(C-)PTSD Thread

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Thanks everyone. I felt a bit better today although still not quite like myself.

More nightmares. JFC.

I’m thinking that stuff might be resurfacing.

It could be your meds causing the nightmares and making you want to hurt yourself.
Those are both common side effects for the first few weeks.
Check your product insert.

Maybe a lower dose would help.

Yeah or if there are any notable changes to you life or routine maybe.

I actually had a dream last night that my mother was being really kind and nice to me. I woke up in a f*****g panic wondering of her ulterior motive.

You just can't win sometimes.

Hope things settle down for you TP.

Thanks. The dreams have been entirely about child abuse, not adult trauma which is what my bad dreams are typically about when I have them.

I'm worried for you either way.
I hope things start to calm down.

I feel so much better today.

I think I've been not myself for quite a few weeks. I know it's my fight mode that has been at play.

Anyway I had quite a revelation of a flashback type thing yesterday and it floored me a bit. So I immediately phoned my T (I'd only seen him a couple of hours previously) and he got back to me. I told him of what happened. Then I told him I need to sleep so he put the phone down and told me to rest and now I feel so much better.

It's not a whole memory that I had and he told me not to force the memory but it's enough for me to fully understand and put into perspective my whole life. It's crazy.

I mean this might be the calm before the storm. I'm not living under any illusions but I feel as though I've found the piece of the puzzle that makes the whole picture.

I know I've still got work to do.

I'm glad that you're feeling better today.

It's so weird how things can be going on below the surface with trauma and how big a difference awareness can make. It's something that I'm newly aware of these days although it seems to take me awhile to notice it. At this point, I'd rather know and deal with whatever the memory is than live in a weird limbo.

It's weird because I can only remember the bare bones of it. Like I know what's happened and how old I was. But it's like I'm seeing it from the outside. I don't know who it was that did it or where I was when it happened. I mean I can hazzard a guess but I'd rather take my time with the fine details.

I feel like I can breathe for the first time in weeks. I didn't realise how tense I've been.

^ I hope you're still feeling better. My dreams are mostly like I'm watching a movie, not like the events are happening as they were. I wonder if in a way my dreams are my current way of making sense of things, especially since I was so young with the current stuff I'm dealing with. Maybe that's sort of how the memories are with you. Mine are like that sometimes, too. It seems more common with my adult memories if I was disassociating at the time.

Something new from today: I've known for a long time that hearing distressing stuff on the news is a major trigger for me because I feel helpless to stop it. I'm just now realizing that when people make it crystal clear that they don't give a f**k about the extreme suffering of others it's also a trigger, perhaps because the psychopaths in my life didn't give a f**k about my pain and suffering. There's more to it than that, but I can't really describe it with words right now. Maybe I need to sit on it some more.

I have that trigger too, if people think certain victims deserve what happens to them and others don't.
That's why I don't understand war.

I'm also triggered by helplessness in any context.
That's my most distressing emotional flashback.

I short circuit when I feel any sort of helplessness, even if it's empathy for someone else.

I've known about the helplessness thing for awhile, but realizing that I'm triggered by people not giving a s**t is new.

I find it triggering when people don't believe me about something or invalidate my experience, but that's a bit different.

Yes - invalidation or being discredited is a huge one for me too.
It links back to all my court trauma and the people who tried to guilt / shame me.
That triggers my reaction against people who lie about me or others.
If someone accuses me of lying when I'm not, I'll totally snap.

(As you've seen recently *cough*)

It's hard for me not to snap about that, too. Sometimes I'll shutdown, though. I struggle with invalidation because the a**hole in college spread the rumor that I was making it up. I told one person. I didn't know that she was friends with him. She told him, and then he decided to spread the rumor that I was making it up while I took the next semester off. When I went back to college, I overheard people talking about me and treating me weirdly. It was awful. I've shared that story before, though.

I think most victims have experienced invalidation at some point in one way or another. It sucks. Some people have said that their experience with invalidation was as bad as the trauma itself. For me, it might equal one event. I don't know.

I'm so sorry that happened. Ahole. I hope your female friend was trying to defend you when she originally spoke to him, but it's sickening that he slandered you in the process. That's how it goes for many victims of crime and especially SA.

I had to defend myself against lawyers, not just in family law but in criminal court for my SA case. Cross-examination on a stand, and paying tens of thousands of dollars to do. Because I'm autistic and I didn't know, I always gave way too much information and detail in my documents and my testimony. Apparently people think that's a sign of lying - trying to cover your tracks with too much information. I was told flat-out that judges didn't read it all because there was so much detail (even with evidence), that they got confused. Then of course I didn't make eye contact or appropriate facial expressions, which body language experts interpret as more lying. I had no idea at the time.

I won everything, ultimately, but the process of being interrogated and humiliated has left me more traumatised than the crimes themselves.

That's exactly what you're experiencing, too.