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Hey everyone,

So this is something I've always struggled with and have no idea if it's connected to my CPTSD or some other process but I've always had difficulty with depressive slumps in late afternoon, just as the sun is setting.

I know when I was younger my mom used to really harp on me about having wasted the day if I slept "too late" (I would stay up all night to avoid my family, it was the only time I felt safe) and also that there might be some attachment to "this is the time parents came home and I had to start masking and pulling away from my safe spaces" - but I was wondering if that's even a thing? Does one's body tack emotional flashbacks to times of day? Has anyone else experienced this?

<3
Auto

Hi everyone,

There's this nonverbal discomfort in me that keeps trying to manifest as the urge to isolate from everyone and just go back to my old ways of isolating and looking for superficial comfort in unsafe relationships I know won't work. It keeps getting more uncomfortable the closer to my intimate relationships that I get (when I think about spending time with my loved ones who know what I'm going through), but then when I spend time with them I feel..better? More present? It's like it's lying to me about how I feel about things to keep me away from them, scared of them.

Have any of you experienced this and how did you help yourself not self sabotage by isolating?

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Auto

Hi fam,

I've been having a * of a time with my outer critic attacking my relationships attempting to isolate me. I have a long history of running from relationships that are good for me and that make me happy and isolating deeply. I actually have a pretty full life, full of people who love me and are patient with me but because of my deeply isolated childhood and primary caregivers punishing me by isolating me it's apparently become one of my coping mechanisms.

How did you all deal with your outer critic? What was particularly successful for you? What was less helpful?

(Pete Walker's def of Outer Critic: The outer critic projects onto others the same processes of perfectionism and endangerment that the inner critic uses against the self. It perseverates about the unworthiness [imperfection] and treacherousness [dangerousness] of others to avoid emotional investment in relationships for fear they will replicate early parental betrayals.

The outer critic builds fortresses of isolation whose walls are enumerations of the exaggerated shortcomings and potential treacheries of others. In an awful irony, the critic attempts to protect us from abandonment by scaring us further into it.")

Hi Auto,

This post is dedicated to my response to your question: Can people share if they've been able to heal in the setting of a long term relationship?

I think this is a great question because I also believe that CPTSD is very, very hard on some relationships. Why do some survive while others don't? Well...I can't speak for other relationships, but I am happy to share how my long-term relationship has thrived despite my plethora of irrational fears.


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I'm in a long-term relationship with the love of my life. My wife, Gramma Coco, and I will celebrate our 40th anniversary next April. We married when she was 19 and I was 22.

We'd only known each other for 4 weeks on the day we married, so we really didn't know each other well, and SURPRISE! My trauma disorders really flared up fast in our first decade of marriage. It was the 80s. Any help I sought failed. Most therapists were bad back then. Nobody understood Trauma, and the term PTSD hadn't even been coined yet. So my young bride and I were alone with my trauma disorders. This was very hard on both of us. It did put a bit of stress on our relationship.

But she stuck by me. We approached MY problems as a team. We endured those first confusing years because my wife is just the perfect partner for me. She loved me so much, that she became determined to learn what she could about my history with sexual abuse and religious abuse.  When I was 29 and she was 26, she answered an ad to volunteer as a Sexual Assault Victim's Advocate through our county's Sexual Assault Victim's Advocacy Center. This is a critical reason why our relationship helps me: where another spouse may have thrown up her arms and said, "I didn't sign up for this!" She, instead, answered the ad because she wanted to learn more about ME through immersion with other victims. Not long after, I took the 8-week training and joined up alongside her.  For a few years, she and I handled the 24-hour Crisis Hotline together, answered calls to go to hospitals, police stations and courtrooms to advocate for victims of rape, or any other Sexual Assault.

Those years where we, together, stayed immersed in the world of SA victims really drew us together by helping us both learn more about the lives of people like me, who were victims of rape and sexual assault. I credit our work as a team on that project for being what it took in the 1980s to learn how to understand the pains of what I'd been through.

She is light on the Autism Spectrum, which has made her into a stable person who is the same person every day. She's 100% honest, even when it hurts. Her intelligence is a bit higher than most peoples', but her social skills are a bit challenged. Not much, just enough to notice. She counts on me to keep our social life alive, and I count on her to love me, even when I go to bed and stay there for a week. When she was working with clients at the SAVAC, she was amazing. Unwavering. She remembered everything that had been taught to her in the training. Her clients were lucky to have been able to snag her, and many of them stayed friends with us for years after we left the program. What she learned through them, has given her intel on how to handle me.

That supportiveness, plus her belief that I'm "worth the effort" has made her into the perfect partner to be with as I struggle for days, weeks, months, years, and decades, with my irrational trauma responses to everything in life.

I know she doesn't really understand what it feels like to be me, but she respects it and stands behind anything I do to try and heal. I spend THOUSANDs of dollars a year on Ketamine treatments, talk therapy, and my own quirks of overprotecting her, my kids, myself and everything we own. I've been attacked by so many different people that I spend thousands on cameras, alarms, locks, and all sorts of tricks to keep my family and our possessions safe from thieves and catastrophic events. She may not agree with everything I do, but she knows how hard I'm trying to become a better person and she loves me for it.

Also, between her and I, we have more problems than just my CPTSD. Coco struggles with life threatening disorders that require her to diligently manage her health every second of every day. I take as good care of her as she does me. I attend all her doctor appointments; I research with her on emerging treatments for her Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and Renaud's. She's fragile physically and I'm fragile emotionally. We balance each other out, and we mutually support each other. EVEN THOUGH neither of us fully understands the other, we fully respect each other's struggles.

Finally: I respect her fears over my problems. I've made 4 suicide attempts from age 19 to 50. How scary is that for my wife and children and grandchildren? I may be traumatized but I'm not selfish. I OWE my family to do everything I can to keep myself from self-harm. I tell them this openly. I know that if I don't keep pursuing healing that I won't survive. And I can't do that to them. So, as a courtesy to them, I intentionally take care of myself. That kind of sentiment goes a LONG way in a relationship.  I'm the one who brought trauma disorders into this family, and I'm as responsible as they are to keep me safe from those disorders.  A lot of what I do to protect myself is really to protect them. And they know it. We've fostered a family that supports one another. That's what I believe is keeping us together through this exhausting journey through a life of being afraid of everything that moves.

So that's my sharing of how my long-term relationship has been instrumental in my healing. (Without Coco I probably would be dead today). Also, this is how our relationship itself survives and thrives while we live with my C-PTSD.

I hope this was helpful in any small way.

Coco! Thank you so much for your considerate, thoughtful answers - you have no idea how much this helped me. The relationship you describe sounds wonderful, and I'm so glad that you have your wife. She truly sounds like a lifesaver. Like your marriage, my relationship has been kind of instrumental in figuring out a lot of what's going on with me. We both come from rough backgrounds full of similar authority figures who left both of us with pretty profound CPTSD - he actually had his breakthrough before meeting me. It resulted in the end of his previous marriage, but also was a very unexpected process and pretty harrowing for him. Alternatively, I grew up with two therapists for parents...which gave me a lot of context for things that might be happening to me...but who used therapeutic concepts to abuse me. I was their designated patient, the problem to solve (by any means necessary).

Through our relationship I've gotten more and more comfortable sitting in...discomfort with intimacy, communicating when I feared that communication would mean that he would see my discomfort as disconnection and leave me, and gaining an understanding of what might be landmarks on my path to recovery rather than horrible internal hurdles that will never be overcome.

I'm going through a pretty tough recovery right now. We're poly and while this current long term partner is wonderful, the person I just came out of a relationship with (consensual non-monogamywise) mapped a *lot* like my uNPD father and had a brutal lovebombing/devaluation/discard process. My partner has been amazing at holding me through the tears and the realizations and the panic attacks, and being a rock for me - but also assuring me that I'm not a burden, that he is here because he chooses to be here, and he wants to walk through this with me because I'm worth it.

I'm just trying to do my part to not self sabotage, not pull away, not fall into fearful avoidant patterns and isolate.

Because ultimately, this is the human I want. He's amazing. I'm so lucky to have him, and I would be devastated if my trauma were a reason I couldn't have this amazing thing.

That's all to say - thank you, yes. I know exactly what you mean, and 'is this good for me' helped tremendously as a litmus for what I asked.

(PS: Funnily enough, I actually call my partner 'Papa' so even your handle made me smile (I know, with an uNPD dad I try not to squint at that particular piece of Freudian...is it subtext if it's just 'text'? - but thankfully he's lovely).

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Auto

Thank you all for taking the time to read and your sweet answers! I can't tell you enough how much this community has already been a wonderful resource and a great place for feeling a sense of community. I'm currently slogging through the mess and fallout but at least it seems like there are lights along the way to tell me others have been here, and that I'm on a path that heads in some approximation of the right direction.

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Auto

Has anyone else experienced a...fear of getting better? Like everything good in your life is balanced on your current mechanisms and if you heal you'll lose the things you love the most?

It also bears mentioning that I'm at the beginning of my healing journey but also in a wonderful relationship with a safe, stable, securely attached person and they've been an incredible support to me. Can people share if they've been able to heal in the setting of a long term relationship? He's also been through his own CPTSD journey and is very aware of the processes going on with me. Honestly, I don't think I would have made it this far without him.

Thanks!
Auto

Thank you so much, both of you, for your warm welcome to the forum. I have to say I'm pretty overwhelmed by the prospect of healing, and this thing we live with. But I'm hopeful! It also helps that kind souls like yours are around.

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Autodidact

Hi there,

I'm just starting my CPTSD journey, trying to figure out treatment options and reading all that I can about the things I've experienced. I have this deep sadness in me and I just wanted to know if anyone else experiences it. It's like a visceral, physical, heavy pit where my heart is. It weighs down even the happiest moments and magnetizes my attention to it.

Is this...part of the CPTSD package, and if so how can I work on loosening it?

Best,
M