Because someone has known us a long time, or happens to share our name and/or DNA, doesn’t necessarily mean their story about us is correct.
But sometimes CPTSD tries to convince us that’s the case.
Our family is perfectly capable of gaslighting the living daylights out of us.
Our family is perfectly capable of not really knowing or understanding us at all.
Our family is perfectly capable of straight up lying about us— both to us, and to others.
It’s a particular mind f*ck when the people who supposedly should know us best, retail stories about us that are wildly distorted.
It’s bad enough when people who don’t have any reason to know us particularly well, or who haven’t known us a long time, buy into or repeat narratives about us that aren’t true.
But when someone can leverage the fact that they’ve known us since we were children, or the fact they’ve shared living space with us, or the fact that they also have experience with certain family members…their story hits different.
Their story about us can hit different both to others, and to us.
We need to be crystal clear that nobody’s story about us is more valid than our lived experience.
They may well have observed or interacted with us over a long period of time— but that’s not the same as being inside our head or our body all those years.
They may honestly think they know what we experienced— but were they there with us 24/7/365? No they were not.
They may think they know how we think, what motivates us, who we are— but do they have anything other than their outside-looking-in perspective to back that up? No they do not.
The reality is, many peoples’ stories about us are self-interested.
They do not exist to reflect reality. They exist to protect someone’s reputation or feelings.
Only you actually know what you experienced— and that’s true even if your memories are scrambled or missing, by the way.
Don’t get up in your head about the story someone tells about you— even if they’re trying to support it with the “authority” of being related to you or having known you a long time.
Many CPTSD survivors get conned into not acknowledging or processing their trauma because someone has told them it didn’t or “couldn’t” have happened that way.
If we’re going to realistically recover from trauma, we need to acknowledge our lived experience as valid raw data.
Even if we don’t love that data— which we emphatically won’t.
Even if that data seems incomplete— which it very likely will at times.
Even if other people question that data— which, they can do that, but they didn’t collect that raw data. We did, every day of our life.
It’s no fun to have somebody, anybody, trying to get us to question our reality. It’s frustrating, it’s confusing, it’s condescending.
But it’s particularly no fun to have somebody who, by rights, should be in our corner— because, perhaps, they do share our name and/or DNA— trying to f*ck our head up over whether we have have a right to be hurt.
You shouldn’t be in that position. And it’s not your fault if you are.
Breathe; blink; focus; and affirm that the raw data of your life is valid.
