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I'm surprised it came out in words actually, as my insiders aren't vocal. They weren't this time either technically, they communicated the feeling in a way very similar to an EF, but as soon as my fingers came close to the keyboard they nearly started typing by themselves and I was "shut out of my mind" (don't know how to explain it better). When the italics part was written I got "back in control" again.

"Princess" (my nickname for her, as she answers to the body's name) is 5, and Caroline (the name she answers to) is... something between 7 and 9, not quite sure as I don't see her clearly. I'd explain more about them but my fingers freeze every time, which I take to meaning they aren't comfortable with sharing more right now. Later maybe.

Glad you're back and feeling better! Take care of yourself, those EFs are terrible. Safe hugs if you want them.

Completely agree with Rainagain here. I'm sorry you're feeling uneasy and isolated amidst your current group of friends, and also triggered by customers. Unfortunately there's not much to do about customers, except extend compassion and sympathy.

But if a group feels toxic to you, even if they're not deliberately evil, then my reaction would be to say better move on. Some people can be very kind and still not be what you need right now because your core values clash. And with what you're already dealing with, you absolutely don't need more micro-aggressions everyday.

Safe hugs, if you want them And a truckload of warm thoughts your way. Wish you to find a bit of peace for yourself, you deserve as much.

(By the way, Aphotic, you might be interested to know I currently have a bunch of insiders telling you: "You're super kind and we like you very much and thank you for always answering our posts thank you thank you thank you we like you a whole lot." I think that comes from those I call/they call themselves 'Princess' and 'Caroline', but I'm not completely sure. Anyway, there you go. I kind of agree, too.)

Thank you Aphotic! ^^ Another 500 words today, I'm keeping it up! With a bit of luck I'll manage to pick up speed and be ready for NaNoWriMo this November.

I find that interestingly fellow CPTSD victims' happiness doesn't bother me at all and makes me feel a little better even, but those without any complications who are happy all the time make me envious or just mad.

For me it depends on my mood. Most of the time I don't mind and will be happy for happy people, but sometimes I wake up grumpy and the mad kind of sad, and everything irritates me.
And sometimes when I try to open up to happy people they unwillingly shut me down because they're too caught up in their happiness to hear me, and that makes me pick up a grudge against happy people until the feeling passes. So yeah. I'd rather not do the same to others. ^^

This is a hard topic for me, I've been misdiagnosed as BPD in youth by my abusive family who made sure it was spread around in the family and among my colleagues later in life. So I was and am treated as the crazy lying manipulative black sheep ever since. It's been 3 decades now.

No one ever believed it was an abusive lie. Everyone was and is convinced I'm a total fruitcake. If I ever was trusting or dumb enough to try to talk to any person in my life about hurt, they instantly put on their disgusted "Oh Lord here we go again" face. My family have all disowned me. I've occasionally tried in every possible way and never been able to convince anyone that this has all been an abusive lie because, of course, people with BPD are the manipulative liars! How clever...

I relate so so so much to this. Unable to talk about it right this moment, but everything you just said. Gaslighting is one of the worst forms of abuse. It leaves no traces and is so sneaky.

[September 28, 2017]

September 28, 2017
Triggers for this post: Happy mood, so if you feel like people are plastering their happiness in your face, please avoid this post.

Pfffeeeewwwww. A week later, things are finally starting to look up. Honestly I can't remember having being in such a funk for years now. I probably have though, but my memory is so patchy at times there's no way to know. I've had hard days, but despair lasting this long? As far as I remember, the last time I slipped that deep into my own personal mud pit was about five years ago, and I didn't miss it one little bit!

As I wrote in this post earlier this week, I hadn't been able to write since sometime early-to-mid September. After more than two weeks I was starting to be afraid it would never come back.

Well, as you can guess I was wrong.

Yesterday I managed to add about 500 words to my next chapter. 500 words isn't that much, a good day will see me fly over twice that amount, but it's not what I call a bad day either. All in all, it's a respectable start and if I keep this up every day, I should even be able to finish this chapter for my self-imposed deadline next week.

That, more than anything else, takes a huge weight off my shoulders.

The meds also seem to be working. I've been taking them for 8 days now and already feel more like myself, able to better regulate my emotions and look up to the bright side of life. It helps that the heat wave is over, and also that despite the occasional bowels twinge still rearing its head when I move, I'm not in constant, acute IBS pain anymore.

And surprisingly, I've also regained interest in small things I used to love but left aside for... well, no reason really, I just kind of lost interest, some of them for years. Knitting for example, other small crafts, or just tea drinking. I used to be a major tea nerd interested in tea culture all over the world, with a whole cabinet to hold my teapots and various types of tea, but for the last few years that cabinet has been sitting in my living room untouched and I've been drinking herbal tea instead of the puerh I love. It's understandable in a way I guess, seeing as it seems depression has a way to change how the taste buds work, less sensitive to sweet things, less able to taste complex flavours, and a lot more sensitive to bitterness. Some kinds of puerh can be really bitter when over brewed (and even when it's prepared properly, bitterness is one of its many charms), but it never bothers me much except when I'm feeling down, then it attacks my tongue and sends really nasty aftershocks to my brain. Anyway this isn't a treatise on tea, my point is that I haven't enjoyed a cup of puerh for at least two years (I did drink some, but hated it every time), and now I've been drinking it for the last two days and wow, had forgotten how much I love it.

Things aren't perfect. I don't yet have the energy to carry on most of my interests, and focussing more than five minutes in a row is still hard, and I'm guilty of a lot of self-neglect too (really need to clean my apartment and take that shower). My sleeping patterns are still off and I can feel my insiders being restless, it's not quiet in my head by any stretch.

But I'm writing again, and knitting, and drinking tea. The weather is cool outside and I'm not in acute physical pain anymore.

And that makes all the difference in the world.

Interesting topic that slipped by me (I vaguely remember reading the first post, have no idea why I didn't pitch in at the time). Not sure I can contribute much as I don't have any friends with alters/inners/littles/etc. and don't have friends close enough that my own switches are noticed. But I'm drawn to this topic as I do have insiders and can relate to some things.

I like your three "alter" categories, Aphotic. I'd like to add two more, if that's okay.

#4: The "broken" insiders that never front. They stay hidden deep inside the mindscape and never come to the surface, as they were created to hold a piece of memory away from the conscious mind. Often we become aware they exist because some insiders talk about them or make allusions to them, but they aren't ready to come to the surface.

#5: The "inner helpers" Blueberry told me about, those insiders that exist only to protect and soothe the younger and/or most hurt ones. They may front sometimes, but often don't and stay inside to take care of others instead.

Thank you for all the work you did here, for being there when we needed it and helping in every way you could. After everything you did for us, you absolutely deserves to think of yourself and take time to heal. I wish for your path to be as easy as possible, and for you to come back to us whenever you're ready. Take care of yourself!

I don't mean to sound racist but this stuff makes me hate my Chinese origins so much.

I relate to this so much. My parents were from two different countries, so I'm trapped between feeling "allegiance" to my non-abusive mother's country (the one I live in) where I've always felt like an outsider and which treated me pretty badly, or to my abusive father's country (the one I've never been to) which I was brainwashed as a child into believing was my "real home" despite never setting a foot there, and is of course closely linked to my abuser.

In my case at least, hating my origins is less a form of racism and more a form of self-hate. I don't hate other people coming from either country, and despite the fact I hate the customs that made me suffer, I can't say I hate everything I was ever taught. There were good things, I just hate what's related to my abuse. Some days it's hard to remember though, especially when I'm in pain.

Oh! Alright, I understand better now. Thank you for explaining again, and sorry for the confusion.

So uhm, right this moment I'm not comfortable disclosing exactly where I live (it may change later), but it's a first world country. My culture is mostly individualistic, but as my people used to be oppressed by the dominant culture's system (mostly through being deliberately kept in poverty and shamed/kept from having important jobs because of religion and language), there's a tradition of being superficially congenial but really wary/judgemental of outsiders. Basically you can come live with us and we'll be polite, but you'll never really be "one of us" (especially if you don't have the same accent). And that includes people born in the same exact culture but coming from a different city where the accent is a little different, not just immigrants from other countries, because for some reason I can't fathom there used to be random feuds between the big cities. It's a really backward way of thinking, fortunately getting better but not as quickly as it should (and not as quickly as the rest of the world either). And so, my point is that despite the individualist culture, there's also an important undercurrent of "stick with your people" (where "your people" is anyone sharing the same culture and background, and no other).

Now, for your question. From what I gather speaking with people around me, PTSD and CPTSD are two very different things. PTSD is associated with veterans and a "noble" syndrome without too much stigma... unless you get it from assault, and then you get shamed with oh-so-funny comments about not having been to war. Doctors of course are a bit better in that they don't shame you, but every time I've brought up having flashbacks I've been dismissed because my diagnosis isn't PTSD but BPD (aka I never got any help whatsoever), so... yeah.

CPTSD just doesn't exist, virtually nobody heard about it and symptoms are clumped with various PDs, most notably BPD, or if you have huge mood swings they'll consider Bipolar Disorder instead. Unless they have first-hand knowledge (aka, they know someone with a BPD diagnosis or have been mis/diagnosed with it before), most people give you a wide berth when you tell them about it because they've all seen movies with spectacular misrepresentation, and most doctors/nurses/therapists treat you like a difficult patient within five minutes of having met you. The stigma is so ingrained that to prevent patients from feeling stigmatised, the PD-specialised centre I was sent to refused to acknowledge psychiatric diagnosis out loud. "We don't use those words because we treat personal difficulties here, not psychiatric troubles," they said. (But of course when you doubt your diagnosis you're shut down. And misdiagnosis occurs at an alarming rate. A friend of mine was told she was BPD when in fact she was having post-partum depression.)

Also, not so much anymore because despite everything I just told you the mental health system is getting better and awareness is slowly rising, but up until 20 years ago if you weren't obviously in a psychotic state then you weren't ill (according to your family). You were "down" or "negative", but you didn't suffer from depression. You were "temperamental" or "a little strange", you didn't have a PD. You were "paranoid" or "an hermit", you didn't suffer from anxiety. And those were considered normal in many families, mostly joked about because everyone had at least one "weird" family member. So that mentality is still there somewhat, in judgemental undercurrents and passive-aggressive humour mostly because people are too polite to say it to your face, until you get yourself to the hospital and come back with an official diagnosis, and then it's either the wide berth I was talking about earlier, or people actually love you enough to give you benefit of doubt (though they still treat you differently).

I think that about sums it up? Of course, this is my own experience, and it's possible people from less abusive families and backgrounds in the same country have better experiences. Actually I really do hope some people in my country don't have it as bad I as do, 'cause if not that would be depressing.

Interesting topic.

I'm not quite sure how to answer, as I don't know anyone else in my country with either PTSD or CPTSD to compare my own symptoms with. I'm also not quite sure if you're asking how PTSD manifests in people with the syndrome, or how the syndrome is understood in our different countries and/or by people who don't have it? But my confusion may be because I still don't get every subtleties of the English language.

In any case I'll be interested to see how other people here answer.

[you]

No, thank you Aphotic for coming up with the idea of turning our discussion into a thread of its own!

Writing has been a part of my life for as long as I remember. Started before even being able to properly write, with little comics made of drawings, lines of gibberish and lots of exclamation points, often asking older kids to help me with the words. Around ten I wrote down my own (horrible) twist on campfire scary tales, got a bit of positive attention for it (meaning no-strings-attached positive attention from non-abusive people), and decided right there and then that this would be what I would do for the rest of my life.

As a teen I dabbled into (bad) poetry a little, but it didn't suit me so I quickly moved on to short stories and novels. Just as you Aphotic, most of my themes were very dark, not really violent or graphic but very depressing. Around the end of high-school I was writing short stories about a child that refuses to be born and chooses death instead, a girl framed as a witch by her jealous sister and who ends up burning at the stake, and tried my hand at the schizophrenic point of view too. Most of my characters ended up dying, probably half because of depression/CPTSD, half because a lot of the entertainment media (books, movies, etc.) I used to be fan of at the time used resurrection tropes like time travel, MacGuffins that literally brought people back to life, or reincarnation. Death never being definitive allowed me to kill off characters without feeling terrible about it (seeing as I loved them more than most people I saw in the "real world").

Things changed a lot in my twenties, between moving away from my FOO and the meltdown (and subsequent hellish hospitalisation experience) that led to be (mis)diagnosed BPD. I lost my craft for four full years, then found it back again (though right now I'm struggling again). It had a huge influence on my themes though. To paraphrase one of my favourite books, where I used to write about death I now write about murder. But what happened to me also let me found light inside because it put everything into such sharp contrasts, and though I still can't write (or stand) happy endings, now at least I can write about hope, and overcoming darkness.

I'm so glad you found a way to lessen the need to SI! 

Don't know what else to say, except same as Hope66, I'm appalled at and so so sorry for what your FOO made you go through. You deserved to be treated gently and lovingly, not with passive and aggressive violence. They deserve your anger, whenever you feel safe to express it. Many warm thoughts your way.

Thank you, Piou and Sceal. I'm glad you could relate to this too. It helps that I'm irrationally afraid of anything to do with dead bodies, and that autumn usually triggers dreams of zombies for 1-2 months every year. At one point I realised the feeling I get from those dreams is the exact same I get when I go outside and meet people, and have been using this analogy to explain anxiety and hypervigilence ever since.

Sceal, you're very right that breaking down complicated issues in small simple explanations helps a lot. And I think it could work even better if those explanations were specifically tailored for and addressed to our Inner Child/Children (or at least in my case, seeing as my insiders are usually the reason I'm on high alert). I'll try it next time I need to go out, explain everything aloud, maybe it'll help alleviate the anxiety. Thank you for this! It's really helpful.