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I find this annoying, maybe even more so than what happens when I want to talk about how bad something feels and another person replies, "Oh yes, that happens to all of us". I never know then if she is trying to show solidarity or to diminish my experience. Possibly it's a sort of denial or protection from having to empathise with a greater pain. I see this as much like the 'mine's bigger than yours' response, but more insidious, the 'we're the same size so button up' response.

Very powerful. Quite unnerving. I almost don't want to look. I really liked the autism one just underneath the PTSD picture. The artist must really care, really does his homework.

Just out of interest, artists and writers who have mental health issues, there is a real conflict about how much to depict in the work. Online here, we're careful to hide our identities, but that can't happen if we make work public, can it? Art is an important means of expression, and a vital way of forging links between those who experience directly and those who cannot usually know. A brave thing to do? Foolish? Vain? Tricky that.

I actually just changed mine, as anyone who knows me might recognise the author I took my previous screen name from. Now I have this, which comes from the trees with their split-open, hollow cores that, nonetheless, keep on growing.

I sometimes imagine quite torturous scenes. I wonder if they might be kind of symbolic, metaphors if you like, for the feelings I have which lack actual images to go with them.

Sounds like a lot to handle. How much does your fiance understand what you are feeling? I don't know what your threshold for stress is like, but I know what happened to me when I began to take more and more on without limits, and what you have would be too much, long term, for me.

See the doctor -- talk about real symptoms of stress. Any sense of hopelessness, any feeling of burnout. They treat symptoms, not life, and a doctor responds best to this kind of approach, I find.

Can you talk to your partner? I know how much it hurts to admit it when we aren't quite living up to the standards we set ourselves, but I bet he would prefer it if you were not feeling so stressed and would understand that things can't carry on for you this way.

What about debt advice? I approached, um, I think it was the Consumer Credit Counselling Service or something like that, who were great at finding better ways to deal with creditors. It was a huge load off to discuss the implications with someone who was familiar with peoples situations all the time. It put limits on how catastrophic my thinking became.

Good luck. For what it's worth, you have permission to leave the washing up whenever you want to.

Thanks, Radical. I chime with what you must feel when you cut down. All the best for getting through.

@sanmagic7 - It's astonishing the number of contrivances I have come up with over the years, so as not to feel stuff. But constructing explanations that are intellectually distant from the hurt itself is probably the main one.

After several years of therapy, what strikes me is how I never could have predicted what I would discover or what the real work would be.

In looking forward to each session, I have begun to look forward to the surprises.

I don't want to warn you off anything, but I did find that my attempt to structure the discovery slowed me down. I went down some misleading routes considering diagnostic labels, when ultimately it was my own self that had to be unearthed. It's satisfying when that starts to happen.

Therapy can make us vulnerable, helpless, for a little while. It's the therapist's job to make that safe. I think the driven feeling can be part of the trauma-emotion, the busy-ness a symptom, part of fleeing from bad sensations. Part of us wants to feel them, part of us fears it. It's counter-intuitive to look for healing in the heart of all the pain. People say that is where it is found.

I wish you very much luck and success.

I relate very much to the dilemma. Most jobs prove stressful enough to spin me out and I start to forget important things (like newly scheduled shifts). Study is great but deadlines stop me dead.

But most I recognise the pressure, having a partner and wanting to 'do my bit.' The therapist I have has put emphasis on actually talking to my partner about what she expects of me. A relationship has many sides, and what we each provide the other with is a complex balance, with finances being only one aspect. People get into relationships for emotional reasons, and what can be provided emotionally.

Would it be worth putting that in real terms, rather than trying to guess what your boyfriend expects?

I had the wrong diagnosis prior to C-PTSD and have been taking a mood-stabiliser for several years. Every time I change the dose of Lamotrogine, up or down, I experience a week or two of intense agitation, hopelessness and dissociation.

It took 2 month to get on the drug. 2 months later on to double the dose. Looks like 2 months to get off it, a fraction of a dose every couple of weeks.

BUT... I'm looking forward to the end result. It never helped very much. There's the offer of traditional anti-depressants next, but I want just to stop and feel. Keep feeling the intensity of whatever it is I feel. I'm going back to counselling. This could be a meaningful time...

Interesting that she wanted you to be...what did you say? ...different from other men. I wonder in what way.

Yes, that was always rather hard to fit into, nothing in certain terms but implied, plenty of stories about men who were inconsiderate, oafish, including seemingly respectable men who were doctors or teachers or whatever. Sexual desire wrapped up in that, somewhere. I always had the impression there was something innately dim and uncouth about manhood, but 'I don't mean you' or 'You're not like that' supposedly was to reassure me. I don't even  know if she fully understands it herself, her idea that men don't respect women like they (I wrote 'they', I mean 'we') should. It certainly changed how I behaved. In adolescence, I actually felt that girls would hate me if I admitted to feeling anything sexual. That took some getting over.

Thanks, Morningdove.

Here in Britain, the system has been given a massive overhaul (with the aim of denying more people support, it seems) and this assessment is about moving from the old system to the new. It should be automatic, but I think they see it as a chance to do some weeding.

Good advice about seeking advocacy -- I had that the first time round. Less is available these days (financial crisis, austerity, charities struggling). Worth looking around though.

Fingers crossed. I'm the emoticon with bricks on its head right now.

I appreciate your good wishes.

I've needed financial help often and for a long time, I don't cope well with regular work. I'm applying again at the moment.

Filling out the claim forms for state support triggers all kinds of fears. It is like being judged. There's a sense of being seen as a scrounger, or guilty before even being judged. It is a reminder of being helpless and dependent on a stern, uncaring entity.

The forms want rigid, yes/no answers. If, say, I had no hands, it would be easy to demonstrate that I needed help. C-PTSD doesn't easily fit into the tick-box lists that qualify a person for financial aid. So... I feel like I'm turning somersaults, performing, squeezing myself into boxes, fawning... it breaks down my self-esteem.

Do you get, or have you ever had, welfare support? What sort of angle did your claim take? Did it set off any triggers?

Myself, it's not for me, I hurt for other's pain too much. But I think Pete Walker, a trauma survivor himself a font of C-PTSD advice, IS a therapist and apparently a good one. Perhaps it depends how far along your own recovery you are? I believe training requires a person to undergo therapy as part of their learning path, so perhaps you will discover if you are ready as you go. Could you explore it through doing the course, and decide later whether you mean to practice?

Thanks for such deep responses. After three years of counselling, I'm finally ready to talk. A lot sounds familiar, and has led to recent re-diagnosis as C-PTSD.

I have heard (from she herself) that my mother dreaded having me, her eldest child. She studied every book she could find to work out how a child could be different to my cousin, whom she watched through so many screaming tantrums she was terrified of having to cope with it herself. I believe, or infer, that by the time I arrived she was an 'expert' in child rearing in all cultures. I think she really did love and care, but her need for a calm and manageable baby was very strong.

I don't have too many bed memories of early childhood, she was very present and we did lots fun and stimulating things, she read me stories all the time (fantastic books) and we were always going places and seeing stuff. I loved it. She chose to home educate. Very critical of the 'establishment.'

@Max:
Enmeshed, yes. Very hard to leave parental umbrella. I relayed her intellectual opinions and judgements of society for years as if they were my own. I'm not narcissistic, I don't believe, but in terms of intellectual argument and alternative opinion preaching I have been aggressive and scary. Also, Emotional Incest, I hadn't heard the term. After she broke up with my dad, I was her confidant. For a long time. By the time I was 16 she was fully depressed. Not much left for me by that time. My dad too though, lived out his regrettably lost teens through me when I was old enough. I had to be his mate.

@Kizzie, that term, 'Covert Narcissism', is helpful. My mum was such an utterly fantastic mother, much better than all the rest. Ha. I thought.

@Sienna, thanks especially for this validating breakdown of everything I said. Reassureing. 'Boundaries being invaded' says a lot. As my mother was a very alternative intellectual and a classic '70s feminist, me being a boy carried it's own trials in her mind, it's own unique schooling needs. There was a well-meaning seed in her approach (guys DO need guidance to grow grow into well rounded adults) but her wish for me not to be 'like other men' wasn't helpful. She scapegoated my dad, that's for sure. Told me things I shouldn't know.

@Wife2, I think you hit the nail on the head. My mother was proud when I was a better intellectual. I can't help but repeat it (no less because, after all, learnedness IS admired generally) but my 'rebellion' may have been through dropping out, being over-emotional and anti-intellectual in my behaviour, impulsive, not thinking things through, gravitating toward visceral art, stuff like that. Trying to let out disallowed feelings.