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I'm really pleased for you.  What a wonderfully empowering outcome!

I was targeted by a bully at work a few years ago.  His behaviour triggered me constantly and in an attempt to make it stop, I spoke to his manager.  She completely mismanaged the whole affair and made it 10 times worse and I ended up having a serious breakdown.  I wasn't able to return to work properly for two years.  I made the decision that I loved my job and I wasn't going to let my CPTSD or him push me out of it.  Fortunately, he was moved to another office.  I don't know if he was still there if I really could have returned.  He had visited my office a couple of times and the first time, I literally legged it and hid in the bushes in the garden!  The second time I stayed at my desk but had a total dissociative episode.  I would love to walk up to him and tell him what an a**ehole he really is but I just can't.

There is nothing worse than someone with authority picking you out as a target.  It is the quickest and easiest way to make a person with CPTSD feel like they did as a child, with all of its unsafe connotations.  His manager told me that as I was articulate and intelligent, I should be able to manage my manager.  But when I have been reduced to my 10 year old self, I am neither intelligent nor articulate and its not actually my job to manage him, it was hers.  You have my deepest sympathy C.  Workplace bullying can be very traumatic and particularly so if you have a traumatic history.

Unfortunately my experience reinforced my already deeply ingrained belief that you can't trust anybody, which I recognise is not helpful to my recovery.  Sometimes we need to stand up to bullys, and sometimes we are not able to.  Only you can know what you can manage right now.  Whatever you decide to do, I hope you hold onto the fact that the problem is all hers and not yours and all that really matters in the end is you and your health.

Probably an EF...but whatever it was went directly to what I have thought/felt since I was a little girl...that I can't be helped.  That I am broken beyond repair.  Looking at it from ALL angles (Intellectually, professionally, emotionally, spiritually, and realistically), this does NOT end well for me.  There is not one scenario that I can play out in my head that has this ending well.   

I have felt exactly like this.  Those are almost exactly the words I used to describe how I felt at the time.  It is so comforting to hear others mirroring my own experience. It makes me feel validated, which is really important, because, like everyone else here, I missed out on this as a kid.

I have always struggled when a T has asked me how I was feeling.  I have lied before because they clearly were expecting some response and I didn't want to let them down!  But the truth is I often haven't got a clue.  I am also trying to learn about feeling and the fact that thought and feeling are not the same.  I feel a bit cheated actually because I am getting the impression this "feeling" stuff can be very rewarding and help you decide what you want in life.  It's really hard to learn about this stuff and I find it's as exhausting as if I were breaking stones!  It's really really really slow progress but I might be a tiny bit better at it.  At least, I think I can be honest if I don't know how I'm feeling and I can forgive myself for not knowing, and I really want to feel sometimes.

I don't know if being a freeze type is treatable or not but I want to believe it is.  I want the full experience.  I want to try.  I now understand that what I do and how I react in some circumstances is perfectly normal given my experiences, even if I don't always have a narrative to fully explain what just happened.  I also appear to have found some self compassion, which means I learned something!, and I'm going to try and not beat myself up about reacting differently to other people.  I don't know if it's that self compassion or something else I've learned but I am more likely to notice when I am feeling something (not always sure what, can't name them yet) and try and respond to that by being kinder to myself.

I don't know if I will ever be in a position to trust people fully.  That still sounds like a really scary prospect.  I suspect I will need a lot more face to face therapy with a good T.  I do think that having my experiences validated through reading other members posts on this site will make me more confident in finding a good T.  Some Ts want to tell me what is wrong with me and how it can be fixed.  I now feel I have a much better idea about what is wrong with me and I am more likely to say so.

I try and approach learning about feeling like learning any new skill.  If I bought a violin today, I'm not going to be a virtuoso by the end of the year.  I may never be a virtuoso but I might be able to stop making that awful screeching noise at least lol.  That is a terrible analogy.  Sorry!  Basically, I think what I mean is, I need to work hard and remember I'm a beginner.

Hi Julie

I can relate a lot to what you are experiencing.  I can hear how much you want to make it stop.  The nightmares can really take their toll.  I remember when I was in an extended emotional flashback, they were so bad and so frequent, I didn't want to go to sleep at night.  I stayed up as much as possible playing computer games.  I also have difficulty looking after myself when I am in an EF, I forget meds, food, sleep.  I hope you find what you are looking for on this site and you get a reprieve in your symptoms soon, and I'm glad you're getting some outside help too right now

G

Thank you for your kind comments. I look forward to reading your comments on other topics and getting to know you all more

I think maybe if you don't suffer with mental health problems, it's really difficult to know and show real empathy and therefore offer some meaningful support.  I'm not trying to make excuses for the kind of wounding nonsense those people spout because quite often, they don't want to learn or try and understand what it's really like.  And although it hurts to have someone flippantly dismiss the trauma I often find myself experiencing, occasionally, when my compassionate self is in the house, I like to remember how limited and small those people's worlds must be, that their minds are not open enough to listen to others stories and their imaginations are not wide enough to accommodate experiences they have never known. 

And I'm probably just as guilty of giving a glib response.  I did once respond to someone asking about my welfare with what I thought was a reasoned reply that I had good and bad days.  I figured that summed up the situation at the time without providing more information than was required.  I was told that everybody had those.  What I should have said was "oh really, did you have a nightmare so horrific last night you actually wet the bed?"  But I didn't.  I can never think quickly enough at the time!  So I am also going to try and remember the line used by Schrodinger's cat earlier. 

And I totally agree that fake it till you make it is not appropriate in every situation.  When I first started giving presentations at work, that advice was perfect.  It's totally pants as a value system however or a treatment because I fake my life every day.  Every day I get up and go to work and fake my way through numerous interactions, I come home and fake some more interactions with my family, I watch a bit of TV and might fake a bit of crying at that.  How can I know what I'm feeling when I've become so detached through faking it to know what the * I'm feeling.  But I can tell you what I'm supposed to be feeling if you ask me, because I've learned to fake that.  In fact, for a while, I fake so damn good, I forget I'm faking it and convince myself this is real until yet another "crisis" hits and the fake walls crumble and there's nothing real to grab hold of.  And that's all tooooo real!

G

Hello all

I grew up in a violent household, and was sexually abused by a number of people but specifically repeatedly by my stepfather over a period of five years.  I left home and went straight into a relationship with a violent alcoholic for three years.  I have had what I call "crisis periods" all my life which last between six months and 2 years, interspersed with periods of what I call normality.  My version of normality is not the same as that of my peers.  I regularly have nightmares and sensory flashbacks but I can generally cope with those.  I can't cope very well with the crisis periods, when the nightmares are often continuous and my flashbacks are triggering on super sensitive.  I don't want to sleep because its so horrible and I have wet the bed when I have a really horrid one.  I cannot read my own emotions unless they are overwhelming and usually that's when I am scared or upset.

I don't always see a crisis coming and I don't always recognise immediately that I am in crisis.  The initial period when one side of your head is trying to work out what is happening and the other side is telling you to run us terrifying.  And I do run, sometimes into bushes, which is not only pointless but embarassing and it's impossible to explain to others why I did that (once I've worked it out myself that is), because they will never understand it.

I am really pleased to find this site, I am hoping to speak with others who can help me and who I can help or just find some people who get it.  Thank you for reading my post.