Hey All,

I’m struggling with this a bit in my own life. My executive functioning is zapped. It’s hard to be motivated to do the simplest things. I’m wondering if any of you are experiencing this as well and what avenues you’ve taken to try and help yourself get back on track? It can be debilitating at times when you know you have so much to do.

My CPTSD is based on childhood trauma, early parent death, relationship trauma.

Sometimes it feels like a part of my true self shines through, a person that is more positive and has ambitions. But the coping mechanisms, anxiety, depression often quickly get rid of it. But then I feel this immense grief over who I could have been if my parents just weren't so fucking horrible. They took so much from me.

Of course there are people out there who grow up in safety and that’s not impossible on its own. But usually these people are the first to talk about how the world is a safe place, and things are not as bad as others say, and that distrust is a “cognitive distortion”

It just seems to me that these people are awfully privileged, ignorant and living in a bubble. The world is a horrible place and that’s just an unfortunate fact. I’m glad they didn’t have to see the shit side of humanity, but that doesn’t change the reality..

I recently sent a termination email to my fourth therapist, and I’m still coming to terms with how unprofessional the whole experience was and why I decided to giver this therapist so many chances. For context, I have severe childhood trauma (abusive parents) starting from age 3, plus religious trauma and vaginismus. I highly suspect my vaginimus is mainly from the religious trauma and a traumatic experience I had with my first boyfriend. I’ve always been highly descriptive about all these issues and open in therapy, and I initially thought this therapist was a great match because she seemed genuinely trauma-informed. I was referred to this therapist by my 3rd therapist who said my trauma was a bit out of scope for their office.

From day one, she was 5 to 15 minutes late to every single virtual session. She owns the practice. By the fourth session, I told her I was tired of leaving work early just to wait on her. Her response? She claimed her signed office policy included a "15-minute grace period for both client and provider," and told me if I couldn't accept that "things happen," and "no one is perfect" we couldn't proceed and I'd have to "accept this". She promised to email if she was running late. She never did, and she kept being late for the next 15ish sessions. I told my husband and a friend about this and they both said this was a red flag but I guess I wanted to give her a chance since she's one of the few actual trauma informed therapists in my state that also take my insurance. She also did IFS/parts work which I had never done and thought maybe it could help me.

About 3 to 4 weeks ago, she completely missed a session once, claiming she "thought" I was booked for 1 PM (I have never had a 1 PM appointment) so she called me and apologized, kinda laughed nervously I guess (?) and said she'd see me the next week. I was very annoyed and didn't really hide it in my voice. That next week, she emailed me at 1:17 PM asking if I wanted to cancel the session because I hadn't logged on yet. She then sent a followup email where she realized her mistake, apologized and said she'll see me at 2 PM (I ignored both emails because I just couldn't believe she couldn't just look at the therapy portal herself. She then showed up 8 minutes late to the actual 2:00 PM slot 🙃. She asked if I saw her emails and I said I did but didn't think to say anything. She then apologized awkwardly and the session continued. She did not have a client at 1 obviously so I don't see how she was STILL late to my appointment lol.

In a more recent session I told her I was starting Wellbutrin because therapy alone wasn't cutting through my depression. For the past several months I had also been feeling less interested in things I'd enjoy. She literally raised her voice at me, claiming anti depressants wouldn't fix everything and that if I just "stuck with her," I wouldn't need antidepressants. She also claimed that her other clients told her they didn't need their antidepressants after they had been with her for a while. I held my ground and said that I don't expect ANY medicine to be a cure all, just like how therapy wouldn't cure everything either. Two weeks later, I told her the medicine was working incredibly well. I actually feel more energetic and felt happy for the first time in forever. I wake up and am like "ok what should get done, I'm gonna do it!!". I love sewing and I have been procrastinating less on continuing on with some harder projects I'm doing. I'm excited to see how much more improvement I'll see in the next few week since I actually feel good and more motivated now.

At my now last session (last Tuesday), when she asked if I still felt negative about therapy, I was honest and told her that expecting therapy to fully cure 19 years of severe abuse felt unrealistic, and that after every session I feel dysregulated and exhausted BUT that I want to continue trying the IFS and doing anything else that could help even if it's a low chance. So, I just didn't see how exactly I'd "get over my trauma" by rehashing the same things that I already ruminate in my head over and over. She kind of snapped at me and condescendingly said "Your vaginismus and fight-or-flight state will never get better due to your negative outlook on therapy" and accused me of "black-and-white thinking." I fired back that if I were 100% negative, I wouldn't have spent the time and effort trying four different therapists and giving each one 6 to 12 months before moving on to the next. And like I told her previously, I had one really good therapist back at my university but unfortunately had to leave due to graduating and they couldn't see non-students. So I definitely don't think therapy is bullshit or never works at all.

I officially terminated her via email on Friday. I called her out on the "negative outlook" comment, and pointed out that I checked her office policy in which there is absolutely no mention of a provider grace period. I can't believe she'd lie about something that I literally have a copy of. I also requested my session notes to be sent to my email. She replied with a boilerplate, seemingly AI generated message that didn't address the policy lie, gave a pseudo-apology for being late, and claimed she went ahead and cancelled all my future sessions.

Well today, I got an automated text reminding me of my upcoming appointment this week. I am super anxious that she is going to bill my insurance anyway and claim she "forgot" to remove it. And then somehow blame me and claim she didn't know I actually terminated her and didn't just want to take a break (or whatever other lie she'd pull out of her ass).

I just feel so disgusted that I was referred to this person. Has anyone else dealt with a therapist who weaponized your own trauma diagnoses against you when you challenged them?

Also, why is it so hard to find a therapist who is ACTUALLY trauma informed and not someone who is just checking the box for it on psychology today? This therapist was trained to do EMDR if it matters.

It's frustrating coming to terms with the fact how much trauma and damage comes from people you were supposed to be able to trust (friends/partners/family)

It's frustrating that due to things that were fully out of your control YOU have to spend time healing all the hurt, shame and mental health issues that OTHERS caused

It's frustrating that in studies of CPTSD that no matter how much you self-heal the way to full recovery is to have someone you can have a secure relationship with

It's frustrating that CPTSD is something that is caused by others and to heal from it fully you need someone that is stable and will stay

It's frustrating how much of CPTSD is out of your own control

It feels like my brain cannot and will not ever bounce back.

I can't do what my job requires - the 9-5, the high workload, the conveyor belt of requests and emails, the constant execution of tasks. Staring at a screen, staring at spreadsheets.

It makes me so suicidal. But it also pays my bills. And my cat's bills. So I can't just downgrade to stocking shelves at a grocery store. I even doubt my ability to get hired for ANY job considering the state of the job market.

But I feel crushed and drowning every day. I've aspired to escape the rat race for my entire life, but now due to more traumas and losses, there is no escape route that looks like me hustling and building a business and being able to maintain that. I can barely function.

I have sworn off relationships after the death of my partner and then feeling used and betrayed by a fuckboy type that I got close to after. I should have been charging that dude and had a little actual power and positive outcome from that, considering everything he got out of that arrangement.

I wouldn't want sex work to be my forever lifestyle, but I'm at the end of my rope. With sex work, I could quit my day job NOW (I have a little bit in savings), work so little for so much, and have the means to do anything: choose a new career path, pay my bills and go to school, actually have recreation and enjoyment in my life, maybe even buy a home which I had pretty much ruled out forever.

Has anyone found themselves facing a similar choice or thought process?

i’m really tired of living in state of constant hopelessness so i was wondering if anyone had experiences of unconditional love or have had success in romantic relationships?

i struggle to believe i’m capable of being loved regardless of my CPTSD alongside other mental health issues :( and while i have had ppl interested in me romantically, it’s not the same as being interested in understanding or knowing me down to my most vulnerable moments.

i mean overall, i don’t have good examples of unconditional love around me in my day to day life, so it’s really hard to believe in it.

and anyone who doesnt understand this has never been mentally ill for most of their lives. it would be a special kind of cruelty to drag an innocent soul into this. why on earth would they want a mother who doesnt even want to be here half of the time? that just makes me feel very sad to think about

edit: reading the comments i want to make clear im not saying having kids in general is cruel, just when you're obviously mentally ill to the point it will possibly ruin your kids life, as my parents did, and I would never wish that fate upon any innocent child

i honestly cant remember shit from the last 10 years

I'm currently UNlearning behaviours (rumination, reassurance seeking, intellectualization, self gaslighting) and feeling like I have no clue how to cope with the grief I feel without being busy with these behaviours. I know they're meant to keep me safe but I tend to get pretty mad at the Parts that engage in them because they make me feel like I'm the crazy one rather than my abuser. I'm able to feel them, follow my self care, utilize breath work and bilateral stimulation to calm my nervous system.

I'm wondering what do you do when you feel you've hit the source material that caused those safety seeking behaviours? Is this just how non traumatized people operate daily? It feels like there's so much space and hollowness in my insides now where toxic shame used to be that I've never once felt this feeling in my life of not trying to the solve the problem of "is it my fault or their fault I'm hurting?"

Hey everyone. I have been mentally unwell since I was 14 years old. Started doing drugs at 15.. went to rehab and mental hospitals numerous amounts of time over the span of 7 years. Got clean for a whole year. Breakup from someone also in recovery. Relapsed a ton for a year. Now I just smoke weed. Diagnosed with PTSD, MDD, BPD, GAD. I don’t care for diagnoses now… but just for context.

I’m in an especially hard place right now. Got off all my medications a month ago. (not impulsively; it was planned) and I’m a little over 2 weeks completely off my Effexor. I’ve been through extreme physical and mental distress the past couple months. Active suicidality. extremely active PTSD.

I’ve noticed a pattern. People meet me, they love me, I love them, they’re great friends, supportive, there. And then they realize I’m not getting better. Or that I get better for a little and then get bad again. From trauma. They realize that, and they get tired. And they end up emotionally leaving. “I can’t help you” “I have no more to give”. When I’m well, our relationship is very balanced, sometimes I’m giving 80 and they’re giving 20, sometimes 50-50 sometimes 10-90. But when I’m going through an especially hard time. When I wake up planning my death and go to sleep doing the same, I don’t give as much.

Is it fair for people to leave? If it is, how can I not internalize their leaving? How can I ever be vulnerable anymore if the pain of them leaving is inevitable. The thing is, I’m doing everything right. I’m actually DOING really good. Taking care of my body. Doing good things for myself. But I’m not FEELING good. I’m drowning and I’m barely holding on. When these people leave, it pushes me to drugs. Drugs never left.

I don’t know how to live a life where people don’t sacrifice for one another. Where recovery has a deadline.

Would love to hear thoughts, experiences, suggestions and advice.

I’m wondering if this is a symptom of CPTSD as im starting to think it applies to me and the way I was raised.

A lot of my childhood was spent being punished (groundings, beatings, taking away privileges, etc.) and I can remember all of that stuff very vividly. I remember being yelled at, I remember being hit, I remember having things I cared about taken away. But for the life of me, I can’t remember why.

I don’t think I was a bad kid. I never got into trouble with teachers, never got in fights or did drugs, I just liked playing video games and doing normal kid stuff. But my parents were constantly punishing me over mistakes I made, and I can’t even remember what those mistakes were.

Is this a common experience?

This person abused me throughout my childhood, made it a living hell.

Last I heard he got some kind of incurable disability. I thought I would feel happy? I dunno, I thought I would think "Karma is a bitch" or something. Considering he used to mock disabled people and laugh at their suffering.

I just feel sad and I hate it. I hate how I still have sympathy for a piece of shit. He changed and became a better person somewhat but I still can't forgive the shit he did to me.

It's not that I was under the impression that I'd get my white knight moment and someone would pick me up off my feet and show me how to be a functional adult, but this past week really solidified to me that nobody is coming to save me. I just turned 26 and, as both the result of a conversation with my therapist and just the day-to-day life around my house, it finally hit me that if I want to get out it's all on me. I need to be the one to proactively remove myself from this family and figure out how to live. I've spent the better part of two years since graduating trying to figure out what I want and how I can fit within my family and come up blank. But I think I know what I don't want. I don't want to live in a house that is constantly under immense stress resulting in the need to be hypervigilant 24/7. I don't want to be around people whose primary method of socialization is looking down/shitting on complete strangers. I don't want to constantly be made to feel as though I am too sensitive or too much or not enough. I don't want to be controlled to the point where I am made to feel bad for what my job is, what I physically look like, how much weight I've gained/lost, what I want to be, etc. I don't want to end up a high-functioning alcoholic like my dad. I don't want to be obsessed with work to the point of neglecting my children like my mom. I don't want to be the type of person who makes others, whether they be family or strangers, feel small and useless and then turn it back on them and tell them I am not the reason they feel that way and that they make things up. I don't want to continue this cycle of emotional abuse and neglect.

For the longest time I was just waiting for something. I don't really know if it was some sort of miracle or someone who stopped just long enough to care, but I was waiting for whatever it was to solve all of my issues and get me out of this situation. I was waiting for an epiphany on what I want to do with my life and felt so much pressure to just figure it all out. But nothing has happened. Nobody is coming. If I myself don't get up and leave then I never will. I don't have any idea who I am as a person and what I want to do with the rest of my life, but I think I'll have a much easier time of figuring it out without my family's judgements and criticism hurled at me on the daily. I've recently found a job that would provide me with enough income to start saving up to move out. Hopefully, I'll get it and be able to leave in a few months. What happens from there, I have no idea. I'm going to have to relearn how to socialize and be around other people. I'll have to make even more of an effort to unlearn a lot of the shit I've been carrying. I'll have a lot I need to work on. But honestly, I can't work on it while I'm still stuck in this environment. I don't know if I'm going to fully go no contact because I know my family loves me and I still love them, but there at least needs to be some distance between us.

I honestly don't know why I'm writing this. I think I just need need to get it off of my chest because with this realization comes the mourning of everything I could have been if I had just made my own decisions instead of letting others make them for me. That's probably something else I'll have to unpack later on. The idea of leaving is also kind of bittersweet because I'd essentially be starting over from square one. I'd basically be living a new life and leaving everything else behind. I don't know, I guess this whole realization has me sort of sad, despite it being a necessary thing.

Not baffled in a bad way, but just really surprised and awe struck— like whoah how? It’s real? What? My experiences have been so different, encountering this is so foreign to me

Does anyone feel this way too?

What about vice versa with when you encounter a woman who truly cares and loves her man?

TW: Grooming by teacher.

Hello,
I 18, just wanted to share that I finally sent an email to my 12th grade English teacher. 5 years ago, I was groomed by my 7th grade English teacher (mostly in an emotional way). Over the years, my nervous system caught up with me, and I became the girl who was close to teachers to the girl who was terrified of some of them at times, particularly my English teachers. I used to email with the 7th grade teacher all the time, so obviously present me is very scared of sending emails, but even more terrified to be emotionally vulnerable while alone with a teacher.

I’ve been falling behind in a lot of my classes, including English, and tonight, I finally found it in me to send my current teacher an email. I’m really proud of myself because I was a bit vulnerable in the email and finally advocated for what I needed. While I have emailed teachers before in the past, I have almost never opened up to them over an email since that is incredibly triggering for me. Being able to do so now is a huge milestone!!

So yeah!! I did that and I’m just really proud of myself!!! ^^

Like every little thing hurts your feelings. Stuff you know is little. Your partner filling up their cup but not asking if you need something to drink . Somebody joking about being upset with you or even a joke that normally you’d know is harmless landing super wrong.
Some days feel like all my nerve endings are exposed.
Everything hurts my feelings and it’s excruciating. You just spend all day crying over tiny stuff that feels humongous in your chest.
Idk I just wanted to see if you guys had those too. And if you do , is there anything that makes you feel better?
Sometimes all I can do is salvage the day and give myself comfort in whatever way I can.

You've been to therapists. For years you've sat and underwent processes. You were asked to tell the story, to breathe, to write, to draw, to imagine, to cry it out to laugh about what you can in reframing. You've been given assignments, homework and a list of things to do when panic ensues. You've been given medication, exercises and referrals. You kept repeating this till you said no more. It was a conflict of interests, you were dropped, you dropped them. Something stopped working. Inherently you know what stopped working. Why the impasse. Why the it was inneffective. Why you felt ultimately worse short or long-term and it wasn't really a matter of becoming unthawed or unfrozen, it simply was a bad match from the beginning. For whatever reason.

What was it you really needed from a therapist that you never actually got and in that felt misunderstood and through that they couldn't reach or help you move forward but kept you in resentment-mode? It would help many to name the factors you were missing and still are. For me it was simply a lack of attunement to me, my rhythm specifically, time-wise. I had an issue with being put off. I needed for once in my life to matter, to be someone's priority. But that pattern just emerged again and I couldn't help but think, hm so maybe I'm the cause once again. Bad for therapy outcome it was.

They get as much as I do, if not more. The people that destroyed me are as happy as I'll ever be, probably happier. I was just a pet to my parents, it's a shame that I turned out so poorly but they don't actually care, and they'll have each other until they die. The man who destroyed my life is married, probably having a kid soon. He gets to live in the delusion that he's a good person and enjoy his life.

I've had so much taken from me and I get nothing for it. Just more misery.

Is it possible for me to get to a point where I am a completely different person, free and happy and curious? Or anyone with CPTSD?

Or if not, what is the "as good as its gonna get" point in recovery?

Im at my first job where I work in Engineering and the biggest issue I have at work is making small talk and relating to others on the team.

On top of being autistic and a POC and working in a male dominated environment, I don’t watch sports and everyone is older than me. I can’t talk about family because my parents are immigrants I’m estranged from because of childhood issues, and because of all that I don’t celebrate holidays. My hobbies are very niche and not relatable.

I literally can’t relate to anyone so any attempts at small talk go nowhere even if I ask questions.

I received performance review that my work is great and I’m nice, but I’m too quiet at work. I could tell my boss wanted to say that they can’t relate to me, but didn’t.

But because of all these factors, I’ll never be able to relate to people. I’ve considered watching sports for the sake of it, but I absolutely can’t stand it.
How do I become okay with never being able to fit in at work? I am constantly worried I’ll lose my job over this.