It took me a very long time to understand my traumata. It took me even longer to dare to say out loud “I am traumatized.”
What I felt and dealt with every day of my life was my normal. I didn’t realize it wasn’t supposed to be like this until I entered my 50ies and my entire life came apart. In one fell swoop, I lost every pillar my life stood on: my marriage, my job, all of my savings, and my home. 4 1/2 years ago, I stood there with my backpack. Homeless. Terrified. And wondered… how had it come to that? What had I allowed? Where had I failed?
This is when I began intensive therapy, took heart, and began questioning everything… Over time, I discovered that there even is a term for what I have been struggling with my entire life. I discovered that I suffer from c-PTSD (Complex PTSD), which manifests after prolonged childhood trauma.
I follow Nate Postlethwait on Instagram and recently he managed to describe some of the symptoms of c-PTSD I’m dealing with very well:
“A habit of traumatized, abused kids, especially kids with unstable parents, is the tendency to notice every little detail. We magnify small nuances into major things, largely because small nuances quickly became breaking points for parents. Managing moods, reading the room, perceiving danger in the order of words, the shift of body weight… it’s all a natural outgrowth of trying to manage unstable parents at a young age.”
Yes, To this day. Every day. I’m reading every room. Every gesture. Every word. Minutely.
Another c-PTSD trauma recovery specialist I’m following is Dr. Glenn Patrick Doyle. He wrote something that also resonated deeply with me (well most of what he writes does):
“We make a joke about how often we apologize to people – or inanimate objects we happen to bump into. But think about how terrified a kid has to be to make “I’m sorry” their first impulse in dealing with the world. Poor kid.”
At 53 years old, my first impulse to everything is still always to apologize. Because deep inside – well, not so deep, just underneath the surface – I’m still terrified of not being loved, of being abandoned, or hurt.
So, I try to defuse everything, before it even happens. Try to manage others’ emotions. Like a soldier in a war that never ends, I try to find and disarm hidden emotional landmines in order not to be blown to smithereens.
The intellectual part of me knows I don’t have to do this any more. And since a few years ago (yes, only that recently) I understand about boundaries. I understand that my needs matter as well. And, I understand the responsibility of others to actually manage their own emotions.
I understand that I’m not responsible for everything and everyone’s actions and emotional state anymore… I never was. Even if that was what my adoptive parents (and later my ex-wife) demanded of me every single moment of every day…
Yet still…
… There is a big gap between finally understanding and steadily, step by scary little step, moving towards coming home to myself.
By holding myself close. Facing the enormity of all that has happened. Practicing Self-Compassion. By taking responsibility for what I allowed. Understanding why. And by – hopefully – breaking the cycle.
My entire nervous system was altered over the years through prolonged childhood trauma. And now, c-PTSD is inarguably part of my life. Part of every fibre of my body and mind.
Often, it’s as if I’m not even in the driver’s seat as I keep catching myself people-pleasing, apologizing, scanning everything and everyone around me at all times for potential danger.
It’s mentally and physically exhausting to be so hypervigilant all the time.
I know, I don’t have to be on high alert anymore, now that I’m a fully-grown adult who can defend himself. But, my nervous system hasn’t caught up and still wants to keep me in this heightened state of emergency to ensure my safety. Because back then, growing up with my adoptive parents, this non-stop scanning of every nuance and shift in atmosphere was necessary to get me safely through each day.
My nervous system will never fully recover. But I started to turn a corner when, after a whole lifetime of not even realizing that (and how much) I was traumatized, I dared to look into pandora’s box, faced up to what I found inside, and began to heal myself.
Slowly, I’m beginning to understand my trauma responses and, slowly, carefully, I’m now able to manage them gently, and compassionately.
Complex-PTSD is not something you just grow out of and leave behind. It is something you work with and hopefully slowly heal from every single day of your life, with a myriad of ups and downs.
Most important is to just hold that little kid inside yourself over and over again.
Whenever anxiety threatens to overwhelm me, whenever I feel unsafe and abandoned but can’t quite distinguish if it is due to something that happened in my past or something that is happening in the present moment, I tell him, “You are safe now, it’s ok. I won’t abandon you. I’ve got your back. I’ll love you no matter what. You are allowed to have opinions and boundaries. My dear boy, you are allowed to feel and have needs. Your needs matter. And you are allowed to say ‘no’ as often as you need to and want to.”