Sufferer Non-combat, Male

[island jim]

My ex is my ex because he told me he never wanted a relationship, which is not what he said at first. As w...

Hi Glara,

Your post is very heartwarming to me. My sympathies go out to both you and your ex. The true demon in your relationship is his C-PTSD. I can relate to him by telling you that I have struggled my entire life with wanting to be close to people AND trying to escape from them at the same time. For me, the people who hurt me as a child were the people I loved the most. My parents, my siblings and my best friend. All this happened before puberty. The significance is that in childhood and adolescence, the brain learns and learns and learns. During teen years key parts of the brain solidify and what was previously learned becomes the indelible truth. The things we call "normal" are set and can't be changed. For me, the state of normal was the knowledge that the people I loved the most had the greatest potential to hurt or even kill me.

I've been married 33 years to a wonderful woman. She and I spend a lot of time apart. We have a small beach house about 3 hour drive from our main home. I go there every single week for 3 days. I drive to the beach on Thursdays and back to the house on Sundays. She has learned the hard way, that I'm a much more pleasant person to be around if I get about a third of my time alone.

At first she didn't like it. But somehow or another she came to see that I'm not "leaving her" every weekend. I'm just responding to my fears and hiding at the beach every weekend. In some C-PDST literature, people with C-PTSD are noted as constantly seeking escape. For now, my wife and I have found a way that I can live out my fantasy of escaping without leaving her.

I also feel compassion for you, the secondary victim. I know my situation has been difficult on my wife and children. And so I know it is difficult for you too. C-PTSD doesn't make the person you love evil. The person might be extremely lovable. And knowing he's suffering is adding to your compassion on him. But the C-PTSD acts like a third-party (I call it a demon) that from time to time gets involved and pulls the loved one away. Loving someone with C-PTSD can be like loving someone with any life altering disorder, like cancer.

 

[Born to Run]

Gaslighting is meant to make a person lose all trust in their own memories and thoughts.

Hi Island Jim,

Thank you for elaborating on gaslighting. However, the body remembers everything that has threatened your survival no matter what. Your cognitive and limbic -emotional- brain have no control over your reptilian -survival- brain. Your body reacts to survival in a way that is driven by the reptilian brain. When your body remembers something it comes from the reptilian brain and your cognitive brain just remains an observer. No influence and that is why I find the method brilliant in every aspect.

Once your body remembers something it is my experience that you will always be able to make some sense of it, and even if you are not, it does not matter to your brain, as the main purpose is to complete the survival actions like freeze, fight, flight that were never completed during trauma and remain stuck in your system. Freeing up these stuck survival actions is the healing aspect, even when you do not know exactly what happened.