Hello, trauma survivor reading this thinking that everything is going wrong, you’re doing everything wrong, and everybody hates you.
Nope, you’re not the first, last, or even the only trauma survivor thinking that.
CPTSD tends to do that to us.
Standard PTSD tends to be focused on what happened to us— whereas CPTSD is very often focused on who we are, what we deserve, what we can do, how our life is working out.
The reason for that is, PTSD is usually the result of one, big, identifiable, outside-the-norm stressor.
CPTSD, by contrast, is most often the result of pain, usually relationship-focused pain, accumulating over time— and often the events that make it accumulate are so familiar to us that we don’t even register them as “traumatic.”
When we grow up abused or neglected, or if we’re the victim of coercive control over time in adult relationships, there is no one big traumatic stressor to fixate on— so CPTSD goes after us, personally.
What this looks like in practice is us feeling like garbage about ourselves.
It looks like us feeling like we’re in trouble all the time.
It looks like us truly believing that everybody hates us— regardless of what they happen to be telling us or how they happen to be behaving toward us in the moment.
Many people don’t understand that these feelings and experiences are actually symptoms of complex trauma.
We think of “PTSD” as “war trauma”— and it doesn’t occur to us that years of being controlled, being manipulated, being subtly (or not so subtly denigrated), being financially or sexually exploited by people or institutions we trusted, all add up to significant traumatic stress.
That is to say, CPTSD survivors often don’t think of ourselves as “trauma survivors.”
We just think we suck.
We just think we can’t do life.
We just think we’re terrible at relationship partners.
I can’t tell you how long I went believing that my “main” problem was social anxiety— and don’t get me wrong, I suffer from plenty of social anxiety— while not registering that the literal reason I was anxious around people was because I had been heavily bullied as far back as I could remember.
Both PTSD and CPTSD can increase our vulnerability to suicidal thoughts— but in my experience, the suicidal ideation of CPTSD survivors tends to be very chronic and very personal, rather than focused on specific memories of a specific trauma, as in PTSD.
That “I suck and everybody hates me” thing is very CPTSD-coded. As is the “fight” response flavored “…and I hate everybody right BACK” chaser; as is the “fawn” flavored chaser “…but I hope they don’t hate me for hating them!”
Turns out there’s a reason they call it “complex” trauma.
Anyway, survivor reading this who thinks everything is going wrong, you’re doing everything wrong, and everybody hates you: it’s not that straightforward.
Yes, there may be things going wrong. Yes, you may be struggling with some things. Yes, people might have feelings about you.
But it’s rarely as black and white as “EVERYTHING” sucks.
That’s Trauma Brain, the internalized voices of your abusers and bullies, f*cking with you.
I’m not saying you’re perfect. I’m not saying you’re delusional.
I’m saying you’ve been programmed by complex trauma to sh*t on yourself because you feel like sh*t. And that’s not fair.
It’s tough to feel like everything sucks and everyone hates you. And I’m realistic enough to know that a post on the internet from someone who doesn’t know you may not help all that much.
Still, I need you to know: I’ve been where you are, and lots and lots (and lots) of other CPTSD survivors have been, too.
It’s kind of unlikely we ALL suck the way our CPTSD has tried to convince us we do, don’t you think?
Breathe. Blink. Focus.
And meet what you’re feeling right now with compassion, patience, and realism.
And for what it’s worth, I like you.
(If people are allowed to DISLIKE you without even knowing you, then I’m allowed to like you without knowing you, too, wouldn’t you say?)
