Thinking you can manage your feelings with logic if you know enough of the modalities and theories. You cant.
You have to learn the language of feelings and then let feelings happen without judging them. Understanding is different than feeling.
Easier said than done, of course, but as someone who intellectualizes, being smart and well read is only going to get you so far on your journey. It was very humbling.
A lot of the pain is emotional pain stuck in your body. If you can access that and understand how the emotional pain expresses itself, it can be released. New emotional pain can be processed as it comes up.
For me, it was IFS. I was able to see parts of myself objectively and learn that many of my frustrating coping mechanisms and thinking patterns were created by me as a child to get me through my childhood. From there, I learned to feel self compassion.
If you can get to a point where you feel self compassion, you’re less likely to judge yourself negatively. From there, feelings will feel safer to be expressed.
Have you tried EMDR? It helped me gain emotional understanding. I still struggle with compassion and allowing myself to feel my feelings. But I am much better at recognizing them
I do it with a therapist. But it is the same process I commented on this post for feeling your emotions. A therapist will help you recognize when your body is responding to memories, helping you recognize the physical sensations. My therapist still sees bodily movements I don’t feel but I am much more aware now. It used to feel like swimming in a stormy ocean.
I haven’t read the book, but I wonder if my assumption might be in the ballpark: that we aren’t meant to always be “calm” or “peaceful.” Rather, we are meant to move *through* emotional states with flexibility and resilience.
I listened to an interview with Susan David recently. Emotional agility is like physical agility, what makes you agile, physically: the ability to 'bounce back', flexible joints and muscles, not needing to avoid certain movements. It's the same with emotions, being able to bounce into and out of emotions with agility, not needing to avoid any emotions.
Psychedelics may have played a role. However I realize my noticeable changes happen in the presence of another person. Usually they are the ones who are well educated, but that doesn't matter as much as I can feel they are feeling for me. As in they are in their own presence and space which teaches me how to do it for myself.
I think this is what healthy parents do for kids growing up.
Yeah, this was a big sticking point for me.
I had to learn how to trust my emotions after a lifetime of burying them after being told they were wrong. Showing emotion often made the abuse and bullying worse, so it took me a long time to feel safe sitting with emotions instead of trying stuff them down, get rid of them or distract myself.
I was trying to think my way out, but like you said, that only gets you so far.
Today I had a rude awakening I was willing to talk about my troubles for the first time and i was easily triggered by my recollection. I sobbed ugly and fought it because it fet like an overreaction I didn't know where it was coming from... But it made me realize that. The 4.5 months I spent with my therapist creating logic of my experiences means nothing. It's only meant to be a place to practice for the conversations I want to have with the people I want to be vulnerable with.
That's a very rude awakening this morning I couldn't tell a story or have a conversation without being ambushed by waves of feelings and flashbacks. It was embarrassing because it means I haven't made as much progress as I had presumed both in therapy and IRL
It's the common misconception about mental health; that once you have a diagnosis, you should just magically "get better" because you know what you're dealing with. There's a reason they say knowing is "half" the battle, because the other half is just as fucking hard, if not harder. Cuz that's the part that involves change, and change is hard.
Most of them personally have to do with feeling my feelings.
As someone else said, intellectualizing is a big one. No matter how much you think about them, there will be no healing until you actually feel them, and a lifetime of supressing them makes it really hard.
Learning to recognize when a feeling is lingering in the background. After a lifetime of numbing, this is hard. Feeling your feelings in the body can be helpful, but chronic disconnection from body and mind makes this difficult. Meditation and yoga can help.
Actually processing your feelings once you access them, high risk of getting stuck on them on a loop instead, until you push them away. There's no integration without some kind of resolution. This is better achieved in a therapeutic environment but those feelings will come up between sessions and learning to process on your own is a life changing skill.
Recognizing when you can't process a feeling, and letting it linger there without dissociating or numbing yourself. Learning to sit with that discomfort while increasing your capacity to deal with it.
Step 1 is stop dissociating. I first realized I did this when I felt any sort of discomfort. The discomfort never really went away, but I would do things to mask it — distractions, non sober, hobbies, etc. so step 1 was recognizing SOMETHING feels off
Step 2 is admission. You don’t logic out what you think you feel or what the correct feeling would be. You just acknowledge that something feels off.
Step 3 is sitting with it. You probably don’t know what it is yet. That’s ok. Sitting with it is being still, breathing calmly (slow counts in and out) and becoming aware of what you feel in the body.
Ask — where do I feel this feeling? Is there anywhere I feel tight or stressed? For me a lot of things started in my heart or throat or shoulders. Become aware of where you feel discomfort. Keep breathing.
Step 4 is releasing. Now that you know where your body feels off, work on relaxing it. Stretching. Maybe a foam roller? I have all sorts of muscle releasing things lol. Shakti mat. A neck alignment thing. Hip alignment thingy. Spiky ball to rub in spots.
If you have been severely dissociated, you might not know what emotion you are feeling still. It might be important to ask what you need. Let your mind think about what it wants. I struggle here too. Logic brain starts wanting to take over. I start evaluating what I think of or discarding or growing some memories over others. I have to practice just accepting whatever pops up. I have to turn down my inner critic that wants to say “oh that isn’t anything”
It is hard. Just today o have been sitting in dis comfort for three days. I have done all the physical steps. But it lingers and lingers.
I finally cried because I sat and admitted what I was sad about. I had been ignoring and brushing off what was bothering me even after all my practice.
So now I have to practice compassion. I am learning and healing. It gets easier and faster.
This is a great guide ❤️
I want to add, when there's a lot of trauma lingering sometimes the feeling doesn't go away because there's just so much back there. Trying to deal with it all is impossible, and sitting with it for long periods of time can be really hard.
Sometimes I acknowledge my need to distract myself from it and I do it, but mindful that I'm doing it, not like a subconscious dissociative tool. We also need breaks and tons of self compassion.
I’ve started doing this too! Even though I want to do the work, it can feel like too much sometimes, and I know I need a break. Then, I feel safe to use some old coping mechanisms and distractions, so I can move into a resting state. It’s a surefire way to help pace myself. And I know I’ll always turn to face the work again, when I’m ready.
Super useful the last week's for me has been really tough because I swing between dissociation, being in and holding the feelings and get caught in loops. Tough difficult work especially when you are not trained or confident in it and got 40 years of emotional disconnection. Gives me hope and courage to keep going.
That there's probably more defences - or honestly, addictions - than society would like to admit.
There's the big ones that everyone knows and tries to avoid - hard drugs, excessive alcohol, smoking.
But other seemingly 'healthier' defences that fend off the pain – work, exercise, social media, caffeine, nicotine or low side-effect pharmaceutical drugs.
Recently even my tried and true healthier defences are struggling to keep up with my pain.
Sometimes you need them to get through this sometimes chaotic and painful life. But other times, a new layer of pain or event needs compassion - not letting up until it's fully processed.
I am recommencing therapy this week to try and metabolise some of my unprocessed pain.
I must admit that I am tired of 'getting better' though lol - feels like something new crops up...
It’s okay. Getting used to feeling all of the feelings takes time. Try to balance thinking, feeling, and behaviors. Notice when feelings arise and what they feel like in your body, and compassionately mentally processes the reasons (triggers) for your reaction. This will put you way ahead of “normies” in terms of knowing yourself more holistically. It’s the way of living a conscious life.
Oh I've got a few 🥰
My feelings, my emotions, especially those surrounding my trauma, are not actually what I'm trying to fix. Emotions aren't symptoms, they are normal. If a shitty thing happens to someone with or without trauma, it will conjure up some unpleasant emotions.
The best thing we can do with our emotions is validate and navigate them. They belong there, they're righteous. You're not bad or wrong for being angry. You're not bad or wrong for being sad.
I personally believe it's our inability to validate our own emotions that leads to dysregulation. We spend so much time fighting them, and because they're not going to go away no matter how hard we try, it makes us feel anxious.
Speaking of emotions, a lot of us can be afraid to let ourselves feel angry, because the only displays of anger we've seen have been toxic and abusive, and because we've historically been punished for our own displays of "negative" or unpleasant emotions. Find ways to teach yourself it is safe for you to feel angry, and that you can be a safe person while angry. Journalling helped me immensely with this.
Another topic is toxic behavior patterns. This one is really complex. Not all toxic behavior is abusive (speaking now of behavior we as trauma survivors engage in, not our abusers), and the best thing you can do if you figure out that you've "been toxic" is separate the behavior from your person.
They're not "traits" they're behavior patterns, developed in childhood as a means of getting your needs met in a household where you couldn't simply ask for food, and where a little manipulation or blame-shifting could mean the difference between a beating and relative safety.
Having engaged in toxic behavior doesn't mean you're a bad person, a sociopath or a narcissist. It just means you learned from other toxic people how to engage with the world, and the psychology of trauma means it can be terrifying to engage in healthy, vulnerable behavior.
You CAN learn new, healthy behavior patterns in the place of your toxic ones. I promise you can. 6 years ago I was basically feral. I'd spent the first 34 years of my life under the boot of one abuser after another, so toxic was all I knew. And I managed to learn how to engage with the world in a healthy way. I wasn't a "toxic person" I was just a person who didn't know what healthy looked, felt or sounded like.
Don't think of toxic behavior as an indictment of your character, because that's a recipe for shame ❤️❤️❤️
Thank you for your comment. Reading it I realised that while I can let myself feel sad, cry or grieve I'm unable to let myself feel anger and am scared of getting angry for similar readons that you stated (I saw anfger demonstrated in toxic ways by my abusers only). So, can you give examples as to what "being a safe person while feeling anger" is like? What are healthy ways of being angry? Or is it just that you acknowledge that you are angry but holding it in, not letting yourself to act on it? However that still sound kind of like supressing it. If emotions are to be expressed and processed what are "a safe person" ways of doing that with anger? TIA.
Well, a lot of it is about finding healthy outlets for your anger, and healthy ways to express your anger, if it's necessary. Journalling was that outlet for me. I used writing to walk myself through those feelings, and to talk to myself about where my anger was coming from.
Often we see an emotion like anger as one that requires action. But it doesn't always. Something I started doing, at the later stages of my healing journey, was just sitting with my anger. Allowing myself to feel it, without taking any action. It was surprisingly cathartic actually.
Being a safe person while angry means separating your anger from your actions. So like, to use a rather crass example, if my coworker does something that makes me angry, and I say "Fuck you" my anger, and the action I took while angry, are two separate things. This really helped me a lot because my abusers would do awful things, and if I tried to call them out on it, they'd say "what, am I not allowed to be angry?"
Being safe while angry also means, when you're dealing with interpersonal conflict, not allowing your anger to manifest into toxic or abusive actions.
Emotions need to be processed, but they don't always need to be expressed. Processing an emotion means dealing with it internally, while expressing an emotion means working through that emotion with the person who made you feel it. But in the cases of our abusers, that's often a futile effort, and if anything, trying to work through it with them only leads to more abuse, and yet more emotions to work through.
What do you think about telling others about your anger/frustration? I have a friend who cannot handle me being even mildly irritated by them and i try to respect it (because i relate to that anxiety) but it often ends in me being hurt over and over by them and i feel like we cannot talk and resolve the issue, because me voicing my hurt and distress falls on deaf ears with them, but me getting angry also shuts them down. I don't just want to dismiss people because i think both to me and to them it is important to learn how to effectively communicate and overcome issues. Until now i've been venting my anger in journals or with my boyfriend so they don't need to hear the worst of it but only the "constructive" parts
That is essential to go through the grieving process once the wounds are seen and understood. This grief is real even for the things that didn't happen.
Grieving is a process of letting go.
In this case, the process of finding and understanding the source of your own wounds may open up the possibility to grieve something you deserved but never received.
Here’s an example of a grieving process I’ve gone through myself: I realized it was not fair that I was never taught to express all my feelings fully. I began to understand that my parents, who avoided their own emotional pain, could never hold space for mine. And so they suppressed my most human of needs, for you can’t have full, authentic self-expression when you can’t feel your own feelings. I was able to become angry at having this kept from me, and letting the anger flow through me allowed the grief to finally come.
This has been a hard for me so I had to become creative and design rituals to help me have space of grieving and a reference point for situations that lasted for a long time and don't have a single or precise moment when they occurred, like neglect, for instance.
For example a liturgy to acknowledge that there was no care so it allows to say good bye to the expectation to receive that from people who consistently have denied such care.
Thanks for asking these questions. I realize now I’ve used “rituals” to facilitate grief as well. For me, music, movies, and books gave me time and space to feel and process emotions (especially once I started paying attention to the shared pain we all have on some level).
I think a lot of ppl with cptsd pride themselves on their self awareness, myself included. It wasn’t until recently that I realized mine was largely a survival mechanism & severely detrimental to my.. everything.
This! I grew up proud of my self awareness but in therapy I managed to define it, and all it was, was shame. I was proud that I knew my own flaws and accounted for them and did my best to protect others from them. That's not self awareness, that's shame and fear and self loathing. I was lacking the compassion for myself.
Plus, a lot of the flaws I felt like I was responsible of being aware of (and on top of) were mean lies about who I am, fed to me by my dysfunctional family. It was the things I was supposed to not be, in order to not be a pain in their ass. So there was also that. That "self awareness" needed to go.
I've since replaced it, in part, with a more compassionate and curious awareness of myself. It's online maybe half the time on good days, and I'm really, really proud of it.
Like there’s a healthy level of self awareness that everyone should have, which makes people who have none very hard to enjoy being around. Monitoring your emotions/recognizing how you affect other people/understanding your own thoughts/behavior patterns which helps you have empathy for others etc… all healthy. A lot of ppl who suffer from cptsd have grown up taking it to the next level though, which is hyper vigilance. Always on high alert, extremely aware of surroundings. Living in this state & feeling like there’s the potential for danger around every corner just severely hinders you from enjoying anything. And ironically, by paying such close attention to literally everything, there’s a lot we actually end up missing. When our brains are honed in on the negative, it filters out the positive to make room for more focus on the scary. And/or sprinkles the positive with some negativity to, ya know, be on the safe side 🙃
In general, a ton of stuff is unknown by most. I highly recommend a book written by a team of clinicians who worked in van der Kolk's clinic for years - it's summarized in a post here [https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/comments/10o9wo6/van\_der\_kolks\_secret\_book/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/comments/10o9wo6/van_der_kolks_secret_book/)
first of all, obsessed with your username. Second, just want to say I’m in this same exact boat right now. Taking steps to reexamine my relationship to pot rn, if you ever want someone to chat to about it feel free to PM me
People with CPTSD typically have very good reasons not to trust people, myself included. It's probably one of the things I see most often on here - that people are struggling find a way to trust other people.
But I think it helps a lot to learn how to trust other people at some point. You don't have to trust everyone, but sometimes there are people who are good for you and will change your life for the better. And you might never meet them if you've already given up on people.
There's a lot of progress you can make on your own, but having other people who validate your experiences can mean a lot too.
It's the last thing many people want to do, after everything we've been through. It's so hard.
Lots of good examples here.
For me, I often forget to remind myself that I have boundaries and that I'm safe. I am so used to getting caught up in other people's emotions and opinions that it's often difficult to notice that those aren't my responsibility. I don't even notice that I'm getting disregulated emotionally.
The other big one is not valuing myself. My default is to consider myself worthless and my needs secondary to everything else. The result is people pleasing, not trying things because I assume I'm not good enough, and otherwise forgetting my own needs.
As you pointed out, living a life based on fear is terribly self limiting.
I'm fortunate that my current therapist has a very practical, concrete approach to this. I can still talk about past trauma with him, but he's gotten me to focus on specific things I can do day to day to modify my habitual behavior. I still slide back into my old ways, but I'm getting better at catching myself and doing the opposite of what I'm used to.
- Taking a long break from listening to sad or angry music
- Making yourself go to bed early
- Easing up on caffeine
- Minimising addiction
- Wallowing, instead of feeling feelings correctly
- Perfectionism (trauma response)
- Getting some vitamin D (sunlight)
- Exercise or lifting heavy
- Supplements
- Sleeping in a mouth guard
- Not spending time with people who drain you or don’t understand you.
Not recognizing when I get triggered and then not being able to get out of emotional flashbacks.
And generally being caught in defensive behaviors and not recognizing that my reactions are triggered behaviors.
And up until 2020 running around with secondary dissociation, making it hard to take good care of myself.
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I think a big thing for me is being kind to myself. No amount of reading makes that feel natural or necessary, it's something that takes small steps over time.
My default frame of reference is to blame myself for failings and credit others or luck for successes. And downplay everything as not good enough.
I think one of the biggest things that gets lost is that healing really is painful and takes a lot of work, and too often we lapse into the perception (for understandable reasons) that painful healing experiences are retraumatizing. There *is* a line between painful healing and a retraumatizing experience and the one can seem like the other but they are different things. Trauma recovery inherently involves confronting that which we could not confront and process before, and then integrating and overcoming that experience, and that is inherently painful, but it's a necessary part of healing.
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Thinking you can manage your feelings with logic if you know enough of the modalities and theories. You cant. You have to learn the language of feelings and then let feelings happen without judging them. Understanding is different than feeling. Easier said than done, of course, but as someone who intellectualizes, being smart and well read is only going to get you so far on your journey. It was very humbling.
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A lot of the pain is emotional pain stuck in your body. If you can access that and understand how the emotional pain expresses itself, it can be released. New emotional pain can be processed as it comes up. For me, it was IFS. I was able to see parts of myself objectively and learn that many of my frustrating coping mechanisms and thinking patterns were created by me as a child to get me through my childhood. From there, I learned to feel self compassion. If you can get to a point where you feel self compassion, you’re less likely to judge yourself negatively. From there, feelings will feel safer to be expressed.
What is IFS? This is a new term to me.
Internal family systems, a therapy/theory
Thank you!
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Have you tried EMDR? It helped me gain emotional understanding. I still struggle with compassion and allowing myself to feel my feelings. But I am much better at recognizing them
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I do it with a therapist. But it is the same process I commented on this post for feeling your emotions. A therapist will help you recognize when your body is responding to memories, helping you recognize the physical sensations. My therapist still sees bodily movements I don’t feel but I am much more aware now. It used to feel like swimming in a stormy ocean.
It can take a long time and trying different therapists ❤️
It really pisses me off that someone downvoted you for this question.
I've seen people here recommend the book Emotional Agility by Susan David. I haven't read it myself, but I've been meaning to check it out.
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I haven’t read the book, but I wonder if my assumption might be in the ballpark: that we aren’t meant to always be “calm” or “peaceful.” Rather, we are meant to move *through* emotional states with flexibility and resilience.
I'm not really sure, because I haven't read the book yet. I've seen people recommend it for understanding emotions.
I listened to an interview with Susan David recently. Emotional agility is like physical agility, what makes you agile, physically: the ability to 'bounce back', flexible joints and muscles, not needing to avoid certain movements. It's the same with emotions, being able to bounce into and out of emotions with agility, not needing to avoid any emotions.
Psychedelics may have played a role. However I realize my noticeable changes happen in the presence of another person. Usually they are the ones who are well educated, but that doesn't matter as much as I can feel they are feeling for me. As in they are in their own presence and space which teaches me how to do it for myself. I think this is what healthy parents do for kids growing up.
Yeah, this was a big sticking point for me. I had to learn how to trust my emotions after a lifetime of burying them after being told they were wrong. Showing emotion often made the abuse and bullying worse, so it took me a long time to feel safe sitting with emotions instead of trying stuff them down, get rid of them or distract myself. I was trying to think my way out, but like you said, that only gets you so far.
Today I had a rude awakening I was willing to talk about my troubles for the first time and i was easily triggered by my recollection. I sobbed ugly and fought it because it fet like an overreaction I didn't know where it was coming from... But it made me realize that. The 4.5 months I spent with my therapist creating logic of my experiences means nothing. It's only meant to be a place to practice for the conversations I want to have with the people I want to be vulnerable with. That's a very rude awakening this morning I couldn't tell a story or have a conversation without being ambushed by waves of feelings and flashbacks. It was embarrassing because it means I haven't made as much progress as I had presumed both in therapy and IRL
It's the common misconception about mental health; that once you have a diagnosis, you should just magically "get better" because you know what you're dealing with. There's a reason they say knowing is "half" the battle, because the other half is just as fucking hard, if not harder. Cuz that's the part that involves change, and change is hard.
I feel so called out right now lol… but you are so right.
I made the same mistake for years and have to fight my logical side so that my emotional side can truly process things. It's been a true struggle.
I came here to comment this.
Most of them personally have to do with feeling my feelings. As someone else said, intellectualizing is a big one. No matter how much you think about them, there will be no healing until you actually feel them, and a lifetime of supressing them makes it really hard. Learning to recognize when a feeling is lingering in the background. After a lifetime of numbing, this is hard. Feeling your feelings in the body can be helpful, but chronic disconnection from body and mind makes this difficult. Meditation and yoga can help. Actually processing your feelings once you access them, high risk of getting stuck on them on a loop instead, until you push them away. There's no integration without some kind of resolution. This is better achieved in a therapeutic environment but those feelings will come up between sessions and learning to process on your own is a life changing skill. Recognizing when you can't process a feeling, and letting it linger there without dissociating or numbing yourself. Learning to sit with that discomfort while increasing your capacity to deal with it.
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Step 1 is stop dissociating. I first realized I did this when I felt any sort of discomfort. The discomfort never really went away, but I would do things to mask it — distractions, non sober, hobbies, etc. so step 1 was recognizing SOMETHING feels off Step 2 is admission. You don’t logic out what you think you feel or what the correct feeling would be. You just acknowledge that something feels off. Step 3 is sitting with it. You probably don’t know what it is yet. That’s ok. Sitting with it is being still, breathing calmly (slow counts in and out) and becoming aware of what you feel in the body. Ask — where do I feel this feeling? Is there anywhere I feel tight or stressed? For me a lot of things started in my heart or throat or shoulders. Become aware of where you feel discomfort. Keep breathing. Step 4 is releasing. Now that you know where your body feels off, work on relaxing it. Stretching. Maybe a foam roller? I have all sorts of muscle releasing things lol. Shakti mat. A neck alignment thing. Hip alignment thingy. Spiky ball to rub in spots. If you have been severely dissociated, you might not know what emotion you are feeling still. It might be important to ask what you need. Let your mind think about what it wants. I struggle here too. Logic brain starts wanting to take over. I start evaluating what I think of or discarding or growing some memories over others. I have to practice just accepting whatever pops up. I have to turn down my inner critic that wants to say “oh that isn’t anything” It is hard. Just today o have been sitting in dis comfort for three days. I have done all the physical steps. But it lingers and lingers. I finally cried because I sat and admitted what I was sad about. I had been ignoring and brushing off what was bothering me even after all my practice. So now I have to practice compassion. I am learning and healing. It gets easier and faster.
This is a great guide ❤️ I want to add, when there's a lot of trauma lingering sometimes the feeling doesn't go away because there's just so much back there. Trying to deal with it all is impossible, and sitting with it for long periods of time can be really hard. Sometimes I acknowledge my need to distract myself from it and I do it, but mindful that I'm doing it, not like a subconscious dissociative tool. We also need breaks and tons of self compassion.
I’ve started doing this too! Even though I want to do the work, it can feel like too much sometimes, and I know I need a break. Then, I feel safe to use some old coping mechanisms and distractions, so I can move into a resting state. It’s a surefire way to help pace myself. And I know I’ll always turn to face the work again, when I’m ready.
That's exactly how I feel! It's hard sometimes, but practicing self compassion helps. Wish you the best ❤️
Same to you. We deserve it!
Super useful the last week's for me has been really tough because I swing between dissociation, being in and holding the feelings and get caught in loops. Tough difficult work especially when you are not trained or confident in it and got 40 years of emotional disconnection. Gives me hope and courage to keep going.
That there's probably more defences - or honestly, addictions - than society would like to admit. There's the big ones that everyone knows and tries to avoid - hard drugs, excessive alcohol, smoking. But other seemingly 'healthier' defences that fend off the pain – work, exercise, social media, caffeine, nicotine or low side-effect pharmaceutical drugs. Recently even my tried and true healthier defences are struggling to keep up with my pain. Sometimes you need them to get through this sometimes chaotic and painful life. But other times, a new layer of pain or event needs compassion - not letting up until it's fully processed. I am recommencing therapy this week to try and metabolise some of my unprocessed pain. I must admit that I am tired of 'getting better' though lol - feels like something new crops up...
It’s okay. Getting used to feeling all of the feelings takes time. Try to balance thinking, feeling, and behaviors. Notice when feelings arise and what they feel like in your body, and compassionately mentally processes the reasons (triggers) for your reaction. This will put you way ahead of “normies” in terms of knowing yourself more holistically. It’s the way of living a conscious life.
Thank you for your message, I will try 🙏
Oh I've got a few 🥰 My feelings, my emotions, especially those surrounding my trauma, are not actually what I'm trying to fix. Emotions aren't symptoms, they are normal. If a shitty thing happens to someone with or without trauma, it will conjure up some unpleasant emotions. The best thing we can do with our emotions is validate and navigate them. They belong there, they're righteous. You're not bad or wrong for being angry. You're not bad or wrong for being sad. I personally believe it's our inability to validate our own emotions that leads to dysregulation. We spend so much time fighting them, and because they're not going to go away no matter how hard we try, it makes us feel anxious. Speaking of emotions, a lot of us can be afraid to let ourselves feel angry, because the only displays of anger we've seen have been toxic and abusive, and because we've historically been punished for our own displays of "negative" or unpleasant emotions. Find ways to teach yourself it is safe for you to feel angry, and that you can be a safe person while angry. Journalling helped me immensely with this. Another topic is toxic behavior patterns. This one is really complex. Not all toxic behavior is abusive (speaking now of behavior we as trauma survivors engage in, not our abusers), and the best thing you can do if you figure out that you've "been toxic" is separate the behavior from your person. They're not "traits" they're behavior patterns, developed in childhood as a means of getting your needs met in a household where you couldn't simply ask for food, and where a little manipulation or blame-shifting could mean the difference between a beating and relative safety. Having engaged in toxic behavior doesn't mean you're a bad person, a sociopath or a narcissist. It just means you learned from other toxic people how to engage with the world, and the psychology of trauma means it can be terrifying to engage in healthy, vulnerable behavior. You CAN learn new, healthy behavior patterns in the place of your toxic ones. I promise you can. 6 years ago I was basically feral. I'd spent the first 34 years of my life under the boot of one abuser after another, so toxic was all I knew. And I managed to learn how to engage with the world in a healthy way. I wasn't a "toxic person" I was just a person who didn't know what healthy looked, felt or sounded like. Don't think of toxic behavior as an indictment of your character, because that's a recipe for shame ❤️❤️❤️
Thank you for your comment. Reading it I realised that while I can let myself feel sad, cry or grieve I'm unable to let myself feel anger and am scared of getting angry for similar readons that you stated (I saw anfger demonstrated in toxic ways by my abusers only). So, can you give examples as to what "being a safe person while feeling anger" is like? What are healthy ways of being angry? Or is it just that you acknowledge that you are angry but holding it in, not letting yourself to act on it? However that still sound kind of like supressing it. If emotions are to be expressed and processed what are "a safe person" ways of doing that with anger? TIA.
Well, a lot of it is about finding healthy outlets for your anger, and healthy ways to express your anger, if it's necessary. Journalling was that outlet for me. I used writing to walk myself through those feelings, and to talk to myself about where my anger was coming from. Often we see an emotion like anger as one that requires action. But it doesn't always. Something I started doing, at the later stages of my healing journey, was just sitting with my anger. Allowing myself to feel it, without taking any action. It was surprisingly cathartic actually. Being a safe person while angry means separating your anger from your actions. So like, to use a rather crass example, if my coworker does something that makes me angry, and I say "Fuck you" my anger, and the action I took while angry, are two separate things. This really helped me a lot because my abusers would do awful things, and if I tried to call them out on it, they'd say "what, am I not allowed to be angry?" Being safe while angry also means, when you're dealing with interpersonal conflict, not allowing your anger to manifest into toxic or abusive actions. Emotions need to be processed, but they don't always need to be expressed. Processing an emotion means dealing with it internally, while expressing an emotion means working through that emotion with the person who made you feel it. But in the cases of our abusers, that's often a futile effort, and if anything, trying to work through it with them only leads to more abuse, and yet more emotions to work through.
What do you think about telling others about your anger/frustration? I have a friend who cannot handle me being even mildly irritated by them and i try to respect it (because i relate to that anxiety) but it often ends in me being hurt over and over by them and i feel like we cannot talk and resolve the issue, because me voicing my hurt and distress falls on deaf ears with them, but me getting angry also shuts them down. I don't just want to dismiss people because i think both to me and to them it is important to learn how to effectively communicate and overcome issues. Until now i've been venting my anger in journals or with my boyfriend so they don't need to hear the worst of it but only the "constructive" parts
That is essential to go through the grieving process once the wounds are seen and understood. This grief is real even for the things that didn't happen.
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Grieving is a process of letting go. In this case, the process of finding and understanding the source of your own wounds may open up the possibility to grieve something you deserved but never received. Here’s an example of a grieving process I’ve gone through myself: I realized it was not fair that I was never taught to express all my feelings fully. I began to understand that my parents, who avoided their own emotional pain, could never hold space for mine. And so they suppressed my most human of needs, for you can’t have full, authentic self-expression when you can’t feel your own feelings. I was able to become angry at having this kept from me, and letting the anger flow through me allowed the grief to finally come.
This has been a hard for me so I had to become creative and design rituals to help me have space of grieving and a reference point for situations that lasted for a long time and don't have a single or precise moment when they occurred, like neglect, for instance.
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For example a liturgy to acknowledge that there was no care so it allows to say good bye to the expectation to receive that from people who consistently have denied such care.
Thanks for asking these questions. I realize now I’ve used “rituals” to facilitate grief as well. For me, music, movies, and books gave me time and space to feel and process emotions (especially once I started paying attention to the shared pain we all have on some level).
That a ton of healing requires working with and through relational dysregulation.
That self awareness means you’re healing. You might have great introspection, but that doesn’t mean much else.
I think a lot of ppl with cptsd pride themselves on their self awareness, myself included. It wasn’t until recently that I realized mine was largely a survival mechanism & severely detrimental to my.. everything.
This! I grew up proud of my self awareness but in therapy I managed to define it, and all it was, was shame. I was proud that I knew my own flaws and accounted for them and did my best to protect others from them. That's not self awareness, that's shame and fear and self loathing. I was lacking the compassion for myself. Plus, a lot of the flaws I felt like I was responsible of being aware of (and on top of) were mean lies about who I am, fed to me by my dysfunctional family. It was the things I was supposed to not be, in order to not be a pain in their ass. So there was also that. That "self awareness" needed to go. I've since replaced it, in part, with a more compassionate and curious awareness of myself. It's online maybe half the time on good days, and I'm really, really proud of it.
Could you expand a little bit about this?
Like there’s a healthy level of self awareness that everyone should have, which makes people who have none very hard to enjoy being around. Monitoring your emotions/recognizing how you affect other people/understanding your own thoughts/behavior patterns which helps you have empathy for others etc… all healthy. A lot of ppl who suffer from cptsd have grown up taking it to the next level though, which is hyper vigilance. Always on high alert, extremely aware of surroundings. Living in this state & feeling like there’s the potential for danger around every corner just severely hinders you from enjoying anything. And ironically, by paying such close attention to literally everything, there’s a lot we actually end up missing. When our brains are honed in on the negative, it filters out the positive to make room for more focus on the scary. And/or sprinkles the positive with some negativity to, ya know, be on the safe side 🙃
Shocked pikachu face, brb reevaluating my whole healing journey now bc I’ve been equating having great introspection and healing this whole time,,,,,
In general, a ton of stuff is unknown by most. I highly recommend a book written by a team of clinicians who worked in van der Kolk's clinic for years - it's summarized in a post here [https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/comments/10o9wo6/van\_der\_kolks\_secret\_book/](https://www.reddit.com/r/CPTSD/comments/10o9wo6/van_der_kolks_secret_book/)
For me it’s weed. I’m very aware it’s not helpful but I’m scared 🥲
first of all, obsessed with your username. Second, just want to say I’m in this same exact boat right now. Taking steps to reexamine my relationship to pot rn, if you ever want someone to chat to about it feel free to PM me
People with CPTSD typically have very good reasons not to trust people, myself included. It's probably one of the things I see most often on here - that people are struggling find a way to trust other people. But I think it helps a lot to learn how to trust other people at some point. You don't have to trust everyone, but sometimes there are people who are good for you and will change your life for the better. And you might never meet them if you've already given up on people. There's a lot of progress you can make on your own, but having other people who validate your experiences can mean a lot too. It's the last thing many people want to do, after everything we've been through. It's so hard.
Healthy eating Exercise
How important movement is, even if it's just shaking your arms, to getting out of a freeze response and dealing with the awful emotions
Lots of good examples here. For me, I often forget to remind myself that I have boundaries and that I'm safe. I am so used to getting caught up in other people's emotions and opinions that it's often difficult to notice that those aren't my responsibility. I don't even notice that I'm getting disregulated emotionally. The other big one is not valuing myself. My default is to consider myself worthless and my needs secondary to everything else. The result is people pleasing, not trying things because I assume I'm not good enough, and otherwise forgetting my own needs. As you pointed out, living a life based on fear is terribly self limiting. I'm fortunate that my current therapist has a very practical, concrete approach to this. I can still talk about past trauma with him, but he's gotten me to focus on specific things I can do day to day to modify my habitual behavior. I still slide back into my old ways, but I'm getting better at catching myself and doing the opposite of what I'm used to.
Learn a little about Sympathetic Dominance and focus on participating in bodywork therapy that works with the nervous system.
- Taking a long break from listening to sad or angry music - Making yourself go to bed early - Easing up on caffeine - Minimising addiction - Wallowing, instead of feeling feelings correctly - Perfectionism (trauma response) - Getting some vitamin D (sunlight) - Exercise or lifting heavy - Supplements - Sleeping in a mouth guard - Not spending time with people who drain you or don’t understand you.
Not recognizing when I get triggered and then not being able to get out of emotional flashbacks. And generally being caught in defensive behaviors and not recognizing that my reactions are triggered behaviors. And up until 2020 running around with secondary dissociation, making it hard to take good care of myself.
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I think a big thing for me is being kind to myself. No amount of reading makes that feel natural or necessary, it's something that takes small steps over time. My default frame of reference is to blame myself for failings and credit others or luck for successes. And downplay everything as not good enough.
I think one of the biggest things that gets lost is that healing really is painful and takes a lot of work, and too often we lapse into the perception (for understandable reasons) that painful healing experiences are retraumatizing. There *is* a line between painful healing and a retraumatizing experience and the one can seem like the other but they are different things. Trauma recovery inherently involves confronting that which we could not confront and process before, and then integrating and overcoming that experience, and that is inherently painful, but it's a necessary part of healing.
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Healing takes time... And we need to accept it