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Hi Perditrix06, aka smart alec  welcome

I have cptsd from childhood like you do, and I became an EMT too. I've met quite a few people who had difficult childhoods and ended up working at jobs where the constant danger was good for them.
I'm so sorry you lost your vision and had to stop working. It must have been extremely rough for you.
I have a physical disability and being severely ill or disabled in any way can be a cause of cptsd, too. For me I noticed my current physical illness makes my cptsd symptoms worse. I bet you've been in pain.

You're not alone, and I'm glad you're here.

Hi Kalmer,

I wonder, are you looking for books for yourself or for someone else?

I can only speak for myself but I wonder because as far as I'm aware, and based on what I've learned and experienced first hand, cptsd is most certainly not a personality disorder. They're different on so many levels. Cptsd is a different can of worms so methods developed for personality disorders may not be as helpful in treating cptsd symptoms.
Maybe.

Just in case you haven't seen it already, here's an interesting thread about CPTSD vs. BPD:
http://cptsd.org/forum/index.php?topic=3725.0

I Foxbrown,

I agree with everything Otillie said so accurately.
I have cptsd and misophonia too. I've always assumed they're related. Growing up into abuse I developed very sensitive hearing in order to try to survive, I guess I needed to try to anticipate danger and be chronically hypervigilant.
Sometimes the most insignificant little sound can leave me feeling terrified or angry.
It can be very painful. Neighbor noises are hard for me too, they do ordinary things without giving them a second's thought but to me their movements sound like violence, I jump and get very scared over and over again. Repetitive noises can be tiringly hard too. And the worst are abusers's sounds.

You're not alone.

Hi LittleBoat,

Sounds incredibly difficult, I'm so sorry.

I wonder whether the anti-psychotics might have anything to do with it. I'm no therapist / doctor / anything really but if it were happening to me I think I'd rule that out next as a cause or at least as a contributing factor. From what I've been able to read about anti-psychotics, they're definitely known to cause this type of side effect. They're notorious for it.

As for dissociation in general, for me it's what I do to get distanced from myself and my emotions. I space out, fail to hear things being said 'etc. when it happens. It's always related strongly to stress. Have you been very stressed lately? More than before? Did something happen (except the obvious stress of what you're going through mentally) to make it worse?

As for your memory feeling like it's disjointed experiences pasted together with gaps and no coherent narrative, I'm like you. I think that may be a symptom of cptsd. It's part of dissociation for me, for sure. I seem to have very odd memory. "Swiss cheese" would be an extreme understatement to say how weird my memory can be. And like you there's no coherent 'me' running the show. If you're in a lot of pain, it makes sense. 

You're not alone.

Hi Safetyinnumbers,

I can't cry either. I never could.

I think maybe there are two types of crying: one that's related to pain and the other that happens when you're touched or inspired by something. I've never been able to cry in pain but I can easily cry if I read about something kind or altruistic or, or brave. Or about someone's pain, or if something moves me aesthetically.
This second type of crying has always reminded me my heart is still there but I can't cry in pain. Probably because I grew up in a very sick sadistic household so I don't show emotional vulnerability.

I know crying clears out toxins from your body and relaxes you, but it's all theoretical and alien to me. I never felt safe enough to cry.
I used to think about learning to cry back when I was told it was necessary, but I stopped. I won't learn to cry anymore.
I'm sure with good empathic therapy it's more than possible to learn it, I don't know if it's a must in order to recover and feel better and better but I'm sure it's possible.

You're not alone.

Hi Whatno 

I had the same reaction as you the first time I read about the fight, flight, freeze and fawn responses. The fawn one caught me by surprise and had such a deep impact on me.

These are just my subjective personal thoughts. Feel free to ignore if they don't help:

I totally agree with you... you may have a questionable therapist. 

I wonder, is she young?
I think she acted unethically and unprofessionally. She sounds trauma clueless and emotionally immature.
Also, it sounds like her method is pretty psychodynamic from what you mentioned. It may not be the best approach for cptsd. Or even for ptsd for that matter.

Everyone gets hurt at times, but not during a session when it's her job to put her own needs aside and focus on your own. You weren't there as a friend. It wasn't a two-way discussion where each side was fulfilling their emotional needs. She was supposed to be there for you.
No wonder you felt triggered. None of what she said and did sounds even remotely okay to me. Not at all. 

From your side, I agree it sounds like you were having an emotional flashback. And yes, if you're traumatized that will have left you more vulnerable than other patients to this sort of thing. If I were you I'd be very triggered too... I'd probably freeze and not say another word for the remainder of the session. 
But that doesn't absolve her of responsibility. On the contrary, she should be more cautious and kind to you. She should know better.

If you talk to her about it again, she may not acknowledge there was a problem and feel she has to justify her behavior to you and explain all over again why she was right and you have a problem. She may get into another confrontation with you to explain herself.
All of which would be understandable if you were friends meeting for drinks to talk something over, but not as your therapist.

You don't have to explain if you don't want to. You don't owe her an explanation. She doesn't have to understand or to agree with you for you to have every right to feel what you're feeling and to stand your ground. That's not a symptom of ptsd, that's just you being a person. You're allowed to disagree with others and you did nothing wrong.

I don't know her but maybe you could write her a letter? Thanking her from the bottom of your heart for everything that she's given you, and telling her you've decided to move on and look for trauma based therapy at this time. Or something.

Moving on doesn't cancel all the good that she's done, but she isn't knowledgeable enough or mature enough. You deserve better.
I hope you can find a wiser, more mature, emotionally able and far more trauma informed therapist soon.
There are different techniques you can try which may suit you much more. Some were developed specifically to help people who are traumatized. And many books and resources to learn what's going on with you, and to experiment with things that may help.

I'm glad you're here.

Mourningme,

If my experience doesn't help, feel free to totally ignore it. It's completely subjective:

I don't know if your parents are anything like my M, but in her case she let me be abused and eventually became extremely, atrociously abusive herself even though it's not in her character to be abusive at all. She was deep, deep... deep... in denial. She was being abused herself and had no self awareness or courage.

She's grown since but she still denies far more than she acknowledges. She denied her own abuse her whole life and then mine and my siblings'. She lives in an imaginary world in her own head. I guess it's a very powerful defense mechanism. I envy her that ability to just forget, I wish I could do it.
But I also know for a fact that her denial doesn't offer her much solace. She still has all the symptoms of cptsd herself.

I did talk to her about the past but I didn't ask her questions, because I could see she understood our shared history even less than I did. She could never tell me why. She didn't understand herself so she had no chance of explaining her own actions to me. So instead I told her a little bit of what I remembered and knew. What she had done, what she hadn't done and should have done. I was quiet and I didn't budge. I told her she was welcome to her "view" of things. I told her I had no problem with the discrepancies in our memories because I understood how denial and repression worked, but I wouldn't play along anymore.
When she said something that was imaginary I said so. I said "No, that's not it" and corrected it calmly and moved on. No discussion. No argument. I'm not going to argue that blue is blue.

I guess she really seemed pathetically sad to me. I did ask her a few "why" questions about concrete things. About specific events to jog her memory a bit. I asked her why she thought social services investigated us re. child abuse allegations when I was a teenager. She remembered it happening, but said "Yeah... I didn't understand why." she brutalized and traumatized me but she wasn't my enemy. She was a deeply broken person with no backbone. I despise her behavior, it was cowardly and deplorable. But I feel pity for her pain.

And I'm so grateful and proud of you for knowing deeply you would never let your daughter be hurt. I wish my M did the same.

My F denies too, but I think his denial is an offense mechanism because he's Lucifer. So do my current abusers. Trying to talk openly to any of them would be dangerous so I never talked to them. Never asked them any questions.
So I guess in my case it was a quiet thing... I phased out. I didn't confront anybody because my abusers were either too dangerous or too blind. Either way, they don't have any answers to offer me. They're even crazier than I am I'm on my own.

I don't know your parents, but I hope you won't get hurt if they can't / won't reciprocate.

And if talking openly is frightening but you think it will be fruitful and beneficial, you have every right to be scared.
But if it's scary because past experience tells you it may not do much good and might escalate without resolution, then it may not be necessary.
I think there's more than one way to stand firm and say what you know to be true. You can write, you can test the waters before you talk openly.
You have every right to do this on your own terms. I guess there may be many, many right ways to do this. My way was silence and it was better than talking.

I agree, it takes so much courage to be where you're at right now.

Phoebes,

I can only talk about myself, I care a lot too. I think it's because I grew up so scared of others' projections of me. The slightest attention from others was dangerous, let alone their moods or hits at criticism. It's why I'd freeze too if I were in your shoes.
And I agree with Libby, you're a good person who cares.

As for what that guy was doing? My ignorant uninformed guess is he's a narcissist or worse and he had a little fun pushing your buttons. He was out hunting.

Good for you for noticing you were triggered and then quietly leaving. If I were you I'd be disappointed in myself. I'd wish I didn't freeze. Didn't sit down with them. Didn't "let" him push all those buttons. But you didn't do any of this. You were baited. The fact that he managed to push so accurately and quickly tells me he's someone with a PD. He probably picked you because he's a bad guy and he was bored or something. I think the fact that you noticed you were being triggered and didn't show him your emotions may in itself be a huge step forward. It's the anti trauma bond, that.

* people are out there everywhere, sadly... I think you acted well. You did the best you could. No wonder you were triggered, you must have felt trapped. Yikes! I can imagine.
These small daily experiences can be so hard because they reinforce the belief that we can't do it. But sounds to me like you met an * and handled it really well.

Guess my needs are beyond their well-intended but meaningless formula.

I couldn't agree more.

I've been thinking about forgiveness too for a long time and struggling with it. I guess I eventually gave it up as an empty word, meaningless white noise. I can look up the word in dictionaries but it doesn't mean anything to me. It's just a label. But it may just be me.

Maybe forgiveness is useful for small to medium sized experiences, the sort of ordinary day to day things that are annoying but not that dangerous. It has its limits, though. Big traumas are far beyond the scope of this theory of "forgiving". It tries to flatten them to fit it but it just doesn't work.

I don't forgive my past or current abusers. It's not that I refuse to forgive them because I "hold a grudge" because I guess that's victim blaming. I don't forgive them because paradoxically maybe, forgiveness seems totally unnecessary to me. It's too small, too narrow. It assumes that other people's behavior revolves around me, but some life experiences are too big. They're beyond forgiveness so I let go of forgiveness.

But it's all so hard to discuss. It seems almost a taboo, like social sacrilege to question forgiveness nowadays
And there's an odd ethical pressure added to it, as though doing it makes you a good person whereas not doing it makes you less than. Forgive and you'll recover! Well, that feels more like shame to me. It's cold and unforgiving toward people who are in pain.

And logically  
If my abuser is a bad person who hurts me over and over, what's the use in forgiving them? Let's say I forgive them but the next day they'll hurt me again because it's their habit. I'll still end up with continual harm, and I'd need to keep forgiving non-stop. There would never be an end to it. My forgiving wouldn't change their behavior, or take away my pain.

If they're not bad, then making huge mistakes and being dumb is a big part of the human experience. It's what we're all made of.
I care about some of the people who hurt me, the ones who are hurt but not evil. I see no contradiction between these two things, non-forgiveness and caring. I can feel both at the same time. I can even end up with NC with them because I care.

Actually, I wouldn't want to forgive the really big things.
I think forgiveness can be dangerous if it tries to normalize the abnormal. I know I stayed in abusive relationships far too often in my life because I believed I was supposed to be forgiving. But violence and abuse, they're immoral. They don't just cause me pain. The same actions would cause cptsd in anyone who would have to experience them. I think people are complex enough to feel pain and also care simultaneously. I know I am. There's no need to deny pain to feel other things alongside it. It's maybe bigger than forgiveness and more nuanced.

Besides, trauma is real. So is violence. I would ideally want them both to never, ever be normal. We need to be able to say "This is not normal, so normal theories don't apply here either. Extreme measures needed. This is the twilight zone."

Maybe?

I Would Never, Ever Go Back.

I know we should not give advice but words can't do justice to how atrocious what you have described is.

I'm sorry.

I couldn't agree more.

What you describe sounds like a combination of unethical cluelessness, insensitivity, and ignorant "feel good" shallow advice that can do harm. Everything she said and did has nothing to do with trauma related pain, and is... well, I agree wholeheartedly with Radical.

No wonder you were triggered by it, I think I definitely would be too.
I wouldn't talk to her again in person. I think you don't have to give her a reason, you don't need to explain, to be agreed with or to engage any further except to politely say you'll be cancelling. If it isn't for you, you have every right to decide that and look elsewhere.

Also, personally I find books on trauma and the brain useful too. One book I personally keep returning to is "The body keeps the score" by Bessel van der Kolk as well as "Complex PTSD, from surviving to thriving" by Pete Walker.
Some resources aren't helpful and not all points of view make sense to me. But some do. There are a lot of resources on trauma and the brain nowadays, and I find some of them can be therapeutic in their own right. Gaining knowledge about what's happening to you can be empowering. A way to become your own therapist while you keep looking for a good trauma therapist who can help you do all that.

You have every right to have painful emotions. You went through painful experiences... and to gradually make sense of them. This is serious stuff, you deserve better.
You deserve a better therapist and more empathy, kindness and love and respect for the pain you're going through.

I too think you're looking at this the right way.

I talked to two people in lots of pain lately, they were as different as could be from one another but they were both suffering. I noticed for a moment, they each had the exact same expression on their face: completely open and visible, like they forgot their guard. Like they were being seen and for a second they let go.

It was gone in a split second but I thought: Oh No, this must be what abusers see in others.

On me it had a sobering effect. It made me doubly cautious and gentler, but I guess an abuser would see it as a prize as a golden opportunity.
It sort of helped me understand that odd fire I can see in sadists' eyes just before they attack. We may not be aware of these moments, but they are. Maybe.

I used to think losing hope and losing faith in people would be crushing, that nothing would lie beyond it. I'd be like a dead scorched desert. But some terrible things have happened to me in the past few months that were worse than previous experiences, and I gave up.

I'm not well to put it mildly, but I survived. It's not a good thing to survive this sort of thing I guess, but my opinion wasn't required. And it doesn't matter. It wasn't earth shattering for me personally either, it was banal. I guess I realized I was naive and eventually stopped wishing, hoping, dreaming, fantasizing, asking, imagining.

It strengthened a sort of split in me, where there's a part of me that responds the second it recognizes someone else's pain, that cares deeply about others' pain. But that's where it ends.

I guess I'm not sure I think much of it, which is ironically the point too. So I don't see any point in trying hard to change my emotions. But I wanted to ask what others thought.
(It's the old split again... I don't see why my situation matters, but I see why yours does, and why your thoughts do.)

I agree with everything said above.

This happens to me too, often it's when I feel trapped. When I can't flee or fight.
It's a mechanism I've developed as a child. I would be present but at the same time I would not be present, so I wouldn't be that hurt by what was going on which I couldn't control or stop. It also gets stronger when I'm especially worn out. Sounds like you had very good reasons to feel that way 

You deserve to be treated kindly, with respect and love.

It happens to me too when I'm very stressed. It's a pretty reliable indicator that tells me I'm overexerted emotionally and I should wind down and look for ways to help myself recuperate a little bit. When my stress levels are very high I get exhausted and this easily happens.

It may be because of a person that triggered me, maybe something innocuous said in a conversation or something unkind that was said. Or just eye contact, that can do it too. Or an experience or something that I saw or heard... also being in EF's can definitely do it when I'm on my own. And exhaustion and dealing with hardships, those will do it for sure.

I'm so sorry it was a horrendous day  how are you doing now?

Hi Safetyinnumbers,

I don't know what your nightmares are like, I only know my own. For me, nightmares are one of the worst aspects of cptsd. They really are so awful. And there's no way to avoid them.

I've noticed though that when I'm able to do mindfulness meditation before going to sleep, the nightmares tend to be milder. So there may definitely be things that may help somewhat.

Still, I always have them no matter what I do. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but they never go away. Every night is frightening. Sometimes they're every night, sometimes every time I doze off, sometimes they're about long forgotten things (or so I thought). My guess is my nightmares are to a large extent a physiological symptom, it's something that's out of my hands.
What you said makes a lot of sense to me, but I'm not sure I could suppress mine even if I tried. They come and go as they please and I sort of tolerate them.

Stress definitely makes them more frequent for me too.
And I had very vivid nightmares as a child, too. Also as an adult, now that I think of it. Maybe it has something to do with stress hormones. After all, when we're wide awake stress hormones make us more acutely aware of minute details in our surroundings so it may do something similar during sleep, too.

My guess is I was so filled with guilt and confusion when I was small that my mind tried and failed to make sense of what I was going through. It tried to dream scenarios and explanations for inexplicable, unexplainable pain. It tried making sense of things that just didn't make sense, and got stuck. Dreams are really good at siphoning through ordinary waking experiences but I guess they're out of their depth when it comes to trauma.

Maybe.