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I was on a call yesterday where someone had messed up in a way that frustrated a lot of people, including me. The short version: we are going to have to drop everything and work pretty hard because of whatever this person did.

It was rough. We kept doing back and forth and finding new things that were wrong every turn. We never did find out who made the bad decision, but anyway I didn't want to add to the flames. I just kept wishing the call would just end because being around all these angry people felt dangerous. I went into my "trapped" mode and didn't speak anymore, which in this case was convenient because my input wasn't needed.

And the leader on the call did something that baffled me. She managed to make a joke about how everyone was feeling that really cut the tension and let a lot of people walk away feeling more at ease. I would love to know more about how she was able to do that so elegantly.

[if you can't volunteer to talk about it, how are people like me ever going to learn to talk about it?]

Thank you for your effort with me. I know a lot of where I am today is possible because of the roadblocks you removed.

Therapist 1, you made room for me at the drop of a hat so that I could quickly get my feet back on the ground and finish school. I know part of it was that you were close colleagues with my referrer, so maybe you felt a bit responsible to help, but you nevertheless made yourself available.

Therapist 2, you were an excellent mirror for me at a time when I was in an exploitative relationship and helped me realize I needed to escape with urgency. I would have let myself degrade much further if you hadn't patiently shown me the lengths I was going to only to receive nothing back.

I do not want to seem ungrateful. I can see your contributions and value what we found. But I wish you had not ignored the clear markers of trauma when I showed them to you.

Therapist 1, you asked me about school growing up, and I reluctantly broke down in tears just a few questions in because you touched on bullies. On our first meeting! And we never talked about it again. Did tears from a grown man who desperately needed to avoid the past make you that uncomfortable? I walked away knowing about automatic thoughts, but nothing about what my past had prepared me to do, or unconsciously repeat.

Therapist 2, we resolved pretty quickly that my exploitative ex was requiring I see a therapist because she had deep-seated issues she was not willing to own, herself. I wasn't willing to see what I had opened myself up to at that time, I was too smitten with the idea that someone professed to like me to see all the dysfunction. But you didn't find that odd that I was gleefully allowing myself to be victimized with obvious negative consequences? We never talked about trauma once.

I could not expect you to be omnipotent. That would be a mistake.

But I do feel strongly that as therapists, it is important not to write people off, assume it can't be trauma, or assume that it is not safe to talk about such things with your clients. After all, if you can't volunteer to talk about it, how are people like me ever going to learn to talk about it? I didn't find out on my own for 8 to 10 more years what this injury was. It might have made me feel bad to learn about it sooner, but then I could have spent 8 to 10 more years healing. Plus it's important to normalize talking about trauma lest we feed this stigma surrounding victims and survivors.

I do not feel safe sending you this letter, not to either of you. One, it would just seem rude coming out of nowhere. But on top of that, it would make me feel horrible in the event either of you responded by seeking legal cover or blaming me for not discussing my needs more clearly. The real issue is I just don't want you to do this to anyone else who comes seeking help, and it becomes apparent the needs are bigger than their asks.

So I will consider sending this, perhaps anonymously.

Growing up I had an imaginary friend until around the age 10/11 I would talk and share things with her, i guess the same sort of thing as you. She went when I started secondary school but was replaced by my own voice in my head, I could have full conversations with myself hearing responses ect.

I'm really thankful you mentioned this. Yes, I do think what I had was akin to an imaginary friend. Connection with others is so important, even if it's an inner being that we gave rise to somehow.

I loathe the idea of writing anything to you. I have been content to pretend you no longer exist for a long time. And that's why I feel like I need to face you now.

You are predators. You are con artists.

You knowingly, willfully infiltrated a protected mentoring space with the intent of recruiting people for your cult. And that's what it was, a cult. You duped that church's leadership into letting you recruit for your extremist group for years.

You ensnared several of us with promises of belonging and easy approval from authority figures. We were children coming from broken homes. Some of us had been traumatized for years. We needed stable care, basic human affection, and people worthy of trusting, and you deliberately separated us out from the rest of the group so you could initiate us in secret. The rest of our youth group could tell something was off. The church leadership could tell something was off. You did it in secret, so even both of you knew something was off. Yet you followed through anyway.

I wonder if I can explain how deeply this betrayal affects me to this day.

I joined and worked as hard as I could because of how hungry I was to win your approval. I alienated my peers. I alienated my teachers. I alienated everyone who was an outsider. I lied to terminally sick people about how I would heal them, and pedaled hate to people who were just trying to get by and mind their own business. I knew it was wrong when I acted out what your group taught me. Outrageously, even your cult members knew my participation was wrong, because they held me at arm's length every time we met, their guilty consciences flickering alive briefly.

It took years to break free, years I can't get back. Relationships lost I can't get back. I had to miraculously meet people who loved me and didn't care what I believed to even have a chance at feeling safe again. Yet even now, decades later, I am utterly terrified of seeing anyone associated with your group.

Can you even imagine trying to avoid 500 specific people and everyone they gossip with in a small town? Never being sure if someone who you wronged will pop back up and have something to say to you? On top of that, can you even imagine trying to avoid 500 more people who remember the awful things you did to them? It's too much.

It feels like all I can do is vanish because hidden wrath is awaiting me if I don't lay low. I am now hyperaware of the conditions I have to navigate just to say a friendly hello to someone. I keep re-experiencing the horrible things I did if I drive past a steeple or see a marquis out front. I can't reach out to the people I alienated anymore because I worry about how I burned bridges with them and should have done it differently.

Other people don't have to deal with this. I am jealous every day of what they have. And you two decided this was a better way to be for me.

It isn't.

I reject it.

I reject you.

And in time I will turn what you've done to me on its head so that I can just live and breathe, have friends, make a life, make mistakes, be forgiven, and help others do the same.

Decades ago, I developed a few different internal voices who would speak my thoughts under key circumstances. Just to be clear, they were only presenting my thoughts. The thoughts did not belong to someone else. However, in my head I would have a very different person than me "present" those thoughts, and this would generally only happen if I needed guidance, advice, or help. They never emerged during a traumatic event, only afterward or in times I was worrying a lot.

The people who presented my thoughts seemed to be very strong or insightful people. One was Mr. Feeny, a fictional character from a famous sitcom, who would step in and help me ponder difficult situations. Another was a black woman who I don't think ever had a name, but she was very experienced and decisive and had a knack for getting down to what really matters. I probably had others. I remember enjoying when they would emerge, like I had a PR team working for me on the inside. Like a team of advocates. I could see their faces. Their hairstyles. I could see their clothes. I could hear them speaking. They were distinct from me in every way except that they would package my thoughts up for me in ways I could not at that time.

I can still remember them clearly now, but it has been a good many years since I actually heard them emerge. I think my own voice is more or less taking the place of theirs. But I'm reading now experiencing these as different people was probably the result of dissociating. I admit, the few others I trusted with this information really didn't understand when I mentioned "my voices," it seemed like an experience that only I had.

What a strange relationship we have. I don't wish ill on you, but I also know that because of the dynamics we developed, we will never be close.

I don't think you ever wanted it to be that way originally. Looking back to when we were little kids, you seemed intensely interested in mentoring and guiding me, and in helping me avoid trouble. That's how it started anyway. But if we're being honest, it went far beyond that, and farther than it ever should have gone. It became akin to psychological torture.

Regularly you would invent games to roleplay fictional scenarios that contained serious ethical dilemmas that even grown adults would have difficulty with. I was only a toddler when this started. First I let you pretend that I was a famous sports player, and it was nice. I got to be special. You actually let me play these games as a grown-up version of myself, not as some other person. In these games, you gave me a fictional wife. Children. You made me a recording artist. You gave me fancy possessions and friends. But then you would get bored with that and invent a nemesis for me who would take everything away from me and force me to lose it all. They would steal my belongings, frame me and put me in jail, kidnap my family, and more.

There was nothing I could do to escape the games when they became too intense. I would cry and try to quit playing. You would coax me back in by pretending I had a way to fix everything in the eleventh hour, which sometimes was true and sometimes was not. So I would be under the illusion that it was up to me to make it better, and quite often that had no bearing. It was just however you felt that day whether I was going to have to roleplay an adult whose life was being actively destroyed. This is in no way fun. This is just torment. You were physically bigger and stronger than me, so I felt I had to let it play out. These games persisted for months. More than once I told a parent that I didn't want to play these games ever again. and yet you persisted.

Let me repeat. I was a child. What were you thinking?

I am spelling this out here because I am 100% certain you would deny this ever happened if I truly confronted you, proof that you and I know this was poisonous and wrong. That was abuse.

I regret trusting you. I let you write my life story for me in real time, I let you cast the fictional world around us that I would willingly react to. That was the level of trust I had. I'm not sure what made you think it was okay to do this to me. I don't think you know what you were setting me up for later in life, giving me unfixable problems and letting me suffer in them until you would let me out.

When real problems would come at me later, like bullies or abusive relationships, how was I going to respond? Well, exactly how you had rehearsed for me. I was going to treat them like gods who could freely decide my fate until their whims dictated differently. But by the time this would be an issue for me, you had already abandoned our relationship and showed almost no interest in my problems. Maybe you ran away out of guilt, or maybe you and the bullies are cut from the same cloth because you refuse to take responsibility.

You cannot make this right for us now. You'll have to make your own peace with what you did. I'll find my peace without you.

I used to have some friends who were opioid addicts in recovery. Once they got clean, they told me new challenges came up because they weren't able to numb their emotions anymore, and they had to learn from scratch how to use them appropriately.

I've never been hooked on substances, but this phrase is jumping out at me today.

As I'm figuring out how trauma manifests today and some of the tools I can now use to manage it, it seems like every little knot I unwind unleashes a part of me I was avoiding or had forgotten. Monday I bawled and cried. Tuesday I was able to smile in the mirror. Wednesday I felt deep resolve like I could really follow through on what I wanted.

It's new territory. In a way I'm excited to get to explore it.

Since there were so many of you, I no longer remember you all. I only remember some of you. I remember how you knew my family's name, and how you assumed things about me, and how you immediately began grooming me to be a target from the moment we were in the same room together. Seeing how many mean names you could call out, seeing how many horseplay punches you could get away with without me trying to get help. I don't really care why you did it. I just know you did it. And I know you did it so you could launch into greater assaults later.

Maybe some of you don't even remember who you were. Maybe victimizing little kids is like breathing to you and you have never questioned it. That's just the kind of thing that irks me and makes me feel helpless, is that even if I had absolute power and could force you to be in a place where you would have to listen to me, it might not make a difference for any of us. So I have never demanded that you apologize to me or pay me back somehow, because I am convinced you wouldn't be capable.

But I do have things I wish I could tell you if you did give a rat's rear.

You wrecked a big part of my life and left me to recover on my own. I hope no one does it to you, although maybe some of you already know what it's like. For a lot of people, a lifetime isn't even long enough to work through these issues. I have painful flashbacks dozens of times a day. I sacrifice far too much in my relationships. For years I couldn't even speak in front of groups of people. I can't seem to keep friends unless they live states and states away, and am now extremely prone to invite exploitative people into my safe zone because they superficially appear to care. I wonder if any of you would have kept mistreating me if you could see this growing recovery time debt you were putting on my shoulders.

I wonder if you're proud of that. But don't give yourselves too much credit. Although you were certainly the people who chased me, tripped me, beat me, made me bleed, made my reputation questionable, made me fearful for my safety every day for years, it stands out to me that I don't see you in my flashbacks at all. Luckily I don't have waking nightmares about what you did. But I do have something else. I see proxies of you all in the life I've had since then, little reflections of the way you forced me to live in those years. Some very good people came into my life after you all left, and they wanted to be my friend, to be my partner, to be a colleague, and in almost every instance I have shut them out and chased them away. So now my mind drifts off into flashbacks dozens of times a day thinking about what I should have done differently, how I can stop ruining things, how I can stop inviting suffering.

And I learned that from you.

I learned that because I wanted to keep away from the danger you brought upon me daily. I now have a very full curriculum of un-learning that will take me years to work through. But I will get through it, because you don't deserve this much importance in my life. I've already started the work.

I'm reading up in this forum about EFs. Maybe I don't fully understand them yet. I do have what are undeniably flashbacks of some kind. But I don't really lose control of my emotional functioning in my day to day when they get triggered. I do have a recollection of a past memory and an emotional reaction, and in response sometimes I reflexively and without thinking will take a very deep breath and cleansing sigh, or I will mutter "it's okay now, let it go," or "they can't hurt you anymore" without even being aware I have said it out loud. The things I re-experience are rarely the same event over and over, nor are they even all events that occurred while I was being victimized, but they are remembered events that all have a common theme of being unwanted, humiliated, or forgotten.

This happens in all kinds of locations:  at work, or while I'm petting the cat, or when I'm in the shower, or in the car, making dinner, just everywhere. I haven't kept count of how often, but I would estimate dozens of times a day if I haven't had CBD oil.  If I am not 100% dedicated to a task or a set of tasks (sometimes I occupy myself with 3 monitors at the same time), then I'm likely to start re-experiencing things within a matter of minutes.

Is it accurate to call this EFs, or is something else going on here? Trying to do my homework on this before taking my next steps.

Dear Renee,

There's no way you'd remember me now. We were in third grade together. We weren't good friends, but sometimes we would have reason to talk. In 1993 you shared a thought with me that no one had ever shared before. I was upset one day and didn't want to talk about it. Seemingly out of nowhere, you told me that if I was sad about the way people were mistreating me, I shouldn't hide it or it could make a "permanent scar." I remember my reaction being along the lines of "I can just do whatever I want and be fine, I don't have to listen to you."

But in that moment, I remember my throat tensing up and wanting to cry just because someone in this world actually saw I was hurting. I felt ashamed that someone could see it. I tried to hide that pain every day and someone I barely even talked to could see it! I hadn't hidden it well enough. You touched on my fear, that I might show my pain and no one would care, or worse, would make me feel ridiculous for feeling hurt.

I didn't think you were someone I could have trusted with my secret, so what I did was to shut you out permanently. I could pretend like it never happened. I never spoke to you again. But in the quiet, when I was alone, when I was in pain, I could still hear you saying that term, permanent scar, over and over. I didn't like that term. It felt like something I had heard on television. Something of fiction that I wasn't entitled to claim for myself. Scars weren't something I was allowed to have, I was supposed to be better than that.

I remember judging you harshly for bringing it up, thinking mean-spirited thoughts about how weak you must be if you had to get help. To the child I was, therapists were things you got if you were a bad kid. It was a punishment. You couldn't behave, and so now someone is going to force you to. In my mind, you couldn't have been a good kid. I judged that you had no right to tell me what to do at all. And then you moved away somewhere and time passed.

I was so wrong about everything, Renee. I'm sorry.

Years passed, the bullies got bigger and stronger and angrier. And more bored. Terrible things happened, and people all knew I was in pain. They could see me sitting alone every day. They could see my bruises. They could see my humiliation. They could see me sweating profusely because gym class was the next period. For years they could see it. They gossiped about it behind my back, what a problem case I was becoming and how concerned people should be.

None of them ever advised me to take care of my own heart like you did. I wished so very much in those times I could have had a friend like you. I hope wherever you are, you are safe, and that any scars you carry have had a chance to heal and that you have been able to find peace.

Please pardon me if I'm in over my head here. I've only known about CPTSD for a week, still making connections in terms of what protective factors you can likely start to work with on your own versus biting off more than you can chew.

Maybe a familiar notion, but a lot of things I have done to protect myself from re-experiencing traumatic moments have been temporary fixes, and have the effect of socially isolating me. I thought maybe that might be a helpful place for me to start.

Are there strategies to "re-assimilate" for lack of a better word that helped you not bump into beliefs about people being categorically unsafe/greedy/abrasive/untrustworthy?

Hi there. I'm not sure how involved I'll be here but I believe it will be a helpful resource to help me map out the extent to which I've been affected.

I'm in my mid30s now, I have a good job now, I live alone with my cat. I suffered pretty severe bullying for most of my teen years, but had written it all off as something that wouldn't affect me after I graduated and moved away. If you had asked me how things were after I got away, I'd say I was doing great and it was all just like a bad dream, and I'm awake now, and it's over.

But looking back now, that wouldn't really be true. I have had a lot of difficulty in college and graduate school and afterward with forming relationships, and constantly remembering awful situations I was in, and sensing danger everywhere. It was difficult being able to network and start a career. People close to me advised it was all just social anxiety, which to some extent I'm sure was true, and so I self-treated for SA for 10 years, and yet a lot of problem feelings and behaviors still persist. Finally a friend told me you could have PTSD even if you had never been in violent combat. I asked to know more. And that's how I got here. The things people talk about regarding CPTSD are very familiar to me, so I'm going to do what I can to retrain my thinking, behaviors, and maybe become a little better version of myself.

I already read the guidelines and introductory materials, no need to direct me there.