Hola!

[Maximo]

Hi, tanks for having me here. I'm 46, male, live in Argentina. Here most psycologic treatment is still widely based on psychoanalysis (of which i had a lot), and trauma based diagnosis isn't common,  so I don´t have a CPTSD diagnostic, but I've been pretty sure that I had PTSD for years, and after finding OOTS and reading around, well, it fits like a glove.
I lived my childhood in a cattle farm, isolated location, with my parents and siblings, one older sister, one younger brother and sister. We went to school
to a city 40 miles away. When I was 8, one early morning we a had a terrible car accident. A guy that worked at the farm was driving and my older  sister my brother and a girl who lived at the farm with us were on the truck. That girl died,  it was the most horrible thing you can imagine. My sister lost part of her forehead but survived, my brother had a severe concussion. I have a huge scar on my face and some other periferal *, but not that bad. But I was the only one who regained consciousness immediately. Except for the driver who was unscathed but in complete shock
Suddenly all life was upside down, we had to mode to Buenos Aires to save my sisters life and begin a slow process of several operations of facial reconstruction . My parents were completely obliterated, my little sister was lied to about everything. I too learned of the death of the other girl  later on, they didn´t have the courage to tell me before.
So form one day to another i started new very alienated life in a city i didn´t know with people I didn´t undesrand. The sadness and helplesness were so bad they were naturalized, I didn´t even know I had them.
My sister underwent a bunch of reconstructive surgeries, terrified, with a deformed face through her first teens. And then on one of the later, mere esthetic interventions, she suffered an anaphilactic shock to anesthesia en entered a coma. She died 30 days later. Just for bad luck. By then we were all completely broke. When you´re a kid and you see your parents completely helpless on the long run it kills any capability you have for optimism or faith. They were destroyed.
2 years later my father had an intestine cancer removed, got complicated by system failure and almost died, long tuff ***. My mother colapsed completely and dedicated a lot of time calling me to her room and crying and saying life had no  more meaning.
another year and she got an intestine obstruction and also almost died of it. Tough long *** too. I think in both their cases it was a huge process of the pain they suffered. But it did a number on me, my brother and sister were better shielded, i guess, although they have their own chains to carry.
After that I was around 20 and nothing made sense any more. Didn't care for jobs or girls or anything else, I always felt death was at the turn of the corner, why bother. So i kept surviving, terrified by everything, knowing I could never kill myself because there was no way I could do that to my family but also completely certain that the darkness that was inside me would never go away and nothing would ever be good again, just a permanent avoidance of pain. Like somebody drowning in the sea and swimming and swimming and never getting to shore.
Did decades of psychoanalysis but the "thing" never lifted. Fast forward, 5 years ago my father had a long battle with another cancer and finally died. In the middle of that I was completely helpless, but i also had started reading about ptsd and SSRIS so I asked my psychyatrist for something to help me through. She prescribed paroxetine, and 15 days later I felt like a normal person for the first time in my life. Just like that. The improvement was huge.
I quit paroxetine a couple of times, went back to m y old self. So I´m on it. I know now that the meds cutoff the spikes but the death ideas are always there, thinking my family is gonna get killed every time they travel by car, or through some strange disease, or that they will never be able to be happy.  It's just there, always,  and the drinking, and living like a hermit. I can somehow enjoy life, but loving people is just painful to me.
And all the symptoms are there. Does that look like CPTSD to you?
Again, thanks for having me, sorry for the long post, but hey, I would have preferred to have less to tell too!!

[the mirliton]

Bienvenido Maximo!
May you find comfort on this forum like I have...
I found that this CPTSD journey that I got dealt very early in life is a bit easier to manage with the kindred spirits here at OOTS.

[sj]

hello Maximo 
It certainly appears you have been through a great deal of very difficult and traumatic experience. Hope this site is helpful to you.

[Libby183]

Welcome, Maximo. I am sure that you will find a lot of understanding and support here at OOTS.

All the best to you.

Libby.

[Maximo]

Thanks guys, its really interesting and supportive to read other people experiences. I find extremely helpful to read about the problem taken as an anxiety issue alone, it's frustrating to keep looking for some deep psychological problem   when you deal with psychiatrists that do not accept these tipe of diagnoses yet. For me the limitations imposed by traumatic stress are more akin to a physical handicap, my perceptions and interpretations of reality are not wrong or deluded in any way, it's just that I finally noticed at some point that I was working under a much heavier load than everybody else. The guilt than arises form trying to match "normal", that really ruined too many years of life for me. So it's super helpful to feel "not crazy", but having a normal, if somewhat exaggerated, reaction to a series of unlucky events. Thanks again!

[sj]

I completely relate to what you say here:

For me the limitations imposed by traumatic stress are more akin to a physical handicap, my perceptions and interpretations of reality are not wrong or deluded in any way, it's just that I finally noticed at some point that I was working under a much heavier load than everybody else.

I do now have physically disabling, chronic health issues (which I know stems from the CPTSD). But I also feel and have for a long, long time - preceding the health conditions - that I was struggling under an extra burden of weight that other people didn't seem to have. Even your description above about running a race without legs is uncannily similar to a metaphor I have seen in my mind's eye and referenced for about 20yrs to describe how living feels for me.

take care

[Maximo]

Thanks Sj. Actually, when I was younger, I believed that everybody functioned under the same amount of stress as I did, and that was the worst, because i saw all my friends getting jobs, falling in love, etc, and I thought it was some kind of character flaw in me, that I failed. It took me a long time to understand that they had it so much easier. After a lot of work I actually understood that some of the other people that had normal lives wouldn't even be able to tolerate the amount of stress I was always taking on. It's a good thing to keep in mind.

[sj]

  to everything you just wrote.
I still fall in and out of forgetting and remembering this. It's great to have you and other people reiterate the point because it is a big, important, useful one, I reckon.
We are actually monumentally strong.