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I completely resonate with everything Kizzie said in this last post. And I learned something that I didn't know I already knew. LOL. For me, I never knew the names of the techniques my T has been using on me for the past 20 years. I just thought he was a very gifted T who just knew how to help me calm down and reconnect. Turns out, he's been doing Somatic Therapy on me for years. I just didn't know what it was called.

At first, 20 years ago, when he would easily witness me dissociate, he'd move closer to me and try to make eye contact. My eyes would go blank, and my face would pale. I'd become less animated and more confused. He would ask me what I was feeling. At first I would answer the way we all tend to answer. I'd say "I'm feeling afraid" or "I'm feeling confused."  He'd ask how I knew I was afraid. I'd get a little angry. "I don't know...I'm just afraid!" Crimeny! Doesn't he know what afraid feels like?

But then he'd calmly ask, "Where do you feel afraid in your body?"

"Huh???"

"In your body. Where do you feel fear, and what does fear feel like? Is it hot? cold? Is it up in your head?  Your neck? Your chest? Are you shivering? Do you feel pain somewhere? Is it a sharp pain? A dull ache? Do you itch?" It took me a lot of visits to really grasp that when he asked me what I was feeling, he meant literally, exactly what physical sensation was I feeling and in which parts of my body.

At first I didn't understand the value of this. But I now know that we were going through a slow and gentle, progressive strengthening of the connection between my traumatized brain with my body. As of today (Thanks to Kizzie) I now know it's called Somatic Therapy. I now fully understand that it works very well. As humans we are body and brain. Sometimes the brain tells the body what to do, while other times the body controls the brain. This new connection started to make me feel whole again. Grounded. Now, when I start to shiver in my chest (in a hot room), I don't ignore it. I know it's my body telling me I'm entering a trauma response, so I quickly go to my breathing exercises, and I imagine my T sitting in a room with me making eye contact and smiling, telling me it's okay to feel this.

My T is a particularly kind man. He offers to let me call him between visits if I need grounding. But I choose not to bother him. I'm a fawn type and still living in the training my former therapist, who was nothing more than just a Cognitive Behavior Modification Therapist with a narcissistic need to be the boss all the time. He would say "I WORK FOR MONEY" if I tried to talk with him one second past the end of any session. He taught me to avoid calling for help between visits. So I still avoid calling my current T also.

The EMDR was done just a few times, 20 years ago, just to get me started. He didn't use it to try and help me remember, but to help me open up the closed off parts of my current brain to help calm the traumatized child brain still panicking deep inside me. The Somatic Therapy has probably been the most important treatment of all for me.  It's gentle, slow and steady, and as my T does it with me, I'm getting better and better at driving my own life with what he's taught me.

I like your tiger metaphor too. Having been declawed. It resonates deeply with me as well. We were taught not to fight back. Our claws were removed and we were left to fend for ourselves with wolves, but we were unarmed.

I'm a huge fan of metaphors to help me understand complex issues in simplistic ways.

One more metaphore that fits for how I learned to protect myself from my own family. I was raised by sharks. Anytime I showed vulnerability, I bled in the water, which incited a feeding frenzie, with me as their meal.

But that's just what it's like for most Catholic families I've evern known. (I'm no longer Catholic--nor religious on any front--too many sharks for my taste). We have to become tough, or very secretive and self protective, or our own families and church peers will eat us alive.

Home is where I should feel safe. Not where I should feel most at risk.

Hey Armee,

Have you read Pete Walker's book yet?  Having been raised by someone with severe mental illness has effected you, no doubt. Pete's book is very insigtful on just how the childhood dysfunctions became the roots of your adulthood triggers, reactions and amnesia. The book comes up a lot in these posts: Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, by Pete Walker. You can ignore this post if you have already read it, but in case you haven't, you might grab a copy. Mine is almost totally yellow from me highlighting everything that helped me. Ha ha!

Hi Armee

Woodsgnome brings up some very good points. For one, this is a tricky subject. Also, the fact that we are all struggling with similar issues, but we are all individuals with different stories. So, what I'm going to tell you is just what I myself experienced with EMDR and amnesia. If I'm off-base, I apologize. I don't usually give advice, but I do feely share my own experiences in case others see similarities that can help them.

I've spent decades trying to remember the details that would support my flashbacks of abuse at seven years of age. It was so frustrating to have these missing gaps in my own memory. I've always felt like if knowledge is power, then the lack of knowledge must be the lack of power. Right? I felt like if I couldn't remember the details then my pain couldn't stop, and I couldn't validate the inner child who still wanted a rescue. I believed I couldn't put any of it behind me until I knew the details of all of it. Names. Dates. Exactly what really happened. And WHY it happened. I believed my peace depended on remembering what my own brain was intentionally hiding from me. I'm human. Humans like answers. Mysteries scare us. How do we protect ourselves from harm if we don't know what's lurking in the shadows?

In 2001 or so my therapist did some simple Eye Movement therapy with me, but only to help me get through the chronic panic attacks I used to have. We weren't focused on finding memories, just blending my fragmented brain back together so I could begin to function under stress. During dissociation, he'd have me follow his thumb with my eyes. Left, right, up, down. I'd talk through my flashbacks and what I was feeling in my body. He was there in the room, ready to stop or rescue me if I started to panic. He made sure it was a very safe exercise. During dissociation, most of my brain would shut down. Only the terrified, traumatized part was active. Eye Movement turned the rest of the brain back on during the stress, so all parts of my fragmented brain could work together again in teamwork to help the traumatized compartment deal with that stress. It helped. We only did it a few times, but now, 20 years later, I have a lot more control over my trigger responses than before the Eye Movement exercises.

As for the flashbacks, for me, it didn't reduce any memory intensity, but it did significantly reduce the terror and the trauma responses that I used to feel whenever the incomplete memories would "visit" me.

I used to wonder if the abuse was even real. Only ONE part of my brain said it was real, but the rest of the brain had no evidence. Just these STUPID flashbacks, the terror, and the severe dissociative responses. But through those few sessions of following his thumb with my eyes, and the subsequent 20 years of follow-on talk therapy, I now have full acceptance throughout my entire brain that the abuse DID happen for real, and that it's safely in the past now. Details don't matter to me much anymore. I'm at peace with the fact that the abuse happened and that it's a memory now. It's no longer a threat. I no longer let my older self discredit my younger self by wondering if my younger self is telling the truth about what happened. I now accept my younger self unconditionally. He says I was abused. The abuse was bad. And I now trust and love him unconditionally.

Today, more relaxed around my fragmented memories, details I used to try to force out are starting to leak slowly out on their own. I emphasize slowly. But it's happening! Yessss!!!! I'm giving my brain the gift of accepting whatever it wants to tell me, and now I'm surer than ever that I know exactly who molested me, and how many times, and I even remember some of the threats made to keep me quiet. I'm not actively playing a stressful game of hide-and-seek in my brain anymore by trying to force out details that my own brain is intentionally hiding from me. My brain is protecting me. I now respect that more fully.

For me, it helps that all the abusers are dead, and I've walked away from my unsupportive, cruel family who put me into his hands and didn't rescue me. So I no longer feel any threat of retaliation or of being called a liar by my own family. This helps the memories relax a bit more. They can safely leak out into my conscious mind now without having to deal with the stress of being attacked or called a liar.

Another thought: Human memories can be unreliable in even the healthiest of lives.
The more I used to try to investigate the details from decades past, the more confused I got. For me, my research was adding more possibilities to what may have really happened. As a child, I didn't understand what was happening, so any memories I may have filed away were based on that child's confused understanding of something too weird to grasp. Like a computer, whatever's filed in the brain's memory bank is filed how it's filed on the day it's filed. If the child thought he/she saw a monster, then the monster is how it will be remembered for all time. For me, the details became moot after I finally started to feel peace around the fact that what was done to me long ago was real—details or no.

A final thought: Do I really want complete healing?
For all my life, I've been seeking a healing that I'm afraid to fully accept. What if I heal so completely that I no longer feel the pain I'm so used to feeling? If I lose my connection to my abused inner child, does that mean he dies? Do I completely fall apart? For decades I have identified myself as an abuse victim. If I'm healed, do I lose my identity? Today, at 61, I realize that I feel like I tend to hold on to my identity as an abuse victim because it's all I know and I'm afraid of letting it go--even if I should let it go. My PTSD came into the world because I felt like I wasn't heard or protected. If I'm cured, do I lose my chance to finally be heard and protected one day?

Traumatic amnesia is a pain killer. That's it's function. To my brain, if I lose my pain killer...what then?

I'm very okay now accepting the slower pace of healing little by little. I can accept new thoughts and feelings (and memories) if I can accept them one at a time, and ease into a great, wonderful life one step at a time. As I relax, details start to appear out of nowhere. It's slow. But it's easy to accept. It's healthier for me this way.

I may have missed the mark on your question, and if so, I apologize for going down the wrong rabbit hole. But either way, I hope all of us who give feedback are helpful to you in some way. No matter what you decide to do, I sincerely hope you find a sense of the peace you're looking for. That peace really is all that matters to me anymore.

Hi Rainagain,

I like your thoughts on this. I don't think you're invalidating anyone.

To me, C-PTSD and PTSD are both a sustained trauma response to a past traumatic event.

PTSD from adulthood
People who got PTSD later in life from a car crash remember what life was like prior to the crash. They remember the crash. Now when they are in a car and hear horns honking, they are triggered to grab the steering wheel and panic. In summary, they know who they were prior to the trauma. They know how they're different post-trauma. They know exactly what traumatic event caused them to change. They even know the date the accident happened. They know what triggers their responses and they know what their reactions are.  They still suffer, but they have a better chance of understanding why they suffer.

C-PTSD from childhood
Most of us who have Complex-PTSD didn't really have a car crash. We were children in abusive or neglectful situations. We didn't know a life prior to the trauma, so we can't compare who we were pre-trauma nor how we changed to who we became post-trauma. We didn't understand that we were being abused. We don't have an event or a date to pin the trauma to. We've spent our lives unable to identify what triggers us. We've also spent our lives not knowing why we react to life the way we do.

I agree with you that trauma is trauma, whether it happened in childhood or adulthood. Many symptoms are similar and so are many of the treatments. The biggest challenge for me is that because we had no "normal pre-trauma life" to compare our post trauma lives to, we just assumed we were born broken.

To us, we've always been like this and up until recently we didn't know why. That's why it's called Complex. The trauma was complicated. The timing of the trauma is complicated. Our triggers are complicated. Our reactions are complicated....

But I totally agree with you that no matter how or when or where the trauma changed us, we all deserve a chance to regain control over our lives now. So again, I don't think your statement was invalidating at all.

Hi Escapegoat!

I'm glad you've found some peace and acceptance in finally receiving the Autism Spectrum diagnosis and the CPTSD diagnosis. Knowledge is power! We found the same relief when our son was diagnosed. Unfortunately, we had never heard of Autism Spectrum (then called Asperger's) until he had finally graduated and struggled his way through the school system. But it wasn't too late to turn things around for him. He now fully embraces his diagnosis and carries on a productive life with his understanding of why he is who he is.

My marriage is so much better now that she and I both understand how the spectrum has shaped her also. As for me, I am not on the spectrum, but I had the same reaction to being diagnosed with C-PTSD.

What a relief to know I wasn't the freak my family and peers had always said I was.

Here's a little storybook analogy that shows how I see the world how it relates to folks like us who weren't diagnosed with CPTSD (or any other spectrum) until later in life:

I was adopted into a herd of horses, but something was different about me. Other horses stared. They didn't like to be seen talking to me. They treated me like an outsider. An embarrassment. I found ways to get up every morning, but I didn't really want to. I wanted to give up, run away and live alone in seclusion where no one would laugh at me anymore for being me. I knew the gods had made a mistake with me. I didn't fit in and I didn't know why.

Then, one day, a new vet came to the pasture and saw me. He said, "My, you are a beautiful zebra." None of my peers had ever heard of a zebra before, so I researched it and found out that there are thousands of other zebras in the world and a lot of them have always felt the same way I did. Then I joined this forum and started sharing my experiences with other zebras.

My life opened up when I finally found out that I was NOT an abnormal horse, but a very normal zebra.

Knowledge is power. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is power!

Have a great day!

Welcome Escapegoat

I like the name you chose. Very clever.

My wife is on the spectrum and so is my oldest son. I've been married to her for 38 years and I think she's the finest human being I've ever met. She's 100% honest, caring, nurturing, but people don't realize that she's also easily hurt. They think she's bulletproof. She's tough, but she's not unbreakable. I'm a big fan of people who are on the spectrum. After 4 decades with her, I've finally learned how to spot the signs that she's not angry, but suffering over something.

I'm fascinated by how well you understand your CPTSD situation and I sincerely hope you find the support and the "listening ear" that I've found to be so helpful here on this forum.

Here's to hoping the stars align in your favor soon so you can move out of your childhood home. I'm 61 years old and I still have nightmares that I moved back into mine. Ick!

Hey Blueberry,

My thoughts are with you as you go through this difficult time. I had to leave my family before my F died also. I never got resolution with him either. It's been 10 or 11 years since he passed, and I'm still very okay with the fact that I had to stay away for my own sanity. My FOO had the power to really damage me, so I owed it to my wife and children to not let my nasty siblings or anyone else in my FOO make a mess of us again. We worked too hard to build a more positive family life outside their reach. My F chose to let me suffer for years. I really didn't owe him any obligatory visits during his sunsetting years.

You're not alone with this. I hope you are able to find peace and strength in the friendship that the people on this forum are able to extend.

Dante!

Seven Days!   

Congratulations!  That's no small deal!

I'm pulling for you too!

Armee,

All that's going through my mind as I read your post is My gosh, what a beautiful person you are to take the high road the way you did.. You gave love to a person who could not give it back, even though you didn't feel it in your heart. Mother Teresa used to say "Love not put into action is only a word." Love can be a feeling, or it can be an action. It doesn't have to be both. All you did for your mom speaks volumes of what a quality, loving person you really are at your core.

I have a theory: You can't start healing from a train crash until after the train stops crashing. Now that your mom has passed, I honestly believe your path to healing is going to get some real traction now that your abusive relationship has ended.

That's what happened to me. My mom died in 2009. My siblings, who had been horrible to me my entire life, became such monsters around how to take care of Dad (hoping to take his retirement money from him) that I had no choice but to estrange from the entire family before Dad's death in 2011. I was 50 years of age when all this went down. At 50 I became free from my abusers. (It took a year or so to get their judgemental voices out of my head, but that problem eventually ended also).

I had been in therapy since I was 22. But from 22 to 50, therapy just kept me alive and functioning. It wasn't a cure. It was a coping mechanism that kept me strong enough to keep taking the family's abuse year after year after exhausting year. But on the day I finally lost my connection to all of them, my therapy got traction.

After they were gone, I stopped coping and started to finally heal.

The past 10 years of therapy have changed me so much I can't even believe I was ever as miserable as I was when I was still connected to those monsters.

I sincerely hope you find a new level of inner peace, and a renewed empowerment in your lifelong healing process. I think your train has stopped crashing.

I love your post. So honest and so real. Thank you for sharing it with us.

Hi Juliaguarde,

I'm sorry you're struggling. I feel like a one-off that doesn't fit in most of the time too. I hope you really, truly understand that it's not true. It's your Trauma lying to you the same way my trauma lies to me. The way I see it, my trauma voice is still alive and well and stuck in 1970, which is when I really didn't fit in because of bad parenting and abuse from my classmates. When I asked my parents for help learning how to fit in, they told me the same BS. "Just ignore them all" and "they're all jealous." My parents didn't want to deal with my problems. I was more of a family pet that needed to not make too much noise than a human being with social needs.

That's bad parenting from many years ago, but the voices are still in my head even though the message is outdated. It still hurts. I don't have a great solution to offer, but I really do hope you fully grasp the truth that it's trauma—not truth.

If you think about it, no one really fits in. If each of us is an individual, with our own unique blend of talents, skills, desires, loves, dreams, feelings, etc; etc; then by the definition of being an individual, none of us really do "fit in." Maybe fitting in is overrated. LOL.

For me, not fitting in feels more like just a raw sense of chronic left-over childhood loneliness. I was lied to and taught not to love and care for myself, so today I still struggle to love and care for myself. I'm still lonely even when I'm with people—which doesn't make sense. If I'm lonely on a crowded planet where I'm not alone, then I must be feeling trauma.

I see a few people have jumped in to tell you that they (and I) also feel like we don't fit in. I guess you know that with this crowd, you fit in perfectly.

I'm pulling for you!

[as long as it's the right therapist! A Therapist who understands CPTSD is a very valuable asset to folks like us.]

Larry!

A quick note about getting Therapist.

I live in a large city, so I have no problem finding therapists, but since COVID, even though I live 4 miles from my T, he and I have been meeting over ZOOM for over a year now. It still works. He's still helpful. No matter where you live, perhaps you can find a T who you can meet weekly on ZOOM?

I'm very Pro-Therapist, as long as it's the right therapist!  A Therapist who understands CPTSD is a very valuable asset to folks like us. I really encourage anyone with CPTSD to look into finding one. Consider ZOOM. If the first therapist doesn't understand you, fire her/him and look again. I went through 6 T's in the first few years. I found my current T in 1999 and THAT's when my healing began.

Therapists are valuable help. So my advice to anyone with CPTSD is 1) don't underestimate what you've been through, 2) Don't underestimate the value of a good Therapist and 3) don't let geography be a roadblock.

I'm pulling for you!

Hi Larry,

I feel you, Sir! I have always been addicted to something. For many years I drank every night but didn't call myself an alcoholic. But I always underestimated everything about myself: I always believed my abuse "wasn't that bad" until a therapist proved to me that it was horrible. I believed my drinking "wasn't that big a problem" until my family proved to me that my drinking was becoming a problem for them.

So how do we know when a habit has turned into an addiction? For me, I realized it when I started to live my life around the drinking. I drank alone in the evenings after everything was done. For years it was under control. But then one day I realized that I was starting to schedule my life around the fact that I needed to be done with everything by 5:00 so I could start drinking. That's not something I could call a habit anymore.

What I've learned about addiction is: it isn't so much the alcohol I was addicted to, it was about the dopamine rush alcohol gave me. It lifted my spirits and let me forget the chronic loneliness that filled my body and soul every day. Some experts say that no one is addicted to the alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, porn, shopping, or whatever; they're addicted to the dopamine rush that the alcohol, cigarettes, gambling, porn, shopping or whatever gives them. I certainly felt like that was true for me, which is why every time I'd quit one chemical, I'd quickly find a new replacement.

I started smoking when I was 21. My health suffered so bad that I quit seven years later, but then I started drinking to replace the smoking. My strangest addiction was to buying and selling cars! Before I turned 50, I had already owned over 75 cars. I lost money on every single sale, but buying a new car somehow gave me a dopamine rush that I couldn't get enough of. Also, cars were the only think my shell-shocked father and I had in common when I was a kid--so I couldn't get enough of them. As a man with a bad case of CPTSD, I admit that I still need addiction. Right now it's TV and ice cream. I even find myself scheduling my day around watching TV. Raindiary talks about how she's found constructive things to be addicted to, which I think is a fantastic idea! I'm going to think about doing that myself. I think I'll start looking for something positive that can help me raise my dopamine levels every day.

Bermuda,

Very nicely written, and meaningful to me too. Thank you for posting it.

Thank you all for chiming in. It's always a relief to know I'm not the only one (again) with yet another ghost that's been living in my head for 60 years.

The details of our lives may be all different, but the reactions seem similar. I've spent all morning pondering all your responses. I think I see where the trauma of waiting for a rescue started. I'd spent most of my childhood waiting to graduate 8th grade so I could be set free from the sexual and physical abuse I was taking at Catholic school. I wasn't allowed to fight for myself, nor was I allowed to ask family to help me stop the abuse, so the hatred and mob-bullying was allowed to freely destroy me all it wanted. Waiting for my "sentence" to end was my only plan. Rather than stand up for myself, I learned to hide and dissociate into my imagination while I quietly waited for the graduation date to save me.

It worked, which had the unintended consequence of training me to believe that waiting for a rescue was a good solution. So then I thought that waiting to turn 16 so my driver's license and an after-school job would liberate me from my family each day. It worked, so then I thought becoming 18 and getting a real job would liberate me from my family altogether. Then I thought starting a family of my own would stop the loneliness in my soul. Then I thought retirement would be the silver bullet that let me relax in a stress-free life.

But in the end, no matter what rescue came and went, the release was temporary. Like they say, Insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result. Add to that the fact that with each failed rescue I'm starting to lose hope in the next one. One of my favorite quotes is: "Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man." ― Friedrich Nietzsche.

I guess this is about control—or rather having been falsely taught that I will never have control over my own life. Your responses show me that others feel this way too, but there are things I can do to overcome it. My sense of waiting is not about needing a rescue, it's about needing to deal with the trauma of believing in the lie that I'm powerless to fix my own problems.

I just remembered a cartoon drawing I saw once, of a person reaching out from the bars of a cage, begging to be let out, but what the person didn't realize was there was no back to the cage. He only thought he was trapped. I guess that's trauma. Believing the lie and becoming my own jailer.

I'm off to do more thinking about this.  Thanks again everyone.