.insomniac.

affirmations:

Say you break your ankle. You could know everything there is to know intellectually about the injury. Even with this vast knowledge, you will still experience physical pain.

A difficult thing about complex trauma is that there may not be any specific events that you can point to as something bad that Happened™️ and explain why you are weird at parties. Maybe there were small things that were mundanely bad but don’t justify the scale of your reaction. And maybe someone else describing the situation makes it sound laughably trivial. “I felt unsafe” never feels sufficient for something to have a profound effect on you. You feel like a phony, you feel unreasonable, you feel like acknowledging it would be stolen valor. Or maybe you wind up with an unscrupulous psychologist who tells you that something hugely, cinematically awful must have happened and convinces you that your mother’s bridge club made you eat gentile babies on the full moon for 13 months.

Tell the truth.