Tag: trauma

careerofconsciousness:

Children who feel they cannot engage their parents emotionally often try to strengthen their connection by playing whatever roles they believe their parents want them to. Although this may win them some fleeting approval, it doesn’t yield genuine emotional closeness. Emotionally disconnected parents don’t suddenly develop a capacity for empathy just because a child does something to please them. 

People who lacked emotional engagement in childhood, men and women alike, often can’t believe that someone would want to have a relationship with them just because of who they are. They believe that if they want closeness, they must play a role that always puts the other person first.

— Lindsay C. Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents (2015)

onceuponaprettyhedawolf:

rootlessnessandmotionsickness:

furiousgoldfish:

rage is bigger part of healing than forgiveness will ever be

Truth. Learning that you are allowed to be angry about what was done to you is such a big part of healing. Learning you are allowed to feel all your feelings is so important. You need no ones permission to be angry about what happened to you.

As someone who has dealt with a lot of various types of abuse, as well as other truamatic life events; this is huge. After I ran away from home, I was finally able to feel what I want when I want without being scolded. Be angry, be sad, be depressed, feel your emotions. If you don’t they’ll just bottle up inside of you until one day you explode on someone you shouldn’t have. My Mom imparticular made me feel like I couldn’t be sad or angry at anything that was happening to me, that it was all normal & I should just accept it. Learning & knowing that all your feelings & emotions are valid is a huge step in anyones recovery.

the-unlucky-thirteen:

Being raised without stability really fucks with your head, you’re forever trying to figure out a person’s “pattern“ to see how you have to approach them, whether they’re in a good mood and it’s safe, or if they’re in a bad mood and you have to be careful or maybe avoid them altogether, just because those who raised you could never keep a consistent emotional reaction

astrologynigga:

geekandmisandry:

dovahfem:

I used to think i didn’t have any triggers. I’m an abuse survivor and i really thought maybe i came out of it just fine with no triggers.

Then a man slammed his hands on the desk beside me in frustration, he wasn’t angry at me he had just messed up something he was doing.

I froze, like literally froze, then tears started streaming and i was shaking. 

I was so fucking upset and distraught, all i could manage to get out was “I didn’t like that.”

My body had a really surprising reaction and i guess i’m not as over my abuse as i’d like to think sometimes. I’m making this post to tell others things like this, triggers, they can pop up at any time. 

Try to be patient, and understanding when someone has a reaction that you might not understand. 

If you’re the person who was triggered, be patient with yourself. 

Don’t be like me and blame yourself for overreacting.

 Now i realize what it was that happened to me, and i’ll try to be better with myself in the future, and not blame myself immediately after.

It’s also possible to not even understand this are triggers. I used to think I just had “sudden mood swings” without realising the common thread because I was so deep into denying myself as a victim I couldn’t even recognise my own trauma.

They can appear long after trauma, they can be hard to recognise and it isn’t your fault.

reblogging for the comment. this explains so much.

hobbitsaarebas:

kipplekipple:

thatdiabolicalfeminist:

stimmyabby:

when you go from a bad situation into a better one you may collapse exhausted and unsure what to do and full of grief, you may need time to regain the ability to do things as yourself or motivated by anything other than terror, you may need time to process or mourn or fall apart in ways you could not before,

and people may use this as proof that the old situation was better for you, proof that you need to go back, and it is not proof that it was better for you or proof that you need to go back

!!!

It’s so incredibly common to “fall apart” when you’re finally safe. You no longer need to stay so tightly coiled in on yourself, you can finally leave survival mode and process your trauma. You’re not holding yourself up by sheer terror anymore and suddenly the damage that terror has done to you becomes immediate and obvious. 

This is so important. Don’t go back. Things are already getting better, even if it doesn’t feel that way.

This is a documented phenomenon with abuse in particular. I’ve had a number of people ask me why they’re falling apart now after they’ve moved into a safer home, or they’re in a less dangerous area, or they’ve left an exploitative job, or they’re in a healthy relationship for the first time. Generally, it’s because they made that positive change. 

When we’re still in the midst of crisis, we’re often too overloaded and physically/emotionally unsafe to really feel or process anything. So for most of us, everything gets pushed down/repressed/dissociated until later, when we’re safe and supported. The threshold of safety at which processing begins to occur varies from person to person. And the mental calculations used to determine “safety” usually happen on an unconscious level. Very few of us have the conscious thought “I’m safe now, so I can process what happened to me.” Instead, the subconscious realizes some level of safety has been achieved, and so it just dumps a load of suppressed stuff. 

Sometimes, it’s contrast to past experiences that makes us realize something was traumatic at all. In such cases, it’s not that we’ve reached a level of safety and can thus begin to process, it’s that we finally have a basis for comparison to know that what went before was unacceptable. 

roseapprentice:

the-moon-in-the-water:

roseapprentice:

One of the most useful things I’ve learned about recovering from trauma is that my decisions need to be judged according to the incomplete information that was available to me at the time.

So, say I’m deciding whether to eat chicken at a restaurant. All evidence is that it’s a good idea. I’m hungry for chicken, and I usually feel good after eating it.

I eat the chicken, and I get food poisoning. The resulting illness causes me to fall short of responsibilities, and creates numerous problems for me and the people who depend on me.

What happened?

Trauma brain says: “This happened because I am Bad At Making Decisions. If I had made The Right Decision and not eaten chicken, everything would have been fine.”

Recovery brain says, “According to the information that was available to me, the chicken was unlikely to make me sick. Eating chicken was a Good Decision with Bad Consequences. This happened to me because I had incomplete information.”

The “trauma brain” response makes all decisions really hard, because each decision involves the prospect of being judged by a future self that has more information.

“Should I buy the $2 mouse pad or the $3 mouse pad? If I buy the cheaper one and it doesn’t work well, it will be my own fault for not buying a better quality one…”

(Then I might end up paying myself $1-per-hour to agonize over which mouse pad to buy, which is probably an ACTUAL unwise course of action.)

But if I foster the “recovery brain” response, I can start to trust that my future self will judge my decisions kindly.

“If I buy the cheap mouse pad and it doesn’t work, then I only gambled $2 on it. If I buy the $3 one and even it doesn’t work, then I’ll have more closely guessed how much I need to pay for a mousepad of sufficient quality.”

And then later when the mousepad doesn’t work: “Well, that didn’t work. At least I made a decision. The outcome has given me more information about the options available to me going forward.”

(Meta level: Decisions you made prior to reading this post about how to treat yourself were probably good given the information you had access to about trauma and recovery!)

tl;dr: Bad results are not always evidence of bad decisions. Give yourself the benefit of the doubt about why you do what you do.

Wait, you mean those are trauma responses? That’s not normal? Not everyone freezes up in complete error mode for 8 months because they can’t possibly spend 25 euros on a bag because it’s a luxury (my old one is too heavy for me to carry w my disability, but it’s not entirely broken either so I can’t. Justify. The. New. Bag.)

This is .. not normal?

Well, speaking as someone who also has a lot of chronic illnesses, it could be a trauma response or an “I’m not used to being this disabled” response. An abled person could reasonably shop around at thrift shops for a cheaper bag, and an abled person wouldn’t need to pay as much attention to their body’s needs.

getting new health problems means learning to make decisions based on an ever-shifting set of criteria (as I am learning on a daily basis). It’s super reasonable to freeze sometimes under those circumstances.

it is also a trauma response. it could totally be trauma.

We Can’t Keep Treating Anxiety From Complex Trauma the Same Way We Treat Generalized Anxiety

invisibledisabilitychameleon:

rapeculturerealities:

I’ve been living with the effects of complex trauma for a long time, but for many years, I didn’t know what it was. Off and on throughout my life, I’ve struggled with what I thought was anxiety and depression. Or rather, In addition to being traumatized, I was anxious and depressed.

Regardless of the difference, no condition should ever be minimized. If you are feeling anxious or depressed, it’s important and urgent to find the right support for you. No one gets a prize for “worst” depression, anxiety, trauma or any other combination of terrible things to deal with, and no one should suffer alone. With that in mind, there is a difference between what someone who has Complex PTSD feels and what someone with generalized anxiety or mild to moderate depression feels.

For someone dealing with complex trauma, the anxiety they feel does not come from some mysterious unknown source or obsessing about what could happen. For many, the anxiety they feel is not rational. General anxiety can often be calmed with grounding techniques and reminders of what is real and true. Mindfulness techniques can help. Even when they feel disconnected, anxious people can often acknowledge they are loved and supported by others.

For those who have experienced trauma, anxiety comes from an automatic physiological response to what has actually, already happened. The brain and body have already lived through “worst case scenario” situations, know what it feels like and are hell-bent on never going back there again. The fight/flight/ freeze response goes into overdrive. It’s like living with a fire alarm that goes off at random intervals 24 hours a day. It is extremely difficult for the rational brain to be convinced “that won’t happen,” because it already knows that it has happened, and it was horrific.

Those living with generalized anxiety often live in fear of the future. Those with complex trauma fear the future because of the past.

The remedy for both anxiety and trauma is to pull one’s awareness back into the present. For a traumatized person who has experienced abuse, there are a variety of factors that make this difficult. First and foremost, a traumatized person must be living in a situation which is 100 percent safe before they can even begin to process the tsunami of anger, grief and despair that has been locked inside of them, causing their hypervigilance and other anxious symptoms. That usually means no one who abused them or enabled abuse in the past can be allowed to take up space in their life. It also means eliminating any other people who mirror the same abusive or enabling patterns.

Unfortunately for many, creating a 100 percent abuser-free environment is not possible, even for those who set up good boundaries and are wary of the signs. That means that being present in the moment for a complex trauma survivor is not fail-proof, especially in a stressful event. They can be triggered into an emotional flashback by anything in their present environment.

It is possible (and likely) that someone suffering from the effects of complex trauma is also feeling anxious and depressed, but there is a difference to the root cause. Many effective strategies that treat anxiety and depression don’t work for trauma survivors. Meditation and mindfulness techniques that make one more aware of their environment sometimes can produce an opposite effect on a trauma survivor.  Trauma survivors often don’t need more awareness. They need to feel safe and secure in spite of what their awareness is telling them.

At the first sign of anxiety or depression, traumatized people will spiral into toxic shame. Depending on the wounding messages they received from their abusers, they will not only feel the effects of anxiety and depression, but also a deep shame for being “defective” or “not good enough.” Many survivors were emotionally and/or physically abandoned, and have a deep rooted knowledge of the fact that they were insufficiently loved. They live with a constant reminder that their brains and bodies were deprived of a basic human right. Even present-day situations where they are receiving love from a safe person can trigger the awareness and subsequent grief of knowing how unloved they were by comparison.

Anxiety and depression are considered commonplace, but I suspect many of those who consider themselves anxious or depressed are actually experiencing the fallout of trauma. Most therapists are not well trained to handle trauma, especially the complex kind that stems from prolonged exposure to abuse. Unless they are specially certified, they might have had a few hours in graduate school on Cluster B personality disorders, and even fewer hours on helping their survivors. Many survivors of complex trauma are often misdiagnosed as having borderline personality disorder (BPD) or bipolar disorder. Anyone who has sought treatment for generalized anxiety or depression owes themselves a deeper look at whether trauma plays a role.

damn, this is important!

We Can’t Keep Treating Anxiety From Complex Trauma the Same Way We Treat Generalized Anxiety

fangirlinginleatherboots:

i think something a lot of ppl dont understand is that the effects of trauma are not immediate. its not like you’re fine and then the event happens, and then everything falls apart. yeah, that CAN happen, but so often, that is not the narrative i see. 

depending on the event, you may even brush it off the first time it happens. sometimes its not until it reoccurs that it hits you. because if it happened once, it was only that, your life moves on, but again? whats to stop it from happening a third time? a fourth time?

depending on the event, it may not affect you until someone asks about it days, weeks, months, YEARS later. you push it down and decide not to feel anything about it and maybe you even forget, at least on the surface, but it takes only a word to break the barrier you’ve set

depending on the event, you may not even know it’s trauma until years have passed and you’re crying on your bathroom floor. until you meet someone who calls it trauma. until you read someone elses story. until you’re begging your mind to please, please, let life move past that point

depending on the event, you forget entirely. there’s nothing there. nothing happened. and you live like that until something digs in too deep and the floodgates break. 

yeah, some of us break down right after it happened. some never go through the dormancy. but god, thats not everyone. im so tired of hearing “but you were fine!” so WHAT? so what if you were fine? you arent fine now and thats just as real a response as those who are impacted in the direct wake of a trauma. dont let anyone ever tell you otherwise.

withatemperofqueens:

iamfinallybreakingfree:

My home will be a home with no loud anger, no explosive rage, no slamming doors or breaking glass, no name calling, shaming or blackmail. My home will be gentle, it will be warm. It will keep my loved ones safe. No fear, no hurt and no worries. I may come from a broken and twisted place but I will build something whole and safe. I’ll sing in the shower again, cook with a smile and dance in all the rooms. I will heal.

Amen. May all of us with toxic pasts break the cycle.