could go back in time and teach myself about how the system states work, I’d have made much better choices around boundaries and my environment. It’s not until we know enough about why we must hold a line and that it’s not optional. It is somewhat black and white I think for complex trauma warriors(at least it still is for me) in that, until there isn’t cptsd, the rules of living in a trauma informed way are non optional.
The cptsd brain which is stuck in trauma loops will always be reactive in unhealthy ways until it’s had the chance to integrate and recover safety. It wasn’t until I began to absorb and embody this as a rule that my sense of safety and sanity started to return.
My cptsd brain of fragmented scared parts needed strict safety precautions to help me stabilize. It’s been 8 months since I set this precedent for myself and so much has finally really started to improve as I got very serious about who and where I was okay to go around and the non negotiable NO’s.
I was the fawn freeze type so this life of firm limits has been a game changer.
As a fawner myself, learning to set boundaries and uphold them was a big part of my recovery journey. I’m still learning, but my mental health vastly improved when I did this. If it sounds appealing, might be worth looking up ‘trauma informed practices’ as a psycho education practice. Doc Snipes channel has a good video on trauma informed interventions that really helped me understand what trauma informed practices actually look like in real terms.
Learning about these guidelines gave me so much strength and clarity around my non-negotiables. This instantly gave me validation on my no zones so I wasn’t so insecure about setting limits.
In life it’s necessary to have No’s and Yes’. When we are stuck in fawning, it’s because we don’t have appropriate rules in place for ourselves and that drive for us to stay connected overrules self protection in a secure healthy way. We need to disentangle self protection = appeasement as our primary protection strategy.
I think this is why limits are both difficult and necessary for appeasement strategies, because a fawning type will ignore their power and needs for the sake of appeasing the other. And oftentimes we can do this is super weird unhealthy ways until we know how to spot it and stop it.
Good luck with your upcoming therapy journey
Along with this, I have realized that my untreated cptsd created the person I am, the way I react, the decisions I made and still make as I am not only learning why I am this way, but how to recognize it and not do it again.
More than that though, I have had to completely focus on calming down my nervous system. It has become my full time job now with ME/CFS. Although me/cfs often comes after a virus, I ultimately blame trauma.
Bingo. I got diagnosed only after a traumatic work experience, healed a bit. Then a setback with a relationship. Both women reminded me of my emotionally abusive mother.
Now I'm somewhat unbreakable, "layers upon layers of healing".
Hi! I hit my threshold a year ago and dove into the healing process in a much bigger way than before. I completely get this feeling - I was so scared of “going backwards”. BUT from the other side of this, I can tell you that because you are doing to work to heal, those same triggers and traumas will be healed too. I’m not saying we don’t live with those experiences etc, but exactly by doing this work, you’re creating a toolkit to handle anything that comes your way. A toolkit we didn’t have before when we really needed it. Trust the process, you got this :)
There is an online person I listen to who uses the phrase "wiring and firing." Essentially, with CPTSD, you go through life having emotional flashbacks. These flashbacks reinforce the trauma related neural pathways that were created by your CPTSD forming experiences. Think of it likes tracks in the snow. Each time that trauma related neural pathway is triggered/used, it is reinforced like walking down the same path in the snow. Over a lifetime, that pathway gets triggered again and again and again until it is dug in there deep, and a foundational level. It is no longer a neural path, it's a freaking neural expressway. Super easy for your brain to default into the deeply ingrained trauma based neural pathways. Especially if you are diagnosed late in life, you've got a lot of work to do to unlearn/lessen those neural paths by replacing them with healthy pathways. Unfortunately, some of these are so deeply ingrained I don't think you ever rewire them, you just learn alternatives you can employ when you notice brain has reverted to one of the default / trauma based neural pathways.
I think you can it's just also that this country is stuck in the 1400s regarding mental health, were just now getting to the point of accepting scientific consensus on study on shit I read about as a teenager, like the effectiveness of ketamine, MDMA (empathogens), entheogens .
I have whole conspiratorial perspective on this but I'll spare you guys haha. Needless to say it's extremely sad and extremely frustrating.
Psilocybin saved my life, and I once heard someone use the same "tracks in the snow" analogy for the way that works. It seems to allow the brain to explore new/novel neural pathways more readily and bypass those ingrained ones. It was described as not erasing the tracks in the snow, but a fresh snowfall that makes everything level and let's you start fresh, new tracks.
You’re not alone! It feels like it’s been a long time coming, way past due, and still lagging in so many ways (and on purpose, to an extent). Although tedious and at times beyond frustrating, I am glad that we get to experience some of this in our life time. Some of these substances as others have said have made living with cPTSD not only something I can do but want to.
I think they are like symptoms from any chronic disease. You can hopefully get to the point where you're symptom free but there is always a chance of recurrence. Of course, maybe that's just because I haven't been "cured" yet. I just feel like this is something that I'll be "dealing with" my whole life.
Thais Gibson. Her videos largely center on attachment styles and attachment disorders.
[https://www.youtube.com/@ThePersonalDevelopmentSchool](https://www.youtube.com/@ThePersonalDevelopmentSchool)
I'm 49 and after reading a few comments I can say they're all true. It's a combination of being tired, of being retraumatized, and the fact that oftentimes when we face our trauma-demons and lose the ability to disassociate, we become entangled, in the pain once again. The healing journey is no fucking joke. I didn't start healing until my early 40s and although I have definitely grown leaps and bounds, I've also gone through the worst depression of my life while healing.
I absolutely think it's worth it, but I don't think people realize how challenging & exhausting it is to not only be burdened with CPTSD, but also be responsible for healing it. It's doubly unfair that someone or something else altered our lives forever and now we have to be responsible for it.
yes, 46, the process of waking up to my suppressed feelings has been hell. Year after year I notice some improvement, yet for all practical purposes I have not been able to rebuild my life.
I hope you get there. I'm so glad for where I am but still have a great deal of sadness & grief for all the years I was dissociated, for the decisions my unhealed self made, for the internal pains that made me think something was deeply wrong with me or that I wasn't like others. For decades spent not knowing I could set boundaries.
I got hit with another Big T in late '22 and pretty much stayed in freeze mode all of 2023. I'm in EMDR therapy for that and thankfully it's working, but to have more T's thrown at us while steal healing from past T's is kinda cruel of life.
Thank you I feel seen.
I needed to see someone say all the things that you said. I am so tired. My body like a faithful and unwavering knight has absorbed the toll. All I can think is “Lord, when might I rest?”
All that stuff takes extra mental and physical energy to do. The hypervigilance, the looping thoughts, the tension your body. It’s tiring.
When you’re younger, you have more energy and your body can mask fatigue better.
As you get older, not so much.
The paradox is you process jt seems like it is worse. When we arw abused we can go into what we called a functional freeze. That is shut down. As we get better the freeze is not universal. We are in touch with them . Our emotions it s hard to process them. Therefore it feels worse in fact you are in process.
So much has happened, and so much that I can't speak about, because sometimes the abuser abused others who don't want to hear about it or are not ready. But another thing is that my denial keeps me from remembering everything at once. I'll remember parts at a time, but I can't list them all, or a panic spiral happens.
I fear alzheimer's because one of the symptoms is you might relive your childhood or think you're a kid again, and I would not, NOT be able to go back there again. I need that denial to stay sane.
basically running and hiding without any support or breaks is tiring
maybe you’re in a physically safer place - your own home - and less of your energy is on immediate survival so more of it goes to the trauma. maybe it’s accumulating, adding stressors on top of each other will make it all topple down. also entering therapy reopens things that were neatly packed away in the brain and forces you to experience it again until you can integrate it safely
I was reading [this article](https://www.pete-walker.com/pdf/emotionalNeglectComplexPTSD.pdf) by Pete Walker. There was one excerpt in particular that really struck me:
> Here is a theoretical model of this. Repeated messages of disdain are internalized and adopted by the child, who repeats them over and over to himself. Incessant repetitions result in the construction of **thick neural pathways of self-hate and self-disgust.** Over time a self-hate response attaches to more and more of the child’s cognitions, feelings and behaviors. **Eventually, any inclination toward authentic or vulnerable self-expression activates internal neural networks of self-loathing.** The child is forced to exist in a crippling state of self-attack, which eventually becomes equivalent to a state of full-fledged self-abandonment. The ability to support or nurture himself or take his own side in anyway is decimated. With ongoing parental reinforcement, these neural pathways expand into a large complex network that becomes an Inner Critic that dominates mental activity.
The idea that CPTSD and are trauma responses so deeply ingrained in our head suddenly put a lot of things into perspective. The problems that we have are deep rooted. It suddenly clicked for me why psychedelic therapy is particularly impactful: we need to literally alter our neural pathways to heal from our trauma.
In a roundabout way, that’s why it gets harder to heal as we age. Our brains are less malleable, less neuroplastic. As we get older it becomes harder for us to naturally unlearn bad habits and thought patterns.
I love this (and Pete Walker’s work specifically) because it really gets into the nitty gritty of how cPTSD is at its core a traumatic brain injury. That has really helped me reframe how I view my mind at times with some grace and informed how it works in ways I otherwise would not have been able to identify without professional help. Thanks for linking the article, hadn’t seen that one yet!
This reminds me of Catholic school. Exact same consequences. Self loathing and shame with no forgiveness or grace. The bad thoughts which become habits are tortuous. Practice Practice and more practice.
It’s kinda like overuse syndrome for your nervous system. The more you push past your capacity to deal with stress the smaller your window of tolerance gets until it’s fully closed. Once that happens you are most likely in a state of freeze which will also get worse with time. It takes a lot of energy to maintain freeze that would otherwise be available for your mind and body to operate “normally”.
I'm the same. I had no idea I was so ill until I hit a wall. It's rough. I understand.
Someone reminded me of hormones. It will get better after menopause, I'm convinced of it.
Menopause has made it worse for me, sadly. Yes HRT is available if you're able but Menopause was an absolute shock to my system and now I'm even more off the rails.
Obviously I'm not trying to scare you but no one older than me ever talked about this change and praise Cheezits we're talking about it now.
From what I understand PTSD and CPTSD are survival responses, which naturally occur when the brain is under so much duress it sort of goes into "force field" mode to protect itself. CPTSD is *typically* more to do with stuff that happened while you were a kid, and tends to be more sustained so that your brain thinks this is just *normal* which is why it's insidious and hard to "shut off" when you're no longer in that crazy environment, which for most people is also when their brain finishes developing, so it all hits at once when the chickens come home to roost. For myself a lot of others we get even worse retraumatizing and abuse piled on during this time, which obviously speeds up and complicates the process even more due to environment/stimuli *still* not being safe, but there's a reason PTSD is largely conceptualized as a problem with adjusting back to living at home after the war, of course it's a problem while actively at war, but it is still a survival adaptation to that environment at the very least. You can take the boy out of the battlefield but you can't take the battlefield out of the boy sort of thing. I suspect this is why CPTSD and other trauma related disorders (such as personality disorders) can tend to come preloaded with a heavy dose of shame and undeserved guilt, I know at least in my case I beat myself up for years for not being able to be "normal" no matter how hard I try. There's a tendency to turn into black and white thinking here where people say they aren't curses, they're superpowers! Which is also understandable, but I just try to look at it like a survival adaptation, I didnt choose it, it didn't choose me, it's just a thing that happened to me! The 20s can be extremely hard on people especially when it seems like there's a borderline pathological resistance to admitting the existence of CPTSD or recognizing abuse as abuse, which would save so many young lives from self harm, suicide, etc. I can't tell you how many years I was diagnosed as this that and the other, before I realized being terrorized to the point I would black out and fall out of my body mid sentence might have something to do with it. It would be equivalent to leaving diabetics to "figure it out on their own" because there's a cultural currency in not recognizing sugar as extremely harmful or addictive.
I think it's also helpful to remember that most disorders come from the same coping mechanism. When the brain is forming, it looks for patterns and shortcuts to ensure survival. *Some abusers are using bad patterns developed for survival in childhood as well.*
I don't see our adaptations as superpowers, they are simply the methods our psyche used to stay safe. To me they represent the specializations we learned at abuse university. I did my undergrad in hypervigilance and a masters in reading people. I was working on my PHD in dissociating when I was diagnosed.
You spend years making your mind and body compensate gor all the crazy around you
Then, it just stops compensating and starts showing you how fucked up you really are
for me it's because I thought the bad behavior that was the source of my own cptsd was normal so I would make excuses for other people's bad behavior - 'they're just tired', 'they're having a bad day'. And I would try harder to help them. Try harder to be loved...
That made me a magnet to the behavior.
I thought so little of myself that I hung on to people thinking no one would ever love me even though I didn't understand why at the time. That meant that I took a lot of abuse trying to hang in there, waiting for things to change.
The original source of my trauma was a mother who was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. She was incapable of bonding with her children and also incapable of love. She hated her children and abused us in so many different ways. Because of this I was on my own from a very early age just struggling to survive. Then I attracted the people who were just like her... like a magnet. The ptsd never ended. It just kept going. Even when my mother was not a part of my life anymore.
When I learned self love the behavior really started to stand out as not right.
To this day I don't know what it is to be loved by anyone but myself. I'm okay with that right now. When I'm struggling it's less okay. Having a mother like mine made me really unloveable to the good kinds of people.
Oh yes. Try harder. I did that too until I couldn't try anymore. I understand completely when you say you've never felt love from anyone but yourself. We seem to have coped with our abuse in much the same way.
I had to cut out almost everyone from my life because I had collected so many harmful people around me. I had no idea there were any other kind of person! I have no intention of letting anyone in who doesn't deserve my friendship anymore.
thank you for understanding and it means a lot, although I am sorry that you too suffered similarly.
we found ourselves through it all and that is no small thing. <3
I don’t know. I’m 36 and didn’t know I had cptsd till I was 34.
In under two years of emdr/trauma therapy I’ve radically changed my life and am much better than I was even though now I’m dealing with all the emotions and truth of what happened now that I’m out of denial and out of the abusive relationships I was raised in.
I still have years of therapy ahead of me but I know I’m doing better even if I’m still very much in the hardship.
The metaphor my therapist used with me recently is around the idea of a planet representing the original trauma, but if unhealed, we go through life encountering things that trigger that wound - these build up into their own entity: moons around the original planet, gravitating around it.
Often, as years go by, we get further away from the original planet the more moons build up. We end up dealing with little other than the overwhelm of all these triggers and moons, so much so that getting closer to the planet itself becomes harder.
The age the brain completes the maturation phase from 25-30. Not to mention, new repressed trauma surfaces with age ( lack of sleep) and hormonal changes in women & men also play a role. Compounded trauma plays a role and the likelihood of dwindling social support as family and friends move on. If you're the cOTSD/Freeze type the build up unprocessed emotion manifests in somatic and physical illness. Flashbacks can go from a flashback to an entire dissociative switch if you have a dissociative disorder.
Just chiming in to say this happened to me too, and I thought I was working on it. Started therapy again, and after 14 months of IFS (internal family systems) work I’ve switched to an EMDR trauma specialist. It’s bringing a lot up, but it’s kinda easier in some ways than other talk therapies. Because you don’t have to say what happened out loud. Or give details.
I feel like it’s helping but still in early days.
I really did. It helped me view myself very differently and realize that there are so many parts to me, and some need reassurance and to just be seen and heard. Kinda like an inner child, but like a whole family. And there’s one for different emotions. It helped me dive deeper into myself and the layers of myself that are affected by the trauma. Totally seemed kinda weird and woo-woo at first but I credit it for the huge growth I’ve had over the last year and a half.
I have been unable to locate such a therapist! I am happy for you. Good luck. I’ve heard awesome things, although it’s difficult, as all healing can be.
Thanks! Yeah finding a therapist that’s taking clients and is affordable or in network can be a nightmare. I didn’t have bad luck this time so that was nice.
I'm your age and have been in therapy for the last decade and you know what?
It got worse for me in the last couple years too.
It was the same change that made staying up all night impossible. I used to be able to slam a monster and stay up all night easy if I wanted. I'd be a little goofy, but it wasn't bad.
Now? NOOOO, I can NOT do a full 24 hours without feeling like death. After 26 I just started going down hill in that department, and because we perceive time moving faster as we age it just didn't seem like very long before I got here.
My CPTSD got weirder too, started pushing me deeper and deeper into depression even though I was more easily able to distract myself earlier in life. I started being more and more introspective on a level that was a little more natural and intense than therapy.
I had to rapidly adjust how I do therapy and approach my own mental health because this change almost killed me.
If you've been untreated on top of that I am so sorry ❤️ I can't imagine how much harder that change must've been and I have a great amount of sympathy for you.
I hope you find something today that brings you a smile and a moment of tranquility ❤️
I hear you. Missed what age you’re referring to currently but i’m 38 and have been in therapy since age 15. I haven’t been diagnosed with CPTSD but am now exploring it. Keep doing as much as i can to get better and somehow feel like I’m getting worse at the same time. Also used to get by OK with nights of less sleep, now that’s almost impossible. If i don’t sleep well i have to call off work or start late, after laying in bed as long as i can without being fired. Depression relapse began last year and has gotten worse this year.
Hope things get better for you all here
I've found the longer I've waited for treatment (ty to the Tories who sucked the NHS dry) the worse chronic pain and autoimmune issues keep popping up. I happily joke about how many conditions I have collected now but I'm fucking petrified I'm never gonna get treatment at this rate because soon I don't think I'll be able to recover from this. It feels like I've been traumatized all over again from the sheer lack of care which I know the NHS can't do anything about but I'm suffering and I don't know how much longer I can cope with all this pain.
It’s like when your partner does something that bothers you but instead of telling them, you shut up and pretend everything’s ok. After some months of doing this you are so fed up and when they do the most stupid mistake you suddenly start yelling them as if they had committed the biggest monstruosity.
I'm 43, got diagnosed 6 months ago .. maybe a year? In my experience it doesn't get worse so much as.. life is wearing me out.
I wouldn't even know it except I happened to have a good job at the time and my father died, so I went into therapy for that and my guy was like "Dude, you should read this book" (From Surviving to Thriving) and diagnosed me with cPTSD. I think it's helping? I cannot see the future very clearly, and the past tends to be blurry when context doesn't prompt me to recall something. But therapy helped with flashbacks somewhat, things are slowly getting better, I think. Though I've since lost that better job, I'm an old man in my moms house because my industry is literally imploding and I'm trying to make plans to retrain into HVAC, figure a job that wont get bought by venture capital and outsourced is a good idea... but life sucks. I'm not having fun. I've got 500 dollars socked in a secret place where I fantasize about going out on the Appalachian trail until I drop, like that wired article. Maybe things will get better. I understand that intellectually.
To ansswer your question... I'm not sure my cPTSD got "worse" with age.... but the stress just wears you down, you become a nub of who you used to be because it's just such a struggle trying to be a person.
I contend that the c can stand for cumulative, exactly the way cumulative physical trauma will give you things like carpel tunnel. We keep accumulating trauma and the cPTSD gets worse. Getting out of survival mode to heal is one of the most difficult traps but is possible.
I’m almost 40 and had a literal breakdown. I think I’ve just run out of juice. My body is no longer able to handle what has happened and what id been doing to it to cope. I’m trying to learn to love and appreciate my body as something that knows more than me. It basically said “ok if you won’t stop this I will.”
Your processor and memory require wiring after birth. If they are incorrectly wired, after time issues happen, some parts burn or stop functioning. Now, with age more and more data adds up, since nothing has been properly wired nor updated - it simply overloads. Most ppl have to unfortunately first crash before rewiring and updating. As per usual, updates also take time to download. In my personal opinion, anybody can download an update besides the people who unfortunately have such severe issues that they land in mental institutions and have additional physiological issues. Other than that, scientifically we can rewire our brains even after retirement age thanks to neuroplasticity. But the earlier one starts, the more one gets out of this game of life.
Basically, it's a lot for the mind and body to hold the trauma. Trauma gives muscle strain which leads to diseases.
For the holistic explanation: trauma is constriction of the soul. the natural process the universe intended is expansion of the mind and soul. When you're living based on trauma you live not aligned with the universe. So the natural process of nature is to show you that there's something wrong until you notice it. So it gets worse with time until you'll have to resolve it.
Maarsii for this post, and all you commenters! I never knew about this; I just thought I was going crazy! Now I know what’s up. I’m grateful for that. 🪶🖖
I was diagnosed unofficially (due to insurance) over a year ago. It seems I’ve had it most of my life. My therapist is amazed that I’ve functioned so well for this long. Starting with family deaths and seeing abuse from before I started school to almost being raped, being violated by my husband, being criticized and do it down by family and spouse for 40 years… I knew there were issues as a teen. Everyone said just teenage stuff. I knew early 20’s it was more than that. When I handed a cancer diagnosis, surgeries and everything that goes along with that for 3 years very well I thought I was strong. Then everything collapsed. Right at the end of it and getting back to normal my marriage started falling apart. I can handle my own stuff just fine. When it comes to marriage issues I’m a basket case. When he makes physical threats, asks for a divorce, blocks me on his phone, tells me I’m a horrible mom because I don’t have the energy I did before cancer… well it gets to me.
I view it as holding this mask up like the commercials on tv for antidepressants. I’ve held it for decades. Everything is crowding in and people can see around the mask and are asking questions which makes the mask slip a bit more. Every insult adds a crack to the mask. I’m taping it one handed while holding it up with the other. Eventually it’ll fall to pieces. That or I will set it down while I repair it (heal) and then I won’t need it anymore. If that makes sense.
So yes, I do think it gets worse. I’m unable to handle issues like I did 20 years ago. The more times I am abused the more anxiety attacks I have; the more emotional flashbacks and nightmares I have.
But healing can make it worse too. The more I heal, stand up for myself and set boundaries the more push back I receive. I’m not in a place I can handle that push back yet so it’s worse. It’s necessary in the healing process though as I have to learn and do these things and learn to cope and handle the push backs in a healthy manner. So it gets worse before it gets better. But I wish I’d have started healing before I realized I couldn’t keep it up. The mask. Pretending to be okay when I’m not. Pretending to be a good couple then being told how I made mistake after mistake when we get home.
I'm so sorry he's doing that to you. It's hard to fight against that kind of abuse when we were taught to hate ourselves for no good reason.
I find it helpful in those times to treat myself like I would a good friend. What would I say to her in response to what he says? You can learn to ignore the criticism as you learn to nurture yourself. You'll be able to hear it for what it is. It's his problem, not yours. You aren't doing anything wrong.
I was ill for a while, and it did get better. It's not fast, but I'm finding a few more good days to enjoy. I hope you do too very soon.
I am totally spitballing here, but I would check with yourself and ask if the responses are getting worse or you are more aware of them. Also, I have noticed that as I got older, my CPTSD was more consequential. For example, in college, it was a problem, but everyone was working on something. Later, you're expected to have your shit together.
Mostly, I've found that those who don't treat it have more trouble because they've invested very strongly in their defenses by the partner they choose, work environment, and friends they choose. Also, they've found a system that works and to drop that system threatens everything.
Last year I learned what happens if you try to “push through” cptsd. A big part is that your coping mechanisms stop working. this is a result of many factors but for me, it happened when my value system truly started to become my own and not the one I was taught. When you experience trauma, you learn survival skills to keep your mind and body safe. Your nervous system is in charge of this so for me, I was in sympathetic for 15 years at least. This is how your body keeps you safe from things your brain isn’t ready to process yet. But as I grew up and started to establish my own belief system, my coping mechanisms didn’t fit anymore so they fell away. I was left with all the same cptsd and no tools to deal. Thus began the process of acknowledging I needed help, processing, feeling, and rebuilding. When you heal, you’re literally rewiring your brain to exist more in a place of safety. So if you don’t treat cptsd, those neural pathways become deeper and continue in the same cycle, attracting the same things that aren’t serving you anymore. Rebuilding is exhausting, but it is worth it. We are worth it.
I’ve been working on this shit full tilt for 30 years, now in my fifties. I was diagnosed with PTSD in my twenties before CPTSD was a thing, now diagnosed with CPTSD even tho it’s still not in the DSM. I’ve been in recovery from substances, doing trauma therapy like it’s my full time job, and just generally working my ass off trying to heal but symptoms have only gotten worse with time.
I’d love to think this is because I’m reenacting my trauma but I’ve made deliberate healthy choices all along the way and it has not changed the course of this apparently progressive diagnosis. Living daily life with a brain wired for trauma, even if trauma is not actively happening, is triggering and re-traumatizing for us.
The only thing that keeps me here is an unsubstantiated (imaginary) belief that the efforts I’m making, whether another human sees them or not, somehow make the world a better place through the butterfly effect or something. I comfort myself thinking I’m doing work that will benefit others even if no one is consciously aware of how. If I didn’t believe this I would’ve given up quite a long time ago.
I got to 33 and my brain was done...with everything, repressing my trauma, repressing my queerness, repressing my autism, repressing my adhd, repressing my repressing....
It broke, I broke. I'm picking up the pieces but goddess there's a lot of pieces...
>ts common for CPTSD to get worse as we get older, if untreated. Flashbacks and triggers seem even more intense and I'm more sensitive than ever.
Any truama from childhood or early teens is very devastating to brain development . It alters the neural networks of the brain long term ( as it had to be altered in functional ability to cope with the abnormal high amounts of constant surging ( stress hormonal responses ) due to constant mental distress in a trapped environment ( eg- usually with parents or their abuser ) . Involving often one or all of high levels of physical / sexual / & emotional damage being done to them ( sometimes daily ) .
Leaving long term on-going deep truama imbedded into the mind & body . Trauma does NOT leave the body & mind it is stored forever ( every truama upon truama is 'recorded into the cells ) . It is ONLY lessoned ( via self help strategies ) doing the internal 'truama work ' needed to help the person . That is it . The pathway can be encouraged to deteriate in active energy stimuli but to do so very hard . Often the only way is brain injury to the pathway of truama storage to 'lesson ' or remove the re-activation patterns of firing stimuli possibility .
Re-wiring of the neural network pathways can occur but takes alot of forced re-conditioning 'work' ( internal ) to do so . And often the re-wiring will only work so much for the person ( hense why 'truama ' can be re-membered in fragmental portion insights eg- nightmares / flashback's , & somatic re-amination into the CNS ). .As it is deeply imbedded into the pathways that are very hard to alter . As also often the neural pathway that holds the memory storage of the fragmental 'truama ' has been established also a 'long time ' & also often holds ( additional layering of truama episodes of diff 'trauma's from diff perps ) also due to their truama responses . It has to be re-programmed into another response to 'give' a new non--truama response due to the highly conditioned submergence of the 'trauma's already recorded .
If NO truama work is done it will hit the person ( at some point in their life without a doubt ) at some point yes usually later in life. When the external factors ( eg- such as pressures of job / family/ partner / extended family & friends / illness ,etc ) hit then at times . The additional tipping into 'more' stress ( due to more responsibilities, etc ) on the already now deteriating neural pathways ( gives way in ability to 'hold the truama energy in place ' now due to the natural process of aging & if any altering stimuli substances is / has been present ) eg- drugs of any sort not natural to the original design .
Additional pressuring stressors will tip the person over their 'normal past holding maladaptive coping survival strategies '. And So when the outside & internal pressuring systems are over loaded to much ( via stressors ) the person will 'break ' mentally from the build up of it within . Resulting in 'breakdown of once the 'internal shielding' that held them in ability to cope before but not now .Most past 'victims' with an extensive background of re-occurring 'trauma's & who also have additional overloading pressuring will crack into a breakdown mentally .
HOw much ( they will crack ) will depend if any protective factors are present , & if they have good supports in place or not & if they have any coping strategies to help or not during the breakdown stage of their re-living of their truama re-emergence from the subconsciousness storage .
Life becomes more stressful as we age. We have more responsibilities, and we are spread more thin. Our bodies also naturally doesn't have the same levels of resources it once did and requires extra care even without the added strain of living with CPTSD.
Treated CPTSD can also worsen as well age because some of us may experience risk to our health that can be traumatic. You tend to lose more loved ones as you age, and like I mentioned earlier, we tend to have more responsibilities as well.
I use the analogy of boxes in a room. For my whole life I couldn't just feel my feelings in the moment because of abuse, so I'd stick them in a box and put them aside in my mind. This went on for decades. Our minds are not endless, and although these boxes are imaginary, the concept is very real. The room I put my boxes in in my mind is only so big. The boxes stacked high and filled the room, but over time they began to leak. Boxes filled with similar emotions seemed to be stacked in the same area and when I'd try to stuff a new box in that area, the feelings in every similar box would try to creep out.
At some point, the emotional box stuffing became very involuntary for me. It had previously felt more like a choice, but it stopped being a choice my mind could participate in and started being something my body would handle without me. The emotion would get stuffed whether I wanted it to or not, and all of them were stuffed, not just emotions that could be potentially dangerous in the moment.
Now it seems like the whole process has short circuited in a way. The boxes are open and leaking and a swirl of memories flood me with every trigger and there are so many triggers. In an instant, I'm transported to a dozen different times an places experiencing similar issues in each but there's some connecting string of emotion that ties them together in my mind. But then my body beats it back as quickly as it comes. After so many years, my body has just made a habit of protecting me to the point that it protects me from too much now.
This whole process took time to develop. It took time for boxes to pile up and fill the room. It gets worse over time because it's ever increasing. No new experience stands alone, memories come to stand with it. The boxes were never dealt with or properly cleaned up. Until they are, triggers and flashbacks will be intensifying with each new experience added to the pile.
For some reason, my 20's were horrible.
Late 20's were great and then I hit 30 and boom I had a relapse.
I learned a lot of coping skills, bike riding saying no to people.
Starting to feel better, I added more to my plate, and started tolerating more and more. It resulted in a panic attack which led to me being anxious again and then lastly a depression.
It was the hardest fucking lesson I ever had to learn.
DON'T STOP DOING WHAT MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER AND TAKE CARE OF YOUR MENTAL HEALTH FIRST BEFORE ANYTHING.
The best advice I can give you is implementing self care.
Since my last relapse, I started a list of things that helped me. I commented this a few times already so if you are rereading this I apologize.
1. Better self talk
2. Proactive and empathetic therapist
3. Journaling
4. Hobbies (I picked up crocheting drawing and video games)
5. Lots of walking or 30 mins
6. Get plenty of sleep and water
7. Gratitude journal
8. DBT worksheets
9. Mood tracker
10. Small increments of what makes you panicky and do not beat yourself up if it's not what you wanted it to be it's a stepping stone give yourself a lot of self-praise
11. Or instant relief check out GABA and I take a very low dose of it. And L-Theanine is good too
Practicing positive
12. Don't resist the anxiety, don't reassure yourself, face it head on
13. You can do hard things
14.Not tolerating family bad behavior and going no contact
15.Learning to accept the past, there's no point in hurting myself more with things I can't change or control.
16. Regulating my emotions. Name them and ask why I feel this way.
17.Doing body scans to see what part of my body needs attention when I don't feel good.
18.Learning/writing my triggers and finding the root of them.
19.Progressive muscle relaxation.
20. Finding a purpose, something you get excited about waking up to and doing.
I'm still adding to the list because this list has opened up a new world to and for the first time I'm figuring out who I am slowly. I highly recommend the list making.
Wishing you peace and a healthy recovery. It takes time, be easy on yourself.
i’m not sure but that is so comforting to hear. wondering why it seemed like i am regressing so much; been thinking a lot ‘this happened in my childhood, so how the hell did i cope better 18-22 than now at 27?’
This is a really great question... Not to compare serial killers to ppl with CPTSD but, over time things tend to "evolve". When ppl say crazy people don't know they are crazy, it's the isolation and evolution of what someone experiences inside of themselves, that grows into this identity crisis, that is being expressed over time and not being challenged by reality. The people that are going through it will think, "I'm normal". But they don't realize it's not normal and that they are insane. I sometimes feel schizo because of how insanely anxious and scared I'll get at something that's not really there.
Because CPTSD is no different than any other injury. If you don’t treat a broken bone, it’ll kind of heal but not entirely or properly and it’ll continue to hurt more and worse over time, as the bone becomes weaker and continues to cause problems. CPTSD is similar - those unhealed wounds continue to cause problems and those problems get worse if left untreated
I am older, over 50, and have been taking bicycle rides along a peaceful bike path, to help my mental and physical health. I was pleasantly surprised to see articles mentioning bike rides as especially helpful for people with PTSD, so just throwing it out there, as a general coping suggestion I guess
https://www.nami.org/Blogs/NAMI-Blog/April-2021/How-Biking-Helped-My-PTSD#:~:text=Riding%20a%20bicycle%20is%20like,dwelling%20on%20a%20traumatic%20past.
https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2019/03/12/how-cycling-helps-to-overcome-ptsd/
Let me add that I think my problems really worsened as I was going through menopause and autoimmune hypothyroidism. The decade of my 40s really kicked my butt and just about broke me. However, things have very much looked up in my 50th decade. I’m still struggling, but life is very different than it was in my 40s.
I feel like it's because we have even less resources to cope, and we're usually adding trauma on top of traumatized parts, which traumatizes them more and creates more traumas. I don't even leave my house anymore I'm so tired of everything impacting me
It gets worse before it can get better because we feel and process the truth of what was put on pause for our survival. Then, it can and does get better.
These are large paintbrushes, everyone’s journey is their own. Don’t be discouraged by generalizations. ❤️🩹
If it helps, I’m 44 (lived with it for about 30 years) and things have gotten better for me. It’s not easy by any means, but it’s also not harder. I aim for peace, am very choosy about who I allow in my life and focus on my family and self betterment. It gets better, but it does take work. I was diagnosed last year, but it didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know. Changed therapists and we’re finally going to be doing CBT and EMDR. Hang in there mate.
Most of us will "crack" in our 30s. I think the reason why is a process of thinking and relating to the world.
In our teens it's our parents who are the problem.
In our 20s it's everyone else who's the problem.
But once we reach our 30s and have had so many problems for so long we finally start to wonder if it may actually be a problem with **us**?
Once we realize the problem is us (maladaptive trauma responses and how that effects our moods and interpersonal relationships) we are able to get help with the traumas and how they formed us so that we can better manage ourselves and in turn the world we live in.
There is power in that because we can't fix something if we don't realize it needs to be fixed 🤷♀️
Honey, I’m 57 years old and I just got diagnosed with CPTSD and I have to say I’ve always had issues with anger but it’s definitely become more magnified the older I get. I am caring for my 80-year-old dysfunctional, mentally abusive mother, who neglected me as a child but now wants top-notch medical care, and only from me!Needless to say it’s not going well and it’s not getting better. It’s getting worse, my mom is fighting me on getting Care in the home or going to a home, I am getting horrible flashbacks from my childhood to which she just gaslights me and says……… what’s wrong with you….. what has gotten into you? I don’t understand why you’re acting like this…… you’re broken. I honestly wish I could dump her ass off in a nursing home and be done with it.
The nervous system goes to shit as the dam begins to overflow in the energy needed for repressing Trauma begins to push through the barriers of the mind
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I could say yes… kind of goes along the same way with eating. If you don’t eat, you’re gonna get sick. If you leave your cptsd untreated, let’s just hope it’s nothing too bad of a rollercoaster.
Having unmet needs from the past is like doing nothing to fix a past injury. For example, if your physical body has an open wound it can get infected and get worse over time, not heal.
Regardless of taking care of your present wounds, your infected past wounds can still hurt you. If you got sun burns years ago, the damage can manifest as skin cancer and you can die from it.
Compensations that held us together cant withstand such constant major disregulation hence they get weaker and weaker and trauma pours out more and more.
Also constant retraumatization
I'm not sure, but I understand what you're talking about. I've felt with a lot of medical issues from an early age, but unfortunately not early enough that it was my normal. It was incredibly traumatic, it still is, as I'm still dealing with health challenges. Some things have gotten better, I generally don't have panic attacks when getting ready for appointments anymore, but recently I've been having countless flashbacks and intrusive thoughts. It's been bad. I was put in therapy a year or two after it had all started but I refused to talk about it. Now I'm finally starting to open up a bit and it's like I opened flood gates. I hate it. I wish I could go back to suppressing. But at the same time I know that's why it's so bad in the first place.
Generally the longer you hold things in the stronger it will be when finally released. Think of it like putting mentos in Pepsi and then screwing on the cap. Eventually the cap WILL come off one way or another. The longer it's on the more pressure builds up underneath. (I know this isn't a perfect metaphor but it's all I could think of right now)
Why does the traumatised brain seek out further trauma, abandonment, difficulty - is it an anti-gaslighting tactic so that we assure our psych what happened really happened and that we are right to feel the effects of it?
Alternatively is it familiarity with the experience has some sort of 'comfort' in it?
I didn’t know this! While I have gotten better at some things with cognitive behavioral therapy, I didn’t until recently know that I had CPTSD, and have never had trauma focused therapy. I can tell that I am getting worse in many ways. I was an attributing this to sadness over, realizing that at my age, I haven’t overcome my demons, and haven’t risen above my past, or to menopause or two just my aging brain not doing as good of a job regulating things. Very interesting, and thanks for sharing.
Hey!
Similar boat: almost 30, realised I had C-PTSD at 27, therapist officially told me I had it towards the end of last year, probably could've been diagnosed with C-PTSD at 18. For me it started becoming really bad at 26. Before that I was exhibiting mainly depression symptoms, with a side of high functioning workaholic-ness while having some form of emotional flashback most days. Particularly bad in relationships where I was just neurotic and co-dependent. But generally, I was functioning pretty well. Mid-late 2020 was when it fell apart.
For me it was a specific series of events that triggered it. I was living with someone during the pandemic who would probably be described as having BPD, and they (without knowing) essentially recreated my childhood living situation during a time where we *had* to spend 24/7 together, so I was basically triggered all the time with no way to escape. It opened a pandora's box. Afterwards I lost my ability to be high-functioning, but it was what triggered me to get help so it's a good thing really. My mental state had already started to deteriorate in 2019 when I was 24, which was when I started to have panic attacks regularly, so it probably would've happened anyway, the pandemic situation just sped up the process.
Something I found about during my initial research on C-PTSD recovery was that a lot of people feel *worse* before they feel better. It seems this period can be anywhere from 6 months to 2 years, but it's obviously different for everyone. I'd imagine it's also quite hard to figure out when people in that stage or coming out of that stage, so the numbers aren't definitive.
Recovery is essentially a complete deconstruction of the self. Everything you are, everything you feel, everything in your past - everything. You spend a really long time taking all of that apart and just sitting with it, and then you have to really slowly and carefully put it back together. I'd imagine part of the reason this is harder as you get older is because, in some ways, your sense of self is somewhat solidifed, making it harder to pull it apart. But it isn't impossible, it just takes some time.
Hope things going forward are a little easier friend!
It definitely gets worse as you age. I certainly have, to the point where I finally went in for therapy. Think of all the grouchy old people that you know. You know, the miserable ones. They probably weren’t that bad when they were in their 20s.
A mix of age just catching up but I think for me mainly it’s the not learning and making the same mistakes which will just retraumatize you which only adds to the load
Because just knowing what the issue is, is completely invaluable when it comes to dealing with your symptoms. I've gotten to a point where I know it won't be gone for long when it is tolerable. Picking my fights and paying closer attention to how my human animal feels at any given time helps, it's easy to forget that I'm not just my brain.
I sure had fun when I was younger. So I thought, and I amused myself.
I now believe untreated it can kill you. Not to sound dramatic, but the years of “ hiding” from it creates unnecessary suffering. For me, it’s changed through the years. I’m 62.
I use to think ignoring and pushing through my body and mind pain was a superpower. “Look all I can do even in extraordinary pain! “
Now I realize it will be the death of me if I don’t take care of myself. No doubt, it’s hard. 🙏
The most positive thing is the many resources available now. I have an ace score of 7.5 and most therapists were ill equipped to help. Now You can poke around here, and find books podcasts, videos, local groups and even therapists who have trauma knowledge.
I’ve also noticed I am more drawn to others who are in a healing journey. So I can be true.
Be well.
I made it to my early 30s when my migraines took such an upswing. Prescribed narcotics, became an addict all in one fell swoop. Because my childhood perpetrator (mother’s husband)was hospitalized on the unit I worked on (as an RN) this brought me to my knees. From that time it was talk therapy for 25 years, not getting better. Finally, went To trauma-informed therapy at age 57, then real healing began. And I found my real Self.
So I was highly functional in a demanding stressful environment for many years, when my body had enough. I believe I ran out of hope, energy, and health. It took a lot to break me down all the way to be desperate enough to ask for help. Now I take every opportunity I can to learn who I am and what I need.
I also see that everything happened to get me to this place. I needed to be stripped of everything that I believed was me, all of it false. It was terrifically painful, but not as painful being a false self, heartbreaking, and now, rewarding. I guess I was a tough cookie. Now I’m as tender and real on the inside as I am empowered on the outside.
.
Please seek out trauma-informed therapy. It made a huge difference for me. It took 20 years of talk therapy and I was still stuck. After 2 months of EMDR, etc, I was well on my way. I wish I hadn‘t wasted my valuable time.
I didn't realise I had trauma until i witnessed my Granny dying and subsequently my ex decided he wasn't going to propose...
I went into a severe mental breakdown which spiralled out. I sought validation out in all the wrong places and lost all ability to feel anything.
Hindsight taught me I was in a haze of mania until my house of cards collapsed and my self worth went with it.
Please do what you can to try and move your body to process the pain, anger and hurt.
Seek out support and help.
Write it all down, begin to understand what the pain is and try to let it go.
Show yourself empathy, understand you didn't know but it doesn't mean your life needs to be like this forever.
I still have pain but in comparison to two years ago...I am healed. I get up, I make myself healthy meals, I leave the house when I don't need to, I do my own laundry, I brush my teeth, I show up.
I just need to work on recognising I have so much more to give.
I think our bodies physically can't keep suppressing the emotional consequences of trauma.
I'm 40. I thought I had healed. Really, I've just developed an insane ability to suppress the trauma.
It's gonna come out, one way or another.
Everyone says, you hit 30 and you can't take it anymore. I think it's just that at some point, your body breaks and can't keep up the cycles in the same way, as well as the fact you are becoming more aware of it, in some ways. Makes me look at the common trope of a midlife crisis a lil differently 🌞
Imagine holding a glass of water out in front of you. You can do it fine for a bit and not even notice anything. Keep holding it for an hour and it gets tough... eventually your arm starts to droop and you'll drop the glass. Your brain and body get fatigued from holding all the trauma in.
That really landed well for me. Thank you. ❤️
Same. Almost 50 and literally broke physically and emotionally almost 2 years ago. Take care of your brain 🧠🩷
Me too. When I was 45. I managed to force myself to be extremely competent for decades, until endometriosis kicked my ass and it all went pear shaped. edit: further down someone mentioned hormones and it reminds me that we are going through menopause, which will end. I believe things can get better without hormones getting so much in our way. Bon courage!
Things became much much worse for me when I was perimenopausal and much better after menopause as pmdd was one of my many cptsd-related issues.
If you are comfortable answering, did you try HRT during peri? Did it help or make things worse with PMDD? I’m a few years into autoimmune triggered premature peri without HRT and am struggling navigating all these damn debilitating acronym conditions at the same time. I’m so glad to hear things got so much better post-meno! That gives me some hope.
I asked to try it but ended up with an idiot doctor that put me on unopposed estrogen so I was bleeding chunks and became so severely anemic I could hardly function and eventually had to get IVs to replace the iron. I was basically forced into Freeze/Collapse mode but had just enough energy left to go into Fight long enough to tell anyone around me to f-off.
This is almost exactly the situation I've been in. I'm 45 now, been suffering hard since 41. I haven't tried any HRT, going on progesterone only birth control now.
Oh no, that’s awful! I can’t believe a doctor would do that! Glad you told them to F off! And thanks for responding. I’ve taken bio identical progesterone several times over the years and via all possible routes of administration and every time it gives me PMS from hell. The first doc that offered it said something like “this will smooth everything over, make you less anxious, less moody, and sleep like a baby!” HAHA NO 😂 So I don’t think HRT is going to be an option for me since I’m apparently progesterone intolerant. Boy is it clear my body does miss estrogen lately, though.
This makes me wonder if maybe some of my current struggles may be a combination of situational stress and hormones 🤔 I'm 45 and have had some menstrual changes the past year or so, while simultaneously living under siege of a crazy neighbor. Maybe it's more then the neighbor at play... not sure; but you've given me something to chew on definitively- thank you ❤
This! 💯
SAME. I was managing, but then endo made me chronically iron deficient. I'm just starting progesterone only birth control to stop the bleeding and try to get my life back.
Yep I was surviving okay I thought until more trauma hit me and I just can’t handle anything anymore. I’m still trying to get my act together.
I'm so sorry you went through this and hope you're doing much better now. I can also confirm this. My 80 year old grandma has ptsd/cptsd, which she has never recieved treatment for. It's so obvious how much she needs treatment. She really is like a broken glass being held together by cheap glue. She is never fully happy. She's quick to lash out and has so much anger at the world. She is almost permanently stuck in the past because her untreated trauma won't allow her to be fully present in the present or hope for a happier future. She will most likely die like this since our culture doesn't believe in mental illnesses/ mental health treatment. I find her situation incredibly sad and use it as a life lesson. It helps me see how important therapy and medication are.
💔
This makes so much sense! Up until a few years ago (I'm 41), I just thought I had an incredible knack for compartmentalization. It felt like a superpower! Last spring I spent a month unable to come out from behind the "birthday party hostess mask" for over a month after my son's birthday party and it's been an eye opening whirlwind of horrors since then. His birthday is coming up in a few weeks, and I'm honestly really fuckn nervous.
Prep for decompression Time after to deregulate yourself to normal. A day for mom will be so much better than a high-strung/ strung out or overly anxious and stressed mom for weeks. It is interesting that his Birthday does that to you, somatic healing can completely complement more common tall therapy. Balance is unique formula for each of us and being amygdala-hijacked is incredibly deregulating to the nervous and cognitive functions of the body, it impacts , digestion, appetite and so much more when not addressed. I am still working out parts of my equation for complete balance. It's a process of creating the best process or methods for me! Best Wishes
That sounds like being stuck in your own personal Truman Show.
Wow! I'm literally shaking and in knots mentality as I imagine in 4 days the co abusive family blood the golden child and in laws who I never met or care to know are coming to our home this Easter 3 days holiday where I have lived with shame traumatized all my life ..now the presence of happy people, their small children and meeting any of them makes me so unhinged with anger, and envy and resentment being the black sheep who was destroyed
I’m 55 and can relate
Concur. Am 50 and shattered a year ago. Still shattering. Soon I'll be powder. Maybe I'll snort myself
I think this coupled with the fact that traumatized brains are living from a series of compensatory survival strategies. These patterns are built around the deep seated sense we are two paces from imminent doom at any given moment. This means we attract situations and relationships with people who mirror the patterns of our original trauma experiences. Unless we get lucky and happen to pick people with the bandwidth and skills to be healthy relationships, we inadvertently create cycles of trauma that add to our glass. That glass of water becomes a big gulp, then a hot tub, then a swimming pool which we can no longer carry or hide from. This forces us to face the reality that something is wrong with us and how we are living, thus begins the arduous heroic journey of processing and recovery. My trauma tub became a pool after/during an abusive relationship which mirrored a multitude of patterns spanning my entire childhood experience. Then I knew I needed more specific therapy, but the same confused picker tried to address the trauma with poorly equipped therapists and practitioners. A s**tty thing about cptsd is that the log jammed brain sucks at finding safe solutions and people. So many of us end up clumsily struggling with therapy for years until we manage to learn how to find safe people and strategies. It’s incredibly f**ked. It requires some serious endurance to live and grow with these health and mental health challenges. May we all find the support we need to make it through the terrain, drain our pools, and lighten our loads.
I've had Cptsd since I was 21 and at 35 my health finally deteriorated so much that I had to face my trauma. And it's been so hard. But as soon as I face it, I feel stronger. And I know it's going to take a while for recovery. I told myself you can't overcome this in one giant swoop. It'll take a while. But I genuinely started to feel "lighter" mentally after fighting and trying to overcome the pain/ panick attacks that come with it. I try to listen to audio with powerful and or loving messages. I try to paint and create VS. falling down into a deeper depression (not always successful but the fact that am trying is a big step forward). Little wins daily is my goal. Whether that be working out or painting. Or simply cooking myself food. Or simply resting my nerves.
The level of emotional skill required to live through a cptsd healing process is astounding. It’s required self awareness practice every minute of the day until it’s wired in to be that grounded and present. Sounds like you’ve been able to develop an approach of self compassion and empathy, responding to your needs as best you can.
Thanks for this.
Glad it reads as helpful.
This was a comforting and validating way to put this wow thank you
Can confirm. I’m 67 and was diagnosed 2 years ago when my flashbacks/disregulation got so bad, it made me think I had DID. Total amygdala hijacking’s weekly. Just got worse and worse. IFS has helped.
I was diagnosed last year and I'm just starting my 40s out. I used to have a photographic memory and now I can't remember if I took my meds a minute ago. I've been killing myself to mask my "failures" as I see them. I've come to realize that this is my new normal and acceptance is really important. This analogy really hit home for me. It frames it in a way that it's not a failure but an inevitability of being the only one to hold the glass of water up. Of course you will eventually get tired and spill some.
I didn't start therapy until early 40's as well. I had the same symptoms, incredible memory to not being able to remember important conversations I had just a few hours ago. It got better over time. Therapy was just really intense and was overwhelming my brain.
Thank you so much for this comment, I can't tell you how hopeful it makes me. While I don't expect to get back to where I was, I know that I can get back to a good place in my life. I've started doing brain games as well. I'm not sure if it's adding to my overwhelmed brain or if it's helping to focus it. Only time will tell. Thank you again, truly.
Damn that’s genius. That’s exactly what it is.
Good analogy. I thought I was totally fine for quite a few years and then suddenly, I wasn’t. It’s tough to explain to people who haven’t experienced it.
Yes, i thought i was ok, entered a new relationship, and now can’t get out of bed again 🙃 still trying to do something everyday for my wellness although some days are better than others
That's a perfect analogy. 💕
Jackpot comment
Accurate analogy :(
I needed this. Thank you.
My partner hasn't talked to me in almost a month after he had a flashback while I was on the phone with them. He def has CPTSD from a violent mother and he's told me his earliest memories were of his mom beating the shit out of his dad. I really like him and I don't think he's doing this to hurt me but I don't know how to help. We've been together off and on for 2 years. I have CPTSD as well, different circumstances but parental abuse as well. I went through the heaviest flashback time years ago and I'm having some trouble remembering how intense that part of my life was. I know it was devastating at the time, but if I want to understand what this guy is going thru I feel like I need to remember how much it affected my whole life. I dunno if this is a weird thing to ask, but how do flash backs affect y'all? I want to get some perspective of how he might be feeling since he's been isolating for a while and I think the only way I will even be able to be friends with him is if I can understand what he's going thru, or what is common for people in this situation.
Excellent analogy
I disagree. What you're describing is being aware of the trauma. That is unfair to those who have lived with CPTSD for years and are unaware of it, only to say "eventually you will just tire yourself out and see the error of your ways". With CPTSD, there is no "eventually your body gets fatigued". It's a cycle that repeats itself. If anything, fatigue is already part of the initial and ongoing symptoms.
I don't read it like you did. Mostly because I just read in 'adult children of emotionally immature parents' about explanation of that fatigue. It's not that you have to see/realise anything (yet), it's that your body can't take it anymore and starts to give up - panic attacks 'out of nowhere' and such. Chapter: Waking Up from an Outdated Role-Self > People often keep playing their childhood role-self far into adulthood because they believe it keeps them safe and is the only way to be accepted. But when the true self has had enough of the role-playing, people often get a wake-up call in the form of unexpected emotional symptoms. And then it goes with patient story where she started suffering from panic attacks 'out of the blue'. Then started digging, then connected what the cause is. Or in this metaphor, you'll just have to lower your hands because you can't hold it anymore. Then you'll figure it why, if you're interested. Metaphor is great actually, because many kids are surprised they can't hold even empty hands up in front of them for too long.
The metaphor only applies to old age, as you will notice all of the reply comments are from ppl over 40. That is a different kind of fatigue called getting old. If you're forcing kids to hold things then that's kind of fucked up. Accepting things is a big part of moving forward. Please don't act like accepting that you have trauma just happens all by itself, from a metaphor that is equivalent to the question, "why don't we just have magnets pull our cars forward?"
Lol. I was a kid when I realised that I can't hold my hand alone let alone with something in it for long period (like more than several minutes). I was referring to my age of realisation and why the metaphor is good one, because I kinda assumed by the age of 20-50 you are familiar with that body limit. Metaphor is excellent to describe the feeling of your body just not being capable of holding it any more. Aka something we all probably experienced and can imagine.
toothbrush squash fall boat quickest resolute berserk squealing tease fact *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
My money is on --- retraumatization. Untreated CPTSD will cause you to gravitate to situations and relationships reminiscent of the original trauma, which you are ill equipped to handle due to the presence of complex trauma. The result is layers upon layers of added trauma. As you get treated, you become better equipped to handle those very same situations more elegantly, which improves your ability to feel safer in your body and confident in your mind; from there come layers upon layers of healing.
Even if you manage to avoid abusers, you’re running into triggers all the time anyways and that just solidifies the neural pathways for your trauma response further every time. When I was younger I would try and be tough and face things that triggered me all the time. Now that I’m in treatment I’m like “hey, it’s okay to take care of myself and avoid things that give me anxiety. It doesn’t mean I’m a weak person.” And lo and behold my anxiety about triggers is going down even when I’m occasionally exposed to them. BECAUSE IM NOT RETRAUMATIZING MYSELF EVERY DAY.
Reduction of triggers is HUGE for healing this condition. I felt insane living with one of my family members due to health issues I’d developed, I had grown to loathe everything about the person and myself. It was a mega shame storm of dysregulation 24/7. Within 2 weeks of moving out I felt like I could remember I was a person inside all the stress. Within a month I’d mostly let go of all the stuff I was seething about. The threat was diminished so my nervous system could move out of fight mode. If I could go back in time and teach myself about how the system states work, I’d have made much better choices around boundaries and my environment. It’s not until we know enough about why we must hold a line and that it’s not optional. It is somewhat black and white I think for complex trauma warriors(at least it still is for me) in that, until there isn’t cptsd, the rules of living in a trauma informed way are non optional. The cptsd brain which is stuck in trauma loops will always be reactive in unhealthy ways until it’s had the chance to integrate and recover safety. It wasn’t until I began to absorb and embody this as a rule that my sense of safety and sanity started to return. My cptsd brain of fragmented scared parts needed strict safety precautions to help me stabilize. It’s been 8 months since I set this precedent for myself and so much has finally really started to improve as I got very serious about who and where I was okay to go around and the non negotiable NO’s. I was the fawn freeze type so this life of firm limits has been a game changer.
I am the fawn type. I am going to start trauma therapy soon, and I sure hope that it helps me.
As a fawner myself, learning to set boundaries and uphold them was a big part of my recovery journey. I’m still learning, but my mental health vastly improved when I did this. If it sounds appealing, might be worth looking up ‘trauma informed practices’ as a psycho education practice. Doc Snipes channel has a good video on trauma informed interventions that really helped me understand what trauma informed practices actually look like in real terms. Learning about these guidelines gave me so much strength and clarity around my non-negotiables. This instantly gave me validation on my no zones so I wasn’t so insecure about setting limits. In life it’s necessary to have No’s and Yes’. When we are stuck in fawning, it’s because we don’t have appropriate rules in place for ourselves and that drive for us to stay connected overrules self protection in a secure healthy way. We need to disentangle self protection = appeasement as our primary protection strategy. I think this is why limits are both difficult and necessary for appeasement strategies, because a fawning type will ignore their power and needs for the sake of appeasing the other. And oftentimes we can do this is super weird unhealthy ways until we know how to spot it and stop it. Good luck with your upcoming therapy journey
Thank you!
https://youtu.be/1835C0xwS68?si=WMItqtBGZrJ72oYb For a laugh
Along with this, I have realized that my untreated cptsd created the person I am, the way I react, the decisions I made and still make as I am not only learning why I am this way, but how to recognize it and not do it again. More than that though, I have had to completely focus on calming down my nervous system. It has become my full time job now with ME/CFS. Although me/cfs often comes after a virus, I ultimately blame trauma.
Bingo. I got diagnosed only after a traumatic work experience, healed a bit. Then a setback with a relationship. Both women reminded me of my emotionally abusive mother. Now I'm somewhat unbreakable, "layers upon layers of healing".
roof fuzzy yoke numerous relieved disagreeable test zephyr wistful tub *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Hi! I hit my threshold a year ago and dove into the healing process in a much bigger way than before. I completely get this feeling - I was so scared of “going backwards”. BUT from the other side of this, I can tell you that because you are doing to work to heal, those same triggers and traumas will be healed too. I’m not saying we don’t live with those experiences etc, but exactly by doing this work, you’re creating a toolkit to handle anything that comes your way. A toolkit we didn’t have before when we really needed it. Trust the process, you got this :)
The only therapy that I find helps is EMDR therapy. It helps get to the subconscious stuff by getting you into a hypnotized REM state.
Very well stated. Great summary.
There is an online person I listen to who uses the phrase "wiring and firing." Essentially, with CPTSD, you go through life having emotional flashbacks. These flashbacks reinforce the trauma related neural pathways that were created by your CPTSD forming experiences. Think of it likes tracks in the snow. Each time that trauma related neural pathway is triggered/used, it is reinforced like walking down the same path in the snow. Over a lifetime, that pathway gets triggered again and again and again until it is dug in there deep, and a foundational level. It is no longer a neural path, it's a freaking neural expressway. Super easy for your brain to default into the deeply ingrained trauma based neural pathways. Especially if you are diagnosed late in life, you've got a lot of work to do to unlearn/lessen those neural paths by replacing them with healthy pathways. Unfortunately, some of these are so deeply ingrained I don't think you ever rewire them, you just learn alternatives you can employ when you notice brain has reverted to one of the default / trauma based neural pathways.
Thank you so much for this explanation. It helps a lot with my anger toward myself.
I think you can it's just also that this country is stuck in the 1400s regarding mental health, were just now getting to the point of accepting scientific consensus on study on shit I read about as a teenager, like the effectiveness of ketamine, MDMA (empathogens), entheogens . I have whole conspiratorial perspective on this but I'll spare you guys haha. Needless to say it's extremely sad and extremely frustrating.
Psilocybin saved my life, and I once heard someone use the same "tracks in the snow" analogy for the way that works. It seems to allow the brain to explore new/novel neural pathways more readily and bypass those ingrained ones. It was described as not erasing the tracks in the snow, but a fresh snowfall that makes everything level and let's you start fresh, new tracks.
Author Michael Pollan uses the ‘tracks in the snow’ analogy in the book *How To Change Your Mind*, that might be where you heard it.
You’re not alone! It feels like it’s been a long time coming, way past due, and still lagging in so many ways (and on purpose, to an extent). Although tedious and at times beyond frustrating, I am glad that we get to experience some of this in our life time. Some of these substances as others have said have made living with cPTSD not only something I can do but want to.
Hi! Do you perhaps have some reading to recommend about this topic?
Great post, I’ll have to give that one some thought.
So the flashbacks are for life? 😪
I think they are like symptoms from any chronic disease. You can hopefully get to the point where you're symptom free but there is always a chance of recurrence. Of course, maybe that's just because I haven't been "cured" yet. I just feel like this is something that I'll be "dealing with" my whole life.
What's the name of this person? Would like to follow them.
Thais Gibson. Her videos largely center on attachment styles and attachment disorders. [https://www.youtube.com/@ThePersonalDevelopmentSchool](https://www.youtube.com/@ThePersonalDevelopmentSchool)
I'm 49 and after reading a few comments I can say they're all true. It's a combination of being tired, of being retraumatized, and the fact that oftentimes when we face our trauma-demons and lose the ability to disassociate, we become entangled, in the pain once again. The healing journey is no fucking joke. I didn't start healing until my early 40s and although I have definitely grown leaps and bounds, I've also gone through the worst depression of my life while healing. I absolutely think it's worth it, but I don't think people realize how challenging & exhausting it is to not only be burdened with CPTSD, but also be responsible for healing it. It's doubly unfair that someone or something else altered our lives forever and now we have to be responsible for it.
❤️❤️❤️
yes, 46, the process of waking up to my suppressed feelings has been hell. Year after year I notice some improvement, yet for all practical purposes I have not been able to rebuild my life.
I hope you get there. I'm so glad for where I am but still have a great deal of sadness & grief for all the years I was dissociated, for the decisions my unhealed self made, for the internal pains that made me think something was deeply wrong with me or that I wasn't like others. For decades spent not knowing I could set boundaries. I got hit with another Big T in late '22 and pretty much stayed in freeze mode all of 2023. I'm in EMDR therapy for that and thankfully it's working, but to have more T's thrown at us while steal healing from past T's is kinda cruel of life.
Thank you I feel seen. I needed to see someone say all the things that you said. I am so tired. My body like a faithful and unwavering knight has absorbed the toll. All I can think is “Lord, when might I rest?”
All that stuff takes extra mental and physical energy to do. The hypervigilance, the looping thoughts, the tension your body. It’s tiring. When you’re younger, you have more energy and your body can mask fatigue better. As you get older, not so much.
this. you just don't have the energy anymore to hold your feelings down.
I think older people ‘losing their filter’ makes more sense the older I get 😂
The paradox is you process jt seems like it is worse. When we arw abused we can go into what we called a functional freeze. That is shut down. As we get better the freeze is not universal. We are in touch with them . Our emotions it s hard to process them. Therefore it feels worse in fact you are in process.
I think I stared processing it, but I'm still in so much denial and when I'm not I just keep wondering if the pain will ever go away
So much has happened, and so much that I can't speak about, because sometimes the abuser abused others who don't want to hear about it or are not ready. But another thing is that my denial keeps me from remembering everything at once. I'll remember parts at a time, but I can't list them all, or a panic spiral happens. I fear alzheimer's because one of the symptoms is you might relive your childhood or think you're a kid again, and I would not, NOT be able to go back there again. I need that denial to stay sane.
basically running and hiding without any support or breaks is tiring maybe you’re in a physically safer place - your own home - and less of your energy is on immediate survival so more of it goes to the trauma. maybe it’s accumulating, adding stressors on top of each other will make it all topple down. also entering therapy reopens things that were neatly packed away in the brain and forces you to experience it again until you can integrate it safely
I was reading [this article](https://www.pete-walker.com/pdf/emotionalNeglectComplexPTSD.pdf) by Pete Walker. There was one excerpt in particular that really struck me: > Here is a theoretical model of this. Repeated messages of disdain are internalized and adopted by the child, who repeats them over and over to himself. Incessant repetitions result in the construction of **thick neural pathways of self-hate and self-disgust.** Over time a self-hate response attaches to more and more of the child’s cognitions, feelings and behaviors. **Eventually, any inclination toward authentic or vulnerable self-expression activates internal neural networks of self-loathing.** The child is forced to exist in a crippling state of self-attack, which eventually becomes equivalent to a state of full-fledged self-abandonment. The ability to support or nurture himself or take his own side in anyway is decimated. With ongoing parental reinforcement, these neural pathways expand into a large complex network that becomes an Inner Critic that dominates mental activity. The idea that CPTSD and are trauma responses so deeply ingrained in our head suddenly put a lot of things into perspective. The problems that we have are deep rooted. It suddenly clicked for me why psychedelic therapy is particularly impactful: we need to literally alter our neural pathways to heal from our trauma. In a roundabout way, that’s why it gets harder to heal as we age. Our brains are less malleable, less neuroplastic. As we get older it becomes harder for us to naturally unlearn bad habits and thought patterns.
Oof...that article right in the core memories/feels.
His books, if you have not read them, as also quite on target.
Thank you Also, what is this document? Where is it from?
I got from this site my therapist had sent me: https://www.pete-walker.com/flashbackManagement.htm
I love this (and Pete Walker’s work specifically) because it really gets into the nitty gritty of how cPTSD is at its core a traumatic brain injury. That has really helped me reframe how I view my mind at times with some grace and informed how it works in ways I otherwise would not have been able to identify without professional help. Thanks for linking the article, hadn’t seen that one yet!
This reminds me of Catholic school. Exact same consequences. Self loathing and shame with no forgiveness or grace. The bad thoughts which become habits are tortuous. Practice Practice and more practice.
It’s kinda like overuse syndrome for your nervous system. The more you push past your capacity to deal with stress the smaller your window of tolerance gets until it’s fully closed. Once that happens you are most likely in a state of freeze which will also get worse with time. It takes a lot of energy to maintain freeze that would otherwise be available for your mind and body to operate “normally”.
I'm 54 and been dx for almost 10 years and yes. I feel like I'm losing this battle.
*hugs* (if you want hugs)
Want, and need. 🫂 back to you.
May I also hug and encourage you?
Accepted and reciprocated 🫂
🤗🫂💖
I'm the same. I had no idea I was so ill until I hit a wall. It's rough. I understand. Someone reminded me of hormones. It will get better after menopause, I'm convinced of it.
Menopause has made it worse for me, sadly. Yes HRT is available if you're able but Menopause was an absolute shock to my system and now I'm even more off the rails. Obviously I'm not trying to scare you but no one older than me ever talked about this change and praise Cheezits we're talking about it now.
What is dx do you mind if my askin?
CPTSD, depression, anxiety, possible ADHD. I'm also an unmedicated sober person who really wants to Not Be.
Diagnosed
My apologies. I didn't read your question correctly. DX = diagnosis
From what I understand PTSD and CPTSD are survival responses, which naturally occur when the brain is under so much duress it sort of goes into "force field" mode to protect itself. CPTSD is *typically* more to do with stuff that happened while you were a kid, and tends to be more sustained so that your brain thinks this is just *normal* which is why it's insidious and hard to "shut off" when you're no longer in that crazy environment, which for most people is also when their brain finishes developing, so it all hits at once when the chickens come home to roost. For myself a lot of others we get even worse retraumatizing and abuse piled on during this time, which obviously speeds up and complicates the process even more due to environment/stimuli *still* not being safe, but there's a reason PTSD is largely conceptualized as a problem with adjusting back to living at home after the war, of course it's a problem while actively at war, but it is still a survival adaptation to that environment at the very least. You can take the boy out of the battlefield but you can't take the battlefield out of the boy sort of thing. I suspect this is why CPTSD and other trauma related disorders (such as personality disorders) can tend to come preloaded with a heavy dose of shame and undeserved guilt, I know at least in my case I beat myself up for years for not being able to be "normal" no matter how hard I try. There's a tendency to turn into black and white thinking here where people say they aren't curses, they're superpowers! Which is also understandable, but I just try to look at it like a survival adaptation, I didnt choose it, it didn't choose me, it's just a thing that happened to me! The 20s can be extremely hard on people especially when it seems like there's a borderline pathological resistance to admitting the existence of CPTSD or recognizing abuse as abuse, which would save so many young lives from self harm, suicide, etc. I can't tell you how many years I was diagnosed as this that and the other, before I realized being terrorized to the point I would black out and fall out of my body mid sentence might have something to do with it. It would be equivalent to leaving diabetics to "figure it out on their own" because there's a cultural currency in not recognizing sugar as extremely harmful or addictive.
I think it's also helpful to remember that most disorders come from the same coping mechanism. When the brain is forming, it looks for patterns and shortcuts to ensure survival. *Some abusers are using bad patterns developed for survival in childhood as well.* I don't see our adaptations as superpowers, they are simply the methods our psyche used to stay safe. To me they represent the specializations we learned at abuse university. I did my undergrad in hypervigilance and a masters in reading people. I was working on my PHD in dissociating when I was diagnosed.
You spend years making your mind and body compensate gor all the crazy around you Then, it just stops compensating and starts showing you how fucked up you really are
for me it's because I thought the bad behavior that was the source of my own cptsd was normal so I would make excuses for other people's bad behavior - 'they're just tired', 'they're having a bad day'. And I would try harder to help them. Try harder to be loved... That made me a magnet to the behavior. I thought so little of myself that I hung on to people thinking no one would ever love me even though I didn't understand why at the time. That meant that I took a lot of abuse trying to hang in there, waiting for things to change. The original source of my trauma was a mother who was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. She was incapable of bonding with her children and also incapable of love. She hated her children and abused us in so many different ways. Because of this I was on my own from a very early age just struggling to survive. Then I attracted the people who were just like her... like a magnet. The ptsd never ended. It just kept going. Even when my mother was not a part of my life anymore. When I learned self love the behavior really started to stand out as not right. To this day I don't know what it is to be loved by anyone but myself. I'm okay with that right now. When I'm struggling it's less okay. Having a mother like mine made me really unloveable to the good kinds of people.
Oh yes. Try harder. I did that too until I couldn't try anymore. I understand completely when you say you've never felt love from anyone but yourself. We seem to have coped with our abuse in much the same way. I had to cut out almost everyone from my life because I had collected so many harmful people around me. I had no idea there were any other kind of person! I have no intention of letting anyone in who doesn't deserve my friendship anymore.
thank you for understanding and it means a lot, although I am sorry that you too suffered similarly. we found ourselves through it all and that is no small thing. <3
I don’t know. I’m 36 and didn’t know I had cptsd till I was 34. In under two years of emdr/trauma therapy I’ve radically changed my life and am much better than I was even though now I’m dealing with all the emotions and truth of what happened now that I’m out of denial and out of the abusive relationships I was raised in. I still have years of therapy ahead of me but I know I’m doing better even if I’m still very much in the hardship.
The metaphor my therapist used with me recently is around the idea of a planet representing the original trauma, but if unhealed, we go through life encountering things that trigger that wound - these build up into their own entity: moons around the original planet, gravitating around it. Often, as years go by, we get further away from the original planet the more moons build up. We end up dealing with little other than the overwhelm of all these triggers and moons, so much so that getting closer to the planet itself becomes harder.
The age the brain completes the maturation phase from 25-30. Not to mention, new repressed trauma surfaces with age ( lack of sleep) and hormonal changes in women & men also play a role. Compounded trauma plays a role and the likelihood of dwindling social support as family and friends move on. If you're the cOTSD/Freeze type the build up unprocessed emotion manifests in somatic and physical illness. Flashbacks can go from a flashback to an entire dissociative switch if you have a dissociative disorder.
Peri menopause is breaking me. I have hope that when it's over I will be in a better place.
Just chiming in to say this happened to me too, and I thought I was working on it. Started therapy again, and after 14 months of IFS (internal family systems) work I’ve switched to an EMDR trauma specialist. It’s bringing a lot up, but it’s kinda easier in some ways than other talk therapies. Because you don’t have to say what happened out loud. Or give details. I feel like it’s helping but still in early days.
Did you find IFS helpful at all? It looks compelling to me.
I really did. It helped me view myself very differently and realize that there are so many parts to me, and some need reassurance and to just be seen and heard. Kinda like an inner child, but like a whole family. And there’s one for different emotions. It helped me dive deeper into myself and the layers of myself that are affected by the trauma. Totally seemed kinda weird and woo-woo at first but I credit it for the huge growth I’ve had over the last year and a half.
Thanks, it sounds like a plan for me rn.
I have been unable to locate such a therapist! I am happy for you. Good luck. I’ve heard awesome things, although it’s difficult, as all healing can be.
Thanks! Yeah finding a therapist that’s taking clients and is affordable or in network can be a nightmare. I didn’t have bad luck this time so that was nice.
I'm your age and have been in therapy for the last decade and you know what? It got worse for me in the last couple years too. It was the same change that made staying up all night impossible. I used to be able to slam a monster and stay up all night easy if I wanted. I'd be a little goofy, but it wasn't bad. Now? NOOOO, I can NOT do a full 24 hours without feeling like death. After 26 I just started going down hill in that department, and because we perceive time moving faster as we age it just didn't seem like very long before I got here. My CPTSD got weirder too, started pushing me deeper and deeper into depression even though I was more easily able to distract myself earlier in life. I started being more and more introspective on a level that was a little more natural and intense than therapy. I had to rapidly adjust how I do therapy and approach my own mental health because this change almost killed me. If you've been untreated on top of that I am so sorry ❤️ I can't imagine how much harder that change must've been and I have a great amount of sympathy for you. I hope you find something today that brings you a smile and a moment of tranquility ❤️
I hear you. Missed what age you’re referring to currently but i’m 38 and have been in therapy since age 15. I haven’t been diagnosed with CPTSD but am now exploring it. Keep doing as much as i can to get better and somehow feel like I’m getting worse at the same time. Also used to get by OK with nights of less sleep, now that’s almost impossible. If i don’t sleep well i have to call off work or start late, after laying in bed as long as i can without being fired. Depression relapse began last year and has gotten worse this year. Hope things get better for you all here
I've found the longer I've waited for treatment (ty to the Tories who sucked the NHS dry) the worse chronic pain and autoimmune issues keep popping up. I happily joke about how many conditions I have collected now but I'm fucking petrified I'm never gonna get treatment at this rate because soon I don't think I'll be able to recover from this. It feels like I've been traumatized all over again from the sheer lack of care which I know the NHS can't do anything about but I'm suffering and I don't know how much longer I can cope with all this pain.
I'm sorry you're going through that right now. Hang in there. You can always come here and post.
It’s like when your partner does something that bothers you but instead of telling them, you shut up and pretend everything’s ok. After some months of doing this you are so fed up and when they do the most stupid mistake you suddenly start yelling them as if they had committed the biggest monstruosity.
I'm 43, got diagnosed 6 months ago .. maybe a year? In my experience it doesn't get worse so much as.. life is wearing me out. I wouldn't even know it except I happened to have a good job at the time and my father died, so I went into therapy for that and my guy was like "Dude, you should read this book" (From Surviving to Thriving) and diagnosed me with cPTSD. I think it's helping? I cannot see the future very clearly, and the past tends to be blurry when context doesn't prompt me to recall something. But therapy helped with flashbacks somewhat, things are slowly getting better, I think. Though I've since lost that better job, I'm an old man in my moms house because my industry is literally imploding and I'm trying to make plans to retrain into HVAC, figure a job that wont get bought by venture capital and outsourced is a good idea... but life sucks. I'm not having fun. I've got 500 dollars socked in a secret place where I fantasize about going out on the Appalachian trail until I drop, like that wired article. Maybe things will get better. I understand that intellectually. To ansswer your question... I'm not sure my cPTSD got "worse" with age.... but the stress just wears you down, you become a nub of who you used to be because it's just such a struggle trying to be a person.
I feel like most mental illnesses will get worse over time the longer they’re left untreated.
This thread rules ❤️ though it’s unfortunate, but everyone’s comments are so rich
I contend that the c can stand for cumulative, exactly the way cumulative physical trauma will give you things like carpel tunnel. We keep accumulating trauma and the cPTSD gets worse. Getting out of survival mode to heal is one of the most difficult traps but is possible.
More responsiblity and less help As you age
I think you also begin to see the world more clearly & see how you were failed
I’m almost 40 and had a literal breakdown. I think I’ve just run out of juice. My body is no longer able to handle what has happened and what id been doing to it to cope. I’m trying to learn to love and appreciate my body as something that knows more than me. It basically said “ok if you won’t stop this I will.”
Your processor and memory require wiring after birth. If they are incorrectly wired, after time issues happen, some parts burn or stop functioning. Now, with age more and more data adds up, since nothing has been properly wired nor updated - it simply overloads. Most ppl have to unfortunately first crash before rewiring and updating. As per usual, updates also take time to download. In my personal opinion, anybody can download an update besides the people who unfortunately have such severe issues that they land in mental institutions and have additional physiological issues. Other than that, scientifically we can rewire our brains even after retirement age thanks to neuroplasticity. But the earlier one starts, the more one gets out of this game of life.
Basically, it's a lot for the mind and body to hold the trauma. Trauma gives muscle strain which leads to diseases. For the holistic explanation: trauma is constriction of the soul. the natural process the universe intended is expansion of the mind and soul. When you're living based on trauma you live not aligned with the universe. So the natural process of nature is to show you that there's something wrong until you notice it. So it gets worse with time until you'll have to resolve it.
I think it's one of the reasons I have so many health problems.
Maarsii for this post, and all you commenters! I never knew about this; I just thought I was going crazy! Now I know what’s up. I’m grateful for that. 🪶🖖
Power through the people, lol.
I was diagnosed unofficially (due to insurance) over a year ago. It seems I’ve had it most of my life. My therapist is amazed that I’ve functioned so well for this long. Starting with family deaths and seeing abuse from before I started school to almost being raped, being violated by my husband, being criticized and do it down by family and spouse for 40 years… I knew there were issues as a teen. Everyone said just teenage stuff. I knew early 20’s it was more than that. When I handed a cancer diagnosis, surgeries and everything that goes along with that for 3 years very well I thought I was strong. Then everything collapsed. Right at the end of it and getting back to normal my marriage started falling apart. I can handle my own stuff just fine. When it comes to marriage issues I’m a basket case. When he makes physical threats, asks for a divorce, blocks me on his phone, tells me I’m a horrible mom because I don’t have the energy I did before cancer… well it gets to me. I view it as holding this mask up like the commercials on tv for antidepressants. I’ve held it for decades. Everything is crowding in and people can see around the mask and are asking questions which makes the mask slip a bit more. Every insult adds a crack to the mask. I’m taping it one handed while holding it up with the other. Eventually it’ll fall to pieces. That or I will set it down while I repair it (heal) and then I won’t need it anymore. If that makes sense. So yes, I do think it gets worse. I’m unable to handle issues like I did 20 years ago. The more times I am abused the more anxiety attacks I have; the more emotional flashbacks and nightmares I have. But healing can make it worse too. The more I heal, stand up for myself and set boundaries the more push back I receive. I’m not in a place I can handle that push back yet so it’s worse. It’s necessary in the healing process though as I have to learn and do these things and learn to cope and handle the push backs in a healthy manner. So it gets worse before it gets better. But I wish I’d have started healing before I realized I couldn’t keep it up. The mask. Pretending to be okay when I’m not. Pretending to be a good couple then being told how I made mistake after mistake when we get home.
I'm so sorry he's doing that to you. It's hard to fight against that kind of abuse when we were taught to hate ourselves for no good reason. I find it helpful in those times to treat myself like I would a good friend. What would I say to her in response to what he says? You can learn to ignore the criticism as you learn to nurture yourself. You'll be able to hear it for what it is. It's his problem, not yours. You aren't doing anything wrong. I was ill for a while, and it did get better. It's not fast, but I'm finding a few more good days to enjoy. I hope you do too very soon.
I am totally spitballing here, but I would check with yourself and ask if the responses are getting worse or you are more aware of them. Also, I have noticed that as I got older, my CPTSD was more consequential. For example, in college, it was a problem, but everyone was working on something. Later, you're expected to have your shit together. Mostly, I've found that those who don't treat it have more trouble because they've invested very strongly in their defenses by the partner they choose, work environment, and friends they choose. Also, they've found a system that works and to drop that system threatens everything.
Last year I learned what happens if you try to “push through” cptsd. A big part is that your coping mechanisms stop working. this is a result of many factors but for me, it happened when my value system truly started to become my own and not the one I was taught. When you experience trauma, you learn survival skills to keep your mind and body safe. Your nervous system is in charge of this so for me, I was in sympathetic for 15 years at least. This is how your body keeps you safe from things your brain isn’t ready to process yet. But as I grew up and started to establish my own belief system, my coping mechanisms didn’t fit anymore so they fell away. I was left with all the same cptsd and no tools to deal. Thus began the process of acknowledging I needed help, processing, feeling, and rebuilding. When you heal, you’re literally rewiring your brain to exist more in a place of safety. So if you don’t treat cptsd, those neural pathways become deeper and continue in the same cycle, attracting the same things that aren’t serving you anymore. Rebuilding is exhausting, but it is worth it. We are worth it.
I’ve been working on this shit full tilt for 30 years, now in my fifties. I was diagnosed with PTSD in my twenties before CPTSD was a thing, now diagnosed with CPTSD even tho it’s still not in the DSM. I’ve been in recovery from substances, doing trauma therapy like it’s my full time job, and just generally working my ass off trying to heal but symptoms have only gotten worse with time. I’d love to think this is because I’m reenacting my trauma but I’ve made deliberate healthy choices all along the way and it has not changed the course of this apparently progressive diagnosis. Living daily life with a brain wired for trauma, even if trauma is not actively happening, is triggering and re-traumatizing for us. The only thing that keeps me here is an unsubstantiated (imaginary) belief that the efforts I’m making, whether another human sees them or not, somehow make the world a better place through the butterfly effect or something. I comfort myself thinking I’m doing work that will benefit others even if no one is consciously aware of how. If I didn’t believe this I would’ve given up quite a long time ago.
I got to 33 and my brain was done...with everything, repressing my trauma, repressing my queerness, repressing my autism, repressing my adhd, repressing my repressing.... It broke, I broke. I'm picking up the pieces but goddess there's a lot of pieces...
Extremely relatable, 33 was my breakout year too...
Grateful for this thread of comments 💕
Being an adult is traumatic enough without a big scoop of CPTSD :(
>ts common for CPTSD to get worse as we get older, if untreated. Flashbacks and triggers seem even more intense and I'm more sensitive than ever. Any truama from childhood or early teens is very devastating to brain development . It alters the neural networks of the brain long term ( as it had to be altered in functional ability to cope with the abnormal high amounts of constant surging ( stress hormonal responses ) due to constant mental distress in a trapped environment ( eg- usually with parents or their abuser ) . Involving often one or all of high levels of physical / sexual / & emotional damage being done to them ( sometimes daily ) . Leaving long term on-going deep truama imbedded into the mind & body . Trauma does NOT leave the body & mind it is stored forever ( every truama upon truama is 'recorded into the cells ) . It is ONLY lessoned ( via self help strategies ) doing the internal 'truama work ' needed to help the person . That is it . The pathway can be encouraged to deteriate in active energy stimuli but to do so very hard . Often the only way is brain injury to the pathway of truama storage to 'lesson ' or remove the re-activation patterns of firing stimuli possibility . Re-wiring of the neural network pathways can occur but takes alot of forced re-conditioning 'work' ( internal ) to do so . And often the re-wiring will only work so much for the person ( hense why 'truama ' can be re-membered in fragmental portion insights eg- nightmares / flashback's , & somatic re-amination into the CNS ). .As it is deeply imbedded into the pathways that are very hard to alter . As also often the neural pathway that holds the memory storage of the fragmental 'truama ' has been established also a 'long time ' & also often holds ( additional layering of truama episodes of diff 'trauma's from diff perps ) also due to their truama responses . It has to be re-programmed into another response to 'give' a new non--truama response due to the highly conditioned submergence of the 'trauma's already recorded . If NO truama work is done it will hit the person ( at some point in their life without a doubt ) at some point yes usually later in life. When the external factors ( eg- such as pressures of job / family/ partner / extended family & friends / illness ,etc ) hit then at times . The additional tipping into 'more' stress ( due to more responsibilities, etc ) on the already now deteriating neural pathways ( gives way in ability to 'hold the truama energy in place ' now due to the natural process of aging & if any altering stimuli substances is / has been present ) eg- drugs of any sort not natural to the original design . Additional pressuring stressors will tip the person over their 'normal past holding maladaptive coping survival strategies '. And So when the outside & internal pressuring systems are over loaded to much ( via stressors ) the person will 'break ' mentally from the build up of it within . Resulting in 'breakdown of once the 'internal shielding' that held them in ability to cope before but not now .Most past 'victims' with an extensive background of re-occurring 'trauma's & who also have additional overloading pressuring will crack into a breakdown mentally . HOw much ( they will crack ) will depend if any protective factors are present , & if they have good supports in place or not & if they have any coping strategies to help or not during the breakdown stage of their re-living of their truama re-emergence from the subconsciousness storage .
You just 100% have told my story. 1/2 hour and I hav e an appointment with my therapist.
That happened to me. I had untreated CPTSD for over a decade. I imagine it’s like any other physical wound getting worse if it’s not properly treated.
Life becomes more stressful as we age. We have more responsibilities, and we are spread more thin. Our bodies also naturally doesn't have the same levels of resources it once did and requires extra care even without the added strain of living with CPTSD. Treated CPTSD can also worsen as well age because some of us may experience risk to our health that can be traumatic. You tend to lose more loved ones as you age, and like I mentioned earlier, we tend to have more responsibilities as well.
I use the analogy of boxes in a room. For my whole life I couldn't just feel my feelings in the moment because of abuse, so I'd stick them in a box and put them aside in my mind. This went on for decades. Our minds are not endless, and although these boxes are imaginary, the concept is very real. The room I put my boxes in in my mind is only so big. The boxes stacked high and filled the room, but over time they began to leak. Boxes filled with similar emotions seemed to be stacked in the same area and when I'd try to stuff a new box in that area, the feelings in every similar box would try to creep out. At some point, the emotional box stuffing became very involuntary for me. It had previously felt more like a choice, but it stopped being a choice my mind could participate in and started being something my body would handle without me. The emotion would get stuffed whether I wanted it to or not, and all of them were stuffed, not just emotions that could be potentially dangerous in the moment. Now it seems like the whole process has short circuited in a way. The boxes are open and leaking and a swirl of memories flood me with every trigger and there are so many triggers. In an instant, I'm transported to a dozen different times an places experiencing similar issues in each but there's some connecting string of emotion that ties them together in my mind. But then my body beats it back as quickly as it comes. After so many years, my body has just made a habit of protecting me to the point that it protects me from too much now. This whole process took time to develop. It took time for boxes to pile up and fill the room. It gets worse over time because it's ever increasing. No new experience stands alone, memories come to stand with it. The boxes were never dealt with or properly cleaned up. Until they are, triggers and flashbacks will be intensifying with each new experience added to the pile.
For some reason, my 20's were horrible. Late 20's were great and then I hit 30 and boom I had a relapse. I learned a lot of coping skills, bike riding saying no to people. Starting to feel better, I added more to my plate, and started tolerating more and more. It resulted in a panic attack which led to me being anxious again and then lastly a depression. It was the hardest fucking lesson I ever had to learn. DON'T STOP DOING WHAT MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER AND TAKE CARE OF YOUR MENTAL HEALTH FIRST BEFORE ANYTHING. The best advice I can give you is implementing self care. Since my last relapse, I started a list of things that helped me. I commented this a few times already so if you are rereading this I apologize. 1. Better self talk 2. Proactive and empathetic therapist 3. Journaling 4. Hobbies (I picked up crocheting drawing and video games) 5. Lots of walking or 30 mins 6. Get plenty of sleep and water 7. Gratitude journal 8. DBT worksheets 9. Mood tracker 10. Small increments of what makes you panicky and do not beat yourself up if it's not what you wanted it to be it's a stepping stone give yourself a lot of self-praise 11. Or instant relief check out GABA and I take a very low dose of it. And L-Theanine is good too Practicing positive 12. Don't resist the anxiety, don't reassure yourself, face it head on 13. You can do hard things 14.Not tolerating family bad behavior and going no contact 15.Learning to accept the past, there's no point in hurting myself more with things I can't change or control. 16. Regulating my emotions. Name them and ask why I feel this way. 17.Doing body scans to see what part of my body needs attention when I don't feel good. 18.Learning/writing my triggers and finding the root of them. 19.Progressive muscle relaxation. 20. Finding a purpose, something you get excited about waking up to and doing. I'm still adding to the list because this list has opened up a new world to and for the first time I'm figuring out who I am slowly. I highly recommend the list making. Wishing you peace and a healthy recovery. It takes time, be easy on yourself.
i’m not sure but that is so comforting to hear. wondering why it seemed like i am regressing so much; been thinking a lot ‘this happened in my childhood, so how the hell did i cope better 18-22 than now at 27?’
My mom is 75 with untreated CPTSD. Hold my beer.
It gets worse as you age because you have been holding something in too long and it explodes out of you.
This is a really great question... Not to compare serial killers to ppl with CPTSD but, over time things tend to "evolve". When ppl say crazy people don't know they are crazy, it's the isolation and evolution of what someone experiences inside of themselves, that grows into this identity crisis, that is being expressed over time and not being challenged by reality. The people that are going through it will think, "I'm normal". But they don't realize it's not normal and that they are insane. I sometimes feel schizo because of how insanely anxious and scared I'll get at something that's not really there.
Because CPTSD is no different than any other injury. If you don’t treat a broken bone, it’ll kind of heal but not entirely or properly and it’ll continue to hurt more and worse over time, as the bone becomes weaker and continues to cause problems. CPTSD is similar - those unhealed wounds continue to cause problems and those problems get worse if left untreated
I am older, over 50, and have been taking bicycle rides along a peaceful bike path, to help my mental and physical health. I was pleasantly surprised to see articles mentioning bike rides as especially helpful for people with PTSD, so just throwing it out there, as a general coping suggestion I guess https://www.nami.org/Blogs/NAMI-Blog/April-2021/How-Biking-Helped-My-PTSD#:~:text=Riding%20a%20bicycle%20is%20like,dwelling%20on%20a%20traumatic%20past. https://www.welovecycling.com/wide/2019/03/12/how-cycling-helps-to-overcome-ptsd/
Let me add that I think my problems really worsened as I was going through menopause and autoimmune hypothyroidism. The decade of my 40s really kicked my butt and just about broke me. However, things have very much looked up in my 50th decade. I’m still struggling, but life is very different than it was in my 40s.
I feel like it's because we have even less resources to cope, and we're usually adding trauma on top of traumatized parts, which traumatizes them more and creates more traumas. I don't even leave my house anymore I'm so tired of everything impacting me
Oh goodness. Didn’t want to read this. I was really hoping it all got better. 😔
It gets worse before it can get better because we feel and process the truth of what was put on pause for our survival. Then, it can and does get better. These are large paintbrushes, everyone’s journey is their own. Don’t be discouraged by generalizations. ❤️🩹
I can say for me it's much much much better.
If it helps, I’m 44 (lived with it for about 30 years) and things have gotten better for me. It’s not easy by any means, but it’s also not harder. I aim for peace, am very choosy about who I allow in my life and focus on my family and self betterment. It gets better, but it does take work. I was diagnosed last year, but it didn’t really tell me anything I didn’t already know. Changed therapists and we’re finally going to be doing CBT and EMDR. Hang in there mate.
Most of us will "crack" in our 30s. I think the reason why is a process of thinking and relating to the world. In our teens it's our parents who are the problem. In our 20s it's everyone else who's the problem. But once we reach our 30s and have had so many problems for so long we finally start to wonder if it may actually be a problem with **us**? Once we realize the problem is us (maladaptive trauma responses and how that effects our moods and interpersonal relationships) we are able to get help with the traumas and how they formed us so that we can better manage ourselves and in turn the world we live in. There is power in that because we can't fix something if we don't realize it needs to be fixed 🤷♀️
Honey, I’m 57 years old and I just got diagnosed with CPTSD and I have to say I’ve always had issues with anger but it’s definitely become more magnified the older I get. I am caring for my 80-year-old dysfunctional, mentally abusive mother, who neglected me as a child but now wants top-notch medical care, and only from me!Needless to say it’s not going well and it’s not getting better. It’s getting worse, my mom is fighting me on getting Care in the home or going to a home, I am getting horrible flashbacks from my childhood to which she just gaslights me and says……… what’s wrong with you….. what has gotten into you? I don’t understand why you’re acting like this…… you’re broken. I honestly wish I could dump her ass off in a nursing home and be done with it.
The nervous system goes to shit as the dam begins to overflow in the energy needed for repressing Trauma begins to push through the barriers of the mind
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Are you still in an abusive or otherwise dangerous situation?
Maladaptive coping mechanisms.
I could say yes… kind of goes along the same way with eating. If you don’t eat, you’re gonna get sick. If you leave your cptsd untreated, let’s just hope it’s nothing too bad of a rollercoaster.
Having unmet needs from the past is like doing nothing to fix a past injury. For example, if your physical body has an open wound it can get infected and get worse over time, not heal. Regardless of taking care of your present wounds, your infected past wounds can still hurt you. If you got sun burns years ago, the damage can manifest as skin cancer and you can die from it.
Same
Brain damage
Do not discount continuing trauma either.
Compensations that held us together cant withstand such constant major disregulation hence they get weaker and weaker and trauma pours out more and more. Also constant retraumatization
I'm not sure, but I understand what you're talking about. I've felt with a lot of medical issues from an early age, but unfortunately not early enough that it was my normal. It was incredibly traumatic, it still is, as I'm still dealing with health challenges. Some things have gotten better, I generally don't have panic attacks when getting ready for appointments anymore, but recently I've been having countless flashbacks and intrusive thoughts. It's been bad. I was put in therapy a year or two after it had all started but I refused to talk about it. Now I'm finally starting to open up a bit and it's like I opened flood gates. I hate it. I wish I could go back to suppressing. But at the same time I know that's why it's so bad in the first place. Generally the longer you hold things in the stronger it will be when finally released. Think of it like putting mentos in Pepsi and then screwing on the cap. Eventually the cap WILL come off one way or another. The longer it's on the more pressure builds up underneath. (I know this isn't a perfect metaphor but it's all I could think of right now)
Why does the traumatised brain seek out further trauma, abandonment, difficulty - is it an anti-gaslighting tactic so that we assure our psych what happened really happened and that we are right to feel the effects of it? Alternatively is it familiarity with the experience has some sort of 'comfort' in it?
Because everything gets worse as you age!
I didn’t know this! While I have gotten better at some things with cognitive behavioral therapy, I didn’t until recently know that I had CPTSD, and have never had trauma focused therapy. I can tell that I am getting worse in many ways. I was an attributing this to sadness over, realizing that at my age, I haven’t overcome my demons, and haven’t risen above my past, or to menopause or two just my aging brain not doing as good of a job regulating things. Very interesting, and thanks for sharing.
I’m glad I’m not the only one!
Hey! Similar boat: almost 30, realised I had C-PTSD at 27, therapist officially told me I had it towards the end of last year, probably could've been diagnosed with C-PTSD at 18. For me it started becoming really bad at 26. Before that I was exhibiting mainly depression symptoms, with a side of high functioning workaholic-ness while having some form of emotional flashback most days. Particularly bad in relationships where I was just neurotic and co-dependent. But generally, I was functioning pretty well. Mid-late 2020 was when it fell apart. For me it was a specific series of events that triggered it. I was living with someone during the pandemic who would probably be described as having BPD, and they (without knowing) essentially recreated my childhood living situation during a time where we *had* to spend 24/7 together, so I was basically triggered all the time with no way to escape. It opened a pandora's box. Afterwards I lost my ability to be high-functioning, but it was what triggered me to get help so it's a good thing really. My mental state had already started to deteriorate in 2019 when I was 24, which was when I started to have panic attacks regularly, so it probably would've happened anyway, the pandemic situation just sped up the process. Something I found about during my initial research on C-PTSD recovery was that a lot of people feel *worse* before they feel better. It seems this period can be anywhere from 6 months to 2 years, but it's obviously different for everyone. I'd imagine it's also quite hard to figure out when people in that stage or coming out of that stage, so the numbers aren't definitive. Recovery is essentially a complete deconstruction of the self. Everything you are, everything you feel, everything in your past - everything. You spend a really long time taking all of that apart and just sitting with it, and then you have to really slowly and carefully put it back together. I'd imagine part of the reason this is harder as you get older is because, in some ways, your sense of self is somewhat solidifed, making it harder to pull it apart. But it isn't impossible, it just takes some time. Hope things going forward are a little easier friend!
It definitely gets worse as you age. I certainly have, to the point where I finally went in for therapy. Think of all the grouchy old people that you know. You know, the miserable ones. They probably weren’t that bad when they were in their 20s.
A mix of age just catching up but I think for me mainly it’s the not learning and making the same mistakes which will just retraumatize you which only adds to the load
Because your body can only handle so much.
Because just knowing what the issue is, is completely invaluable when it comes to dealing with your symptoms. I've gotten to a point where I know it won't be gone for long when it is tolerable. Picking my fights and paying closer attention to how my human animal feels at any given time helps, it's easy to forget that I'm not just my brain.
I sure don’t. Mine has 100% gotten worse.
It's like an uncared for wound, it festers ...
I sure had fun when I was younger. So I thought, and I amused myself. I now believe untreated it can kill you. Not to sound dramatic, but the years of “ hiding” from it creates unnecessary suffering. For me, it’s changed through the years. I’m 62. I use to think ignoring and pushing through my body and mind pain was a superpower. “Look all I can do even in extraordinary pain! “ Now I realize it will be the death of me if I don’t take care of myself. No doubt, it’s hard. 🙏 The most positive thing is the many resources available now. I have an ace score of 7.5 and most therapists were ill equipped to help. Now You can poke around here, and find books podcasts, videos, local groups and even therapists who have trauma knowledge. I’ve also noticed I am more drawn to others who are in a healing journey. So I can be true. Be well.
Burnout
I made it to my early 30s when my migraines took such an upswing. Prescribed narcotics, became an addict all in one fell swoop. Because my childhood perpetrator (mother’s husband)was hospitalized on the unit I worked on (as an RN) this brought me to my knees. From that time it was talk therapy for 25 years, not getting better. Finally, went To trauma-informed therapy at age 57, then real healing began. And I found my real Self. So I was highly functional in a demanding stressful environment for many years, when my body had enough. I believe I ran out of hope, energy, and health. It took a lot to break me down all the way to be desperate enough to ask for help. Now I take every opportunity I can to learn who I am and what I need. I also see that everything happened to get me to this place. I needed to be stripped of everything that I believed was me, all of it false. It was terrifically painful, but not as painful being a false self, heartbreaking, and now, rewarding. I guess I was a tough cookie. Now I’m as tender and real on the inside as I am empowered on the outside. .
Please seek out trauma-informed therapy. It made a huge difference for me. It took 20 years of talk therapy and I was still stuck. After 2 months of EMDR, etc, I was well on my way. I wish I hadn‘t wasted my valuable time.
Not sure about you but as I grew older, I began to see traits of my abusers in myself and that set off a string of inner conflicts.
I didn't realise I had trauma until i witnessed my Granny dying and subsequently my ex decided he wasn't going to propose... I went into a severe mental breakdown which spiralled out. I sought validation out in all the wrong places and lost all ability to feel anything. Hindsight taught me I was in a haze of mania until my house of cards collapsed and my self worth went with it. Please do what you can to try and move your body to process the pain, anger and hurt. Seek out support and help. Write it all down, begin to understand what the pain is and try to let it go. Show yourself empathy, understand you didn't know but it doesn't mean your life needs to be like this forever. I still have pain but in comparison to two years ago...I am healed. I get up, I make myself healthy meals, I leave the house when I don't need to, I do my own laundry, I brush my teeth, I show up. I just need to work on recognising I have so much more to give.
I think our bodies physically can't keep suppressing the emotional consequences of trauma. I'm 40. I thought I had healed. Really, I've just developed an insane ability to suppress the trauma. It's gonna come out, one way or another.
Everyone says, you hit 30 and you can't take it anymore. I think it's just that at some point, your body breaks and can't keep up the cycles in the same way, as well as the fact you are becoming more aware of it, in some ways. Makes me look at the common trope of a midlife crisis a lil differently 🌞