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I would say YOU GO GIRL...but it would be weird, wouldn´t it?      So maybe leave the "girl" part out. I´m very happy for you and pass me some non-alcoholic alternative please. 

Actually Dalloway, my feminin side absolutely appreciates that expression! And I'm so happy for your comment because I somehow missed this party when SO brought it to light. Not sure how that happened, but even late to the party I appreciate it beyond words.
And me I drink a lot of bubbly water... even that, with good friends, makes me act silly :-)
 

Hello Ollyollyoxford, Your name reminded me about when I was a kid and we'd play hide-and-go-seek with the other neighbor kids, the person who was "it" would count to forty or fifty, then shout at the top of their lungs, "Olly-olly-in-come-free!" To this day I have no idea why we shouted that... But thank you for bringing that memory back to me. And welcome to the Forum. I think you'll find a lot of understanding here. That's been my experience, and more. I had a baby snapping turtle when I was a kid. He hibernated the first winter we had him, and my dad added a captured lizard into the terrarium which was half water, half dry land with a big branch. We figured the lizard was way too fast for the turtle to ever do him any harm... boy were we wrong. Woke up one Spring morning to find the poor little lizard floating in the pond with several chunks taken out of his body exactly the size of the turtle's mouth. It was pretty shocking for me as a young sensitive kid I remember. But it taught me explicitly not to get my fingers anywhere near Mellor's (his name was Mellor) mouth :-)
  

I've been reading and re-reading the ChatGPT info. If you have the wherewithal, I strongly suggest putting the following question into ChatGPT: Please explain how prediction error relates to trauma, CPTSD, and nervous system dysregulation.

I'm finding the explanation extremely clear, thus very coherent and, for me and my own needs, organized. Especially the explanation as to "why" trauma is stored in the body and talk-therapy is limited in affecting deep change...

And now I'll stop :-)

Now what strikes me is the statement, "In a healthy environment: The brain updates its models"

For me, this makes a clear distinction between "healthy" and "unhealthy". These are EXTERIOR conditions, outside of the control of the individual (note, they may also be outside the control of the person inflicting the conditions, environment or behavior, which is not so say this person is not responsible, only an explanation for why the pattern seems to repeat over generations...)

As Shakespeare said, "Therin lies the rub..." It is VERY VERY difficult to "explain" what is an "unhealthy environment" because everyone seem to think they know already... And no one likes being told something they are pretty sure they know already... The brain doesn't want to waste energy learning something it has already learned... or thinks it has learned...

Here, on the Forum, we don't have to jump that hurdle. When we talk about an "unhealthy environment/circumstance/person" it is understood. This is a shocking situation, especially at the beginning. But even later, it remains very hard for me to "reverse" my mental prediction error as it is presented to me by other Forum members. I just have to keep banging away at it.

(BTW, I hope I don't sound like I'm giving a lesson here, I think everyone already knows pretty much everything I'm talking about here... I'm just writing all this out for my own clarity. When my brain seems to be functioning relatively well, I find it a good opportunity to take advantage and put it in words for myself... I've had a heck of time really getting the concept of "prediction error", it just never made sense to me. Anyway...)

Thank you all, especially if you made it this far :-)
 

So I asked ChatGPT the following question: Please explain how prediction error relates to trauma, CPTSD, and nervous system dysregulation.

Response:
1. Prediction error: the brain's basic job
At its simplest: The brain is constantly predicting what will happen next.
Prediction error = what actually happens − what was expected.

If prediction error is small → nervous system stays regulated

If prediction error is large or repeated → nervous system adapts

In a healthy environment: The brain updates its models

Safety predictions become more accurate

The system stays flexible

2. Trauma = extreme, uncontrollable prediction error

Trauma is not defined by the event itself, but by this:
An overwhelming prediction error that cannot be resolved or escaped.

Examples:

You predict safety → danger happens

You predict care → neglect or harm happens

You predict "this will end" → it doesn't

Critically:

The nervous system cannot update the model

Because updating would require safety during learning, which is absent

📌 The result is protective overlearning, not learning in the healthy sense.

"Prediction errors aren't problems. They're a normal part of the operating instructions of your brain as it takes in sensory input. Without prediction error, life would be a yawning bore. Nothing would be surprising or novel, and therefore your brain would never learn anything new. Most of the time, at least when you are an adult, your predictions aren't too far off-base. If they were, you would go through life feeling constantly startled, uncertain... or hallucinating."
-Lisa Feldman Barrett, p. 62, How Emotions are Made

Two things: One, Lisa Feldman Barrett clearly doesn't have the faintest clue what the experience of developmental trauma is like for adult survivors... And two, developmental trauma has apparently provided my brain with the most excruciating opportunity to experience and understand the most extreme limits of the concept of Error Prediction.

I don't know whether to celebrate... or cry...
 

So I'm coming to realize that coming out of the EF is, for me, a period of incredible insights and revelations. I just walked my daughter to a "play-date" afternoon with one of her friends. As I was walking back I passed through the Parc de l'Archevêché (in case you want to google it :-) AND! I had the memories of two years ago when I met with my ex-g for the last time, where she told me she had met someone new, where she drove the long-sword of my trauma to the very hilt of my attachment wound. It was a meeting from which I literally ran for my life. In my car I began screaming at the top of my lungs to keep my sanity, to keep myself from accelerating, to find a new pain, any new torture that would keep me from feeling what was actually inside me... that's the park I walked through. I have been back there, tempting chance and EFs and deep pain. I have entered and breathed and called my support group on the phone to distract me, aid me, help me through that place, which is and always will remain an enormous risk.

I walked across the gardin, classic French style, everything orderly, rectilinear, hedges perfect squares, trees clipped into boxes, bushes cut into pointed cones... I stared at the pointed cone... it was the object of nightmare I had dreamed of as a child. It was the figure of the moment when I did something so horrible, I have been running from it my entire life. It happened when I was one... maybe two years-old... It was the sacrifice of my spirit, in order to survive.

I stared at that tree like the Christmas trees in Charlie Brown's Christmas special. You whack it and it rings hollow metal...

Things come, it's all there, the mind of the baby, is still in me. I'm totally amazed... Pain IS healing. We are all trying to heal so as to reduce pain... but I now believe, Pain is the catalyst to heal. Pain IS healing. Maybe this is old news for most, but for me it is a revelation. The Pain in my shoulder, the Pain in my body, the Pain in my soul... the PAIN IS HEALING. When I am in pain, I am healing. When I abandon myself by lying in bed, I am healing. When I decide to stay inside, I am healing. When I avoid a party because I am too scared, I am healing. I have always looked down on myself, always judged myself for the things "I didn't do". But I think now that all those things I didn't do, were part of healing. I'm not "worse" or behind in my "healing schedule" because I didn't do those things. I'm very simply VERY MUCH CLOSER to doing those things because I "healed" in the past.

The proof?

I can do MORE today than I could in the past. I feel less pain in my shoulder than last month. Could I have done things to have "sped it all up"? Almost certainly not. Or I could have amputated my arm altogether... that would have gotten rid of the pain for sure... But I want to keep my arm. I want to continue living.

Two years ago, in the Parc de l'Archevêché I was provided with the opportunity of my life... to feel in it's near entirety the full sum of pain I experienced when I was one year old... I was blessed with it's return... because this wound wants to heal... an it's going to heal... and to heal I have to hug it close to me, know it, get inside it as it is inside of me, I have to love this gift no mater how excruciating it seems. A psychic wound is timeless. It lives on as if time never moved forward, that's why I'm still suffering from it today. But as such, the wound is fresh, the intervention can happen in real-time at the instant it happens. Like the paramedics awaiting you the bottom of the cliff you just drove over. Every time I have an EF and re-plunge into that Pain, I can instantly go to my own aid. I can be my own Jesus and lay hands upon myself... Self-Savior... auto-salvation...

I want to change how I feel about the next EF. (Not least of which I KNOW it's gonna come... ("I ain't dead yet!" said my grandma :-) I want to walk right up to the thing and shake its hand... "Hello EF, where do we go today? What do I need to see? What do I need to understand? Is it possible to go deeper? How many levels of the Soul exist? Infinite, you say? Ok, lead on, I will follow, though the valley be black as death, I'll follow you. I know where you lead me now... you lead me to myself, and there, in my own arms, I will know a love that encompasses the universe. I will melt entirely with that Love and therewith know my self.

Thank you TheBigBlue!

here, amazingly enough, there are a bunch of honest, caring people who, as far as i've known, do not lie when they give out compliments.  for me, it's been part of the reprogramming, getting pos. stuff over and over until it finally finds its way to sinking in, even if only an inch at first, but eventually all the way to the heart, cells, and soul. 

we wouldn't say these things if we didn't mean it.  with our experiences, we know what pos., healthy parenting looks like, and i, for one, absolutely want to celebrate it.  you deserve it, chart.  i hope you can begin taking it in as real.  this is what we all wish we had. 

Thank you, San!
Yes, it's always funny to hear things that you know cognitively, yet still have not integrated to the deeper levels because of Trauma. It takes the time it takes, I guess. But it does helps so much when positive messages get repeated. I need to hear these things, despite the side of me that "knows" it "knows"...
Thank you
 

 

You're in my thoughts this weekend, San. Take care. Sending love.
 

Marcine, SanMagic, SenseOrgan, NarcKiddo, Armee, DesertFlower, TheBigBlue, BlueSky, Dollyvee!!!
Good lord, thank you! I feel like my thanks are so insufficient. But, lordy, your presence, it helps so much. I still feel like a fraud, but I know the inner critic does fraud really well... so I just try to ignore the IC as much as I can. It's such a struggle for me to receive. I can give. Was trained to give. Was trained to climb up on that cross and give until my last breath, but receiving is a million times harder. I breath, I relax, it's okay. Might never go away... completely. It is such a funny feeling... people always say "Trust your feelings"... sadly, with Cptsd, it's just not possible, so many of my "feelings" are just dead-wrong.
Thank you all again soo much.
 

Hi Hope,
I read your opening post for 2026 and was very touched. But I didn't respond immediately, probably related to being interrupted by a child or suchlike :-) Anyway, I'm back and I wanted to say how much I sensed self-care and understanding in your objectives for this year. It was very touching to read and feel the love in your words to yourself. It was inspiring, thank you.

And your comment to your husband about your night cries was touching too. I totally agree, it's probably better that it comes out, than it stays in. This has been a thought of mine since my last EF. I had the strange thought last week, when I was feeling pretty terrible, something like, imagine if I DIDN'T feel this? That is to say, it's there, but I don't feel it? And the next thought struck me... is it possible that it's actually "healthy" to feel the pain? That the "negative modality" (the Trauma) that must/needs/wants to come out, is much much better since it IS coming out? Imagine it's there, but it stays inside, hidden, crushed, throbbing...

This has been along the lines of my thinking for a long time about the purpose of pain. I feel a little childish thinking this, but I've not really understood why there's so much pain... And the idea has slowly been forming that pain is part of healing... or even, pain "initiates" healing. Whether it's the start of healing or integral to the process, I'm not sure...

Sorry to divert a little bit on my ideas, but your experience of night terrors brought it up in a very interesting way for me. Though I am very sorry you are experiencing that.

Sending love and hoping for peaceful rest.
 

I like cute things. I like children. I like childish things. But when I think about the concept, the manifestation of a child being a child, my heart hurts and I fear it. I want to cry. I am filled with fear. Part of me also imagines an adult acting like a child and I am repulsed somehow, like a magnet. Yet still I am always drawn to these instances.

lowbudgetTV,
For me the context is different, but the "conflict of feeling" (which is how I interpret what you wrote) is the same. It is hard to describe and explain, but I think you expressed it well: wanting one thing, but feeling torn and repulsed at the same time. Emotions or dissociation coming up from situations that we want to experience but are deeply conflicted by.

I believe this is one of the many symptoms of complex trauma. I believe it comes from having primal needs manipulated by caregivers in an unhealthy manner. That is to say, needing something, then having that thing manipulated or twisted such that we perceive that the thing is somehow conflicted with the emotional response of the parent.

Thank you for sharing this. I'm still thinking and reflecting on it as it seems to impact me in a very subtle way. But I'm closer to it now that I've read your post and processed my own feelings from it a little.
 

A book I'm reading now says that we need to forgive ourselves for the wiring. We aren't as responsible for ourselves as we try to believe we are. At least, I'm not. It described me perfectly when it said I'm like a leaf that's blowing in the wind but thinks I'm dancing of my own free will. That's been a comfort. I absolutely believe in personal responsibility, but I have to stop taking it so far as to think I can muscle through all the terrible things my family and church did to train me for most of my life. I'm behaving as I was trained to behave. I'm taking responsibility for myself by seeking help, admitting my feelings and fears, connecting with the right people, reading the right books...I don't need to behave like nobody's ever hurt me before. I can be responsible without believing I need to be undamaged. I like that old saying that our scars are where the light enters us.

PapaCoco,
I'm so very sorry for your current state. I want to absolutely support and validate what you wrote. It cannot be said enough, cannot be repeated enough: We are not at fault for feeling terrified and triggered at events and situations we know all too well. This pattern was pounded into us when we were in development, construction, neuronal creating, processing and pruning... it is as if during the construction of the house, an evil clown passes every night and switches wires around, changes the plumbing, inverts doors, pulls out insulation, unscrews the drywall, saws through the beams, and tears off parts of the heating system... Day after day, and for years after, we keep finding things that break, don't work, explode suddenly... it just goes on for years. We got sold a lemon... a lemon of a nervous system and limbic brain... Visitors to the house, like our prefrontal cortex see very little, but we know, when the lights go out at night, and things start going wonky, we know, that f*ing clown was one sadistic sob...

I got an email from a narcissist yesterday. They demanded to know what I meant by "X". I read the email and felt the clench in my stomach, the twist in my gut, the shame-jolt through my heart. I reread the email, then reread what I had originally written... I never wrote "X"... For a good fifteen minutes, my brain did a somersault... I "tried" to figure it out...I tried again. I got scared. I felt their anger towards me. I began responding, writing, thinking of a way to explain to them that they got it wrong, that it made no sense, that they'd made a mistake. I began explaining the mistake, searching to express how I could be understood. Then I stopped. I realized I could not do anything. The feeling I felt inside was horrible. This sick person had just jabbed a pen into my wound of 57 years. Bloody heck... I deleted my email... I shut my computer... I walked away... But the feeling of "wrong" and "responsible" and "you're in trouble" stayed right with me... I still feel it now.

That "thing" is punched into my nervous system like a cannonball punches into the side of a ship...

PapaCoco, YOUR family was a forty-gun ship of the line, and they had but one target... But lord almighty, you are one tough son-of-a-gun... You're still afloat! How many broadsides did you take? That beautiful little innocent trusting boy, looking around, wondering... they tried to kill you, but you're still here, standing, weeping perhaps, but tears more justified I have rarely seen. I say, "Go ahead, slink around your house feeling however you want to feel. Hide, cry, rage, suffer... none of that comes from you, even if it's as deep as it goes... it's still not the "real you". The real you is on either side, before the torture began, and now that the torture is long done. That is the real you. And you know this is going to pass faster then in the past, faster than it ever has, because you have done the work, pushed forward, opened to the love. You're firing salvos yourself now, but they are bombs of love that explode like fireworks in that dark night sky. And by their light, we see a thousand other little ships out there alongside you, floating on the soft swell, all your friends who know and love you. We're watching your magic, PapaCoco, it's so beautiful. Thank you, thank you for letting us be part of YOU...

Thankyou HannahOne! That was absolutely lovely. Frank is now a rockstar thanks to you.