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I find this hard. I always go back to Jon Kabat-Zinn's saying "if you are breathing there is more right with you than wrong"

I try to do 3 things I am grateful for.

1. Healthy energetic kids 
2. Having healthy food to eat.
3. Our safe home.

I hope everyone is having/has had a good day

Yes, I was recently diagnosed with ADHD and with medication I function a lot better, still takes me a while and I can't ceal with many things going on. I think people with learning difficulties are more vulnerable to trauma. Perhaps because learning deficits affect how people treat us, or our more frequent failures, or we are easier targets. Or maybe these deficits make us more prone to trauma. I find I am often left thinking "what just happened? am I upset? oh yes, I am upset!" but well after the interaction.

I do wonder if learning difficulties are associated with intergenerational abuse. For example I was listening to a video today, ADHD is accepted to be a genetic disorder. They have also isolated a gene known to be involved in ADHD as well as narcotic and alcohol addiction, in addition to the well established connection between ADHD addiction in general. Therefore, I imagine, more children with ADHD would be born into traumatic circumstances. If that makes sense?

With my children I am just honest and try not to go into more detail unless they ask for it.

I would say because the human body can only stay alive for so long, sometimes it wears out, or gets a disease or has an accident that it can't recover from. 

I don't know if that is the "right" but I tend to start with something like that and then answer all their other questions that lead from there.

I find I have problems with the same thing.  It never occurred to me that someone would actually want to help me with a problem. And asking for help or sharing my struggles made me feel so ashamed and would send me down into a depression spiral. If it was in uni I would just drop out of the class rather than ask someone, especially a teaching (authority figure).

I started having a big shift in this when I was studying teaching and discovered the concept of locus of control. In order to strive and grow you need to have an internal locus of control. Meaning that you believe you are able to influence what happens in your life. However, if you have an external locus of control you feel you have no control over the events that happen in your life. It goes without saying that all people with a C-PTSD would start off with an external locus of control - having no control over the events is what causes the trauma. I did some reading in growth mindset as well. It's all a work in progress but I find knowing and learning gives me more confidence.  So having this knowledge really helped me understand what was happening in my brain and how it was holding me back to not ask for help, and that it's OK to look stupid sometimes, generally no-one will ridicule you for it. If they do, you know you should run very fast and in the opposite direction!!

The hardest part is discovering what these blocks are, once you see them they start to lose their power. The only way from here is up!

I am off to discover Trauma Recovery University. Thanks for the heads up.

My firstborn was a very intense baby who cried 24/7. I was so overwhelmed, we had no support and my Dad used to laugh and say "it's what you deserve for putting us through the same thing"

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for having me. I thought I would start by sharing my story.

I have always struggled with depression and anxiety. The last 3.5 years or so have been an epic journey of self discovery, prior to this I hadn't even realised I had anxiety, to me that was "normal". It started with the birth of my 3rd child when I started having panic attacks trying to leave the house with 3 kids because I was convinced I would lose one. I signed up for a post natal depression group therapy and found it a source of great comfort, to finally be able to share my insecurities. I continued to do other classes because I couldn't understand why parenting was so hard for me, why my kids were so difficult. Eventually I did a class that focused on our own childhood experiences. I don't think I really understood I had had a bad childhood until that point. I knew I felt lonely, but we had food and a roof over our heads. My parents were on the P&C. I finally realised that there was something missing. Support, validation, praise. Basically my childhood was devoid of attention and emotion. So I keep plodding along. I was studying teaching and realised I had inattentive ADHD. So I took myself off for a diagnosis. Since I started medication just over a year ago, I have felt much better. My brain had settled down, I started to develop self esteem. I started to realise that I had feelings, and when they came up. I started noticing I would fall apart whenever I felt unsupported, unheard, invalidated. Once one my kids said something like "mum is stupid" and I felt wild inside. A number of times a memory would pop up of my mother on her death bed and all I wanted to ask was "why didn't you love me?" and I kept feeling deeply ashamed.   I experience extreme anxiety around school staff, well school grounds in general. 

I started to notice how deeply hurt I was from interactions with my father.  I finally voiced how hurt I was by his behaviour and all I got was an email listing how much of a terrible person I am and all the horrible things I had done to him in the last 5 years since I last stood up for myself. I have not had contact with him for almost 9 months.

Then I started to notice all the things in my marriage that weren't right. I hadn't even realised they were happening. I left my husband a month ago and our counsellor mentioned when he dealt with people with complex PTSD he finds "slower is faster" in reference to me feeling smothered by my husbands attempt to make amends. When I got home I looked into it and find I relate to a lot of it, and that my ex- husband would, too.  In all this I think we were both deeply wounded souls who found comfort in each other, but have never been unable to give each other what we needed.

I started schema based therapy after ending contact with my father, but with the marriage breakdown we haven't progressed very far, I now understand that I was emotionally deprived and abused as a child. I think this is the first time I have actually been able to "say" that.  I have tried so desperately hard to be a better parent than what I had but I have to keep pushing myself through this to have the best chance of breaking this awful cycle.  I really hope I have.