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The interesting thing about the emotions part is that my parents were NOT overtly abusive.  They were invaliding at times.  I suspect this is because they were raised in a very staunch religious culture where displays of negative emotions were seen as almost unholy.  My dad especially had a very cold mother who was not nurturing at all, and I think he reacted negatively to my emotions because he was taught to react negatively to his own emotions as a child.  They say that we are most often critical of people who embody things that our Inner Critic beats ourselves up for.  I don't hold a grudge against my parents because they didn't know what they didn't know.

I became very stressed by school early on.  I do not have happy memories of elementary school and I do not think of childhood as being carefree.  I think that my nervous system was probably overaroused for a lot of my growing up years.  Because I was so sensitive, I would snap at people in my family because that was at least a little bit safer place to reveal my negative emotions than at school.  It didn't help that I lived in such a small town, and my mom worked at my elementary school.  She was sort of compromised as an advocate for me because the adults who were critical of me were often her friends and colleagues.  It was often convenient for my negative feelings and experiences to just dissipate on their own because it meant a lack of confrontation for my peace-loving parents. 

My internship at the end of my undergrad years was far and away one of the most overtly abusive experiences I have ever had in my life.  My mentor was the only person I would see (other than the "customers") all day because it was a very independent work environment.  Five days a week, seven hours a day, it was the abuse channel.  I would dream that I was there and being abused and then get up to go be abused some more.  Someone asked me once what my proudest accomplishment in my life was, and I said it was surviving that internship.  Surviving is a relative term.  I still wish I could be "perfect" enough at my job to feel like no one would abuse me like she did.  Two  years into my career, a "customer" launched a months-long campaign to get me fired for incompetence because of a very misplaced grudge.  That pretty much ripped open all the wounds again.

The part about "frantic efforts to avoid abandonment" always scares me.

I totally panic if I think I'm being rejected.  Totally.  When I was younger and less mature I would sometimes frantically try to get people not to abandon me, but as an adult, I usually just accept it as my lot in life.

I've had a lot of fair-weather friends who hung out with me because I was a warm body and there was no one else, and then left, or just plain stopped liking me because I'm weird.  I feel like whenever someone find out what I'm truly like, they leave.  Or whenever I assert boundaries in a relationship or express any negative feelings, they leave.  This goes for friendship or romantic relationships.  If I ever ran into someone who I felt really "got" me and I felt safe with them, and then they left, I would sometimes frantically try to get them to change their minds.  I often feel like a total reject and that no one really loves me for who I am.

Does that mean I could have BPD?

I agree with many of the statements in this post.  I am an extremely empathetic person, able to intuit and read other people's emotions.  (I don't always respond appropriately when I empathize, but that has to do more with fear of failure and social anxiety.)  Other people's emotions are extremely vivid to me, especially anger.  It seems sometimes like another person's emotions can be so strong that they can hijack my emotions just by being near me.  I'm an INTP, by the way.  I also think that my temperament has contributed to how easily I am impacted by trauma.

I have also had this ability since I was a child, and the thing I am most sensitive to is volatility, i.e. the feeling that another person's mood can change instantly.  For example, I just spent a few days of my vacation with some of my parents' friends, one of whom is known to be a moody and volatile person.  He triggered me so much I could barely look him in the eye.   I think this was adaptive during childhood, because with my high level of sensitivity, it took very little to traumatize me.  Often adults with egocentric views of situations, the ones who view children's misbehavior as an affront to their authority or a challenge, are the ones who snap and respond most angrily.  Even seeing other kids disciplined in the grocery store by adults who yell at them or hit them triggers me, and did as a child.  I literally feel the adult's actions as if they are disciplining me, probably more than the kids do sometimes!

I dated a guy last summer who was a volatile individual with a lot of masked rage and a hair trigger.  I never felt safe around him.  I began to use one of my two typical responses, fawning (as described in Pete Walker's work), to compensate for my lack of safety.  His opinions on people and ideas shifted quickly and with scant evidence, and he could be angered by a tiny slight.  I knew in my gut that he would turn on me if I made one wrong move, and I was right -- that was exactly how the relationship ended.

Hope I'm not out of bounds in posting on an older thread, but . . .

So many things in this thread resonate with me!   Yes, yes, and extra yes.  I am a perfectionist because being perfect makes me safe.  I was labeled as gifted before I even entered school and always had higher expectations than other students.  Other students were allowed to be average, but if I made any mistake at all, it always elicited a lot of unwanted attention.  My feelings were also expected to be perfect when I went home to my family.  I was socially awkward and different from my peers, so pleasing adults was how I found acceptance.  This was particularly true with my behavior; if I misbehaved, I often found myself receiving disproportionate or merciless punishment because the teacher/authority figure needed to prove that my intelligence and work ethic did not make me "special" and immune to punishment.  Like other posters have said, being mostly perfect became a prison because it only led to continual expectations to be mostly perfect.  I developed OCD in middle school as a consequence.

I can tackle projects with great enthusiasm if I think that I can make them nearly perfect.  This sort of stress-fueled drive is what got me through college (and graduation with high distinction).  I have struggled with my job from the beginning because I was verbally abused by my mentor in my internship, who told me that I had chosen the wrong profession and would inevitably fail.  Every time I have to do a project for work I hear her words telling me that I chose the wrong path and that I'm not good at this.  If I can't do something perfectly, there's no safety, only the risk of drawing attention to my failures.  I feel like my job is a constant exercise in exposing my vulnerabilities, and I often feel like a fraud, because someone will see my work and realize that I am bad at my job and should be rejected/fired.  Academics were always the arena where I could prove that I was a worthwhile person, because heaven knows I didn't have that kind of security in my social life.  It was always that sort of hope, like, high school is awful, and I will get out of here some day, and my grades are the promise that one day I won't be bullied and alone.

I think that this guy is freaked out that *I* liked him, its not a compliment to him as it was *me* who had feelings for him!!
I feel worthless and as though know one wants me.
And i have suddenly started feeling really ugly and i hate the way i look, and i hate my body.

This really, really resonated with me.  I'm new here and still trying to figure out if I have cPTSD, but this part of your post completely hit home.  Most of my anxiety is about trauma like this.  When I was 15, I had a crush on my best friend, and when someone told him, he stopped speaking to me (and didn't contact me again until well into adulthood).  I know now that he did it because of some of his own issues, but it made a huge impact on me at a formative age.  I don't think it had really occurred to me up until that point that someone could react to my interest with such disgust.  I began to hide crushes and not talk about them because I began to realize that just being around people was better than being outright hated by them.  Unfortunately, this has happened to me several times since, twice in adulthood.  It makes me believe that I must really actually be disgusting if men keep reacting to me like this.  Sometimes they seem to actually consider it an insult that I am interested in them, like they can't believe that someone so low sees them as being on her level.

I always wondered what it felt like to have a man flattered that I was interested.  That never happened to me until recently.

People describe me as "quirky" and it's not endearing.  What I really want is for someone to see all my quirkiness and love it all for what it is, but the people I've met in my life who have felt that way about me are few and far between.  I don't fit most people's ideals of physical appearance and female personality, and like you, I start wondering what I would need to change about myself or my body in order to finally be acceptable.

To address your question, I am not sure that for me the people I am interested in represent any sort of missing childhood affirmation.  For me, I spent my teen years finding out that my sexual interest was repulsive to people.  I think it is very traumatizing to see yourself as someone's equal, like you saw yourself as the equal of this man you were interested in, and then find out that that person sees you as far beneath them.  I carry a hope that I will not end up with a guy who sees me as a desperation move, and it hurts my heart terribly to think that my age, my weight, my intellect, and my personality make me someone that a man would only choose if he couldn't get anything better.  I want someone to feel lucky that he has me, and I want that person to be someone who is also desirable himself, not someone desperate.  I think there's also the idea that you can pick and choose your mate, not just have to settle for whomever is interested in you.  You tried to exercise some control over your future, and found out that the future you wanted was not available to you because you didn't pass some arbitrary test of desirability.  Having my dreams halted by someone else's judgment of me is definitely a trigger, because it puts me back into those childhood situations where I was so harshly judged by authority figures and peers and needed to be perfect in order to have any future at all.

So to sum up, I think for me it is really a matter of agency, and it sounds like that might be the case for you too.  It creates a real sense of helplessness in me when I am trying to attain a goal and I don't even know what the parameters are, because I am back in my childhood trying desperately to figure out what arbitrary rules an authority figure will use to judge me, or what social test I need to pass to avoid people thinking I'm some kind of freak.

This is my second post here.  I posted my introduction on the welcome board.

I have had issues with object constancy with romantic partners for a while.  My first high school sweetheart (age 15) was an exchange student who went back to his home country and "ghosted" on me because he had his own fair share of psychological issues.  I was a really lonely person, frequently bullied or ignored, and he was the one person at school who I felt a connection with.  From then on, if I couldn't see the person I was in a relationship with or contact them, I would lose a sense of object constancy when triggered.  Separation became synonymous with abandonment. 

Partners accuse me of being "clingy" because of this.  If they leave to go on trips without me, I need frequent calls or texts to continue to feel safe.  Not hearing from a significant other when we are apart is a major trigger for me and I will freak out trying to get in touch with them.  I have been made to feel a lot of shame about this because men inevitably take it personally when I feel like they may cheat or leave when they're gone.  This is not to mention the connotations of being "clingy" and how it is labeled an unattractive trait.  So then in addition to my flashbacks to previous abandonments, I get the added bonus of the shame I feel when I want to contact the person, and how that makes me a worthless, horrible girlfriend.  The more I feel worthless and horrible, the more I want to contact my boyfriend for reassurance, the more I feel worthless and horrible . . . a downward spiral.

Hi everyone, this is my first post.

I have recently been reading Pete Walker's book on cPTSD and I strongly suspect that I have it.

Unlike many of the people on these boards, I had a relatively stable and loving family growing up.  Most of my initial trauma took place at the hands of teachers and peers.  I did not experience any overt physical or sexual abuse, but I do recall feeling a lot of shame as a child.

I am an extremely emotionally sensitive person and feel others' emotions very intensely.  When adults got angry at me, especially abruptly, I felt deeply traumatized and shameful about this.  I was an intellectually gifted child who often behaved or thought differently from my classmates and teachers, and I internalized at a young age that anticipating what adults wanted from me was more important than reaching my potential.  I had many teachers and adults in my life who were worried about me getting stuck up from my intelligence, and declared that they would knock me down a few pegs so that I knew I wasn't better than anyone else.  I often found myself being disproportionately punished for small honest mistakes, like one very memorable incident when I accidentally forgot to do the back of a homework assignment and received a detention -- and then the teacher invited my classmates over to see me in detention so that everyone could see that I wasn't perfect.  I can recall adults accusing me of testing them, resisting their authority, being disrespectful, or just plain being a bad kid for making honest mistakes that had no intention behind them.

My parents were generally supportive, but since I grew up in an small community where 85% of the population was the same ethnicity and religion, it's safe to say that I was raised by a village, and many of the authority figures in my life were friends with my family. 

By 7th grade I began to show symptoms of OCD.  I had learned that being perfect was the only way to avoid punishment.  When other kids were caught misbehaving, their bad behavior was expected, but when I was caught, I ended up being made into an example because no one could "let me off the hook" for being good most of the time.  Because of my sensitive nature, I was easily humiliated and shamed. 

My father was raised in a very repressive environment and didn't like displays of emotion.  When I would cry at home with my parents, it would distress my father, so I would be told to stop.  My negative feelings were often labeled as "just PMS" or some other similar dismissal.  By the time I was 17, my mother took me to the doctor to be put on Prozac so that I wouldn't be so emotional.   I can remember being punished or threatened for not exhibiting enough self-control over my emotions.  Expressions of negative emotion were not received well.  If I asserted myself with my parents, explaining that they had hurt me or done something I didn't like, I was often told that I had no right to protest because of all they did for me.

By age 22 I was diagnosed with OCD by a therapist.  Most of the OCD therapy I have either read about or experienced has been related to CBT, which discourages the patient from looking deeply into the causes of the behavior.  I am convinced that my OCD is trauma-based.  In my early 20s I was also treated for PTSD for a cancer scare and successfully recovered using EMDR.  Prior to that, I had begun to check my body for lumps to the point that my skin was green beneath my clothing from bruising.

I have experienced a string of very abrupt, traumatic abandonments in my life, which I will not explain in detail here.  They began in my early adolescence and mainly consisted of very harsh rejection by peers or potential romantic partners.  I have repeatedly experienced male friends cutting me out of their lives in disgust when I showed romantic interest in them, beginning in high school and extending into adulthood.  Usually when I share my feelings with someone or assert myself by having boundaries, that is when people leave.

As much as I feel that my issues are caused by trauma, and I can point to experiences in my life that impacted me, I also worry that I have BPD.  I've heard it said that "frantic efforts to avoid abandonment" are a symptom of BPD, not cPTSD.  Most of my coping mechanisms are geared toward making me an acceptable person so that I will not experience rejection.  I don't do other BPD behaviors like splitting or having an unstable sense of self.  If I had BPD, I feel like it would be further evidence that I am worthless and unacceptable and that all the people who disliked me in my life were right.

I have been going through a particularly difficult time with an abusive ex-boyfriend lately, and many triggers have entered my life.  I'm hoping that posting here will help me deal with this.