Hi.
I'm around twenty. I'm a student. I've been diagnosed with CPTSD for a couple years. It's been a bumpy ride. When I have my normal support system, I'm stable. Almost normal. When I don't, I have to work twice as hard to be half as healthy. Right now, I don't have my normal support system.
The background of my trauma isn't something that I've shared with a lot of people in depth, either in the sense of telling them about it or in the sense of knowing others who have had comparable experiences. This is going to be long, and this is the short version, so please bear with me. It's an unpleasant story. I hope I've skimmed where appropriate so as not to cause anyone pain in reading this.
I was essentially raised by a kind of one-person cult: my mom. She subjected me to emotional, physical, and sexual violence that ranged from very subtle and insidious methods to much more... extreme ones.
I'm not going to delve into the more lurid instances of abuse. I just want to cover the ones that have conditioned me to this very day. She brainwashed me in ways I'm still just beginning to be aware of. Because she was a fundie Baptist, and what some would today call a neo-Nazi, she homeschooled me. For the first twelve years of my life, social contact with anyone my age was limited to select monthly playdates with my friends. My dad was constantly working, and I still can't say how much of his lack of interference was due to her abuse, or to external factors, and how much to his own neglect. Furthermore, my media consumption was highly controlled: I wasn't allowed to have my own music, I could only watch the movies or shows that we owned on VHS/DVD, I wasn't allowed to touch computers, and she closely monitored which books I was reading, always making sure I was interpreting them in the "right" ways. I grew up isolated from my peers, and from the culture around me as a whole, except if she chose to teach me something about it. Certain political buzz-phrases still give me... certain gut reactions, positive or negative, even if I strongly hold an opposing view now to what my mom taught me. The conditioning was intense.
I didn't have a childhood. She expected me to be her perfect kid (so she could live vicariously through me), her best friend (she was socially paranoid, not to mention a generally abrasive person, which led to isolation among her own peers), and her therapist, and some sort of "eromenos" to her "erastes", and the list goes on. She was totally dependent on her idea of me, but she had all the power.
When I was fourteen, she started letting me have a little bit of independence, comparatively speaking -- she would let me go to (take me to and sit in the room with me during) a local youth community service club, she would send me to the occasional summer day camp, but at that point social exposure just served to brainwash me further. In the eyes of my peers, I was a freak, and no one made any bones about excluding or insulting me. I eventually found two other freaks who would tolerate me, and for the first time I had friends. Not that I, as a friend, deserved them -- I was argumentative and aggressive on good days, incoherent and hateful and detached on others, and downright manipulative on the worst. Then again, I never really had a chance. I regret my behavior, but I can't beat myself up over it. I started being allowed to use computers, but my mom was watching over my shoulder whenever that happened. Another major change was puberty, when I started having weird feelings -- not normal puberty weirdness, but daily dissociation whenever I became aware of my body. I would later find out that this was a symptom of gender dysphoria.
As high school progressed, she put more and more pressure on me to do the things she never got to (I guess). In a year, I went from minimal social contact to a full extracurricular schedule. By senior year, I was sixteen. Between home study and dual enrollment (because I had then developed a fixation on college as my only viable escape route, not that I ever would have said that, because I was living the lie so hard that it was almost true), on top of college applications, I've crunched the numbers, and between those commitments, two semi-professional bands, and an internship, I was doing the time-commitment equivalent of a full undergraduate course load + a full time job. I barely slept that year. On the upside, I also had my driver's license (thank god). For the first time, I could control my environment, even if only for ten or twenty minutes at a time; I could even occasionally visit or meet friends (no, no more of those had come around, I still only had the two -- but I'm proud to say that I had become a much better friend, at least performatively, even if I didn't know how to connect with them deeply).
Aside from the sheer workload, senior year of high school was a turning point for me in two ways. One, I had learned how to fake social engagement. I'm pretty sure I came off somewhat fake and robotic, but I wasn't an embarrassment anymore, and hey, living a lie was natural to me at this point. Two, actually being exposed to normal social interactions began to force me to face the wrongs I was always hiding from at home. Between this and stress, and let's not forget my burgeoning gender dysphoria, the CPTSD symptoms became unignorable. I essentially dissociated for the entire year. I barely slept -- couldn't sleep -- and when I did, I would invariably have sleep paralysis. Psychotic symptoms became normal: I would keep a mental bingo sheet to see if I could get all five kinds of hallucinations in a day (gustatory, olfactory, tactile, auditory, and visual). I had panic attacks on a weekly basis or more. I was also engaged in an extremely physically demanding extracurricular, to the point where even if I ate everything I could manage, I physically could not gain weight. I was constantly emotionally numb, and started self-harming in subtle ways. And yet, even though my subconscious was screaming at me to realize what was wrong with my life, I couldn't admit to myself that my mom was the reason for this. Honestly, sheer terror was the only thing that kept me out of involuntary inpatient that year. I was simply too scared of being powerless when I was so close to being out of there.
Finally, I made it to undergraduate, got out of the state, and two really good things happened. I got to devote myself to a field that I really love, and my mother died of natural causes in my freshman year. The emotional impact of the funeral was a blip on my radar -- and I can never say this publicly, because I have to play the part of the loving child while my dad's still around (though after he dies, I suppose I could say something; my extended family has already disowned me for being transgender anyway), but it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
I'm recovering, I really am, but I'm trying to make the most out of life at the same time. Dealing with the self-destructive tendencies I have as a result of my "childhood" is difficult at best, and I always feel like I'm working twice as hard to make it half as far. Likewise, it's hard for me to find fulfillment in relationships. I'm bad, really bad, at empathizing with people, even ones I care about deeply. The upshot to that is that I've worked twice as hard to be good at sympathizing with people, and now I can definitely say I'm a good friend. I enjoy caring for my friends, but I always worry that I'm doing it for the wrong reason -- do I just want a distraction from my own problems? Am I still playing by the rules of conditional love, do I think that I'm indebting them to me? And the obvious flip-side is that I'm really bad at letting my friends care for me in ways that are meaningful to me (instead of being more performatively-based acts of caring), even when I know they want to help me.
In the end, I've spent the majority of my life in my own personal hell. I'm trying to climb out. And that's really hard to do when no one else seems to understand what kind of struggle goes into having to assimilate into a culture you supposedly grew up in over the course of half a decade. In some ways, I have a very strong sense of identity, but in others I feel like a changeling.
If you've had a similar experience, whether you were denied a childhood by a cult, a family member, something else, or somewhere in between, please talk to me. I want to be a good person, and I want to feel like I am a person. I'm overseas and struggling and I don't want to feel so alone.
I'm around twenty. I'm a student. I've been diagnosed with CPTSD for a couple years. It's been a bumpy ride. When I have my normal support system, I'm stable. Almost normal. When I don't, I have to work twice as hard to be half as healthy. Right now, I don't have my normal support system.
The background of my trauma isn't something that I've shared with a lot of people in depth, either in the sense of telling them about it or in the sense of knowing others who have had comparable experiences. This is going to be long, and this is the short version, so please bear with me. It's an unpleasant story. I hope I've skimmed where appropriate so as not to cause anyone pain in reading this.
I was essentially raised by a kind of one-person cult: my mom. She subjected me to emotional, physical, and sexual violence that ranged from very subtle and insidious methods to much more... extreme ones.
I'm not going to delve into the more lurid instances of abuse. I just want to cover the ones that have conditioned me to this very day. She brainwashed me in ways I'm still just beginning to be aware of. Because she was a fundie Baptist, and what some would today call a neo-Nazi, she homeschooled me. For the first twelve years of my life, social contact with anyone my age was limited to select monthly playdates with my friends. My dad was constantly working, and I still can't say how much of his lack of interference was due to her abuse, or to external factors, and how much to his own neglect. Furthermore, my media consumption was highly controlled: I wasn't allowed to have my own music, I could only watch the movies or shows that we owned on VHS/DVD, I wasn't allowed to touch computers, and she closely monitored which books I was reading, always making sure I was interpreting them in the "right" ways. I grew up isolated from my peers, and from the culture around me as a whole, except if she chose to teach me something about it. Certain political buzz-phrases still give me... certain gut reactions, positive or negative, even if I strongly hold an opposing view now to what my mom taught me. The conditioning was intense.
I didn't have a childhood. She expected me to be her perfect kid (so she could live vicariously through me), her best friend (she was socially paranoid, not to mention a generally abrasive person, which led to isolation among her own peers), and her therapist, and some sort of "eromenos" to her "erastes", and the list goes on. She was totally dependent on her idea of me, but she had all the power.
When I was fourteen, she started letting me have a little bit of independence, comparatively speaking -- she would let me go to (take me to and sit in the room with me during) a local youth community service club, she would send me to the occasional summer day camp, but at that point social exposure just served to brainwash me further. In the eyes of my peers, I was a freak, and no one made any bones about excluding or insulting me. I eventually found two other freaks who would tolerate me, and for the first time I had friends. Not that I, as a friend, deserved them -- I was argumentative and aggressive on good days, incoherent and hateful and detached on others, and downright manipulative on the worst. Then again, I never really had a chance. I regret my behavior, but I can't beat myself up over it. I started being allowed to use computers, but my mom was watching over my shoulder whenever that happened. Another major change was puberty, when I started having weird feelings -- not normal puberty weirdness, but daily dissociation whenever I became aware of my body. I would later find out that this was a symptom of gender dysphoria.
As high school progressed, she put more and more pressure on me to do the things she never got to (I guess). In a year, I went from minimal social contact to a full extracurricular schedule. By senior year, I was sixteen. Between home study and dual enrollment (because I had then developed a fixation on college as my only viable escape route, not that I ever would have said that, because I was living the lie so hard that it was almost true), on top of college applications, I've crunched the numbers, and between those commitments, two semi-professional bands, and an internship, I was doing the time-commitment equivalent of a full undergraduate course load + a full time job. I barely slept that year. On the upside, I also had my driver's license (thank god). For the first time, I could control my environment, even if only for ten or twenty minutes at a time; I could even occasionally visit or meet friends (no, no more of those had come around, I still only had the two -- but I'm proud to say that I had become a much better friend, at least performatively, even if I didn't know how to connect with them deeply).
Aside from the sheer workload, senior year of high school was a turning point for me in two ways. One, I had learned how to fake social engagement. I'm pretty sure I came off somewhat fake and robotic, but I wasn't an embarrassment anymore, and hey, living a lie was natural to me at this point. Two, actually being exposed to normal social interactions began to force me to face the wrongs I was always hiding from at home. Between this and stress, and let's not forget my burgeoning gender dysphoria, the CPTSD symptoms became unignorable. I essentially dissociated for the entire year. I barely slept -- couldn't sleep -- and when I did, I would invariably have sleep paralysis. Psychotic symptoms became normal: I would keep a mental bingo sheet to see if I could get all five kinds of hallucinations in a day (gustatory, olfactory, tactile, auditory, and visual). I had panic attacks on a weekly basis or more. I was also engaged in an extremely physically demanding extracurricular, to the point where even if I ate everything I could manage, I physically could not gain weight. I was constantly emotionally numb, and started self-harming in subtle ways. And yet, even though my subconscious was screaming at me to realize what was wrong with my life, I couldn't admit to myself that my mom was the reason for this. Honestly, sheer terror was the only thing that kept me out of involuntary inpatient that year. I was simply too scared of being powerless when I was so close to being out of there.
Finally, I made it to undergraduate, got out of the state, and two really good things happened. I got to devote myself to a field that I really love, and my mother died of natural causes in my freshman year. The emotional impact of the funeral was a blip on my radar -- and I can never say this publicly, because I have to play the part of the loving child while my dad's still around (though after he dies, I suppose I could say something; my extended family has already disowned me for being transgender anyway), but it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
I'm recovering, I really am, but I'm trying to make the most out of life at the same time. Dealing with the self-destructive tendencies I have as a result of my "childhood" is difficult at best, and I always feel like I'm working twice as hard to make it half as far. Likewise, it's hard for me to find fulfillment in relationships. I'm bad, really bad, at empathizing with people, even ones I care about deeply. The upshot to that is that I've worked twice as hard to be good at sympathizing with people, and now I can definitely say I'm a good friend. I enjoy caring for my friends, but I always worry that I'm doing it for the wrong reason -- do I just want a distraction from my own problems? Am I still playing by the rules of conditional love, do I think that I'm indebting them to me? And the obvious flip-side is that I'm really bad at letting my friends care for me in ways that are meaningful to me (instead of being more performatively-based acts of caring), even when I know they want to help me.
In the end, I've spent the majority of my life in my own personal hell. I'm trying to climb out. And that's really hard to do when no one else seems to understand what kind of struggle goes into having to assimilate into a culture you supposedly grew up in over the course of half a decade. In some ways, I have a very strong sense of identity, but in others I feel like a changeling.
If you've had a similar experience, whether you were denied a childhood by a cult, a family member, something else, or somewhere in between, please talk to me. I want to be a good person, and I want to feel like I am a person. I'm overseas and struggling and I don't want to feel so alone.