Being raised without stability really fucks with your head, you’re forever trying to figure out a person’s “pattern“ to see how you have to approach them, whether they’re in a good mood and it’s safe, or if they’re in a bad mood and you have to be careful or maybe avoid them altogether, just because those who raised you could never keep a consistent emotional reaction

All about EMDR! A lot of people have been asking me how it works, so I made a silly little comic doodle on Illustrator (just with my mouse, sorry it’s sloppy) about my experiences with it. *I am by no means a doctor, so please do some research on your own before making any decisions to do EMDR!*

I’ve also seen a lot of videos on Youtube of “DIY EMDR,” I would VERY STRONGLY recommend NOT using those. EMDR opens your emotional brain up so fully that it’s very overwhelming, and having a trained professional there to assist you is invaluable.

griefonlosingsomeone:

“Traumatic events, by definition, overwhelm our ability to cope. When the mind becomes flooded with emotion, a circuit breaker is thrown that allows us to survive the experience fairly intact, that is, without becoming psychotic or frying out one of the brain centers. The cost of this blown circuit is emotion frozen within the body. In other words, we often unconsciously stop feeling our trauma partway into it, like a movie that is still going after the sound has been turned off. We cannot heal until we move fully through that trauma, including all the feelings of the event.”

—

Susan Pease Banitt, The Trauma Tool Kit: Healing PTSD from the Inside Out

Sometimes, you think you’re doing well for a while and then it just hits you. Maybe it’s because you’re too overwhelmed to feel anything. But you have to feel it eventually.

(via survivingsiblingsuicide)

PTSD/C-PTSD Thought

kelpforestdweller:

actuallycptsd:

wildcascadian:

If you need to relocate, move or leave where you’re residing, don’t feel ashamed by it. Sometimes places or locations have such negative attachments from whatever happened that you get physically ill just from being there.

There may be people who will tell you that you’re “running away”, “avoiding the problem”, or trying to “escape everything”. Don’t listen to them. Your mental health matters. You have the right to heal.

I just moved across the country to get away from my abuser. My last therapist told me that I was only running away from my issues and it would do nothing to help me get better.

For the fist time in 5 years I can leave the house without fear of my abuser stalking me or of him showing up at my job to harass me. This is a very real thing to do that can and does do wonders to help your mental health. It’s is by no means a permanent solution, but it can make life so much easier.

i moved to a new country. they told me not to. best decision i’ve ever made.

if you have something to run from, it’s ok to run.

it only becomes a problem when you are trying to run from yourself, because wherever you go there you are.

Complex PTSD typically includes an attachment disorder, which arises from the childhood experience of not having at least one caretaker safe enough to go to for comfort or help.When the developing child lacks a supportive parental refuge, she never learns that interrelating can soothe and metabolize confusions, conflicts and hurts. She also never learns that real intimacy grows out of sharing all of one’s experience – the good and the bad, the happy and the sad, the loving and the mad. To the degree we are vulnerable and authentic in relationship, to that degree do we experience the incomparable healing power of intimacy.

However, to the degree that our caretakers attack, shame or abandon us for showing vulnerability, to that degree do we later avoid the authentic self-expression fundamental to intimacy. Inclinations to verbalize feelings, ask for help or reveal one’s struggles are short-circuited by subliminal memories of being scorned or attacked for daring to seek our parents’ support. Even worse, retaliation fantasies can plague us for hours and days on the occasions we do show our vulnerabilities.

pete walker, “shrinking the outer critic in complex ptsd” (via complexptsd)

Source: fightyour–demons

Some effects of dissociation

dissociationdays:

– gaps in your memory

– finding yourself in a strange place without knowing how you got there

– out-of-body experiences

– loss of feeling in parts of your body

– distorted views of your body

– forgetting important personal information

– being unable to recognise your image in a mirror

– a sense of detachment from your emotions

– the impression of watching a movie of yourself

– feelings of being unreal

– internal voices and dialogue

– feeling detached from the world

– forgetting appointments

– feeling that a customary environment is unfamiliar

– a sense that what is happening is unreal

– forgetting a talent or learned skill

– a sense that people you know are strangers

– a perception of objects changing shape, colour or size

– feeling you don’t know who you are
acting like different people, including child-like behaviour

-being unsure of the boundaries between yourself and others

– feeling like a stranger to yourself

– being confused about your sexuality or gender

– feeling like there are different people inside you

– referring to yourself as ‘we’

– being told by others that you have behaved out of character

– finding items in your possession that you don’t remember buying or receiving

– writing in different handwriting

Types of dissociation

dissociationdays:

1. Amnesia – this is when you can’t remember incidents or experiences that happened at a particular time, or when you can’t remember personal information.

2. Depersonalisation – a feeling that your body is unreal, changing or dissolving. It also involves out of body experiences, such as seeing yourself as if watching a movie or floating above.

3. Derealisation – the world around you seems unreal. You may see objects changing in shape, size or colour, or you may feel that other people are robots or generally unreal.

4. Identity confusion – feeling uncertain about who you are. You may feel as if there is a struggle within to define yourself.

5. Identity alteration – this is when there is a shift in your role or identity that changes your behaviour in ways that others would notice.

The Center for Treatment of Anxiety and Mood Disorders – Complex PTSD

drafts-to-post:

PTSD can occur after experiencing even just one threatening situation, such as being involved in a car accident. But, what about those who have gone through long-term exposure to a continuing, intense level of stress?

Recently, mental health experts have begun to realize there are more layers to the emotional suffering experienced by people who have been through long-lasting stressors like childhood sexual abuse, for example, or years of domestic violence. In cases like these, a PTSD diagnosis partly addresses their condition, but doesn’t adequately define the severe psychological harm that has resulted from the trauma. Therefore, some mental health professionals now believe there should be a new category added to the PTSD diagnosis – one that will encompass this emotional scarring from long-term, chronic trauma: Complex PTSD (C-PTSD).

Even with this new classification, it is important to note that the victims of chronic trauma can have both PTSD and Complex PTSD simultaneously.

The Center for Treatment of Anxiety and Mood Disorders – Complex PTSD

12 Life Impacting Symptoms – Complex PTSD Survivors Can Endure

drafts-to-post:

Complex trauma is still a relatively new field of psychology. Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, results from enduring complex trauma.

Complex trauma is ongoing or repeated interpersonal trauma, where the victim is traumatised in captivity, and where there is no perceived way to escape. Ongoing child abuse, is captivity abuse, because the child cannot escape. Domestic violence, is another example. Enforced prostitution/sex trafficking is another.

Complex PTSD is a proposed disorder, which is different to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Many of the issues and symptoms endured by complex trauma survivors, are outside of the list of symptoms within the (Uncomplicated) PTSD diagnostic criterion. Complex PTSD does acknowledge and validate these added symptoms.

12 Life Impacting Symptoms – Complex PTSD Survivors Can Endure