all the highly empathetic people i know in my life have had abusive home lives and that’s because we were trained to read a situation at any given moment in our homes and learn how to react within seconds because if we didn’t and said or did the wrong thing, we’d get fucked up and beat and hurt
but like subconsciously always reading the mood of any atmosphere or space you’re in, always being able to gauge how people feel, it’s not a fucking gift, it’s exhausting. you can’t turn it off, even if you want to. you read the situation and if it’s negative, you freak out because if someone’s angry at you, it’s the end of the world
like we’ve internalized the scars from our childhood when an adult being mad at you was the worst thing ever and it’s carried with us into adulthood. it’s hard to unlearn all that.
so like a lot of us have mental health or anxiety issues because we also start internalizing all the energy from people, be it positive or negative, and so anxiety-inducing and frustrating to the point of tears
…..I had no idea this counted as hypervigilance. no idea what so ever.
#thanks Youre welcome. I’m writing out all the shit I learnt from the cptsd specialists when I was in the hospital because so much of it was brand new information for me, (and i consider myselr fairly well educated on my illness) and even being there for only three weeks gave me enough info to completely change how im viewing my plans in terms of treatment and recovery.
I figure it will also be extremely relevant to a lot of my friends on here, but it’s going to take me a while to sort it all and write it out in a readable way. But I’m working on it.
this is so fucking helpful for me
the symptoms of ptsd (and cptsd) are so poorly known by the general public tbh, as is the cause. Friendly reminder:
And child abuse is chronically under-reported. I didn’t know until I left my family that anything was unusual about my upbringing, and was diagnosed with PTSD this year from it.
also, that
you freak out because if someone’s angry at you, it’s the end of the world
like we’ve internalized the scars from our childhood when an adult being mad at you was the worst thing ever and it’s carried with us into adulthood
This is a type of flashback. What’s known as an emotional flashback. People think flashbacks have to be sensory hallucinations, when in fact in C-PTSD (that is, PTSD from chronic mistreatment, like child abuse) it’s more commong for flashbacks as a symptom to manifest as emotionally responding to a situation as if you’re “back there”. You sense your friend is mildly displease with you and you get a strong fear response, despite the fact that your friend hadn’t and wouldn’t be hurtful towards you for it? That’s your body using that maladaptive schema it developed from when you were in abuse!environment to try to protect you from what it learned was a dangerous situation. It too is absolutely a symptom of PTSD.
This is why confrontation is so difficult for survivors sometimes. Reactions to people who have reasonable/mild disagreement can FEEL like a serious threat, so you can be compelled to respond with appeasment, strong defensivness, shutting down, basically your go-to survival response.
It’s a hard thing to train yourself out of, but if you have this kinda symptom you can mitigate the effects by actively recognizing when it’s happening (this is the hardest part imo), then taking a step back to assess the reality of the situation. Is this person’s emotions your responsibility? What is the likely outcome of this conflict? How mad is this person actually? Are they even mad at you?
It can also help to have a plan for people you interact with a lot, like a partner or best friend. For instance, you sense someone is angry and it feels like dangers, talk about asking how angry they are outside of a conflict, maybe like a number scale. “I’m senseing you upset. What’s your number? What’s going on?” “Oh, pfft I’m just a two cos my amazong package didn’t get delivered on time today.”
You can learn how serious a vibe is and what it’s actually directed at by asking, and it can help mitigate that constant impulse to ask if someone is mad at you.
Also, if you have access, I strongly rec a good therapist to help you reasses how much responsibility you should claim in other people’s feelings. Maladaptive schemas can make you feel like you’re responsible for other people’s happiness, to the point where you can start to micromanage and become codependent. It can even feel like you’re doing a good thing. It’s not. Pls learn how to take care of yourself folks
“The core experiences of psychological trauma are disempowerment and disconnection from others. Recovery, therefore, is based upon the empowerment of the survivor and the creation of new connections. Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation. In her renewed connections with other people, the survivor re-creates the psychological faculties that were damaged or deformed by the traumatic experience. These faculties include the basic capacities for trust, autonomy, initiative, competence, identity, and intimacy. Just as these capabilities are originally formed in relationships with other people, they must be reformed in such relationships.
The first principle of recovery is the empowerment of the survivor. She must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery. Others may offer advice, support, assistance, affection, and care, but not cure. Many benevolent and well-intentioned attempts to assist the survivor founder because this fundamental principle of empowerment is not observed. No intervention that takes power away from the survivor can possibly foster her recovery, no matter how much it appears to be in her immediate best interest.”
PTSD is a chronic illness and depending on your history, it might never be gone completely. Especially if that trauma was ongoing and happened young, before your brain is fully formed. And thats pretty much any age under 25.
25!? Yeah. So the reason the shit that happened when you were a pre-teen or a teenager? That’s why it’s still not ok. That’s why you might not be experiencing your expected results from therapy, because it’s not enough to treat your trauma as though you are/were an adult.
Popular theory states that it’s only in early childhood development that ongoing trauma or abuse* forces physical and permanent changes in the brain, because it’s still forming.
But the fact is that human brains aren’t fully formed until adulthood (which can be between 18 and 25 – the same reason you can’t get car insurance till then and why they say you shouldn’t drink) and this extreme trauma forces the brain into what is essentially a ‘reset’ state, where it then adapts to the environment of constant abuse and is harmed in exactly the same way. (*Abuse can be physical, sexual, emotional, mental, or environmental (neglect, emotional neglect etc), and/or being witness to extreme ongoing abuse of someone else.)
So what’s the damage?
Well there is a few things that happen.
Trauma affects what children anticipate and focus on (y’all are children till you’re adults in terms of brains remember), and how you can view and understand the information that you receive.
Changes in how you perceive threats because of trauma end up being expressed in how you think, feel, behave and even how you regulate your biological systems.
This presents in problems with
self regulation (being able to start or stop doing something when you think you should, overeating or over-doing anything really is a good example of this)
aggression against themselves and others
problems with attention and dissociation
physical problems (I will expand upon this later)
difficulties in self concept (who am I, what am I, believing you have worth, believing you are a person, etc)
and the capacity to negotiate satisfactory interpersonal relationships. (Why do I keep ending up in abusive relationships, why can’t I make friends or connect with people etc)
Trauma is so powerful because the amygdala starts functioning almost immediately after birth; children rapidly are able to experience fear and assess danger. Babies get scared even when they can’t think properly because of this.
Basically, early abuse and neglect can affect the development of the limbic system which makes individuals with traumatic histories to become highly sensitive to sensory input, which is known as hypervigilance.
Your amigdala is part of the limbic system that controls instinct, your “lizard brain” that keeps you safe and controls your “fight, flight, freeze, or feign” instinct. (The amigdala and the limbic system are so heavily affected by this hypervigilance that I am going to write a whole nother post just on it’s effects on the body.)
SO. We now know PTSD from your developmental years is more damaging than if the same abuse occured later in life.
That’s why regular therapy focusing only on CBT might not be enough, that’s why you might not be fully recovered when you feel like you should be. And there are heaps of us with this shit. So you’re not alone, and now that we know why, we’re going to get through it.
I’m capping this off with some important notes:
ongoing abuse of any kind between the ages of ‘born’ and 25 will result in the same physiological and mental damage as abuse as a child
Abuse can be emotional, physical, sexual, or environmental. It can be from a caregiver or from a relationship you chose to enter. Abuse is abuse is abuse and it affects us profoundly.
Many of you reading this might actually have been told (like me) that because of your PTSD symptoms you must have also experienced abuse that you don’t remember as a small child. This is not necessarily true. (NOTE: for some people it might be true as well. do not use this to invalidate people or i will come for you. This part honestly is here because you have no idea how relieved I am to know that there doesn’t have to be more horrible memories lurking in my head)
Trauma affects our ability to process information, to retain information, and to process threats. This means that sometimes everything is a threat (hypervigilance) and sometimes we don’t know what is abusive because that’s our normal.
Being constantly surrounded by potential threats results in hypervigilance. Hypervigilance is when you are so hyperaroused (sensory arousal not sexual) that you are trying to anticipate the reactions and read the emotions of the people you interact with to be prepared and stay safe. It is constantly being in a crisis state, and it is exhausting. You know when you’re so wired you’re trying to see out the back of your head and you can hear which room your neighbour is walking to? That.
This shit makes you physically sick. Asthma, allergies, immune disorders, fibro, lupus, chronic fatigue, osteoarthritis, osteoperosis, gastrointestinal disorders, migrane, vertigo, vomiting and constant nausea are some of the possible physical symptoms.
Mental health wise you get depression, anxiety, self harm, dissasociative disorders, and DID.
That’s it for my intro to PTSD from trauma during developmental years. Which I need to find a shorter name for.
Next up I’ll be discussing the physical changes that this trauma causes in the brain, and how it affects our bodies.
This is a really important read that examines the current state of ABA, studies on the long term effects on ABA, and asks some important questions about early intervention outside the context of childhood therapy.
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.
Earlier I realised that when something bad happens suddenly, I tend to react to it quite well. Like if I drop something, i’m good at catching it, or if someone hurts themselves badly, i do what needs to be done with a suprisingly cool head.
And I realised it’s probably something to do with my ADHD?
Like, with our brains, time is weird. There is only NOW and NOT NOW. We don’t cope well with NOT NOW. But if something needs to be done NOW, we’ll do it NOW. Like getting an assignment done only when it’s about to be due in.
So if say, there’s a fire to put out (and yes, I have had to put out… too many fires because of my inattention) then it needs to be put out NOW.
And I dunno, I guess with ADHD you get a lot more practice at getting stuff done in panic mode, because that’s the only way I usually get stuff done? Friends of mine will get their homework done on time, but freak out and run away when something catches fire. But because I have to put out a lot of “life fires” I am better at dealing with “actual fires”.
Just a weird thought… what do you think?
A few years back I read that that was a thing with some people who had survived trauma as well – basically a tendency to function well under certain kinds of extreme acute stress/physical peril even if they were sort of people who got overwhelmed by minor daily life things. I wonder if it has something to do with adrenaline and executive function?
i hope it’s ok to add this, i probably don’t have adhd but the above addition seems to have broadened the topic.
this is so true. shit goes down, im ur guy. anything from emotional upset to honest to god disaster, i am There. i am a firefighter. i lock into emergency mode and im not just ok, im better than normal. calm, clear, confident, and ready. rest of the time im a confused disaster.
and yeah, i think it’s the trauma/survival mode thing. once it kicks on, you can handle whatever is coming your way so much better. but it’s exhausting and unsustainable.
it’s emergency mode for a reason – your body will sacrifice anything to achieve it, since it is supposed to be brief and a matter of life or death. living like this long enough wears down your body and immune system. i think this is a major reason i am sick, i think it is a big reason so many of us are.
Earlier I realised that when something bad happens suddenly, I tend to react to it quite well. Like if I drop something, i’m good at catching it, or if someone hurts themselves badly, i do what needs to be done with a suprisingly cool head.
And I realised it’s probably something to do with my ADHD?
Like, with our brains, time is weird. There is only NOW and NOT NOW. We don’t cope well with NOT NOW. But if something needs to be done NOW, we’ll do it NOW. Like getting an assignment done only when it’s about to be due in.
So if say, there’s a fire to put out (and yes, I have had to put out… too many fires because of my inattention) then it needs to be put out NOW.
And I dunno, I guess with ADHD you get a lot more practice at getting stuff done in panic mode, because that’s the only way I usually get stuff done? Friends of mine will get their homework done on time, but freak out and run away when something catches fire. But because I have to put out a lot of “life fires” I am better at dealing with “actual fires”.
Just a weird thought… what do you think?
A few years back I read that that was a thing with some people who had survived trauma as well – basically a tendency to function well under certain kinds of extreme acute stress/physical peril even if they were sort of people who got overwhelmed by minor daily life things. I wonder if it has something to do with adrenaline and executive function?
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.