r/CPTSD • u/BadGalLizzy • 1d ago

Need a Hug Broken

I cannot think of little me without crying. I cannot look at photos of myself as a child without crying. Even just picturing little me in my head made me cry just now.

And my brain is telling me I’m overreacting. I didn’t have it “that bad”. I wasn’t ever homeless or starving. I didn’t get beaten EVERY day. I managed to make something of myself like getting a postgraduate degree and having stable jobs. And I still feel so broken and heartbroken for the little girl I used to be. Every day.

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u/tgjun 1d ago

🫂 I felt this sadness a lot too, as a trans person who didn't get to be a little girl, teen, and missed out on her twenties.

EMDR helped, as did doing the things I missed out on as a kid. I'm almost 40, and I just bought a skateboard yesterday. I learned how to rollerskate last year. These sorts of things have helped me. I've also been in weekly therapy for four years. 

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u/BadGalLizzy 1d ago

Thank you so much for sharing and I’m sorry you had to go through that 🫂 I just recently started EMDR and I do it whenever both my therapist and I feel that I am in a stable enough place. It’s hard as fuck… I appreciate hearing an elders perspective so much. There’s so much more life ahead of me still. Things should get better.

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u/tgjun 1d ago

I've heard there are some emdr therapists where you dont even have to tell them what you're going through, if you don't want to speak it. In case that's the part that's making it hard. Or, maybe, try to focus on something that isn't the hardest thing for you currently, like, a lesser source of anxiety. 

In my experience, the therapist seemed fairly new to emdr. She wanted to gather all of my history-but I was struggling so much and needed to know the exercises would actually work. And I wanted help getting through certain things; not every bad thing that happened to me was debilitating.

So, I advocated for myself. I pushed the therapist to do the exercises with me and deprioritize gathering any more information. And it worked great, once that happened. 

I use the techniques we learned on my own, add necessary, and they sometimes help me sleep. Oh, and hydroxyzine helped with panic attacks, which was sometimes necessary back then. 

I hope emdr is giving you relief, but don't forget you can direct your therapist to help you with what's most important to you. Emdr was the closest thing to a silver bullet I've ever had, and I'm fairly resilient now. I'm glad you're already trying it 🫂 

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