Hi everyone

[bluejayway]

Hello,

I'm new here and new to sharing on forums in general. I have been reading some of the posts and am feeling quite emotional. I've known that I have CPTSD cognitively for years now, but I am only coming to terms with it emotionally and somatically in the last year.

Last year was very intense for me after receiving a late diagnosis of Audhd at the age of 32 while I was travelling around India for a year. I am working through the denial and relief, loss and joy diagnosis brings. Recently, I did safeguarding training for a youth mentoring role, and it triggered a trauma response, which has taken me 70 days to reach a firm footing in myself again. I have been having anxious, scary thoughts that originate from transferred shame from childhood abuse and neglect. Also, I think from repressed body memories.

For months, my identity has been clouded. It feels like the fog that surrounded me growing up. The kind that has kept me in transactional friendships, that I took for real and meaningful. I wish to break from these cycles. I'm here to find meaningful connections, to express myself authentically, and to learn to live with CPTSD and feel what reciprocity is like.

Thanks to therapy, art, music, poetry, nature, and animals, I feel stronger.

It has taken a long time to build up the strength to find this place and share something. It means a lot to me to be here.

[NarcKiddo]

I'm glad you found us, and that you have had the courage to make your first post. I know how tough that is, so very well done.

[Kizzie]

Hi and a warm welcome to Out of the Storm BlueJayWay    And well done you for the recovery work you've been doing! I hope being here will help you get further along. 

[Blueberry]

Welcome to the forum, bluejayway! Sorry you need us, but glad you found us.

It's good to hear you have therapy, art, music, poetry, nature and animals! Those are all good strengths to have onside while healing. If you're like me, you maybe had to work at getting those strengths on board? If so, good job on that.

I hope to see you more around the forum when you feel able to share more.

[bluejayway]

Thanks for the warm welcome everyone. 
It was definitely a struggle Blueberry. I can see now that a lot of things I did for  regulation, like singing and music, became about external validation. Now I'm trying to practice art, song not as a performance but to orient to feeling and joy.
How was it for you to get your strengths back on board?

[Teddy bear]

Hi BlueJayWay,

Welcome here! 👋 Hope you'll like it.

I'm a recent member too. I also enjoy animals, travelling, nature, and art therapy — among other things.

I find practising painting or drawing very therapeutic, as a means of self-expression. I also try not to seek external validation for it.

🤝

[Blueberry]

How was it for you to get your strengths back on board?

Actually not anything like external validation or at least that's not how I would term it. I was severely blocked from doing anything creative or artistic or musical. The way I was treated in FOO as a child, teen, young adult meant I suppressed most impulses in that direction and the few I retained I could only do under extreme nervous tension and feeling very vulnerable, in the basic sense of the word ('able to be wounded' / 'ripe for wounding thru others'), it was really visceral. I think it was getting them on board at all rather than back on board.