Is anyone's trauma a story too complex to tell, making it harder to get help?

[rebelsue]

I have found that my own story, why I am traumatized, is just too long and complicated to tell well. I have tried to get help and it takes such a long time for the therapist to even wrap their head around my life that sometimes I never even make it to the helping part. I've actually quit therapy and resorted to telling my story in multiple volumes of journals. I've written 100 pages already and I may need to get a second book.

There has been so much, and it feels impossible to fully capture with snippets and summaries. And so providers and friends often never fully get why I am the way I am and I never get advice that is useful and I often get misunderstood as being someone opposite of who I really am. I feel completely unable to communicate my needs to others. My husband knows the most of the story, likely all of it, and he's the first to stay around long enough to hear the whole thing, and even sometimes then he still gets frustrated and shuts down. He wants me to be okay as much as I do.

I feel like I've been to so much therapy I outgrew it. I could be a therapist at this point. I even subscribe to a therapist professional magazine because regular self help articles and books are too simplistic for me. I look in scientific journals now when I want to know about some new psychology topic or therapy method. And still I am broken. I am really furious that my parents raised me to be the worst kind of person, the kind of person who has a personality that nobody wants to help.

It's almost as if trauma causes the victim to create even more trauma for themselves, and then it becomes very easy to be like "that person isn't traumatized, they just suck as a human being."

Anybody else have this problem? Feel this way? Relate?

[Bach]

I relate.  Abuse from my narcissist mother started the day I was born, and throughout my youth took many forms that were so strange, covert and hard to describe that I have had trouble understanding that they actually happened.  Then as a teenager I went to live with my father and at first I thought things were so much saner and healthier, but it turned out to just be different kinds of traumatising dysfunction.  With many years of heavily self-led therapy with a variety of people behind me, I am refining the narrative into something that I feel tells enough of it to allow both myself and other people to begin to understand the depth of it, and how pervasive and inescapable it is in my life.  It will never be possible to process or provide all the details and all the context, so the trick is to figure out what I can present/process and how without feeling like I'm being unfair to myself by:

1.  Minimising my experiences because I'm ashamed/it's just too painful to be so exposed/I can't handle it and am driven to escape into self-destructive and retraumatising behaviours; 

2. Exaggerating those experiences out of fear that people won't understand how damaging it was, because so much of it doesn't sound "that bad" on the surface, or;

3.  Normalising them into something that is related but not truthful, that will be easier for people to believe or understand was "that bad".   As a childhood victim of constant gaslighting, truthfulness is extremely important to me.  So, I am working on the art of how to tell/process the important parts of the truth without getting caught up in all the details of circumstances, contexts, specific gestures that were made or words that were said, etc.  It's no small trick, I'll tell you, but, slowly I'm getting there.  Don't give up.

[Kizzie]

 

I am refining the narrative into something that I feel tells enough of it to allow both myself and other people to begin to understand the depth of it, and how pervasive and inescapable it is in my life.  It will never be possible to process or provide all the details and all the context, so the trick is to figure out what I can present/process and how without feeling like I'm being unfair to myself  ..... so I am working on the art of how to tell/process the important parts of the truth without getting caught up in all the details of circumstances, contexts, specific gestures that were made or words that were said, etc.  It's no small trick

Well said Bach   

[RiverRabbit]

I have attempted getting this communicated through poetry/creative-writing.

I have found, conversationally, I lose people pretty quickly... they tend to have no schema in which to fit what I am describing.

With covert NCP mothers, abuse is so ingrained in the daily interactions... and each interaction is just short of overt abuse (see "covert")... you cannot sufficiently convey this to the "normal" people who never personally experienced this type of abuse.

[Bach]

...With covert NCP mothers, abuse is so ingrained in the daily interactions... and each interaction is just short of overt abuse (see "covert")... you cannot sufficiently convey this to the "normal" people who never personally experienced this type of abuse.

Yes, I think you're right, RiverRabbit.  It's all such slippery stuff, like how I crave physical affection from people I love because it can be so incredibly comforting and I've never had enough of it, but I'm also afraid of it because a lot of the physical contact I did get from my mother was in the form either of vague and grudging minor gestures, or showy insincere displays.  I remember her once grabbing me and dancing me around and then kissing me a bunch of times on my face, and being absolutely terrified because I didn't know what it meant.  How can you expect someone with less damaging parenting to understand that?  Or expect someone with a generous spirit and a decently healthy sense of humour to understand differences in tone between affectionate teasing and cruel jokes, and what those differences in tone can do to a child?  How can you tell things like that to someone who believes that child abuse means conventional physical violence or at least visible physical neglect and obvious verbal cruelty, and expect them to even believe any of it and not think YOU are the crazy one?  That stuff only scratches the surface, and it is the easier stuff to fathom.

[Jazzy]

Yeah, I can relate for sure. A big part of why I haven't really told anyone about having CPTSD is the followup. I don't want to sit and explain everything, but if I don't, I feel like I'm not being fair to myself. A couple of T I have talked to tried to couldn't really handle me telling them multiple things. I'm trying to get to a place where I'm more open about it all, but it is difficult.

[Otillie]

I don't know if this is helpful, but I sometimes tell people: "On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 = 'raised by angels' and 10 = 'raised by Satan' — the abuse events of my childhood are maybe about a 6. They were bad, but there's so many people out there who've been through worse. If you use the scale to measure how confusing my childhood was, though — that was a 10. Or maybe a 4000. Nothing about my childhood made any sense, and I had to figure it out alone, and it means my basic understanding of the world is not-quite-right in more ways than I even realize."

[Bach]

I don't know if this is helpful, but I sometimes tell people: "On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 = 'raised by angels' and 10 = 'raised by Satan' — the abuse events of my childhood are maybe about a 6. They were bad, but there's so many people out there who've been through worse. If you use the scale to measure how confusing my childhood was, though — that was a 10. Or maybe a 4000. Nothing about my childhood made any sense, and I had to figure it out alone, and it means my basic understanding of the world is not-quite-right in more ways than I even realize."

YES!  This perfectly sums up something that I've been trying to put my finger on for years.  Thank you! 

[Kizzie]

Love the scale idea Otillie 

Two things that might help untangle what is a complex background to some extent.

First, I developed CPTSD because of parents who suffered from NPD, but were very covert in how they behaved.  Trying to explain this kind of stealth abuse was just so hard     BUT then I landed at our sister site Out of the FOG,  and I learned the language to name the NPD behaviours I was subjected to. It made all the difference in the world  I was finally able to talk about what I'd been through, to understand I wasn't crazy or overly sensitive, and now I recognize the behavior easily and clearly.   

Second, we do have some information sheets and CPTSD history/ symptom tracking forms  that may be of help when talking to a professional or family/friends.

[Jazzy]

Thank you Kizzie. There is a lot of good stuff here and at outofthefog. I really need to utilize my resources more.

[LearnToLoveTheRide]

My CPTSD developed in adulthood, over 8 years. I know - more or less - what, where, why and how everything went down. But, I still struggle to understand exactly when it became a problem for me; when it developed into CPTSD.

When I try and explain it to people they generally become quite agitated and have a lot of 'ádvice' to offer me. I usually just say that I have CPTSD and leave it at that.

[Silverspoon]

Hi Rebelsue
Oh how I can relate to this. I struggled with my story for over fifty years. I felt so alone, so different. Any amount and type of words just never met the mark. In later years I never talked about it or if the issues ever came up I used to down play things as i didn't have to attempt to give my story  the attention it deserved. I always felt exhausted before i even got started and i always felt that it didn't take too long before my audience got bored. What i had to tell couldn't be covered in just a few words.

After I was diagnosed with CPTSD I did a lot of research about the symptoms and i could relate to everything that was written. I felt real... a whole person. But i needed to tell my story... the diagnosis was the catalyst to my writing my story. I took three and a half years to write my story... which i called 'Condemned to a Life not Your Own'.
Can any of you relate to these words?
Silverspoon

[Rainagain]

Like LTLTR my cptsd is adult onset.

I struggle to explain things, even to myself.

I think I had PTSD from pretty extreme trauma prior to experiencing the situation which caused the cptsd.

People dont understand at all, they can understand that the obvious extreme trauma would have been damaging but sort of get hung up on that and so miss the complexity of the later stuff I was trapped in.

I've seen that in health professionals too, the overall picture gets missed.

I get told that I seem ok, people just dont understand that the trauma has become internalised somehow, not sure I understand it myself. I used to 'act out' with the PTSD which was obvious.

Telling the story and working out what happened and the effect it had seems important, even if it's only working on the narrative in your head and not sharing it with anyone else.

If your own story makes no sense to you then it's so hard to explain it to others.

I suspect I was more obviously unwell with the PTSD, people dont seem to pick up on my cptsd much, if at all.

And the depressive disorder? I only use that when I need to explain sudden episodes of drastic weight loss.....

The 1-10 scale is interesting, the events which led to PTSD score higher but the later stealth abuse has had a more profound effect on me I think, somehow more damaging even if the symptoms are not obvious to others.

[theburningmonk]

Your share resonates with me most definitely. I've recently started neurofeedback. I can confidently say it's changing my life for the better. Neurofeedback doesn't require any story telling or even belief that it works. The premise is that all brains are not alike. There are biological differences of which some carry a diagnoses. When speaking to trauma, the brain is injured and altered by traumas. Those suffering from or managing CPTSD have experienced traumas in childhood and perhaps well into later ages. The brain autonomously manages, survives the trauma using strategies that result in CPTSD. In doing this, some parts of the brain are never developed or are highly over developed. When we experience the symptoms of CPTSD or PTSD, Anxiety, Panic Disorder, OCD and so on, the part of the brain that is responsible for flight or fight is highly developed, overly developed. The parts of our brain that help regulate or is responsible for executive thinking is not developed or under developed. Using an QEEG Brain Scan a map of the brain is generated. This scan measures 50-55 parts of the brain. The scan reveals what parts of the brain are not working at optimal levels as well as what parts are responsible for your symptoms. With neurofeedback you can train the parts of the brain that are under developed or weren't developed at all. Like a muscle these parts of the brain start to grow in function so much so that the overly developed parts of the brain can take a back seat bringing your brain back into balance. Some people report being cured of CPTSD or PTSD entirely. My doctor explained that she would never use the word cure however she would say, your quality of life will drastically improve for the better.

An example, pre-neurofeedback you walk into a room with 20 triggers (could be identifiable triggers or subconscious triggers), you have an experience. After neurofeedback you walk into the same room, same triggers and you aren't bothered by the triggers. I can attest to experiencing this result myself. It's kinda unbelievable to me in some way still. I'm still processing the benefits. I can also share that I've had neurofeedback after spending 5 days and nights in complete terror, not able to eat, suspicious thoughts, believing on some level I may have come to the end and after one powerful session, these symptoms diminished greatly. I was able to eat, the panic stopped, I could sleep and the suspicious thoughts were no longer present. I'm able to leave my house still anticipating anxiety and there is very little to be found. It's not gone although lessoned to a manageable place.

Hope this share is helpful!

[Silverspoon]

Dear burningmonk
Thankyou so much for your post, you explain this strategy very well.
Silverspoon