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  back to you, DM. You're definitely not alone. I'm sorry my post stressed you out, thank you for your response. I'm so, so sorry to read that you struggle with some of the same drivers and self-talk I do. 

I fear that workaholism isn't something people understand very well, and I think it's hard for people to understand just what a numbing relief it is to run to something like work, but it is every bit as damaging as any other addiction. I daydream about running off to a country where working too much is seriously frowned on (or perhaps impossible, or prohibited by law), but I know myself well enough to know that it wouldn't matter. My drive is from the inside and I have to face it and fix it. Which is just...a long, hard slog.

I hear you, too, on the counseling and the board. I feel like I'm not alone here, when sometimes my T was helpful, wise, amazing....but didn't really know what it's like to live in this space. But then I stay away for long periods of time because it's just really hard to be here.

Peace and hugs to you. And not to make light of it, but I'll raise a glass if I ever see anybody else in the pub with a computer, just in case it's you. 

I need to put *** TRIGGER WARNINGS *** on this, because I want to be really honest in my response and it may be hard for others to read - about alcohol, and depression, and some very unpleasant self talk.

Hi DaisyMae, yes, I totally relate and am so sorry you're experiencing this. This is a central problem for me and it's tied directly to the reasons for my cPTSD in the first place. My parents made it clear that I didn't have any right to exist, that I had to earn it, and it could be taken away at any moment if I hadn't "earned" my right to exist properly.

I haven't been able to crack the code of coping with the driver of the workaholism - I hate myself when I'm not working, as in, my depression and self loathing are so loud and angry and vicious that it's exhausting to function.  There is a voice in my head that I fear, and that voice screams that I should die if I'm not working.  Working "earns" my right to exist...if I leave anything undone, it is an act of rebellion, defiance, and I always, always lose the emotional argument that rages in my head if I try.  I have about 10 hours of work I need to do today (Sunday) and I'm so shut down typing this that I can barely see....I will only become clear headed again when I'm back to work.

And so the only times I allow myself to relax are when I drink to numb the self-hatred I feel from relaxing.  It works for a little while, but drinking exacerbates depression, so after awhile I wake up hating myself more than I can even describe. And what cures that hatred?  Work!  And what numbs the misery of working all the time? Alcohol!  Eating/drinking out were, for most of my life, my only "allowed" downtimes, so of course when I'm more stressed and overwhelmed I go out more. With my laptop. To work while I eat and drink out.  Seriously, I'm the one at the bar with the laptop.

I don't have any answers for you. I'm struggling with this more as I get older and realise this really is not how I want to spend my life.  I go for walks a lot. I make myself spend Saturdays without any work (most of the time I fail, but you know) and with friends or at least outside.  But even then there are rules - I can't spend the day napping or reading or doing nothing or in front of the TV unless I'm actually quite sick. If I try it, I pay so badly the next day with self loathing it's insane.  I can go outside, go for a walk, go out with friends, accompany my partner in her hobby.  So I focus on those things, to create at least one day a week that isn't work. 

Knowing my triggers is critical.  Knowing that I have to "earn" the right to do a thing that I enjoy means that I don't take therapists' advice on finding something I love and doing it. That's for other people, people whose self loathing isn't tied to earning the right to live, whose self loathing won't flare up if they do something they love. Instead I find things that don't trigger me, and gradually and slowly expand the edges.  If walking is OK, then walking daily is OK as long as it doesn't interfere with my to-do list.  If walking daily is OK, and going out with friends on Satuday is OK, then an unplanned Wednesday drink is maybe maybe ok (most of the time not, but sometimes).  I take my laptop to the waterfront, because at least I'm near the water which calms me down.  These things seem insane to others, but to me they're a compromise that lets me craft new boundaries wholesale out of a deeply sick inner life.

The only time I've ever been mostly free of it was in grad school, where we were on an accelerated schedule and I took on paid work and project work, and I STILL worked less and with less stress than I ever had in my life. But because I was in grad school, it was OK in my mind...I was, in fact, earning my right to exist.  I still had a lot of self loathing and fear but it was nowhere near what I feel now that I'm back in the workforce. I think about it daily because I want to solve the problem. I recognize it as a sickness and a problem, and not a reality or truth that I have to live within, which is a big deal for me. So from there...maybe I can start gradually creating another reality?

Please keep us posted on your progress too.  Just knowing someone else goes through this is so helpful to me, I'm so grateful you posted.

Wishing you peace

LyndaLinnea, I have the same experience. I remember very little, snippets here and there, until I moved out at 16 and was away from my abusers.  I also feel left out when people are recalling childhood memories.  I have begun telling people that I was raised by wolves, the BBC, and public libraries, because it's true enough and light enough to get me out of these discussions.  I used to tell friends that my only memory of childhood was of being really confused all the time, like things were blurry and inchoate and disjointed, until I learned that really wasn't normal.

bee - I struggle with the timeline too! I realised recently that I routinely leave off a couple of places that I've lived if I'm trying to make a list, and if I do get a list I have no or almost no memories of most of the places.  I can remember an extraordinary amount about my clients and professional work I did  as long as 20 years ago - details even the clients forget - but cannot reliably remember the apartments I've lived in during the last 5 years without writing it down. There seems to be something about my autobiographical memory that's just pretty poor, like forming memories about me is really hard, even now.  I'd love to know what that's about.

My partner does not have cPTSD, and remembers a lot about her childhood. Teachers names, friends names, summer activities, vacations, interactions with parents and relatives. It feels really different to me, like I can remember some factual stuff but it's the same feeling that accompanies recalling that Monrovia is the capital of Liberia. It's not connected to me in any way, it's just a random fact that got lodged in there somehow. My partner says for her it's different, the memories are ... part of her, somehow. 

No idea if any of this is connected to cPTSD but it seems like it is, somehow, particularly the disjointedness and derealization.

This is a very thought-provoking thread.  Like voicelessagony2, my inner critic (I guess?) isn't words, it's self-loathing feelings but it feels like my dad. Maybe because I'm so terrified of it because it hates me so much.  It was actually my mom who hated me, but I was terrified of my dad.  My mom was predictably nasty pretty much all the time.  My dad was totally unpredictable, so maybe just scarier on the whole. Inconsistent behavior wires our brains more strongly than consistent, they say.

But schrodinger, your theory about needing to make some kind of sense in a way that gave me some kind of control really resonated.  Of course I couldn't mind-read. *, as a young kid I couldn't even make any kind of guess as to what two adults might have to scream at each other about. But I learned that somehow, it was my fault, and I learned that because they had no problem blaming me for whatever they were screaming about.  I learned that I shouldn't exist, and of course I had to make up some kind of story - some kind of thing that I could control - that explained why that was.  I latched onto the one thing that could get a positive response from them with some regularity, and began to believe that I didn't deserve to exist unless I was perfect at that thing....and since it's not possible, I just internalized the loathing and failure.  To lonewolf's point - yeah, I assimilated into my part of their dysfunction.  The truth is, they were horrible people and it had nothing whatsoever to do with me.

*sigh* It makes a lot of sense, and feels really true. I just wish that the sensemaking could make the horrible feelings go away. :\   Peace to us all and hugs.

It feels like two films going on at the same time which just don't fit together

Hi ET - the film analogy makes so much sense to me, I've never heard it put that way.  The outside bit is acting as if everything is totally OK - laughing at the right times, smiling at the right times, being serious at the right times.  And the inside bit is completely unable to feel any of it.

My emptiness is pretty persistent.  It's very, very rare that I actually feel things other than anger...but it's related to how much stress I'm feeling.  Nothing else seems to register, even though, as you say, life on the outside is anything but empty. 

Work helps me, because I find a lot of satisfaction in solving hard problems, even if it's just for a really tiny fleeting moment before the empty comes back. I usually have some kind of hobby that I do with my hands - building stuff makes me feel peaceful. I fight the empty with long walks with headphones in, where I just listen to the music and let whatever feelings come.  I read a lot. I write a lot.

All of these are alone time things...as you say, it helps because being two people at the same time in front of others is exhausting and, probably, triggering back to when it was required due to the abuse. 

Peace to you on your journey. You're not alone in this.

Liliuokalani, I'm in a totally different industry, and long since not a student anymore, but I had a very similar thing happen to me tonight with a client and it isn't the first time.  I wish I could look at the interaction and shrug it off like my colleagues do - the guy is clearly horrid, and everybody can see it.  So I should be able to read the email and say "meh, idiot." and move on with life.

But instead I wound up on an hourlong adrenaline/rage spike that I couldn't tone down and just stood in a corner with all my muscles tensed, and shaking.  Total overreaction, all because the guy triggered a massive emotional flashback to daily life with my dad. Some ignorant, powerful, jerk says some stupid thing that anybody could see makes HIM, not me, look bad but puts me in a no-win situation....and I react like my life is in danger.  Full-on EF of the worst possible kind. My entire evening gone because some ignorant jerk says some stupid thing and I'm flashed back to that totally powerless, totally unjust state with my dad where any direct engagement would result in an emotional and verbal deathmatch that required my complete humiliation and capitulation before it could end, and silence and walking away would result in a terrifying rage from him and days of punishment by my charming mother.  As an adult, my response to this particular EF is white hot rage (an overage of repressed fight response?), which isn't the most professional or productive of things to feel. 

I get road rage like this too.  It's the powerless feeling, the knowing you have to do "the right thing" and will never get an apology or even acknowledgement even though the other person is behaving really, really badly. Being trapped and forced into something that's unfair.  I hate this feeling more than any other feeling in the world.  Like to the point that I choose my living situation around public transit so I don't have to drive and do my best to get out of other situations where I feel it coming on. I really don't want my tombstone to read "she died of impotent rage."

With work, which is unavoidable, I play a dangerous game where I type exactly what I want to say, into an email response to the offender, and then I erase it.  If I'm not paying attention, one tiny slip could "send."  It may sound stupid, but it lets me regain my power and locus of control.  It says, yeah, I feel this way, and I'm justified in it, and I could hit send, but unlike jerk-at-work I am in control of how I present myself to the world.  Unlike jerk-at-work, I refuse to belittle others publicly, to question others' intelligence in email, to point fingers or make unfounded accusations or, basically, show my arse.  I also refuse to engage with disrespectful and narcissistic behavior; I can't control jerk-at-work's opinion of me, but I can refuse to indulge his bad behavior by not dignifying any of it with a response.  It's a tiny, tiny victory, but it's mine.  Also it's better than destroying my company's reputation to fight with a narcissist.

It sucks to be triggered this way, to feel so powerless in the face of the injustice.  It sucks to know that this isn't justice, it's a type of capitulation.  I've basically decided that dealing with a fleeting annoyance at capitulating is better than dealing with the fallout of saying something I regret.....and only after some really ugly instances where I didn't make that decision.  Sounds like you're way ahead of me and have learned to avoid that regret - good on you. It's definitely the better way to go.

I say to the jerks-at-work: YOU HAVE NO POWER OVER ME.  And one day, I'll believe it.

Lastly... I don't know whether that'll make any difference for you, but for me, it was a profound relief to realize that I DO have the right to grieve. I used to feel afraid of my fear, and ashamed of my shame, and I used to be sad that I was grieving so often - like the shame and grief and fear were problems I had to fix ASAP, and when I couldn't manage to do that, I felt like it was a sign of how defective I was.

Thank you for writing this down, SC.  Except for the "used to" I could have written this if I'd had the words and the insight.

The shame and grief and fear were very much problems when I was a kid.  If I felt them, if I showed them, I was told immediately and in no uncertain terms how much of a problem they were, so I learned that it was in fact a sign of how defective I was.  Tonight I had a very bad, very destabilizing EF, and instead of allowing my partner to comfort me, I apologized for being crazy, for being so unstable.  I feel ashamed, I feel silly and stupid and untrustworthy.  And now I'm hiding because I only feel safe when I'm completely alone.  I'm grateful that my partner understands this, but I'm tired of it. I'm almost 40 years old and am quite safe.

I think to myself "this is absurd" but it's what you said - that you felt it wasn't OK to be grieving so often.  That it isn't OK to be grieving at all.  I feel that it isn't OK to feel so unsafe still, to be so upset still.  That's an ah-hah moment for me.  I confessed to my partner tonight that I'm having flashbacks and intrusive thoughts / memories daily still, and that I fear the quiet rumination time of showers or walking to the office.  I face it every day, and I keep it to myself...I keep it hidden, and I'm ashamed of it and won't tell anyone.  I'm terrified it won't ever go away.  It's so reflexive that I don't even think "maybe I should tell someone that my flashbacks are still really frequent." 

Anyway, thank you.  Every little insight hopefully provides new coping skills, and tying the silence about the EFs to shame is a big revelation. 

I remember feeling horrified by people who would want to hear "your most embarrassing moment" stories. The first time I heard that all I could think was that there was no way to rank my embarrassing moments as 'most' or 'least'. Almost all my memories have a large degree of shame attached.

Wow. Going back through this thread because the first pass through was too much to digest - so much in here speaks so strongly to me. 

zazu, I hope you're doing OK. 

I realised something was unbelievably wrong with my life when I would routinely get hit with floating shame and crippling guilt, and the intensity and frequency increased dramatically when I was at peace or happy.  Crossing a certain bridge on foot was guaranteed to bring strong feelings of serenity, gratitude, happiness...and self loathing, hatred, sickness, floating guilt and shame.  Couldn't tell you why, the bridge was new in my life and not tied to any trauma.  I can just so relate to your "innate badness" idea, the shame that isn't fixed on any one thing. 

And to Whobuddy's point, all of my memories have shame, guilt, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, that unpleasant feeling that you're about to get in trouble.  Every single memory I have (which aren't that many) before I was 16 feel like that. 

In a way I think the free-floating shame is an emotional flashback; I know that for me, the same coping techniques helped me get through the episodes better, and maybe in turn that helped me heal some, enough to gain some different perspective on the shame itself.  I'm not sure how exactly it all works together, or why, but I do know my attacks are much less frequent these days.  So for whatever that's worth, it can get better.  Hang in there. 

Hi all, just wanted to come back a few days after and thank you for the thoughts.  It's been an awful roller coaster this week - all the feels.  Wednesday was ANGER (so scary I posted here).  Thursday was confusion/numbing out/grief and lots of sadness and processing later on.  Friday was happy (I never feel happy. I was so happy that it was scary too).  And today I got a photo of FOO from a family friend that I was hoping not to have to cut out of my life, but it seems that family friend can't/won't respect my boundaries around NC with the FOO.  But dear god after all of this this week, having not heard a peep in months?  Awful awful awful to get an unsolicited photo.  Which led to - surprise! - more anger.

I guess the feelings are healthy, at least?  Or at least, I guess there are feelings, which is different.  I haven't felt my feelings louder than a whisper for quite a long time.  I've been working not to squash them but truthfully, like that peeling onion thing - it's quieter and somewhat more functional without them, so it's a little alarming to have them suddenly shouting out of nowhere. Anyway, just ranting here. 

Kizzie, it's comforting to know that you feel that way about the layers of the onion. Thanks for your comments and support! 

Marycontrary, it's interesting that you mention Dharma talks. I do find a lot of peacefulness in listening to them.  I haven't in a awhile, thank you for the reminder.  If you have any in particular you find helpful I would appreciate links, thank you.

Schrodinger's Cat - hah! Maybe you're right...it's so normal to have something happen that it's a shock when this particular something actually touches a big nerve and sets off a full blown flashback.  I like the idea of pretending it makes us super cool.  It's only a flesh wound!

Thank you Kizzie. I really appreciate that feedback.  All of the things you wrote are helpful, and to have the validation that it's ok to be wrong-footed by the experience...thank you. 

I am sure there's something at the bottom of this.  It's interesting that you mention that, because even though I don't quite know what it is, I'm afraid of what is at the bottom of this.  As you say, maybe it's my mind being ready to peel another layer of the onion.  Truthfully I'd be content if it didn't, but I guess that's the healing process, eh?

The first 16 years of my life were defined by hypervigilance around my uNDad, and being blamed for his moods by my oh so charming uNMom.  Until my mid-20s I thought that's how you behaved when you were unhappy (and I thought it was normal to get unhappy/angry over random stuff) so I had massive fleas I've worked very hard to squash.  Being angry about stuff that makes me angry - yeah, that's a little hard for me.  Being angry for no obvious reason, just walking to work?  That's terrifying.

Interestingly, I had a big breakthrough this weekend about some issues I've had with clients that has really impacted my whole career.  It's tied to my dad's behaviors.  I don't feel angry about this, not that I can tell, I was actually fairly pleased (if somewhat embarrassed) that I was able to identify something that has eluded me for a very long time, and approach my business partner about a constructive solution. 

Maybe that's sinking in and I just didn't realise it...I'm definitely having an uptick in random symptoms since that realization and I did not put two and two together.  Heart racing, panic attacks with no known trigger, trouble sleeping, trouble concentrating, and then the anger yesterday....  Ech. 

Thank you, this really helps me see a broader context and be a little less afraid.  Lots to think about.   

I've got a theory about this. I live in my head too much, sorry. It's like this. Most people think that things happen on a sliding scale. Take for example a lack of sleep. Most people know what it's like to not sleep enough: you feel tired. So they assume that true insomnia is like that, only worse. They think there's a seamless transition from "mild tiredness" on the left hand side of the scale to "really bad tiredness" on the right hand side.

BUT. On this scale, at some point, there's a red dotted line. When you cross it, things abruptly get a LOT worse. Also, you get new symptoms that weren't there before.

But people in general don't know that. They still think that "zero hours of sleep during the past week" is only a more tired variation of that one time they pulled an all-nighter to prepare for an exam. And for that reason, they'll chirp: "Sleeplessness? Oh yes, I know all about that! Just put your feet up for about ten minutes and you'll be fine!"

OMG. YES.

So "Fake it till you make it" is my non-traumatized business partner's life advice. Every time he says it I want to hit him.  I want to scream at him that he has no idea what it is to be fake all the time.  But I don't, because he has no idea, and he is genuinely supportive and marvelous and considerate in the rare times I bring up my symptoms with him.  He just can't imagine this world.

The general presumption is that if you pretend to be something long enough, you adopt the habits and mannerisms and, ultimately, do become that thing.  I do think it has its place, even for me it helped a little in some important respects.  The more valid version was "what would happen if you were to act as if that very negative thing you believe weren't true?" and it's part of CBT.  I believe that if I enforce a boundary, I am in actual, physical danger.  I believe that because it was adaptive at the time, when I was a kid, because it was more or less true.  Now it isn't.  How do I unlearn it?  By setting up a different belief system, one that I don't actually believe in yet.

What that does is get me over irrational fear.  That lets me function.  It lets me face every single morning that I have to go to work and say "yes, I am having a panic attack. It is a physical response to a conditioned belief system.  I am going to choose to behave as if I believe the same as everyone else - this is not an existential threat to me."  I have to say that every morning.  The problem is (a) it's still fake and (b) it's still a fight, and (c) for the things I legitimately have reframed with this technique, the problem is that there's nothing to replace the old, problematic beliefs with!  I can pretend as if they are untrue (faking it) but then...what's true to replace it?  There's a void. And so I feel more fake.

I think Schrodinger's Cat nailed it - there's a point in everything where it shifts from being annoying but fixable to being disordered.  Anything that helps annoying but fixable is probably going to be counterproductive and insulting to those who live at the other maladapative end of the spectrum.  For those of us who have lived in fakeness all our lives....well...it's just insulting.

Woo - hit a nerve. Thank you for posting about this though!

Hi everybody

I don't know if this is the right place to post this, but I'm trying to figure out how to think about something that happened yesterday.  Nothing particularly unusual and no obvious triggers, out of the blue yesterday morning I got hit with what one PTSD author calls "a bucket of anger" and it would. not. dissipate.  I was angry and hate filled at everything and nothing.  It stayed with me all day, which has never happened before.

It's been about 10 years since I felt the total overload of nonspecific anger, and even on my worst days it would last for an hour or two before burning out.  They were nightmare hours, but still, nothing like yesterday which was more a bed of hot coals rather than a blowtorch.

For the last decade, I've used CBT and mindfulness practice to be aware of my anger triggers and reframe them and most of the time I can take a few breaths and regain my footing.  I feel like I cope with the world more or less the same as "normal" people now - maybe not great, but not extreme or unexpected or out of proportion either anymore.  Yesterday was all of those.  Yesterday I became my dad, even while my intellect looked on and said "there is no reason for this, look for a trigger, reframe it, breathe" nothing worked, and I resorted to just staying away from people.

To be honest, today I feel disoriented. I was a legitimately different person yesterday, and once it wore off 8 or 9 hours later all I wanted to do was sleep.  Today I'm tired, disoriented, can't focus, and frankly terrified. Yesterday, there was no reframe. There was no get past. Whatever was angry wasn't listening to whatever helps mitigate and integrate the anger, like it had never heard of this before and was having none of it.

I've lived with what I guess are dissociative episodes my whole life. This was one clearly, but it was so different than anything I've experienced before. I'm terrified that I couldn't cope with it, couldn't deal with whatever was happening.  That I lost control of my own mind. 

I told my partner that I feel like I just got the news that some terminal disease just resurfaced after a decade in remission.

Has anyone else gone through this?  Am I just tired, stressed and over-sensitive because I'm embarrassed at how I acted yesterday?  Is it normal to have something new like this crop up in your late 30s/early 40s?

Hi Sandals, this may be way off base but do you mind if I ask if your perception of your forgetfulness and your actual performance on remembering things are lining up right now?

What I mean by that is, you said your anxiety and self-hate ramp up when your memory gets worse.  I had that too, because I have an emotional trigger around it.  I was also gaslit by my Narents from as early as I can remember, so "remembering wrong" was a big trigger for me, too, and causes huge anxiety.  But it was all about how I felt about my memory, rather than my actual ability to remember things.

With the help of my T, I did the following:

• Observed how often other people forget things.  Colleagues are particularly useful research subjects, and it's really easy to do if you happen to have to sit in a lot of meetings.   Turns out people forget a lot of stuff...probably because there's so much to remember in a modern life it's no wonder we all forget a ton of things.
• Considered why I was freaking out about forgetting, and thought seriously about what the worst that might happen would actually be.  That let me prioritize the important-to-remember stuff and manage my anxiety a bit about the rest.
• Realised that there are a bazillion listmaking devices on the market for a good reason!

All of which helped me pick apart the emotional triggers from the actual memory performance and recalibrate my expectations.  I'm not sure my memory got better, per se, but I got calmer about the whole thing and so far things are pretty OK.  I have a bazillion lists, and the important stuff gets done. 

I don't know if this is in any way helpful but I thought I'd throw it out there just in case.  Good luck to you!

Hi EO, I wonder a lot if it will get better.  I wonder a lot if I'll ever heal.  I wonder if I'll ever actually feel again on my own, in the present tense.  I wonder if I'll ever stop being hit in the middle of an otherwise normal day by intrusive thoughts and emotions from crap that happened 30 years or more ago, and some crap that kept happening for 37 years until I went NC.  I struggle a lot with feeling like I'm just riding out a particularly long numb patch and not terribly interested in what comes next.  I'm scared, a lot, that nothing will ever make this stop.

It seems the numbness and lack of joy or even hope is pretty common for C/PTSD folks. It makes sense. The way my T explained it to me is that I lived the first half of my life with the emotional volume at 15 on a scale of 10...so learning to "hear" emotions at normal level is hard.  And all of those "loud" experiences naturally take center stage, even well after the fact, and overshadow the "quieter" normal stuff. 

All of that said, I absolutely believe that small changes - even tiny changes - add up over time. Right now I feel a lot like nothing could possibly heal me from everything I'm dealing with. But I also know that if I don't try, even a tiny bit, then there's no possibility at all of healing.  Many days, getting out of bed and saying "today I won't give up just yet" counts as trying. Over time, making that one decision adds up to thousands of opportunities for other tiny changes, and if that's the only decision I can make that day, that's OK.

We're all fighters here, in our own ways, and I think everybody on this board has hope or else we wouldn't be looking for answers.  Be as kind to yourself as you can, and hang in there.

I've had vivid nightmares all my life, like many of you. Pam, it's interesting that yours are themed - mine have been too.  As a teenager I dreamed a lot about getting murdered, too. One of my most vivid dreams from that time is still with me, I can still see the imagery more clearly than a lot of my own memories.

The worst of them can leave me feeling deeply disoriented and unsure of whether I'm awake or dreaming, and feeling very detached/dissociated all day after.

The worst is a recurrent dream of the same theme.  In the dream, I was in bed asleep in the exact room I happened to be in.  I'd wake up suddenly, feel like something was wrong, get up and go to the bathroom or reach out for my light, and the lights wouldn't come on. I'd start flicking the switch frantically because I knew something was wrong, something just outside of my field of vision...and then I'd wake up, suddenly, and think "what a strange dream" and get out of bed, go to the bathroom or try to turn on the light, the lights wouldn't come on....  You get the picture. Over time of having these dreams, I'd learn what was just out of sight was a man in the hall about to come in and choke me.  I never saw him. I finally learned to wake myself up from these dreams, but I still have a variation of them sometimes.

The dreams always feature a man who will kill me, who is in no hurry, who isn't scared of me finding him or confronting him.  He will always kill me by choking me.  I have never seen him but I have come close to seeing him, and I know what he's there for.  It's horrible.

Have any of your dreams faded as you've gotten older or, for those of you going through therapy for C/PTSD do they get better as you work through this stuff?