Life with c-PTSD

I did something this week that I’ve never done before. 

I googled, no, I read the wikipedia article on c-ptsd. 

Here it is:  c-PTSD

Because, not for the first time in my last few years, it has been something that my partner at the time identified that I might have, or be in the midst of navigating the symptoms of. 

Currently this has been because I have had some very close encounters with my abusive childhood in the last month, and needed to ‘re group’ in the way I have needed to – to feel safe, EMDR, journalling, sensing emotions/thoughts and loving them, and myself. 

I guess I had been reluctant to self identify with ‘having’ c-ptsd before. WHY JAMES? 

Maybe because i just existed and what I had to deal with was ‘normalised’ .

Maybe because I had to hide all experiences, and feelings, and knew that was my only choice to stay safe

Maybe because I didnt feel the need to categorise what I suffer from in such a way…. yet, given that my childhood was about survival, and counting down the days until my 18th Birthday (and leaving home when I was 18 1/2 and never going back) and survival in a marriage of limited emotional health (I’ll be kind) or support, and no supportive parents to go to… trapped, wasnt the word …….. but it was what I was used to. 

The story of my childhood and surviving it, amid psychopathic parents is here 

I took on their weight of expectations, shame, guilt, I hid my emotions, self soothed, self harmed in a variety of less seen ways, and then to add this, adapted this into a religious belief that also created self-loathing, shame and high expectations. 

That was what happened to me….. that I took on as being my fault, and my responsibility to fix. 

But…. none of these things are in my life right now. 

Even if they have got a bit close in the last few months, for reasons I cannot go into here. 

Even with safety, even with the tools, even with the measure of control I have. 

Doesn’t mean to say it hasn’t affected. Doesn’t mean to say it hasnt required work. 

Thats the thing….. 

The Trauma has gone. 

But it doesn’t quite shift. 

‘I feel like I am an escaped prisoner’ 

William Cartier Bresson 

And it’s not the ‘wanting to go back’ – it’s that the magnet of its emotional pull fights to go back, fights to cause sinkage, stuckness and have the voices of despair, doubt, pain. Past takes over when present and future had been almost blissfully enjoying themselves for a rarity. 

I didnt want to say ‘I have c-ptsd’ because well what difference would it make?

and it would mean causing a fuss or a statement or recognition of this, as a thing. See how thats a symptom in itself. 

But I do. 

And the thing is, with what happened to me, and when, it has required a lengthy painful inner ‘journey’ to feel safe within, to feel safe without, to be able to feel emotions, and for my trauma brain to trust, its what Ive been doing and what I continue to do. 

C-ptsd was my normal – it was a survival strategy. 

And I lived in day to day trauma for over 40 years. 

Yet. I wonder. 

I wonder whether what happened to me, is not just for me any more. 

What if it was something that might be a superpower to bring light and life to others? Not just a survivors gift….but a statement of what it is to be, to be fully human, and shine light

What if the very thing that I had to be, to survive, is actually a strength and a superpower? 

What might my story or my sense of being from the post-traumatic growth I’ve encountered in the last 18 months – from a life of abuse survival – might bring to others? 

As I shine light on what I did to survive, as I bring light into the wounds, as I notice and love myself to my fullest, i just carry on doing this, and being able to live, grateful, honoured and joyful in the open possibility of a future. 

I don’t need to label myself. 

I am not a label or a diagnosis

I just need to love myself. 

I am me

I just keep being in love with me

one step and day at a time. 

Mending the love pathways inside, where there was only fracture. 

Maybe wounds are where the light wrestles its way in. 

And those wounds keep opening every now and then, to reset and remind me, that I am someone now, I am love now, a trigger as a reminder that I can love myself….and a wounded part of me requires time, care and attention. 

C-ptsd, might just be

Compassion

Powering

Trauma to

Step

Down. 

Because I am not my trauma. Nor am I my past

And neither are you.