INACTIVE BLOG

Someone: don’t you miss being younger and having no worries and responsibilities :’)

Emotional Flashbacks

It’s like anything else where you just need to communicate it.  It’s also perfectly fine if you’re initially okay with it and then realize you can’t handle it!  It’s not a fun conversation to have, but all you can do is communicate that you can’t handle that, and do what you need to in order to be safe.   As someone with DPD, I would much rather you straight up tell me, so that I can work on trying to cut the dependency, than to find out after the fact that someone I care so deeply about was messing themselves up for my sake.

Childhood trauma can affect a person so greatly because of its prescence in the time of developmemt. Events that would normally change a person become embedded in every fiber of one’s identity. It is this time of life which is so crucial to your entire future. This is the unique nature of C-PTSD, which doesn’t merely change a person, it creates them. It builds every trait, interest, and understanding of the world with this toxin. Nothing is unaffected or unaltered because all there is to alter was created by the trauma. Moving forward is not moving back to before the trauma, it is in every essence a rebirth and reeducation of life itself. To move on we can not erase, because to erase trauma’s effect we in theory erase ourselves.

Folks with CPTSD can often exhibit the outwardly signs recognized with PTSD such as anxiety and avoidance behaviors, but they have literally developed their identities within the containers of trauma and neglect, unable to make external changes to their environments to bring relief. Because there was an inability to create external changes to protect or remove onesself, the person learns to make deep internal changes, often absorbing as fundamental truths the insidious lies of the traumas in order to survive. Because of this, relationships can be some of the most challenging and in fact terrifying things to navigate as they are the actual battle ground where the original traumas occurred. Imagine if all the ways you learned to understand yourself, what you can expect from others and your role in the world was shaped through neglect, gas lighting, manipulation, shame, physical,  sexual and psychological boundary violations and isolation. At the core of CPTSD is the very real struggle for trust, especially trusting yourself. The primary relationship that is most damaged in ongoing developmental trauma is the relationship we have with ourselves AND it is the one we have to fight the hardest to get back.

trauma is not defined by the traumatizing thing that happened.