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I can NEVER relax

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Maybe it's not a bad as I remember. I can say for certain im a victim of childhood mental and verbal abuse, trauma and neglect, there's no doubt in my mind about that but to be diagnosed with anything is scary to me.
All normal, @SunsetDawn83.

When you have been diagnosed with as much stuff as I have you learn its just a label. It helps describe whats going on to others. You can't get better without finding out whats wrong first.
 
It's been a massive pain in the backside, trying to understand what I'm feeling re: CPTSD, and it wasn't until, oh, a half hour ago, browsing this forum for the first time after joining, that I realized what I do has a clinical term: hypervigilance. I was describing the way I lived my life to someone and was busting out all these metaphors. The one that made most sense to me was that I have a spotlight, and it focuses on one life problem, gets obsessed and ruminating about it, and when that passes, it immediately swings to another problem. In one week, I was going to be living destitute in a cardboard box, I was a terrible person who is hated by his peers, I had seventeen strains of COVID and two STIs, I was a crap lover and intimate partner, and completely untalented, which would soon be exposed by all the people in my life.

The annoying thing is, each of those issues can 'pass' as reasonable in my mind. That's why hypervigilance is so insidious; there's always SOMETHING to freak you out. And every day, the focus for me is identifying threats everywhere. I have a problem isolating myself from people, because they might post a threat. My body aches from the terror, and I'm getting old enough that it's starting to really break me down, physically. Plus there's the emotional fear flashbacks that have started coming, more and more. My (least) favourite is the way my body starts to get cold, and I shiver. I know that's a trauma / PTSD response because the last 'normal' time it happened was when I was accosted by a drug addict coming home from the library. My body got cold, cold, cold.

Anyway, all to say, I understand how you feel, and I feel like a complete newborn when it comes to this stuff.
 
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