What a devastating disorder this is. I am fortunate all of the reasons or causes of my living a life under cPTSD are now gone except, of course, for myself. Within the past few months, I have learned to know when I am triggered and that has helped me stop or shorten the pain associated with being triggered.
Over the past year or so, I have progressed in my thinking from being a 3 year old, the age at which the trauma affected me, to somewhere in my teens. But I am growing up alone in uncharted waters and I find myself fully capable of quickly making the same mistakes I made, throughout my entire life, before I discovered why my life was never right, I was suffering from cPTSD, a few years ago.
I recently went through, got myself into a situation spanning several months that slowly ate me up. I knew something was wrong but didn't know what it was and it kept getting worse. I was digging myself into a deep hole daily while looking for responses from others but hearing only crickets. My efforts were based on good intentions but wrong headed - never let a child do an adults work without supervision and at my age, there is no supervision available.
Yesterday I gave up, quit the situation and within an hour or two of removing all interaction with the others involved in that situation, I began to feel better about myself. Didn't know why but I felt relief from something. It was then, while scrolling back through some saved stuff on my phone, that I came across something I had received from Roland Bal months ago, began to read it and discovered what I had gotten myself into and why. I also realize that elimination of the traumatic effects of living with cPTSD does not mean one is free and clear of that disorder's deleterious impact on ones life. He wrote (these 3 paragraphs taken from a longer message from him):
"A pleasing response isn’t just used to minimize or avoid further abuse. It is also a way of getting approval, feeling adequate and useful, being seen, and feeling loved and appreciated; so the pleasing response, through being directed continuously outward, serves as a dissociation. It serves as a dissociation for you, so you don’t feel constantly overwhelmed by the residual pain of neglect and experienced lack of love in your early formative years.
As with all emotions and feelings, there can be a healthy aspect to receiving appreciation and feeling good about yourself and your accomplishments, though when you are continuously looking outside of yourself for acknowledgment, and you have a lost a sense of containment, it becomes destructive. You are actively devaluing yourself by continually seeking validation from others, and this will make you emotionally unstable and dependent.
On top of that, it becomes harder and harder to interpret other people’s intentions and responses due to your lack of containment and self-reference; this, in turn, will create a lot of self-doubt and overthinking. Guilt and the fear of having done something wrong can easily take over."
He nailed it and when I first read this months ago, I didn't "get" it but I sure do now. The points he made that perfectly describe the situation I created for myself are in bold above - he said it so much better that I ever could but what he said is a 100% fit to what happened to me over a few months time. I took a giant step backward, fell victim to the disorder once again.
So even after having realized the source of my cPTSD, had all of the parental tapes removed from my head, understood where I came from and why I was the way I was for close to 70 years, I now realize that while the cPSTD affects and pain from my first few years of life set me on a life's course that can now, with active mindfulness, be to some degree minimized, the pattern of living as a fawn that I learned in my first 6 years of life is still there, will always be there and is ready to let me quickly fall into the same predicaments I experienced, I unknowingly got myself into, during my whole life living with the fawn, the "please" typology.
I guess life was going too well for me and my carefree, thoughtless day to day behavior created that situation, opened the trap door, and let me fall into a very bad event. Mindful is now a word that I understand much more clearly and I must be much more mindful of what I do from now on, mindful of what I get involved with and what I expect out of everything I do going forward. And while it is devastating for me to still not have any feelings other than anger, hate and sadness, it is comforting to know that I do not have any feelings for if I did, today would be so much more worse for me thinking about that disastrous situation I got myself into and hopefully am now out of.
All of this recent event just makes me sick to think about what can still happen, can in very subtle way, creep into my life and if not recognized and stopped, can and will take me back into the throws of everything that was wrong with my life. It seems that can happen quickly without constant mindfulness. Children need guidance and I guess the only guidance I can expect at my age is learning from mistakes. The one feeling that I have today is that of great sadness, sad for what I got myself into, sad at how it went down and sad to know I made mistakes. Hopefully, when the sadness goes away, I will have learned something.
