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General A question for anyone having to live with CPTSD

I have been down this road before. I was severely abused in a short, but horribly destructive relationship in 2013, causing my ptsd (cptsd) diagnosis.

I've learned a few things since then.
Number 1 - happiness is a choice. In that lies that nobody can take away my happiness. I can choose to be happy every second and every moment of my life. I am a happy person, and I allow myself to be happy. I never judge myself for feeling happy about the silliest things, even in the midst of disaster. :-) I have no trouble being happy, even when life is hard. THAT is a gift I'm happy I have. :-p
Number 2 - I cannot drink caffeine or aspartame as both ruin my mental stability. I have been on caffeine lately, so I am off due to that too.
Number 3 - One must move on, and not linger in old wounds. But it is easier said than done, so I allow myself to explore thoughts more than what is healthy, I cannot easily let go of questions like "why did it happen?" and "what went wrong?", it seems. I guess this is the core of trauma, btw - to not let go. But unlike in 2013, when I didn't dare to cut contact with my abuser, I have this time cut all contact with my ex. I read something you wrote somewhere about not being over the person but knowing that the relationship is over. That. Took me forever to understand, so well done!

Why? you asked. Because it happened, is the only answer you'll ever get, I believe. Probably nobody wanted it to happen, but it did. And now it is too late to change it. It already happened.
Interesting! I had a bipolar kind of existence for years. I gave up everything which would change my brain chemistry; coffee, cigarettes, tea, and alcohol. It made a difference in a couple of weeks! Aspartame is very bad for your digestion and colon cancer is a genuine risk! Being hurt now that I have ended things is normal but I must not let the empath in me create an abnormal reaction, that's why I'm doing therapy. Yes, it can be wonderful to be an empath and when I was dabbling in that terrible online dating thing it made it soooooo much easier! But for me, being an empath can also be very, very hard - and I choose the word hard rather than the word difficult.

Can you see the light at the end of your personal tunnel?

**I am so sorry you had an abusive relationship. I don't understand why anyone would want to hurt you and it was so, so very wrong. What things do you really enjoy doing these days? For me they are music and motorbikes!
 
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So she's on the Schizophrenia spectrum? As in, she has ongoing psychosis?

Based on the behavior you've described, she is not going in and out of being ill, depending on whether she's triggered or not.

She's ill, full stop.

There might be PTSD somewhere in there, but it's probably not at the center of what's going on. You're letting yourself seriously minimize the situation by focusing on CPTSD and interpersonal conflict as the key problems.

Are you getting support for yourself? You mentioned being in counseling...
Thanks for that joeylittle 🙂

We used to live with her Schizotypal issues but I always wondered where the short fuse and extreme anger came from. The anger itself was always psychotic. She would change her stance, her voice (her voice didn't change because of shouting. No, it changed into someone else's voice). She would threaten to punch me and was on the verge a few times so I left the situation). On one occasion she lost her shit with me over dinner, grabbed my plate from me, got very abusive; calling me "little boy" and making my life hell for a few hours. It turned out she heard me calling her little girl.

I mention the CPTSD because she told me of the recent diagnosis and told me that was the only problem she had according to the psychiatrist she saw.

She had reached out to me after having me arrested. But there was still blame. I had forgotten about that! She said to me "why didn't you come and get me after I left? That's all I wanted you to do!". I did tell her that she had been so horrible to me that it made no sense to come after her.

I'm waiting for counseling to start as the NHS help I was promised hasn't happened, so I'm going private.

I do need something to begin soon as I am feeling traumatised and depressed.

I have to be the one to initiate it or it infuriates me, honestly, and I've felt that way my entire life. I like to choose and pursue and then I like when the person flirts back, after I've already decided on them and made my intentions and hopes obvious. I cannot stand feeling stalked, pursued, or manipulated, particularly by a man, and that's how I feel when someone else intitiates and then doesn't back off when I am clearly not interested. As soon as my current partner had his breakdown and pushed me away, all of his friends started trying to hit on me, even the married ones, and I felt like I had been thrown to the wolves and I'm still sick over it. I see men as overwhelmingly predatory and opportunistic and they rarely prove me wrong (and I'd say that a majority of women who were sexually assaulted and abused feel this way). Men act like I should be flattered by their attention when I just want to be left alone and then they keep bothering me after I've made it clear that I'm not interested, trying to get me into bed with them when they know that I am vulnerable. It's like they think that I am stupid and they need to pounce on me while I'm already heartbroken and 'weak' and there's a race to see who gets to me first. There's one guy that isn't even that close to my partner who, after I rejected him, told me something like, "Your partner told me that you're his crazy ex-girlfriend and he wishes you'd just leave him alone and you're humiliating yourself, so why would you be trying to hold on to someone who just disrespects you and doesn't want you at all?" That is a cruel thing to say and I knew my partner wouldn't have said such a thing to this man in particular because they aren't even close (and, when I asked my partner directly, he denied it and was furious and wanted to know who said it). I ghosted all of these guys on Facebook, literally just stopped signing in, and now one of them downloaded another app to contact me on and sent me a picture of himself twice and keeps saying, "When am I going to get a picture back?" and asking me to video chat, and I still haven't been responding, but he won't go away. And I'm in the horrific position of not wanting to burn all of these bridges in case my partner gets better and wants to stay together, but then again, he wouldn't want to stay friends with any of these people. I shouldn't be having to deal with any of this, though, and it's amazing how insensitive these men are being, but sadly not surprising. A lot of times a man is like I'm flirting with you, I'm pursuing you, you should be grateful for my attention, and it's terrifying and it's harassment and there's nothing enjoyable about it at all. I feel forced to respond and I know I'm not going to respond favorably and then they are going to freak out. I flatout told a man that I'm not interested in him or dating at all recently and that I don't consider myself single and he called me a "stupid bitch" and was like, "You'll learn your lessons the hard way, stupid Taurus. I won't fight for someone who won't fight for me." That was someone that was a 'professional' acquaintance at best. Men don't like to take no for an answer and they act like they're entitled to you as a person and they don't handle rejection well. I hate all of it. If my partner and I never get back together, I have no plans to date again. I used to tell my partner that being in love was terrifying because it's like you rip your heart out of your own chest and put it in someone else's palm and beg them not to smash it or drop it and just try to trust them. It was an uncomfortable feeling for me, being that vulnerable, and I won't repeat the gesture anytime soon. If my partner does want to stay together, I now need lots of therapy and we would need couple's counseling to work through how much his sudden abandonment has destroyed me as a person.

Anyhow. I liked it when my partner and I were good together for the 8 years before his breakdown. I liked him complimenting me and flirting and touching me. I did choose him, though, and felt an odd love at first sight feeling with him. When I trusted him, I felt positively about him flirting with me. I would not like it if any man just started flirting with me, though, and I'd feel suffocated and scared. One of the nicest things about being with my partner was actually that when we were together, no other men dared to approach me or try to flirt with me or even look at me. It contributed a lot to my feelings of being safe when I was physically with my partner. That is sad in and of itself. Like, as a female, I feel the need to have a man to protect me from other men.

Question... when you went to hug your girlfriend and she interpreted it as assault, was she already having a panic attack or did she try to push you away or did you refuse to let her go? Or was she simply triggered by you approaching her at all?

I've definitely had moments where I would do anything to get away from a man and out of his arms. I wouldn't call the cops on him and lie about him assaulting me, but if someone tried to hold on to me and not let me go, I would start fighting and I wouldn't be able to tolerate them. Feeling trapped by a man is definitely a huge trigger to me.

I hope that something here answered your question or made sense. From the perspective of someone who has CPTSD from being sexually abused.
It's a shame you have met a lot of men who are like they have been. We're not all like that. When I was dipping my toe into the world of online dating I found being an empath made it so much more straightforward. I knew exactly how the woman I was out with was feeling. No, I couldn't tell what she was thinking but I could feel her emotions as though they were mine, so I knew when any kind of flirting or moving things to the next level were going to be okay for her. The downside for me being the complete emptiness after any intimate physical contact if there was no connection.

I need space away from getting close to women so I can regroup, heal, work out how to filter the idealisation that can come with being an empath and remember who I am. The past will always be there but (for me) I can choose when to visit it.
 
Interesting! I had a bipolar kind of existence for years. I gave up everything which would change my brain chemistry; coffee, cigarettes, tea, and alcohol. It made a difference in a couple of weeks! Aspartame is very bad for your digestion and colon cancer is a genuine risk! Being hurt now that I have ended things is normal but I must not let the empath in me create an abnormal reaction, that's why I'm doing therapy. Yes, it can be wonderful to be an empath and when I was dabbling in that terrible online dating thing it made it soooooo much easier! But for me, being an empath can also be very, very hard - and I choose the word hard rather than the word difficult.

Can you see the light at the end of your personal tunnel?
Sure, lots of light in my tunnel :-)
And yours, too, it seems like? :-D
 
Sure, lots of light in my tunnel :-)
And yours, too, it seems like? :-D
The light is good 😊

I'm not seeing it yet. Too much has happened. I'm still at the relationship trauma vs missing the woman I love, so it's very early days and I admit that I'm not feeling that emotionally strong after everything that's happened. Work is busy and the TIA has physically taken it out of me. But the plan is to get there...
 
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