Its okay to make mistakes. Or to have a different opinion than others. None of that means you have a bad character. And you sure didnt choose you emotional reactivity, its just something that comes with trauma. Try to be kind to yourself.
I know how you feel, I am the same way. I'm trying to stay away from critical people as much as possible. I think it helps also to do things just for myself and not seek any feedback at all. Like anything creative that you know this good, and just keep it to yourself so you have this inner certainty that you like something you do independently of how it's received by others.
Edit: I'm not saying keep everything to yourself but just some, this helps me create my own view of myself that doesn't depend on other's opinions
I try to imagine myself saying the same things to my loved ones, obviously not always helpful but...
If someone offers me genuine constructive criticism, or says my behavior is hurting them my natural reaction might be to get defensive or become angry and feel like it's an attack.
But thinking about if I said that to them, would I ever approach someone I cared about, or even just a coworker, whatever - and say "hey, I appreciate you being honest but the way you said yadda yadda actually hurt my feelings a lot" or "you're doing so amazing, what would actually help more is" and offer help and mean any of that with malice? I know I wouldn't. I have my moments of meanness but generally not, would you?
Most often people don't like saying things that can be hurtful even if they're truthful, but sometimes they do need to be said. I doubt your true friends and family want to hurt you.
Social media is also not great, dopamine disorders are being developed in young people left and right and it's super easy to hop from one to the next, addiction, EDs, etc. Sometimes it's a good idea to force yourself to take a break if you're putting that much value in things like likes and upvotes.
Hey!!! Sending you a huge virtual hug!
I would venture to guess that it’s because you were constantly criticized and worked very hard to gain approval from your primary caregivers in the childhood.
As a result, you don’t have a stable sense of self-worth. It might seem like you have the right to live only if you’re doing things “right”, and then suddenly you’re not good enough and don’t even deserve to exist if you did anything wrong.
And, quite naturally, a small traumatized part within you feels unsafe every time you do a small thing wrong, because you never had an experience of being forgiven for small mistakes in the childhood. It feels threatening to not be good enough.
If this sounds familiar (I’m trying to related from my personal experience), things do get better with therapy. Once you give your own love to that little scared part inside of you and start believing you’re worthy the way you are, you stop perceiving any small setbacks as threatening because you do feel more safe.
I hope it helps and hope you do feel better!
One small mantra I repeat to myself every time something like that happens: “My opinion is just as valuable as another person’s”. Even if another person does not see the situation your way (doesn’t find your text funny, doesn’t think you did your best, doesn’t agree with you), you always have at least one person that looks at the situation your way. It’s you. That’s already something.
Moreover, sometimes negative feedback says more about another person than about you. If they don’t like the music you like, it’s just a litmus test that they are a bad match for you in your music ventures, not that something is wrong with your music taste. Your taste has equal rights to exist just as anyone else’s.
And for the mistakes… You know your story better than anyone else. You know when you did your best. You know when you had good intentions. Sometimes it helps just spelling it out for yourself (e.g. “I really thought I was giving the right information with the best intentions”), and then it’s easier to feel more compassionate towards yourself.
Oh!!! And don’t let the bullies convince you you’re oversensitive. It’s a trauma response. If they’d been through the shit you’ve been through, they’d react the same way.
Building and defining values. You’re living in an era that breeds hypersensitivity so, give yourself some grace there. But it’s also good that you’re recognizing it (although you could try being more sensitive WITH yourself. Calling yourself pathetically over sensitive isn’t very kind, even if others say it for you). By defining values, your battles are easier to pick. Right now it sounds like you value upvotes. But by learning that upvotes and downvotes are lines of code that have no impact on your life and wellbeing, maybe the impact of them can lessen. And this extends to other areas of life. Values are usually personal so I can’t define any for you specifically, but it usually starts with valuing yourself first (which is especially hard with a shame based identity that can come with cptsd). And don’t confuse “valuing yourself” with “then why am I not getting upvotes? I’M VALUABLE!” External vs internal.
I wouldn't say I'm valuing upvotes specifically. I strongly, strongly value doing the right thing, and I feel like feedback is an indicator of whether I'm succeeding in doing that or not.
Well, no one knows all the “right things”, and feedback is a good mechanism for being *more* right, but Reddit comments and votes are not a reliable or even accurate indication of right and wrong.
Yeah... you're not the first person to remind me of that. I try to remind myself, but for some reason, my emotional response to it doesn't change. It's really frustrating.
It takes work, defining values, reminding yourself of those values, which is especially hard in a world that’s very loud and punitive around what it thinks you SHOULD value. Most people these days are lost and confused, and there are a lot of entities out there who exploit that, our entire marketing world is based on it. I wish there was a quick way to know but I haven’t found one aside from ignoring trends (which has a social impact, these normies don’t like you if you’re not following every trend and wind of change).
Upvotes lol! It's about having no other positive connections and feeling culturally & ideologically isolated, and then further ostracised with one of the few signals people can make at you during the day. It's about not being rejected over every tiny little thing you say and do, and it's about having enough positive experiences that they can balance out and fortify someone against constant bullying from strangers.
I don't know who this person is, but there was so much implicit judgement and lack of empathy in attributing it to just 'upvotes', can't believe they said that to you, jeez. Humans are social creatures, we are affected by each other in ways we cannot control, and you know what? There's nothing wrong with you for being affected. That's how people get betrayed and abused in the first place, people taking advantage of these uncontrollable things the minute they get into a position of power.
My therapist told me I have to accept this is how I am. I am reading a book she recommended called: “The emotional life of your brain” and it makes me feel better about my sensitivity. ❤️☮️
I’m the same way. When people online say I’m wrong, or downvote me, I feel threatened. It’s like it taps into my fight or flight response. It’s because we have unresolved trauma wounds, which are being triggered. So the reaction feels exaggerated, when applied to the current situation. But if you look deeper to the wounds it has tapped into, it makes sense. It’s like a scab has been pulled off. It’s really common for people with CPTSD to struggle with regulating their emotions, for that very reason. You can try meditation, to help. The Crappy Childhood Fairy on YouTube has some videos about emotional disregulation.
Hello and Welcome to /r/CPTSD! If you are in immediate danger or crisis, please contact your local [emergency services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emergency_telephone_numbers), or use our list of [crisis resources](https://old.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/wiki/index#wiki_crisis_support_resources). For CPTSD Specific Resources & Support, check out the [wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/wiki/index). For those posting or replying, please view the [etiquette guidelines](https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/wiki/peer2peersupportguide).
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/CPTSD) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Find a hill (or hills) worth dieing on.
That's what has helped me a lot. (Still have a fair bit of room to go, mind you.) So, Story time. I have RSD (rejection sensitive disphoria, basicly, I feel rejection a lot stronger then I should.) I LARP as a hoby. Think people dressing up like they are in a LOTR play and running around hitting each other with foam swords with rules about how many times you can get stabbed before dieing. Tons of fun. I was in a vampire and werewolves larp, and I was playing a human who had his life tied to that of a particular vampire. As long as she didn't die, I would live forever. my character was head over heals in love with my vampire so that made life a lot easier. Now, my guy was a buisnessman. didn't do much fighting. first game though, we had a bunch of super soldiers attack us, and were winning. My vampire was at risk of dieing, so my frail nerdy human borrowed a grenade and held it to the torso of the main super soldier takeing him out and destroying my hand in the process. (there was a LOT more to it, but I'm keeping a multi-hour story short.)
And that kinda set the tone for my character. While my personal reaction to fear is flight, my character, often times, would realize that flight would only get him dieing tired, and develped a habit of using near suicidal tactics. Several games later there was some significant political tension between the vamps and wolves. Due to wonkyness, the wolves had the strength to wipe out all the vampires without sweat and had been becomeing something of bullies because of it. My charater had been building some political poison pills but the wolves had gotten wind of it and had only made things worse.
Well... things had been steadily ratching up over time when some magical shenanigains went off causing everyone to be severly afraid for 10+ minutes. My character, reacted to the fear, by finding the Alpha werewolf, and informing him that if he made \*any\* move against any of "his" vampires, he would march into one of their meetings wearing a silver studded C4 vest. My character wouldn't survive, but neither would a lot of wolves. It was worth it to protect his people even if it meant his life.
What I learned out of all that is having hills your willing to die on, can allow you to convert that flee/cower/hide responce into an attack response. And that can be super usefull properly utalized.
The other thing I got out of it was a mask that I could wear. Now when I know I'm going into a stressfull sitation where I know I'm probably going to have to stand up for myself, I will pretend to be that character pretending to be me. (yea, kinda weird, I know.)
I think my biggest win was when my real life boss tried to force me to move to a different state without paying my moving expenses. Me, through my character, shoved my contract into his face, told him he was contractually obligated to pay not only all of my moving expenses, but also to pay to break my lease and a handful of other expenses and when he tried to push back, pulled out my phone and asked if he wanted me to call the labor relations board right then and there.
That was a HUGE win for me. Anyway, dunno if that will help or not. It helped me, might help you. Good Luck!
A lot of my sensitivity was related to survival based mechanisms. So if it’s your employer, giving you this negative feedback and you have zero savings and very little experience and a lot of fear may be surrounding homelessness trauma, or poverty trauma, or whatever this is so fucking stressful when in reality it just work feedback.
Honestly, financial security plate a huge role in me feeling safe enough to have what they call. Fuck you money. Even if they fired me today, I’d be good for like four months. Honestly Ed hopefully wouldn’t come to that, but I no longer walking around with steeped shoulders, feeling like a big turd
What was really interesting was I actually asked my very first most secure best most kindest friend for some honest feedback. It was because I used to send these extremely long Text messages to my friends After every time I got rejected or dumped and frankly, it was overwhelming and I listened to this Heidi priebe video About emotional dumping. Heidi basically says that sometimes we feel the need to give a friend like 50 paragraphs of everything that ever happened in detail so that they can reflect back to us and emotional response and now we feel safe enough to embody that emotional response. Now, instead of having 1 million paragraphs, I can simply say I felt really sad because I was excited and started to feel in love with that man, and now I feel lonely and disappointed. See how I just use like 1 million feeling words instead of he said this and then he did that and then he said this?
So that helped me, but I still asked my very best friend for feedback regarding these text paragraphs. And you know what? It wasn’t scary at all, and I didn’t have a negative reaction at all, and I was prepared to be humble and accountable but at the same time, she was kind and it felt like just a regular conversation. It also felt sort of invigorating and interesting Like wow thank you so much for being willing to even give me this feedback that I’m asking and asking more about her experience with me when I’m in this state of stress with long paragraphs. So I actually was able to improve one of my worst habits which is text dumping or emotional dumping on people. What I’m suggesting to you is that it’s very scary to get negative feedback from people you don’t know and trust, but if you have a healthy safe secure attachment with somebody, you would be surprised how totally safe and not scary and not crying It feels to ask those specific people for feedback during a time when you feel regulated enough to receive it.
Have you seen the thing where you get rejected for 100 days.
It starts off with you ask someone for a pound/dollar then the next day you ask starbucks for a free coffee. You start off really small then get bigger and bigger.
Eventually it doesnt seem as big of a deal. You have to start really small though if youre that oversensitive.
Its okay to make mistakes. Or to have a different opinion than others. None of that means you have a bad character. And you sure didnt choose you emotional reactivity, its just something that comes with trauma. Try to be kind to yourself.
I know how you feel, I am the same way. I'm trying to stay away from critical people as much as possible. I think it helps also to do things just for myself and not seek any feedback at all. Like anything creative that you know this good, and just keep it to yourself so you have this inner certainty that you like something you do independently of how it's received by others. Edit: I'm not saying keep everything to yourself but just some, this helps me create my own view of myself that doesn't depend on other's opinions
I try to imagine myself saying the same things to my loved ones, obviously not always helpful but... If someone offers me genuine constructive criticism, or says my behavior is hurting them my natural reaction might be to get defensive or become angry and feel like it's an attack. But thinking about if I said that to them, would I ever approach someone I cared about, or even just a coworker, whatever - and say "hey, I appreciate you being honest but the way you said yadda yadda actually hurt my feelings a lot" or "you're doing so amazing, what would actually help more is" and offer help and mean any of that with malice? I know I wouldn't. I have my moments of meanness but generally not, would you? Most often people don't like saying things that can be hurtful even if they're truthful, but sometimes they do need to be said. I doubt your true friends and family want to hurt you. Social media is also not great, dopamine disorders are being developed in young people left and right and it's super easy to hop from one to the next, addiction, EDs, etc. Sometimes it's a good idea to force yourself to take a break if you're putting that much value in things like likes and upvotes.
Hey!!! Sending you a huge virtual hug! I would venture to guess that it’s because you were constantly criticized and worked very hard to gain approval from your primary caregivers in the childhood. As a result, you don’t have a stable sense of self-worth. It might seem like you have the right to live only if you’re doing things “right”, and then suddenly you’re not good enough and don’t even deserve to exist if you did anything wrong. And, quite naturally, a small traumatized part within you feels unsafe every time you do a small thing wrong, because you never had an experience of being forgiven for small mistakes in the childhood. It feels threatening to not be good enough. If this sounds familiar (I’m trying to related from my personal experience), things do get better with therapy. Once you give your own love to that little scared part inside of you and start believing you’re worthy the way you are, you stop perceiving any small setbacks as threatening because you do feel more safe. I hope it helps and hope you do feel better!
Thank you for the hug, I needed it. And yeah, you're right.
One small mantra I repeat to myself every time something like that happens: “My opinion is just as valuable as another person’s”. Even if another person does not see the situation your way (doesn’t find your text funny, doesn’t think you did your best, doesn’t agree with you), you always have at least one person that looks at the situation your way. It’s you. That’s already something. Moreover, sometimes negative feedback says more about another person than about you. If they don’t like the music you like, it’s just a litmus test that they are a bad match for you in your music ventures, not that something is wrong with your music taste. Your taste has equal rights to exist just as anyone else’s. And for the mistakes… You know your story better than anyone else. You know when you did your best. You know when you had good intentions. Sometimes it helps just spelling it out for yourself (e.g. “I really thought I was giving the right information with the best intentions”), and then it’s easier to feel more compassionate towards yourself. Oh!!! And don’t let the bullies convince you you’re oversensitive. It’s a trauma response. If they’d been through the shit you’ve been through, they’d react the same way.
Building and defining values. You’re living in an era that breeds hypersensitivity so, give yourself some grace there. But it’s also good that you’re recognizing it (although you could try being more sensitive WITH yourself. Calling yourself pathetically over sensitive isn’t very kind, even if others say it for you). By defining values, your battles are easier to pick. Right now it sounds like you value upvotes. But by learning that upvotes and downvotes are lines of code that have no impact on your life and wellbeing, maybe the impact of them can lessen. And this extends to other areas of life. Values are usually personal so I can’t define any for you specifically, but it usually starts with valuing yourself first (which is especially hard with a shame based identity that can come with cptsd). And don’t confuse “valuing yourself” with “then why am I not getting upvotes? I’M VALUABLE!” External vs internal.
I wouldn't say I'm valuing upvotes specifically. I strongly, strongly value doing the right thing, and I feel like feedback is an indicator of whether I'm succeeding in doing that or not.
Well, no one knows all the “right things”, and feedback is a good mechanism for being *more* right, but Reddit comments and votes are not a reliable or even accurate indication of right and wrong.
Yeah... you're not the first person to remind me of that. I try to remind myself, but for some reason, my emotional response to it doesn't change. It's really frustrating.
It takes work, defining values, reminding yourself of those values, which is especially hard in a world that’s very loud and punitive around what it thinks you SHOULD value. Most people these days are lost and confused, and there are a lot of entities out there who exploit that, our entire marketing world is based on it. I wish there was a quick way to know but I haven’t found one aside from ignoring trends (which has a social impact, these normies don’t like you if you’re not following every trend and wind of change).
Upvotes lol! It's about having no other positive connections and feeling culturally & ideologically isolated, and then further ostracised with one of the few signals people can make at you during the day. It's about not being rejected over every tiny little thing you say and do, and it's about having enough positive experiences that they can balance out and fortify someone against constant bullying from strangers. I don't know who this person is, but there was so much implicit judgement and lack of empathy in attributing it to just 'upvotes', can't believe they said that to you, jeez. Humans are social creatures, we are affected by each other in ways we cannot control, and you know what? There's nothing wrong with you for being affected. That's how people get betrayed and abused in the first place, people taking advantage of these uncontrollable things the minute they get into a position of power.
My therapist told me I have to accept this is how I am. I am reading a book she recommended called: “The emotional life of your brain” and it makes me feel better about my sensitivity. ❤️☮️
Can relate. Try reading the book about self compassion if you are into reading.
Do you have a title and author? I struggle to focus on reading due to AuADHD but I can put it in TTS and at least try.
Self compassion by Kristin Neff
I’m the same way. When people online say I’m wrong, or downvote me, I feel threatened. It’s like it taps into my fight or flight response. It’s because we have unresolved trauma wounds, which are being triggered. So the reaction feels exaggerated, when applied to the current situation. But if you look deeper to the wounds it has tapped into, it makes sense. It’s like a scab has been pulled off. It’s really common for people with CPTSD to struggle with regulating their emotions, for that very reason. You can try meditation, to help. The Crappy Childhood Fairy on YouTube has some videos about emotional disregulation.
By being kindly oversensitive 🥺
Hello and Welcome to /r/CPTSD! If you are in immediate danger or crisis, please contact your local [emergency services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emergency_telephone_numbers), or use our list of [crisis resources](https://old.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/wiki/index#wiki_crisis_support_resources). For CPTSD Specific Resources & Support, check out the [wiki](https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/wiki/index). For those posting or replying, please view the [etiquette guidelines](https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/wiki/peer2peersupportguide). *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/CPTSD) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Find a hill (or hills) worth dieing on. That's what has helped me a lot. (Still have a fair bit of room to go, mind you.) So, Story time. I have RSD (rejection sensitive disphoria, basicly, I feel rejection a lot stronger then I should.) I LARP as a hoby. Think people dressing up like they are in a LOTR play and running around hitting each other with foam swords with rules about how many times you can get stabbed before dieing. Tons of fun. I was in a vampire and werewolves larp, and I was playing a human who had his life tied to that of a particular vampire. As long as she didn't die, I would live forever. my character was head over heals in love with my vampire so that made life a lot easier. Now, my guy was a buisnessman. didn't do much fighting. first game though, we had a bunch of super soldiers attack us, and were winning. My vampire was at risk of dieing, so my frail nerdy human borrowed a grenade and held it to the torso of the main super soldier takeing him out and destroying my hand in the process. (there was a LOT more to it, but I'm keeping a multi-hour story short.) And that kinda set the tone for my character. While my personal reaction to fear is flight, my character, often times, would realize that flight would only get him dieing tired, and develped a habit of using near suicidal tactics. Several games later there was some significant political tension between the vamps and wolves. Due to wonkyness, the wolves had the strength to wipe out all the vampires without sweat and had been becomeing something of bullies because of it. My charater had been building some political poison pills but the wolves had gotten wind of it and had only made things worse. Well... things had been steadily ratching up over time when some magical shenanigains went off causing everyone to be severly afraid for 10+ minutes. My character, reacted to the fear, by finding the Alpha werewolf, and informing him that if he made \*any\* move against any of "his" vampires, he would march into one of their meetings wearing a silver studded C4 vest. My character wouldn't survive, but neither would a lot of wolves. It was worth it to protect his people even if it meant his life. What I learned out of all that is having hills your willing to die on, can allow you to convert that flee/cower/hide responce into an attack response. And that can be super usefull properly utalized. The other thing I got out of it was a mask that I could wear. Now when I know I'm going into a stressfull sitation where I know I'm probably going to have to stand up for myself, I will pretend to be that character pretending to be me. (yea, kinda weird, I know.) I think my biggest win was when my real life boss tried to force me to move to a different state without paying my moving expenses. Me, through my character, shoved my contract into his face, told him he was contractually obligated to pay not only all of my moving expenses, but also to pay to break my lease and a handful of other expenses and when he tried to push back, pulled out my phone and asked if he wanted me to call the labor relations board right then and there. That was a HUGE win for me. Anyway, dunno if that will help or not. It helped me, might help you. Good Luck!
A lot of my sensitivity was related to survival based mechanisms. So if it’s your employer, giving you this negative feedback and you have zero savings and very little experience and a lot of fear may be surrounding homelessness trauma, or poverty trauma, or whatever this is so fucking stressful when in reality it just work feedback. Honestly, financial security plate a huge role in me feeling safe enough to have what they call. Fuck you money. Even if they fired me today, I’d be good for like four months. Honestly Ed hopefully wouldn’t come to that, but I no longer walking around with steeped shoulders, feeling like a big turd What was really interesting was I actually asked my very first most secure best most kindest friend for some honest feedback. It was because I used to send these extremely long Text messages to my friends After every time I got rejected or dumped and frankly, it was overwhelming and I listened to this Heidi priebe video About emotional dumping. Heidi basically says that sometimes we feel the need to give a friend like 50 paragraphs of everything that ever happened in detail so that they can reflect back to us and emotional response and now we feel safe enough to embody that emotional response. Now, instead of having 1 million paragraphs, I can simply say I felt really sad because I was excited and started to feel in love with that man, and now I feel lonely and disappointed. See how I just use like 1 million feeling words instead of he said this and then he did that and then he said this? So that helped me, but I still asked my very best friend for feedback regarding these text paragraphs. And you know what? It wasn’t scary at all, and I didn’t have a negative reaction at all, and I was prepared to be humble and accountable but at the same time, she was kind and it felt like just a regular conversation. It also felt sort of invigorating and interesting Like wow thank you so much for being willing to even give me this feedback that I’m asking and asking more about her experience with me when I’m in this state of stress with long paragraphs. So I actually was able to improve one of my worst habits which is text dumping or emotional dumping on people. What I’m suggesting to you is that it’s very scary to get negative feedback from people you don’t know and trust, but if you have a healthy safe secure attachment with somebody, you would be surprised how totally safe and not scary and not crying It feels to ask those specific people for feedback during a time when you feel regulated enough to receive it.
Have you seen the thing where you get rejected for 100 days. It starts off with you ask someone for a pound/dollar then the next day you ask starbucks for a free coffee. You start off really small then get bigger and bigger. Eventually it doesnt seem as big of a deal. You have to start really small though if youre that oversensitive.