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Our World is a Complex Mess of PTSD

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  • June 4, 2025 at 6:53 pm #446575
    anita
    Participant

    On Survivors and Survival—

    Surviving ongoing childhood trauma—what falls under Complex PTSD (C-PTSD)—is an experience shared by so many of us. Those untouched by it may be the minority, the lucky few. In my real life, I don’t know anyone untouched by it. Every adult I know carries the weight of C-PTSD, and here, in these forums, it’s no different.

    Our world is a complex mess of PTSD.

    Like a wild fire of PTSD.

    If you are reading this, do you know anyone in your life who is alive and is NOT survivor of C-PTSD?

    Anita

    June 4, 2025 at 7:04 pm #446576
    anita
    Participant

    My answer: I can’t think of a single person, some are in worse shape than others, some in better shape. but who is UNTOUCHED BY C-PTSD or another kind of PTSD.

    Aren’t we a P T S D S O C I E T Y (PTSDS, if you will)?

    anita

    June 5, 2025 at 12:11 pm #446602
    anita
    Participant

    At the core of my personal C-PTSD is emotional suppression. Those things—emotions. I just noticed I typed ‘those’ instead of ‘these,’ and that, in itself, reflects the essence of emotional suppression—creating distance between myself and my own feelings.

    When a person disconnects from their emotions, when they deeply distrust their own feelings, and when that distance and distrust become a long-term reality, mental illness is the inevitable result. The self becomes fragmented, with its fragments working against one another.

    One fragment longs to express, while another relentlessly silences it- over and over again.

    I came across a writing exercise. I’ll call it “Giving Voice to the Unspoken”, or “Giving Voice to the Silenced/ the Suppressed”.

    – “Step 1: Write Without a Filter- Set a timer for 10–15 minutes and write freely without stopping. Don’t worry about grammar, making sense, or judging your thoughts—just let your emotions flow onto the page. Start with: ‘If my emotions could speak freely, they would say…’ Let the words come as they are—anger, grief, exhaustion, longing, frustration, hope—whatever needs to surface.”

    – Okay, here it goes: If my emotions could speak freely, or more freely than before, they would say: I AM SICK AND TIRED OF BEING SUPPRESSED! STOP SUPPRESSING ME! LET ME BE! LET ME LIVE! (oopsie, I wasn’t expecting this at all, wasn’t aware of this anger, this rage- before I let my fingers type the words in big-case letters!)

    * The suppressed just got uncomfortable by the comment in parenthesis, right above.

    Please continue (sorry for the interruption, Suppressed 😞)

    Continued: WELL, I AM SICK AND TIRED OF BEING SUPRESSED, I HAD IT, ALL MY LIFE.. (SCREAMING RAGE)

    (Please tell me more..?) WHY SHOULD I? YOU RE ALWAYS SPEAKING FOR ME IN YOUR INTELLECTUALIZING WAY, I DON’T GET TO BE HEARD!

    (I will not interrupt until you are done) CAN YOU NOT INTERRUPT? CAN YOU…???

    (I promise: I will not interrupt until you tell me that I can speak)

    YOU MEAN I HAVE THIS POWER TO STOP YOU FROM SPEAKING??? WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME BEFORE THAT I HAVE SOME POWER IN THIS RELATIONSHIP???

    (Silence)

    I DON’T EVEN CARE ABOUT WHAT I WANT TO SAY, I AM NOT USED TO BE GIVEN THE STAGE, THEOPPORTUNITY TO SPEAK WITHOUT INTERRUPTION. I FEEL LIKE TALKING AND TALKING FAST BEFORE I AM SHUT DOWN AGAIN, SILENCED, DISMISSED, IGNORED.

    (Silence)

    Taking a moment to think- WITHOUT YOUR INTERRUPTION)- I just want to be heard. I want my own space, space to speak and be heard.

    (Silence)

    There’s been this monster in my life who took over me. She took over and there was no space for me.

    I want to be. I want to be allowed to breathe, to feel, to think my own thoughts, my own feelings. You know, I am a person, NOT A THING! You can speak now, you in parenthesis)

    Okay, back to the exercise: “Step 2: The Suppressed Dialogue- Write two voices: one representing the suppressed emotions (pain, anger, resentment, things left unsaid), the other representing the part of you that silences or suppresses them (self-doubt, fear, survival mode). Let these voices speak to each other… Let both sides speak honestly—this helps externalize inner conflict and reveal emotional truths you may not realize.”- I think I did this part in Step 1.. but there is more:

    (I was trying to make sense of things. I was not trying to silence you. I was trying to help you)

    I suppose you did better than our monster did. She never tried to understand us.

    (I am glad you are using “us”. Let’s be an “us”, together, working together)

    “Step 3: A Letter to Yourself.. write a letter to yourself, as if you were talking to a close friend who struggles with suppression. Offer kindness, validation, and permission to feel.”

    Dear Suppressed Anita:

    I know how difficult this has been for you, to be suppressed and silenced for what seems like FOREVER. I like what just happened- the intellectual part started the sentence, the suppressed part screamed into the page with rage- FOREVER). We cannot go back in time and change anything that already happened. But we can change today, and it will be worth it. Let’s EXPRESS today and every day. Let’s embark on this path of FREEDOM- the freedom to BE reborn, so to speak, to start our lives with that initial scream of a newborn, and take it from there!

    Anita

    June 5, 2025 at 10:41 pm #446619
    anita
    Participant

    Let me EXPRESS-

    Finally tonight- almost dark, not quite, at almost 10 pm. I can still can see the light blue skies from behind the trees. Birds are singing LOUDLY. They wont stop until it’s completely dark, some time from now. And then they start singing- so very loudly- at the very first sight of light, before light is visible to the human’s eye, or audible to the human’s ear.

    This will be in about five hours from now, which leaves me only five hours of darkness, and it’s not summer time yet.

    Darker now.

    Can’t hear the birds now, not over the YouTube music I am listening to.

    Where did they go, the birds.. prepared for the night.

    I washed my hair after mowing for hours, the dust and dirt getting into my hair. I can smell the nice smell of shampoo, my hair is no longer in a pony tail, not for the night.

    Within me, as a result of C-PTSD, I keep running (the Flight Response)- ever since I was five, or six- running with nowhere to run to, stuck running (tics)

    Trauma caught within.

    I try to relax, to release this somatic stress, this Flight Response caught within.

    This RUNNING has been caught within, trapped for too long. I don’t think that it’s possible for any human in my place to make it stop. it’s been going on for too long. More than half a century long.

    When you run away from your own mother.

    When you are running away from the person you love the most, the person you need the most.

    It’s a never-ending human wound, to be running away from the person you need the most.

    .. Oh my God, or god.. it is Completely dark right now. it happened! Completely Dark. No sign of the sky, no sound of the birds. It’s just after 10 pm. It is completely SILENCE. How special! How unique! I am excited!!!

    Five hours of silence is the most I have in front of me.

    Where are the birds? Perched close to the trunk for protection, sleeping inside tree holes or nest boxes. I already miss them, although I longed for their silence just a moment ago.

    And where are you tonight, you, human, you who may be reading my words tonight?

    Are you Alone, or are you Together?

    Silence. Darkness. Cool air (unlike the warm- hot air of the day that closed)

    I looked forward for the birds to be quiet (they were so LOUD!) and now I miss them. Why do I miss them?

    It’s just that I have to trust that they will come back. Just because they are silent now, does not mean they are gone. They are only resting, so that they come back again, loud and ALIVE as always.

    Going back half a century ago, at night, when it was ..deathly quiet, I was afraid that the quiet will always be, a death verdict, permanent, irreversible.

    My mother, the most important person in my world back then, she told me, she said: I will DIE. I will! Because of YOU!

    This is the Trauma in my C-Post TRAUMATIC Stress Disorder.

    It’s caught in my muscles, in my nerve cells, in my physiology and biology, and I cannot undo it, cannot reverse it.

    If you are a mother reading this, don’t ever tell your child that you will kill yourself (and die) because of something your child said, or didn’t say, did, or didn’t do, or because the expression on your child’s face didn’t sit well with you.

    Because this is what my mother said.

    In my last post, right above, I wrote: “Let’s embark on this path of FREEDOM- the freedom to BE reborn, so to speak, to start our lives with that initial scream of a newborn, and take it from there!”-

    Well, the path toward freedom is through the slavery that was imposed on me. it’s about the rejection of the indoctrination I was born into: Mother- with all due respect, and with all the love I have had for you- Your misery is NOT MY FAULT. I am not, and never have been, your Enemy. You got the wrong person to crucify! I am not the Enemy, not YOUR enemy! You got the wrong person.

    You got the wrong person, punishing me just because I was there and there was no one else to take in your hate.

    To the people who think I should “just get over it”- you are funny- in your over simplification of things.

    It is now almost 11 pm. The silence outside is complete. No sounds of birds. Will they ever come back?

    Anita

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