From the mighty

[Gromit]

https://themighty.com/2017/08/life-impacting-symptoms-of-complex-post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=PTSD_Page

This was the first time I saw 'body armouring' which is what I do, even other people have noticed I physically brace myself. I am not always aware of it at the time.

[woodsgnome]

Thanks Gromit, for the link--it's a nice summary.

Body armouring is something that's always affected me hugely. I've often felt like I'm being pressed down; I attribute a lot of this to a particular teacher at a private church school who loved, as part of his overall sinister abusive personality, to grab me, peer into my eyes, and silently but intensely work his hands on my shoulders, tightening his grip and literally pressing me downward as he forced me to crumble. That's for starters; there was other stuff, some much worse. This kind of thing causes me to react to trigger words like 'massage' in uncomfortable fashion.

That kind of thing became internalized as body armouring. In large part I learned to just stoically ignore it, as I soon grew tired of the purely medical model used by physicians who treat anything beyond the merely medical as a rare bird they're not equipped to deal with. So the body carriage issue continues to plague me.

Well, okay; while I can halfways understand physicians reluctance to go outside their norm, I have a harder time with the stigma, first in trying to explain cptsd, next in the typical blame-the-victim sort of brushback ("if you'd taken better care, etc.--your fault...bad you"). They hand out pills, many with disastrous side effects; while I end up with dissociation, EF's, and even more body armour from their callous 'medicine'.

Oh well. 

[Three Roses]

It's something I do, too. It's no wonder we're tired!

[Resca]

Thanks for posting this, Grommit. I had never heard of body-armouring either but - like all of you - it's such a constant thing that I barely notice that I'm doing it. It causes headaches, backaches, makes exercising difficult; I've even tried massages but it just makes everything worse, probably because being vulnerable with the therapist causes me to brace harder. Funny how the body can develop such problematic habits even when the previous trauma isn't physical.

This article does a really great job of explaining "hypervigilance" in general, both the physical and mental type. Most articles I've read of PTSD and even CPTSD categorize vigilance as a defense against perceived threats of violence, but this idea that it can literally just be the need to have a way out or to try and "get" people rings much more true against my experience. Several other people on this forum have talked about being highly sensitive or intuitive. I wonder if this intuitiveness is a sort of in-grown defense mechanism that helps those with CPTSD feel like that have more of a handle on the situation. Like if they know enough about their potential adversaries, they can easily notice hazards and plan for escape (or at least instant defense).

You're right Three Roses. It's truly exhausting.

[Gromit]

My body armouring feels like a hardening from the inside out. The first time I had a facial the therapist massaged my neck and shoulders and commented on how knotted they were. Luckily, I have no problem coping with massages but at the moment am struggling to find one as the person I previously saw has moved away.

The glass wall remark meant something to me, there always seems to be some kind of barrier between me and other people. I also spend a lot of time trying to understand people, to make sense of things, probably over complicating things but it also means that I can spot things other people can't, kind of like intuition Resca.

Tensing the body, holding breath, using your brain trying to work things out all the time is exhausting, that's why I was always thin. Anti-depressants made me a normal weight.