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From my own personal experience, gaming can evolve into a very effective dissociative activity, helping escape for hours to whole days. We definitely are all allowed our escapes, but that level of dissociation (As I believe not all levels of dissociation are harmful) is debilitating on its own and can negatively impact a person's life, I've noticed. I've done it and I've watched friends go through it, too.

There are some great ideas about the benefits of gaming since they can help to encourage interpersonal relationships and teamwork environments. They obviously also inspire creativity in many people, which I think is a huge bonus as that, in turn, makes people want to create themselves. What awesome coping mechanisms.

But as I've hypothesized before, the biggest challenge is moderation. We gotta make sure we create boundaries and be mindful of when gaming goes from a healthy escape to just another challenge we have to overcome.

Other than that, I loooove gaming and I've been trying to get my boyfriend to play The Last Guardian. That is one game that really inspires so many feelings of compassion, patience, and love because of the amazing companionship between the boy and Trico. Such a beautiful game. Makes me cry at the end, haha.

I completely agree.

That sounds like a brave thing to do to me too Blueberry. We can all be less than nice at times, or even down right horrible, I think. Dealing with those times productively/healthy and not by shaming ourselves when those times happen seems very important. It's not a worse or better part of the equation than the inner critic I guess, seeing as either side of the coin views people as worthy of shameless attacks. Only difference is who the attack gets directed at, ourselves or other people. It's funny now I think about it (not ha-ha funny), since by feeling less ashamed about the inner critic I guess that means I think I deserve to be treated in ways that I wouldn't want treat others.

Definitely need to focus on positives today, struggling a little and the inner critic is active.

1) I am actually achieving my dream job - okay I'm not hired, I haven't even completed my training and it'll take years of work to gain and develop all the skills, but I am actually doing what I wanted to do!!

2) I worked on not allowing an unpleasant Narc's comments, that were intended to undermind me, get to me.

3) I have one decent relationship with a close member of FOO who cares about me, and I'm thankful for our relationship.

I love games, but I wasn't allowed to get into gaming beyond PC games so much of that world is very new and exciting for me. I love learning about things, so even though I still haven't played most of the games people talk about, I'd love to get the chance to! I find their worlds and stories very interesting, although plenty of games seem like a bad idea for someone with CPTSD - at least they do for me. My body and reactions seem to struggle to distinguish between a pretend threat and a real one, so things I'd love to play are in many cases too stressful. I'd love to heal this.

Yes, I find eye contact hard. Sometimes it's pretty easy, but over the last seven or so months I've had an increasing number of periods when I can't even look someone else in the eye without feeling a kind of 'blurry' horrible discomfit or pain-like feeling in my mind. It's horrible. Not sure what's triggering it now.

When I'm not like this I struggle with knowing whether or not I'm making too much eye contact, if I'm staring, how many times I need to blink to look normal. But even then the eye contact itself isn't painful.

I recognised that I was being pushed around by my Flight side, and in danger of getting into an unhealthy Flight rut.

I've successfully escaped a short-term but damaging abusive relationship! That wasn't today, but I keep feeling grateful and happy for it, and reminding myself that I did good when the inner critic tries to echo all of the abuser's words.

I'm home and can relax and eat dinner.

He yelled at me a lot. He knew I was sensitive to loud noises (another autistic trait) but he did it anyway. Then he would yell at me for crying, which made me cry harder.

I love my dad, but that's not acceptable behavior. It's also not acceptable for him to say he never did that when I call him out on it.

Hello and welcome, Caita.   

I agree with what Blueberry and Kizzie have already said, it's definitely not acceptable behavior - it's abuse. It wouldn't be acceptable to do that to an adult, and it's even less acceptable to do that to a child.  I'm sorry you had to grow up with such explosively frightening and aggressive behavior.  Being scared and attacked by an adult as a kid is such a painful thing to go through.

I don't know the ins and outs of your relationship with your F, but denying that it ever happened once he's called out on it was something my abusive NPD father would do, so that rings an alarm bell for me.

This isn't stupid at all, and neither are you. You are expressing perfectly valid, healthy concerns that relate to harm that you should never have had to suffer. You're trying to look after yourself and understand your life and what sounds like an important relationship that means a lot to you but also involves abuse.  I lived in great pain, confusion, doubt and denial (he was my hero once) for many years about my NPD-F , and making sense of my relationship with him made sense of my life for the first time - it freed me from the confusion, and the trap of an utterly toxic person who never regretted anything they did.  Your F may not have a PD, but what he's done has hurt you. Trying to take care of yourself is noble - never stupid.


I wish you all the best in this.

Welcome back.  Congrats on getting back in contact with your child parts and being able to have that realisation about looking after them!

Hello Ruby, and welcome. 

My parents are loving but overprotective and controlling and their involvement with a fundamentalist Christian cult through about half of my childhood only made things worse.

I can relate. My family were involved in a Christian cult-like environment for almost as long as I could remember as a child, and the cult-like aspects in our lives continued even after we left that group.  I had one well-intentioned but somewhat controlling and overprotective parent, and one sadistic, controlling and overbearing parent (no good intentions at all).

The damage from spiritual abuse in particular seems to be a tricky beast to tackle at times.

You're very welcome! Both for the welcome and the book suggestion. Pete's books are talked about a lot on here. As a therapist with CPTSD himself, he's spent many years helping other survivors, and has a lot of insight. He's actually got a new guest blog post up on the Out of The Storm blog now, talking about some of his top 10 Practices for Navigating CPTSD.

That sounds like a very disheartening environment in the long run. As you say, we all need to have positive recognition. And not so positive (but non-abusive) recognition, too. Either one alone isn't much good.

I look forward to hearing from you as you travel along your road, too.  Like Gromit mentioned, I think it's great that you've reached this point early on in life, although I think from my own experience that no age feels 'soon enough' to learn about CPTSD (I'm a similar age and found out a bit younger than you did). It can be pretty exciting to discover you're not alone in the world anymore and your issues actually make sense!

Hello Gromit.  It's sounds very brave of you to have agreed to give an interview, I wish you all the best with it.

Regarding the NHS, to me they seem to have very little in the way of meaningful support when it comes to mental health (certainly when it comes to CPTSD).  Seems more about fixing people up with plasters and getting them out of the door.  Slim put it very well.

I'm off to see my psych tomorrow.

I just hope I can get pushed out the door in half an hour without meds, the last meds were damaging, although I wasn't keen on the idea I got convinced to take them.

He has literally nothing in his bag of tricks that can help me, I know this but its hard to resist an offer of help even if its next to impossible that it will work out.

Rainagain, that's the tricky bind of it all, isn't it? Needing/wanting help but the only thing the official lines of support can offer are things that aren't really helpful.  Although a supportive GP with no solutions is better than a dismissive one.

 

Thanks for reminder on taking care of myself. I was a little better at that today, or well yesterday, since middle of night here. Yes, there's "room for feeling a lot of stress" though I could turn my back on that "room" I suppose.

That's good to hear, Blueberry. 

The 'talk to someone' thing gets me. Like people don't understand how difficult it is, or that talking may not necessarily help (edit: because talking isn't always the thing needed in a moment of internal difficulty, and if it is needed than the other person needs to be a good person to talk to) - it isn't some kind of wonder pill and it's a lot harder to do than posting something on social media reminding people to somehow have awareness of those around them who are struggling but not telling anyone.

I appear to have gone off on one here, I think its something that annoys me.....!

I think I have some annoyance at it, too. I see people I am acquainted with in real life posting these sorts of things on social media, and I can't tell if it's for the benefit of the struggling or the oblivious.  The fact that none of them know what I'm dealing with every day and wouldn't be able help if I did talk about it somehow makes it a bit aggravating. Like they think the struggling are perhaps far away from them.

I think I might be being unfairly harsh, they seem to be decent people, but yes this is something I can get a bit irritated at.

On a different note, James that is far worse than simply seeing something annoying - scream if you need to! People who actively couldn't care less about you when you're in need but then loudly broadcast to all and sundry that they care 'oh so much' about people just like you make me go 'grrr'.

  Hello dur, and welcome.  I'm glad you met a counselor who could point you in the right direction.

I must confess not being from a very Italian part of the world that I don't know what an old school Italian family looks like, but from what you described I'm guessing such families are harsh.

I am just now coming to the terms with the fact that I am extremely emotionally stunted because I have had friends and relationships, and I have not been able to connect on an emotional level like a lot of other people my age do.

I struggle with emotionally connecting with people too - I can form strong emotional connections very quickly because of the attachment issues my parents left me with, but the connections are shallow and disappear almost as fast, leaving me feeling indifferent, almost bored, overwhelmed, and/or disliking the person.  I used to worry sometimes that it meant I disliked people in general, but I think it's that I'm not in a place to build healthy connections that are authentic to who I am. My attachment disorder is running the show and until I get that sorted I'm not going to be able to become genuinely close to anyone.

If you haven't already come across it, Pete Walker's book 'Complex PTSD: From Surviving To Thriving' and his guest blogposts on the Out of The Storm blog are some of the best resources available on CPTSD.

I'm glad to hear you managed it - hopefully it there will be some sort of positive resolution from it.