Greetings,
One has to be the author of their own accommodation/partial recovery if some movement is going to be realized - especially alone. As might be guessed from my user name/avatar, I too counsel 'read, read, read', whereas I'd recommend mixing matters up with the collection of academic journal articles culled from school academic journal databases. I've found it terrifically important to get beyond the Internet, where most everything is not much more than three pages in length. It's very hard to develop mastery regarding the dynamic behind PTSD without greater length and better reinforcement than that.
Though just one voice here (imagine you are making a calm and deliberate inspection of a buffet service, whereas I'm in the stainless steel tin up towards the left), I can just share in brief bare outlines of a largely solitary journey that has at least made a contest of coping with PTSD. There is no 'one-size' or 'one-spec.' solution to afford you, but please sample all the same for even what might not strictly suit at first glance may in time prove to have considerable utility.
I imagine I started with the core works articulating a contemporary understanding of PTSD and especially C-PTSD (service for one now remember!) split out for emotional neglect and emotional abuse equating to a form of child abuse. Reviewing such prompted an embrace of the study of attachment disorders, of contemplation of the Harlow Monkey experiments regarding attachment - especially fragile attachment. Digesting this, I was soon drawn to materials that spoke of the dynamic of bullying, which I found most artfully handled within materials that encompass the social lives of teenage girls where such topics as 'alternate aggression' and 'social aggression' are taken seriously.
As for my proclivity to be drawn towards individuals who mimic the inter-relational styles (usually narcissistic and abusive), I first sought out works penned for battered women trying to make sense of their relationships with alcoholic men (yes - I'm a guy, and yet just try to find material that is penned for a fellow that is both appropriate and sophisticated enough!), before making a more thoroughgoing embrace of what is termed object relations theory. Severe legacies of prolonged socioemotional isolation compounded for my enmeshment with my diabetes-addled and deaf mother wedded to identity confusion for secondary school years spent in the company of friends of circumstance who were homosexual in the main did me quite profound damage - but just to lay out the wreckage in a hanger F.A.A. style counts as progress as bewildering as such reads. If this sounds the work of years, believe me - it absolutely has been.
All the above could be said to set the stage for establishing a foundational understanding of what is up with me and me alone. PTSD fires flare unabated without concentration on developing still further understanding of what is going on, and hence my studies extended out to embrace the challenge of establishing a nuanced appreciation of who did what, when, where, why and how in a manner of a scholarly cub reporter. In a sense some comfort and modest distance may be established from the locus of trauma by abstracting out and away a bit to embrace such issues as feminism, critiques of what masculinity means in the early 21st Century, conceptions of stigma and how it is manifest and enforced, etc. In short, what cannot be forgotten may also be reconfigured to afford some (not all) a capacity to focus and possibly contribute back consistent with being a fine activist. We've seen, we've experienced, we've witnessed - and what shall that mean?
Anyone perusing my posts knows well that I get slammed by PTSD recall; i.e. flashbacks of scenes run with alternate behavioral tracks whereby I attempt to play out different roles consistent with fighting off attacks to my right sense of self. These are unexpected, while if I'm observant of circumstance and can evolve my capacity to recognize when I'm in a weakened state of mind, I've probably disconnected an ever greater wave of traumatic episodes from playing back then and there - probably. How can we sense in sum what was avoided? What is tangible about an avoided experience? Clearly I'm speaking of the speculative - but I have found that keeping notes in the wake of a PTSD experience of hell can help deconstruct a certain triggering 'fall of the dominos' and sometimes - not always - afford the option to back out - sometimes.
End Part I for my messages become too long to properly edit given the system...
