It’s one of the most normal things in the world for trauma survivors to struggle with seemingly “little” tasks.
This includes tasks that you wouldn’t think would have anything to do with surviving trauma.
Going to the grocery store.
Keeping our space clean and organized.
Personal hygiene.
Many people take these tasks for granted— which can amplify survivors’ shame when we struggle with them.
For many CPTSD survivors, these tasks have subtle triggers embedded in them that we don’t fully appreciate.
The variety of items at the grocery store and people all around stoke anxiety.
Being at the grocery store scrapes up memories of being there with a parent when we were young.
Trying to keep our space clean and organized stokes shame and feeling trapped, controlled, or in trouble.
Attending to our personal hygiene requires looking in a mirror— which many survivors hate— or reminds us we have a physical body about which we have conflicted beliefs and feelings.
Non-CPTSD survivors may be oblivious to those sorts of triggers— but for CPTSD survivors, they’re the kind of thing that rules our world.
They’re also the kind of thing that is virtually impossible to explain to someone not in our head or our nervous system.
You need to know there’s zero shame in struggling with these kinds of “little” things.
You need to know that just because you can’t immediately or directly trace a trigger back to what happened to you, doesn’t mean your reaction is invalid or not a trauma response.
We meet any and every symptom spike we experience with compassion and patience and realism— including those symptoms we don’t quite understand, and especially those symptoms about which we feel reflexive shame.
There is no symptom that indicates we’re “too broken” to recover. Really.
We do not choose trauma responses or other symptoms.
Trauma responses and other symptoms are not resolved or managed by insisting we “suck it up” or “get our sh*t together.”
For each “little” task you struggle with, break it down into its smallest component tasks, then use the tool of self talk to supportively, realistically talk yourself through it.
Imagine I’m there, on your shoulder, in the grocery store. What would I say?
Probably not “suck it up.”
I’d remind you to breathe. To blink blink blink. To focus on just the next thing.
And I’d also remind you that this is not your fault— and that this will get better with practice and self-compassion.
Easy does it.
You are not the first, last or only CPTSD survivor for whom the supposedly “little” things are not so little.
