So is this something I've had all along without realising? Please help.

[Confused92]

Trigger Warning: abuse and bullying

Hi everyone.

I've only recently come across CPTSD and as someone who had a pretty terrible childhood, it seems to fit exactly what I am now like as an adult to the T. I know I have a variety of mental health problems but I never thought they were all linked together in such a way as this. However, I suffer from extreme self doubt and I can't help but think that I'm exaggerating/trying to see something that isnt there. However CPTSD seems to fit exactly how I am and where all my problems stem from. I was wondering if anyone could help me put my mind at ease over this?

First I'll tell you about what happened to me which caused my mental health problems in the first place. I was a reasonably happy child in the years before I started school and there weren't really any issues. However, when I got to school age it all started to change. Firstly, I have figured out that my mother is a very dysfunction person, very likely a narcissist and some of my earliest memories are of being really frightened of her, despite never being severely abused or beaten or anything (although I DID get slapped/hit quite a lot). She wasn't too bad as a very small child but her behaviour got much much worse as I got older. I'll come back to that later. So after a couple of years in school I ended up being targeted by another girl and was severely bullied. It was an absolutely horrific experience. She exacted psychological torture. She turned every single one of my friends into her gang of bullies and they relentlessly picked on me. She actually poisoned the entire school against me and they also joined in the bullying to some degree. 100 kids actively hated me. I have blocked out a fair deal of exactly what they did but what I can remember was very cruel. I remember several incidents where they tried their hardest to turn my best friend against me (and they succeeded in the end). One was where they smashed up one of her lego show and tells and blamed it on me (along with claiming I'd said stuff about her that wasnt true). They did several bad things and framed me for it and did things like grab my head band and throw it in the road, telling me to go and get it. This girl though did things like regularly grabbing my coat hood and holding me there infront of all the kids in the playground who laughed at me, while I kicked and screamed to get away. And on top of all this, my teacher was completely hostile towards me and sympathetic to the bullies ( probably because my mum had insulted her to her face). She was cruel and harsh towards me and I got shouted at for everything. She even did things like tell me off for "telling tales" if I told her someone was picking on me, yet if one of the bullies told on me I got shouted at for misbehaving. It got to the point where I apparently self harmed (don't remember this, my mum told me I did) and wanted to die (I DO remember this). I was only 8. I got moved to another school but for some reason I ended up being a hate magnet, and I got picked on by most of the kids there as well (although it wasn't as relentless and targeted). So I get to secondary school (middle/high school equivalent in US) and I am still ostracised and hated by many of the kids there too. No matter what I did I just seemed to attract disgust and contempt from the other kids. I had a small lasting group of friends for the first time in my life since the bullying I got at 7 years old however. When I got to sixth form, this was the first time in my life I wasn't hated by the majority of my peers. However, I STILL got badly bullied by a handful of people. One was extremely manipulative and managed to chip away my confidence by convincing me I was an outcast and nobody liked me. The other was part of a friendship group I got into. Most people were friendly except this one girl who disliked me for some reason. Anyway after a whole year she decided to leave me threats on facebook, hack into my email account and turn every one of those girls in that group against me. All of a sudden they went from being very friendly to also leaving me threats and being very nasty. After sixth form I went to university and this was the first time in my whole life I was NOT bullied by anyone and had a fairly good time, except from a manipulative boyfriend who never wanted to see me.

So that was the bullying from non family members. I mentioned before that my mum is abusive. That left a massive impact on me that I only recently realised and accepted. She treated me in a typical way a narcissist treats her children. I was the scapegoat of the family and I was always blamed and given unfair treatment. As I got older she was very mentally controlling and very manipulative, and I didn't even have my own thoughts or personality - I did exactly what she wanted all the time and became the person she wanted me to be. She hit me alot and went into crazy rages when I dared do even the smallest thing to upset her. I was constantly put down, always being told how selfish/ungrateful/spoilt I was. There is quite alot of stuff that she did but there is too much to go into on here. Look up narcissist mothers for more info. My sister is also abusive. As a small child she bullied me at the same time I was bullied in school and she was extremely cruel. She would pretty much do the same as the girl who bullied me - tell my parents lies about me and get me into trouble (which they believed of course), blackmail me into doing what she wanted, locking me outside the house while the parents were out, physically attack me (hit me repeatedly, pull my hair so hard she had me on the floor) when they were out, steal my things and claim they were hers and snitch on me constantly. It was absolutely horrific and scarred me just as much as the school bullying. Whats more she was nasty and manipulative pretty much until last year (even after I moved out 200 miles away). The last nasty thing she did was when I was visiting for the weekend. On the day I was supposed to go back to my home I was feeling very ill with a flu like thing and stayed in bed all day before I had to go back (6 hour train journey so I was trying to save my strength). My sister came upstairs and asked me to wash up (despite not having used anything in the kitchen that day). I said no because I was unwell and she flew into a rage, saying I was selfish and "i'm going to tell mum about you" and was just very verbally abusive. That kind of thing happened every day in their house when I lived there. Along with my mum and sister, my dad was no saint despite not being an emotionally abusive person like they are. He has trouble controlling his anger, and he used to get very aggressive if I upset him. Saying things like shut up would result in him charging upstairs after me and threatening me. I used to lock myself in the bathroom but he would hammer the door so hard it almost came off the hinges and demand I come out. When I did he would grab me and start shaking my arms and basically just scare the * out of me until I apologised. It was frightening as *.

But perhaps the very very worst thing they did was when I had a boyfriend they didn't like when I was 20. I went out with someone who was 10 years older than me and half white half arab. They went absolutely crazy when they found out and exacted the worst kind of psychological manipulation and torture campaign to force me to break up with him. They kept telling my my friends were lying to me and were trying to convince me to completely mistrust my own judgement. They shouted me down everytime I tried to reason with them about it, instead trying to convince me that he would abuse me and that he was a terrorist/would become a terrorist, that I would be spat at in the street for having a boyfriend who wasn't white etc. It was awful, it was like having my brain invaded. They even confiscated my phone for a while because I was trying to contact all of my friends. During my sister's graduation, which was at the time this happened, my mum and sister refused to speak to me until I dumped him and maliciously blamed me for "ruining" the graduation, with my sister telling me for months afterwards how she was going to ruin mine. I carried on refusing to break up with him because they demanded it up until the point where they really played dirty. My mum told me that unless I broke up with him she was going to disown me and ask my grandparents (her parents) to do the same. She was absolutely raging and I was terrified. I was in complete disbelief that my own mother would do this and I felt as if a rug of safety had been pulled from underneath me. So I ended up backing down in a way and pretended to break up with him. All I could think of was wanting to get out of there, so I decided I did not want to go on holiday with them (was the day after she threatned to disown me) and go back to my university house. But that ended up with her then threatening to disown me if I didnt go on holiday with them! So I was dragged away into a holiday apartment for three weeks with nowhere to go and no escape, with my mum and sister hurling emotional abuse at me the whole time (including finding out I hadn't really broke up with my boyfriend and then taking my phone and writing out a breakup message). It was one of the most horrific experiences of my life, it gave me a mental breakdown (which happened over the holiday and meant I couldn't really defend myself from them), normal PTSD and made my already existing mental health problems 100 times worse. It has permanently altered my personality, and I am now pretty much permanenetly depressed, hypervigilant and I have developed awful social anxiety. I no longer have the will to live my life to the fullest and hobbies/going to societies and groups/trying to achieve anything are just too much effort. Whats more, it has destroyed what relationship I did have with my mother and she still refuses to apologise or accept she did anything wrong, blaming me for "driving her to it" by not doing what she wanted.

Now I will talk about my symptoms and mental state. The bullying at school caused me to become a very negative person and started my life long bitter self loathing, with very high anxiety. I started getting full blown depression at around 18 and it has been getting stronger and more frequent ever since. I have severe social anxiety (just being around other people makes me panic and even small talk makes me sweat. Socialising is a chore these days) which is so bad I can't even go to any excersise classes/societies and clubs/public lectures/parties etc  without my partner where I don't know anyone there, so I am pretty much stuck at home most of the time not wanting to leave. I struggle with very bad self doubt and only recently have I managed to start trusting what I think, even if its different from others. I have an extremely negative critical voice and I am quite self destructive and I often self sabotage. If something goes wrong I automatically blame myself and have a strong urge to punish myself for it (went through a phase of self harm recently thats thankfully stopped). Its like I want myself to fail and feel like I deserve it. My self esteem is rock bottom and I often believe I can't do anything, which makes things hard at work. I am very shy and submissive around others to the point where I am a doormat, because I am so afraid of annoying people or making them not like me. I seem to have a preoccupation with trying to make sure people like me. Even now I always ask my partner after speaking to someone whether I have annoyed them and whether I did anything wrong. I am also constantly hyper vigilant with very high anxiety, which means that I cannot spend time by myself without feeling awful. If I'm by myself for the day (I only work part time), I wake up feeling ok ish but I feel unsafe, even in my own home, for some reason and my mood slips and slips throughout the day until I feel very depressed and deflated by the time my partner gets home from work. Nothing I do stops it either. It seems to happen completely uncontrollably. This and all the other anxiety I experience is making my life pretty unbearable if I'm honest. I'm not really living, I'm just trying to hold myself together and just get by most of the time. And there's the feeling that I haven't fully developed as a person. I feel like there's some part of me missing that other adults have but I can't put my finger on it. I am also extremely distrustful. I can't trust anyone fully and I am always suspicious of people. I have also recently developed nervous tics, where parts of my body jerk unvoluntarily when I am feeling very worked up. The strange thing is is that the only other time it seems to happen is when I am physically close to my partner. Him holding me or hugging me seems to trigger it and I've no idea why (I read that CPTSD can cause things like this). These are the biggest struggles I have but also have most of the other problems that come with CPTSD in some form.

Therapy-wise, nothing works. I've tried three courses of CBT, numerous courses of counselling and one course of dynamic interpersonal therapy but none of those have made any lasting impact, infact I have been continuing to get steadily worse throughout my life despite these therapies. CBT is just not enough, it only scratches the surface and simplifies my problems too much. I did all the exercises and worksheets but it never manages to shift my negative feelings and thoughts towards myself. I feel better for a while but eventually the deep down self hatred takes over again. I've tried mindfullness but it just does not do a single thing. It doesn't make me feel better in any way and for me its just a waste of time. Counselling didn't really do anything either, and the therapist I had for interpersonal therapy was scepitcal of me from the start that it was what I needed and didn't really do much to address my problems. I felt a very strong feeling that she thought I was wasting her time and she quickly discharged me as soon as my mental health scores were over the "normal" threshold (probably because I had just got a new job and that made me feel slightly better). I have always felt my therapists don't really understand me or my problems and I have never been able to trust them or relax while in their office. Alot of people can't understand why therapy has made absolutely no difference to my mental health.

Sorry for the long winded post, but this is what has happened to me and how I am currently mentally. Does this indicate that CPTSD is what I've had all along? Because I can't think of anything else to describe my multitude of seemingly unrelated problems.

[Pieces]

Hi

That sounds like a lot of abuse and a lot of pressure to take, and that's putting it mildly. It would be easy for me to say that what you've experienced definitely would cause CPTSD (I certainly believe so) but if you want to know sure than this book is great http://www.amazon.com/Complex-PTSD-Surviving-RECOVERING-CHILDHOOD-ebook/dp/B00HJBMDXK I think you'll recognize more than a lot of yourself in there.

I think to heal CPTSD you need a therapist who really understands what it is so maybe you could look for someone who specializes in it? Are you still in contact with your family?

[Dutch Uncle]

Hi Confused92 and a warm welcome to Out of the Storm.

Does this indicate that CPTSD is what I've had all along?

That's a pretty profound question. And kudo's to you for asking. 
An answer is not easily given. I'd like to quote from our Guidelines for All Members and Guests

Welcome to Out of the Storm (OOTS)

We are a discussion group and resource site for those whose lives have been affected by Complex Post Traumatic Disorder (CPTSD), also known as Complex Trauma. As a community we share information about our understanding of and experiences with CPTSD, and support one another as we move forward in learning, healing and recovering.

We are not medical or mental health professionals, and the discussion board is not intended to be a substitute or replacement for professional therapy or mental health services.

It sounds like you are dealing with a lot of issues and I'm glad you have found us. Since you have identified yourself as someone suffering from Complex Post Traumatic Disorder, or CPTSD, we want to make you aware of a couple things as you settle in.
In the cPTSD Glossary you may find a lot that may resonate with your experiences. A few highlights to start your journey with:
On cPTSD
On Boundaries
One that has been of great value to me personally is: Learned Helplessness

Whether or not what you experience is the result of cPTSD or something else, you are welcome here!
A lot of what you have told us are experiences, both in the past and present, that a lot of us relate with. Feel free to read, share, post on things that strike a chord with you.
A formal diagnosis will have to be made by a professional. Though such a formal diagnosis is not required to join the community.
I have no formal diagnosis either, if that's of any comfort to you. 

Because I can't think of anything else to describe my multitude of seemingly unrelated problems.

Welcome again, I hope and wish this place and community will give you comfort and be of aid on your journey through cPTSD. I already mentioned the Guidelines which are there to keep this a safe environment for you and us.

Looking forward to see you around.


Dutch Uncle.

[Boatsetsailrose]

Hello confused 92
Thank you for sharing what I struggle to describe
What u are currently experiencing is so similar to my own experience . The self loathing , anxiety , self doubt - the missing a part of you that others seem to have - blaming self ( I just relapsed with food ) and the not feeling do anything right ( I'm off work can't cope with it )
I've had yrs of therapy but it's only since being free of addictions and I then came off anti depressants that I got to see clearly the problems and my mental state .
I have a mind that berates me all the time 'like its on loud speaker' a small child in my feelings and a missing middle bit 'adult '
But u know as hard as this is we can see exactly what is going on within us - now it's just getting the right help -
I did 12 wks with child trauma therapist and it was very good - not long enough to integrate though and in my current mental state I looked at all the handouts and notes and didn't have a clue how to use any of it --
I'm being sent for a psych assessment and being on here and hearing others describe what I find difficult to describe is really helpful so thank you for that ...

My experience is find the best where u can -- someone who specialises in child trauma
I've been reading about emdr too and it's results
All best wishes
Keep getting well