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All very true. Insightful. The problem is the truth that you describe so well is probably very seldom understood by a person who hasn't already been chewed up and damaged.

So it's now a case of, for me I mean, how to manage the psychological injury suffered,  but also how to manage the deep need for the truth to be heard. I live in a community where the misrepresentation cultivated around me and about me following my attempts to stand up for myself, now define me.

Do you know what I mean? I am defined by their lies and the stress I exhibited.

I think I know exactly what you mean. I'm in a similar situation. It's a hard place to be. I bet you're in a very tough spot.
I wish I could take it away from you. It's crazy making, all these lies and people's blindness. For what it's worth I'm completely 100% with you. It's very hard to see how dangerous some people can be before it happens to you.

She says management love this guy...  this guy has had 2 harassment cases taken against him before and a man has tried to kill himself because of his management....... but management have invested in him and they can't have him fail!!!!!

What the *?

I agree with every word Rainagain said and I've been in similar situations more than once. Heard literally these exact same words from management about work place abusers. More than once. So I guess this reaction from different managements is part of the abuse cycle itself and is a clear pattern too.

I guess there aren't many options. One can stay put at work if the dangers are known: if your friend understands that this is abuse and maybe, just maybe, if the abuser doesn't get bored the level of abuse might stay constant and it might be hard but bearable. Still, there may be long term repercussions for her. But if she's fully aware of the risks and is willing to take them on then that's one choice she can maybe make.

But this is an abuser who's fully backed by management so it's easy to imagine he might get bored and escalate his behavior more and more. This is a real danger.

Walking away is so hard. I know. None of us want to believe such evil behavior is out there, and that we have no protection from it.

Maybe your friend can write down the pros and cons of staying put and re-assess them on a weekly basis? Even if it was worth it to stay put last week, it's always possible to change one's mind.

I'm sorry for your friend and for the stress I'm sure it's causing you too. How insanely triggering it must be... so I really respect you for being there for your friend, that's no small feat of courage and kindness on your part.

It's a dangerous place to be for your friend. Probably there are no good outcomes, that's what happens when a sadistic abuser picks a person as a favorite. I'm sorry she has to go through that.

I'm not well so this is short, my apologies...

I'd say everything you described above fits emotional abuse.
I've read some books that describe certain types of abuse as "covert" vs. overt abuse, and it makes sense to me. Violence is violence, it may be covert but that just makes it even more insidious than overt abuse that's physically visible.
I think there's a big blind spot in society re. emotional abuse. But the science shows it's real abuse and it's just as bad as other types of abuse, if not worse. Some research done recently shows that it may even be more harmful than physical/sexual abuse.

Here's a good book about it, specifically about emotional abuse in relationships: Healing from Hidden Abuse: A Journey Through the Stages of Recovery from Psychological Abuse Paperback / Shannon Thomas.

This may be just me but... what you're describing is just how I felt when I tried narrative trauma, and it's the reason I stopped it. It seems to be very good for ptsd, but maybe it isn't always suitable for cptsd.

It's really personal so if it doesn't help you, feel free to ignore it:

In my experience, if I go through a trauma narrative as it is, just the memories of the raw facts of what happened to me without adding in more things, then it's too much. I feel buried under it. Instead of helping me re-integrate my memories and make sense of my life, it just weakens me further. So I stopped doing narrative exercises and I sort of incorporated the narrative viewpoint into a larger scheme. When I go through my trauma narratives now I always add extra things before and after.
For example, I might do this: take a few moments to breathe and try to be in my body (instead of my usual habit of dissociating all the time); then I gently and cautiously go through a specific memory, then I also go through what I'm feeling when I remember that memory (I might give the feelings names: I now feel sad, angry, shocked, disgusted, whatever it may be), and I might add more things like trying to imagine the same thing happening to someone else which helps me feel compassion. I can't feel compassion for myself, but when I imagine the same memory in someone else's life quite often it helps me turn the really heavy sadness, for example, into something softer that's less painful.

Or I might go through the memory and then imagine the people who were in it are sitting next to me now and I talk to them. Calmly, as the person I am today, I tell them what I think about what they did and the impact it had on me.

And other things I've tried. They vary... but in all cases I add extras to the narrative. Otherwise I get the sense my brain can't handle just the narrative on its own.

Maybe.

Hi Safetyinnumbers,

I don't know if everyone feels this way, but I definitely feel like you. I feel really inferior to others, and whenever anyone asserts power or superiority I tend to instantly believe them even if they're making it all up.  it's as though I instantly surrender to them even if I know for a fact they're not the superman or superwoman they're trying to convince me they are.

I tried FB briefly but left it and never went back there for this exact reason. It isn't a good place, everyone is trying to sell some story, a made up version of themselves that just left me feeling worse.

I don't know how to change any of it (except leaving social media...) the one thing I've started doing is to notice the dynamics in a conversation when I notice myself trying to be approved and looking like some imaginary version of reality. And I just try to pay attention to that need. I think "Okay, this is silly. The person you're talking to right now isn't even seeing you, they're too busy trying to show you how amazing they are." also, I talk to people who have a hard time, and try to steer away from people who are busy portraying a perfect life. I get closer to people who are in pain or have known pain in their lives. They're more interesting, multi-layered, more mature... and sometimes I can do something to help them out and we both benefit from it in a real way.

Btw the clothes I'm wearing right now are the same ones I've had for 10 years. You're not alone. I've learned to use it as a quick, effective way to know the person in front of me. If they read far too much into my sandals or my t-shirt, I know I may not belong not because I'm not as good as them but because they're boring

Maybe?

Phoebes,

I feel exactly the same. Feeling that you somehow bring the worst out of people doesn't sound paranoid at all to me. In my case, it was totally true. I think people with a PD could sense very strongly that I was "preconditioned" and knew how to dance along so they always took advantage of me. But learning about trauma and cptsd and what my body is doing helps me recognize them and keep my distance. I noticed I've stopped being as "juicy" to PD's as I've been before.

I've internalized all the dreadful things I've been attacked with so deeply that I'm sure they're all my fault. But you didn't ridicule yourself, you didn't tell yourself others didn't like you, you were tricked into believing it by people whose brains just weren't screwed on straight while yours is just fine.

It sounds to me a little like part of your caution around people is the normal response to gaslighting. You start out talking to someone you trust (not realizing their pegs are a little loose), believe terrible things they tell you about yourself, then they manage to convince you that you do things you never did, that you're the unhinged one and run off leaving you too confused to know what's true anymore.

And, you know... the people who everyone likes and think are so awesome, who are a lot of fun? They sound to me like potential narcissists or worst. The charisma is often a symptom, not a good quality but a sign of danger. If you feel like you seem to bring out the "bad" in them maybe that's exactly what's going on. You're a PD detector 
Maybe?

Hi Debora,

Kizzie asked:

Was this person worthy of my friendship or am I better off looking for healthier relationships?

That's a really good perspective!

I couldn't agree more.
The way I view people has been slowly changing as I learn more about cptsd. Maybe you're changing?

I agree it sounds like a possible vicious inner critic attack. What he said was so short and could be understood in more than one way but then your inner critic might have hijacked your moment of pleasure and accomplishment and used it against you.
And, I bet you know far better than me how feedback you get from other artists can be weird. Sometimes when the feedback is odd that's an indication you did a good job
Either way, whether others will love your work or not, you're good and nobody's opinion can take that away from you. Not even your inner critic can.

Morning,
Welcome 

In my experience, a BPD diagnosis can be an awful thing.
It's sometimes called a "trashcan diagnosis" because at times, when they don't know what's wrong with you they say "Oh! Ok, let's call it BPD" but it's not a neutral diagnosis, it can be stigmatizing and re-traumatizing. Instead of recognizing you're traumatized, that you went through things that weren't normal and reacted to them in the most normal way possible (by developing cptsd), it puts all the blame on your own personality and labels you as incurable, unreliable, imbalanced 'etc. I have no words to say how bad that can be when it's used to further abuse an abuse victim.

I was misdiagnosed with BPD many years ago by doctors blindly colluding with my abusive family to make sure I was silenced. It did me a lot of harm because it meant no one ever believed me. It was the absolute opposite of what I'd imagine "therapy" or "help" to be like.
It left me with distrust of psychiatrists so I never got a formal diagnosis of cptsd, but I have cptsd and I read about cptsd, trauma and the brain.
I don't need a psychiatrist to tell me what I know about myself and my experience. There are very good books out there now, you can self educate.
But maybe if you're looking for good specialized, informed trauma therapy, then getting the right diagnosis might be very helpful.

I feel like I went my whole life not knowing "what was wrong with me" and now have this clear answer that explains how I have felt always.  It made me realize I am not one person, but in a special population on earth that gets handed childhood tragedies that scar us for life. Finding out that my brain and body is not diseased, but that in reality my horrible symptoms are a NORMAL reaction to traumatic events has given me some ground to stand on. I felt like I was freefalling for a long time into my isolated * before I found this place.

I couldn't agree more.

Very interesting book about "betrayal blindness" theory, how and why people who are betrayed and people who witness it seem to be so blind to it.

Some parts of it are hard to read but in a good way. For example, it suggests what might be happening to a child when the caregiver they're attached to and depend on is betraying them, and how it's their own blindness of the betrayal that helps them survive it. Really turned on its head my tendency to see my confusion as weakness.
It got me thinking and understanding abusers' accomplices / flying monkeys' blindness better, and also my own swiss cheese memory.

https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Betrayal-Ourselves-Arent-Fooled/dp/0470604409/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1533240789&sr=8-1&keywords=blind+to+betrayal

I think I spent years either half asleep or fast asleep. 
I guess part of it is physiological. You're overwhelmed by painful experiences you can't get away from, your body reacts by feeling very stressed and then when it can't sustain the high stress anymore it gets very tired, which makes you slow down. Psychologically too, I guess it's an effective way to get some distance from your experiences. Since you can't run away or fight, you withdraw. You shut it all out and get away inside.

I may be wrong but I don't think you were escaping. The circumstances that enabled you to learn this sort of sleep-all-you-can survival mechanism must have been very abnormal, painful and dangerous. You were trying to protect yourself as best as you could.

I'm sorry you've had to develop this mechanism, I know it really well. That moment of depression and exhaustion when bad news comes. I'm sorry for the financial bad news too, unrelated to the tiredness.

Among other things, it shows emotional abuse in is just as dangerous as other types of abuse. 

https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/tra-a0037766.pdf

Here's an interesting article from Reuters about it, with an interview with the head researcher (all from 2014):

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-psychological-abuse-children/for-kids-psychological-abuse-may-leave-the-deepest-scars-idUSKCN0ID1OQ20141024

It isn't published yet but it seems interesting, and written by people who know about cptsd. It's for therapists but I'll probably read it just the same. I'm forced to be my own therapist so I might as well know what I'm doing for my client 
The title alone may be good news, I think. Just the thought that finally there's some awareness of emotional abuse may be a step forward. 

https://www.guilford.com/books/Treating-Adult-Survivors-Childhood-Emotional-Abuse-Neglect/Hopper-Grossman-Spinazzola-Zucker/9781462537297/authors

I know why..to deflect and deny the story. To create a barrier to make me look crazy should the story come out. To imply SHE is a loving forgiving daughter (covertly) and I should be too. To others, a loving doting daughter (unlike me, to the people that know I'm supposedly "stranged") It's very warped. Further evidence to Stay TF away.

I couldn't agree more. My parents, abusers 'etc seem to have read the same instruction manual to life and relationships as your Nm.

Last time I checked my F's FB it was similar. Friends singing his praises about imaginary insane things. Deranged lies covering up reality so that his self important facade could be kept intact, and probably also to warn me not to open my mouth.

My experience has been that no matter what I do the response is the same. I keep silent, I don't keep silent, I talk, I keep NC, it doesn't seem to matter. They're stuck on just one repetitive behavior. It's very warped indeed and also very boring. They don't seem to grow. You do.

Hi Elena, welcome too
I can relate very much to what you wrote. It's taken me decades to understand I have cptsd too. There was no information about it anywhere to be found, and I was in a deep coma of minimization and self hatred chasing its own tail all the time.
And misdiagnosis too. I was misdiagnosed with a PD as a teenager (part of my abusive FOO's attempts to silence me and destroy me) and it did irreparable harm too.
You're not alone though I wish you didn't have to go through any of it. I wish I could take it away from you.