They will misunderstand and dislike us. Whatcha gonna do.

One of the hardest parts of CPTSD recovery is letting others dislike or misunderstand us. 

That might sound odd— why would anybody dislike or misunderstand us for working our CPTSD recovery? 

But it happens. 

CPTSD and DID are injuries that many people don’t understand— and many people fear. 

The culture often views CPTSD and, especially, DID as “mental illnesses,” similar to bipolar disorder or schizophrenia— and there’s nothing wrong with having bipolar or schizophrenia, but CPTSD and DID are in a different category. 

CPTSD and DID are injuries, not mental illnesses. 

(Again, to affirm: there’s nothing shameful about mental illnesses— it’s just that precision in our thinking about the differences between illnesses and injuries matters to designing a recovery blueprint.) 

That, I think, is what bothers people about CPTSD and DID— they can happen to people whose brain chemistry or genetic makeup is not predisposed to them. 

That is to say: they can happen to anyone subjected to certain kinds of traumatic stress. 

This scares people. 

People don’t like thinking about this. 

So— they develop negative reactions to people who remind them of their— of every humans’— vulnerability to trauma. 

This, then comes off as dislike or distaste— that is fueled by fundamental misunderstanding. 

It’s not fair that people will get a whiff of our trauma history, and decide to put distance between us and them. 

But many, many survivors have had that experience. 

There are CPTSD and DID survivors right now, reading this, wondering why certain people out there seem to dislike or be wary of them, seemingly without reason. 

Of course, our trauma conditioning will happily step in and furnish an answer to that question: according to Trauma Brain, it’s because we’re “bad” or “gross” or whatever— and people can sense it. 

That’s not what’s going on. 

What IS going on is, many, many people out there are woefully uneducated about what complex trauma and dissociation are. 

They fear it because they don’t understand it, and they don’t want to understand it because they fear it. 

And the thing about all that is: we’re not going to change them. Not all at once, anyway, and not overnight. 

We trauma survivors can do what we can to educate and normalize and de-pathologize CPTSD, DID, and other trauma-based struggles— but we also have to accept that our first responsibility is to our recovery, not their education. 

That is: we have to drop the rope. 

We don’t have to love the fact that the culture often misunderstands and shames and isolates survivors of complex trauma. 

But we do have to let it be a “them” issue— at least, when the alternative is taking time away from our recovery to try to change their minds. 

Breathe; blink; focus.