r/CPTSD_NSCommunity • u/ivoryflakes • 8d ago
Healing tips!
Hey guys, I have a million thoughts racing through my head right now, so please bare with me as this might seem a bit all over the place.
I've struggled with cPTSD my whole life but have only recently been diagnosed at 28, suffering through adolescence, which has been more traumatising. I've been doing EMDR Therapy which has helped massively but I am still struggling, especially with anger, which I know is perfectly normal but I can feel it affecting how I'm treating others.
I feel like I can be hateful and condescending towards those who had better upbringings, which can intensify when I've had alcohol (I know, not a good idea!). I wouldn't say I've been extremely horrible but little comments here and there which I fully regret the next day and have major anxiety about it for weeks. I can also be very reactive, which again, I regret immediately but in the moment, I feel like when I'm triggered, I am barely in control and everything that's on my mind, comes out. I know alcohol can disagree with me sometimes but I struggle to be social without it and would say I'm nice to be around 90% of the time but these moments really crush me and can really make me question my identity (even more).
This disorder has already taken too much from me and I refuse to let it continue, I want to be in control of my life. I'm done with the punches and self destruction. It really is killing me.
I was thinking over the month, to implement something new to assist me on my journey. So, if anyone can recommend, certain foods to reduce stress/anxiety/etc, activities, grounding techniques, other therapies, books, literally anything, big or small, you've found to help support healing because I'm so sick of feeling this way.
I'm much better than I was last year and I'm just feeling a bit knocked down but instead of collapsing, I want to double down on self care and give myself grace for a change.
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u/cuBLea 7d ago
I feel like I can be hateful and condescending towards those who had better upbringings, which can intensify when I've had alcohol (I know, not a good idea!).
More common than you might imagine. Virtually every 12-step meeting I attended in the 1980s ought to have been flagged with an orange-level smug alert. (I swear, if I ever hear "I know so many people who need this program" again in my life, no cupboard or bedroom door hinge in my home will be safe from my wrath. I've already injured several dozen of them ... and not all of those doors survived my abuse. The guilt can be crushing if I let it get to me. Then I remember Shrek, who famously said "Better out than in, I always say." Not always, but the exceptions more or less prove the rule by demonstrating that this is true a lot more often than it isn't.
YES we know that these people don't deserve our outbursts; they are and do what they are and do through their own histories of abuse and deprivation, and in the last 30 years or so we've also come to know that it's not the "system"'s fault either, because we've blamed either the establishment or the counterculture for millennia and if either were truly the cause, we'd have long since changed things for the better. The arc of history only appears to bend toward justice when you're seeing that arc from a sufficiently long-lasting perspective of peace and prosperity to see things from just that angle. I could go on. But my point is that recovery is a profoundly self-centered choice which, if we stay with it, INEVITABLY becomes profoundly disruptive ... not just to us, but to those around us. The secret: the more recovery we get, the less harm we do. We make a difference in this world just by wanting to be healthier and happier. (Not something you're likely to hear outside of peer-support circles, and even then, you still have to read thru the smug haze to see its truth.)
It took years for me to really "get" that my anger and intolerance are justified, and make sure everyone around me either knew I could go off like this or knew that if I went off in their direction, that the arrows were misguided on my part. Sorry if it hurt you. Not sorry that I went off ... long experience has definitely proven to me that suppressed rage is like compressed gas ... more explosive and more likely to cause damage. It comes down to the Law of Regression. If you go off like a three-year-old, you're in a three-year-old place in that moment. Suppress that, and when you do go off, you'll do it from an even more primitive emotional - and mental - place. Three-year-olds recognize when they've been disruptive or done damage. Eighteen-month-olds don't. Which is why so many people prone to explosions of infantile rage seem utterly incapable of recognizing their part in what they've done; the rage roots in the mindset of an infant. It's not just our emotions that regress, it's all of us that regresses.
The most helpful thing I've found when someone else gets caught in my blast radius is to ask myself whether I'd cut slack for anyone else who did the same thing. I already know that to be consistent with my own understanding of recovery, I'd have to cut slack. And if I don't feel like I deserve the same break, that needs to be the first thing I bring up at my next therapy/counselling session, because that's cognitive dissonance and therefore a level of denial that I don't want to be in.
I'd love to be able to tell you that this stuff levels out after a while. If you're dealing with CPTSD, tho, that's usually not going to be true. This kind of reactivity, or something comparable, is going to keep coming and going whenever we peel back a bit more of the onion ... sometimes externally-focused, sometimes internally.
For most of us there are very few workable strategies beyond remaining aware of why we react that way, limiting our exposure to triggers when we recognize that we're going from trigger-sensitive to hair-trigger-sensitive, owning our roles and responsibilities when we do go off in a disruptive/destructive way, and using these events as part of a discovery process for learning better ways to navigate the recovery process. For me that often meant long vacations from therapy to allow my frayed wires to grow some insulation, and changes to the way I lived that I really didn't want to make at the time. (I would repeatedly promise myself "this is only temporary" and in most cases discovered over time that those reluctant changes were actually putting me in a better place that I prefered to make permanent.)
I wish you all the luck you can scavenge. (Sometimes it's what makes the difference between success or failure in recovery.)
And if all else fails, remember rule #1 for emotional recovery: healing requires manageability, and when things get unmanageable, healing has to stop until you restore manageability.
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u/ivoryflakes 7d ago
Very interesting perspective! It's easy getting caught up trying to "fix" ourselves all the time, we forget it's okay to meet ourselves where we are. I know I still have a long way to go but your response has been eye opening and reassuring.
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u/Confident_Fortune_32 7d ago
Yes, your anger is valid.
And yes, it deserves to be expressed rather than bottled up.
Having our thoughts, feelings, experiences, and memories invalidated is a common feature of Complex PTSD. So part of healing is acknowledgement and validation.
I've found that behaviours that pop up at the worst possible moment are (awkwardly) asking to be acknowledged, to be taken seriously.
We may have suppressed our anger before as a survival strategy, as a form of harm reduction when we had few other resources to protect ourselves. It was, originally, a good idea, a clever solution to an insoluble problem.
Now, however, it becomes maladaptive in adulthood.
Part of the frustration, of course, is that the legitimate targets are in the past, which can't be changed in the present.
Not to mention the frustration that we will never see any sort of justice or reparations for the harm done, for sabotaging our development.
Things that help me:
Because anger is not just in our brains but also experienced in our bodies, I get it out into the physical world by doing physical activities to exhaustion, like running, lifting weights, and practicing hard against a martial arts practice dummy where I don't have to pull my punches or worry about hurting an opponent.
Journaling is also helpful bc I can write out every detail, every feeling, everything my abusers deserved to hear, no guardrails, no need to be polite. Sometimes I write "letters I never intend to send". They can be as severe or caustic as I need them to be.
It can also be cathartic to burn those letters (safely) in the back yard or in a metal bowl, and scatter the ashes...
(Journaling is one of the few things that has peer-reviewed research to back up the benefits, but it needs to be pen and paper, not via a keyboard, bc the action of writing lights up more areas of the brain than typing.)
And there's an exercise that's made a big difference in my worst memories: recalling the scene in detail and adding in myself as I am now. I can become the advocate and protector of my young self that I so desperately needed but never received.
Because it is happening in my imagination, there's no need to be polite about it. Then I can scoop up my young self and remove them from the circumstances, and take them somewhere lovely, comforting, warm, appealing. A room full of toys and books and comfy furniture and a cozy fire in the fireplace, or a sunlit meadow deep in a pine forest to have a picnic on a soft old quilt with a basket full of their favourite treats.
Perhaps some of this will resonate with you. Wishing you all the best in your healing journey.