Hi anita,

“I guess so. I am a bit concerned about going through all this with the current state of my brain“- good point, something to ask a competent professional, if you are interested.”

I just happened to finally see a professional for the first time in my life, usually I would avoid them like the plague. At our first session he agreed about childhood trauma delaying emotional growth, he called it arrested psychological development. Reminds me of that noughties show Arrested Development, that I avoided watching.
He said I’ve spent my whole life wrestling with an invisible disability that I got when I was 18 months old. This disability was the prolonged febrile convulsion I experienced, causing hypoxic brain death of critical emotion and memory functions, oh and epilepsy.
This meant that every trauma after that, including my arrested development, was due to the invisibility aspect of my disability, and made worse by being so young. My natural intelligence meant I was really good at masking my disability, all the way till my 50s. The imposter syndrome I mentioned before.
So I’ve lived my whole life in a grey area, between appearing not disabled enough to get recognition and not being able enough to fully participate in society. Unable to engage in playing the game of life you could say.

“In general, any kind of re-associating/ re-personalizing work should be done very gently, a bit today, a bit tomorrow, noting rushed.”
Fortnightly should be enough time for me to process each session.

I feel a huge relief at realising I have an invisible disability that isn’t obvious to others, I thought I was just someone severely down on my luck due to “fate”. Now I have a chance to get myself unstuck and try to move on.

“C-PTSD is an umbrella diagnosis. Last I read, in the U.S. (DSM-5) it was rejected as a diagnosis because it’d make many previously accepted diagnoses obsolete”

What separates Cptsd from ptsd are 3 DSO’s; Disturbances in Self Organisation
1. negative self worth (how worthless you feel)
2. affective dysregulation (emotional control)
3. disturbances in relationships (how well you relate to others and maintain relationships)

Look up(google) the International Trauma Questionnaire, I rated myself highly on 1, and about medium on 2 and 3.

Generally speaking: CPTSD is rolling life long traumas. PTSD is discrete traumatising events, like what first responders, soldiers victims of crime etc.

“There are so many mental health diagnoses available, no wonder most- if not all people fit at least one. I was diagnosed with quite a few.”
-Alot of people don’t like labels, too convenient. I am not to keen on them myself. Some people need a label to feel better about themselves. It is similar to the concept of god, someone who people can pass their self responsibility of their mistakes and failures off to, be “absolved of their sins”. That’s where I got my definition of god I mentioned earlier.

CPTSD is the first mental health diagnosis I have ever been labelled with. It usually starts with a seed trauma somewhere in childhood, then all the other traumas throughout life, are triggered by the deficits the first one created. Like a snowball effect. My invisible disability was the seed trauma. The resulting social isolation led to child-abuse, then the abuse led to distrust of society, which reinforced the social isolation, etc.

Hope you’re keeping well,

Klast