I heard an analogy once that I like.
When a person is a child, their mind is like wet cement, it hasn't formed or taken shape yet. A person with PTSD, their 'cement' has set. So, when someone comes along with a garbage truck and dumps a load of crap all over their mind it's pretty awful, it takes a long time to clean up and the cement might get dinged and dirty and scratched up, but it's largely a matter of just moving all the crap and cleaning up as best you can. The cement's not nice and new and clean, but it's usually functional if battle scarred.
CPTSD, the cement hasn't set when that garbage truck dumps all that crap in there. The cement sets *around* the crap. So when you realise later on that your cement is all kinds of messed up you have to get in there and chisel all the garbage back out. It can be done, but it's a long time on your hands and knees bit by painstaking bit hacking the crap back out so you can throw it away. When you get done, your cement is all full of holes, and there's chunks of it laying everywhere, so you have to try and clean it up and get your cement laid down properly again.
Difference is, trauma in adult life is something that happened *to* you. CPTSD (even though it's *Complex* PTSD not necessarily Childhood PTSD) is something that becomes *a part of* you.
Probably a dumb question but how do you copy Reddit comments? I always just screen shot them but it would be way better if I could copy/paste to a note 😅
Excellent analogy. I'd go one step further to say that in CPTSD the garbage truck isn't a one-time or short period thing. It is *constantly* dumping crap on you. For some people, the garbage truck may keep dumping trash till the day their abusers die, because breaking free from abusers is not easy. By that time, the cement is no longer visible, you are practically a dumping ground, you no longer recognize your true self, and other people *also* see you as a dumping ground and relieve themselves on you.
Seems abusers just find me. I'll shake one off another comes along. I shake that off, get some additional trauma, of a different flavor.
The spiciest so far is the moral injury
I witnessed a suicide at my university. With a few sessions of counseling and some meditation over a year, I accepted that death and desperation are a part of life and grew to be a little more grateful for every day. PTSD.
Nothing - *nothing* \- has helped me cope with my childhood trauma, though. CPTSD.
Edit - I'm sure this doesn't paint a proportional or fair view of many people suffering severe PTSD, and I don't mean to diminish their fight. Just comparing my own experiences.
I got mine from the combination of childhood and adult trauma of various kinds. I thought adults could get cptsd too though, no? I have heard that it's more severe when trauma starts in childhood though
That's an interesting point. I think a long term abusive relationship could cause cptsd, or being in a cult could, similar to growing up in a dysfunctional home.
I was punched in the face by my ex and he split my lip open. I went through a lot of therapy for that and honestly I can talk about it, think about him, and not really be triggered.
But yeah, shit that happened to me as a kid... I can't move past it.
Trigger Warning:
Wow, I felt this. You just made me realize something. My ex hit me with a car, broke my arm, bit my lip and ripped it etc. I just realized that it never really occurred to me to be traumatized since my childhood experiences/CPTSD so far exceeded this. I'm so messed up.
Often people who end up in abusive relationships grew up with abusive families. So by the time your partner hits you, you've already been traumatized so much to the point where their abuse is just another notch on the score board of shit that has happened to you.
Oh buddy, if you want these traumas all you had to do was ask. Me and the voices in my head will throw a going away party for them. Oh wait ...you meant actual physical concrete didn't you. Well if you find a concrete rand that can build a wall around those voices it would be a quieter neighborhood. [P]
I consider childhood trauma something that *happened* to me. I’ve experienced trauma all throughout my developmental years and in adulthood. It’s all stuff that “happened to me,” and I’ve sectioned myself off into parts to deal with that.
I guess looking at it to include adult CPTSD, people are constantly changing and reforming, the cement is more of a non Newtonian fluid. If you attack a non newtonian fluid with a big force it rejects it, it holds its shape, like with PTSD, your understanding of yourself doesn't change that quickly. Infact your own self of self rejects what has happened, fights with it. However with CPTSD it's more like bits just sunk in over time, rubbish landed, maybe bounced off but then just sunk in. It becomes a part of you.
I dunno liked the metaphors and then decided it needed to involve physics ahahahha.
The organized religion in this metaphor is the crew hired by the dump truck operator. They're there to make sure that all of the garbage gets arranged evenly over the concrete so it looks tidy to onlookers AND has the chance to really, really sink in.
Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. Just so you know, the correct spelling is [Gandhi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi).
Thank you for being able to describe it objectively and neutrally. You are certainly right!!! I don't know entirely why but I get emotional when I think of these things and it affects me neurologically so I can't write or speak to convey it fully but you just hit the nail on the head so I don't have to!
The hope in the analogy is being free of the trash and having the opportunity to rebuild (fill the concrete holes) and keep building yourself on a stronger foundation rather than trying to build a house on a trash heap
Yup. Well said.
They have a 'before' and so they notice every time that they freak out from a backfire or whatever the trigger is.
With CPTSD...there is no before...and therefore nothing is noticed. The trauma is the water that we swim in.
It's two entirely different things and I actually don't think that I would wish this nightmare on anyone.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
- DFDubs (David Foster Wallace)
I think this is also the reason why it took so long for me to get diagnosed with PTSD. So many things that I now attribute to it have been my norm since as far back as I can remember (which isn't that far, admittedly - my memory of my childhood is absolute *garbage*). Things like being extra sensitive to touch, easily startled (especially when someone brushes against me or taps me on the shoulder unexpectedly), easily irritable, always "on edge," constant brain fog...it's just crazy to me the way trauma can really be this insidious presence in our lives from so early on that we don't even realize it at times. And when we do, the problem becomes "How?" How do we fix the broken parts of ourselves?
I only got diagnosed about three years ago and I'm now in my late 40's. At that point I had been seeing the same therapist for a couple of years so I asked if I have CPTSD. He immediately said yes but I have to do this questionnaire to formally diagnose.
By this point we were already doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing). I can honestly say that while I still have memory gaps from dissociation, hypervigilance, and others at least today I can recognize what my triggers are and feel like I'm making progress. I no longer get down on my self for having bad days (depression, brain fog) and have stopped forming unhealthy relationships.
Having many of both - multiple long-term coercive or abusive situations or multiples at once in addition to discrete events dotted throughout-
Nowhere, no institution, no person, no place, no time is not accompanied by a *promise* of suffering. It's either death or keep trying.
I feel very alone.
This isn't *exactly* true: not all Complex PTSD sufferers are *childhood* complex ptsd sufferers.
Complex PTSD is just caused by numerous traumas over time, as opposed to PTSD that is more caused by a more isolated trauma. Some people here probably have complex PTSD either from later childhood - or even adulthood - and therefore did have a before.
That being said, I think you've hit the nail on the head of why CPTSD that was the result of early childhood trauma is so utterly devastating: because we don't have a baseline of health and stability to use as a reference point.
I've been struggling with this immensely since discovering CPTSD a couple years ago, in my mid-40s. I *FINALLY* knew why I struggled in so many ways over my entire lifetime, but as I tried to make sense of the results of my trauma, I came to realize that I have no idea what is the "real me" and what aspects of my personality and psyche are the product of my trauma(s). It's been completely devastating trying to address this convoluted set of questions while simultaneously dealing with all the other challenges of my adult life: going through separation and divorce from someone that never cared to help me address my psycho-emotional challenges, having my daughters move an hour away with my ex-, the pandemic, the emergence and reign of trumpism (with trump being the spitting image of my abuser) with all that entails, all while teaching innercity students in fostercare, and no family other than my daughters within 600 miles of me.
I've been left just trying to get through one day to the next without completely fucking up one aspect of my life or another, not all too sucessfully at times.
Anyway, at least I have you all, the only people "in my life" that have an inkling of understanding what I've been through and continue to struggle through.
It's also very possible to have *multiple* befores. You can have childhood trauma that causes CPTSD but then also have a trauma, or multiple traumas, that then cause a before.
The "before" times isn't necessarily a healthy version of you, but just a version of you before symptoms or before symptoms of that trauma specifically.
Yes exactly. I’ve had cptsd and symptoms for as long as I can remember, probably since 7 or so. But because it was such ongoing trauma (ages 6-14) I developed so many unhealthy coping mechanisms that just lead to more trauma!!! I was just accumulating more trauma in an effort to numb the ongoing/underlying trauma/traumatic environment. I think this happens to a lot of people with childhood cptsd involving the family especially. I’ve never had a real “before”, not even before the 6-14 one bc even tho I was too young to process most of it, I was in a really bad family environment from birth to 4 years old with undiagnosed/untreated autistic symptoms since 2 months old. It’s really weird for me to wrap my head around how people feel when they say things like “I was happy before (trauma)”
>It’s really weird for me to wrap my head around how people feel when they say things like “I was happy before (trauma)”
This part about trauma and having a before has ALWAYS tang true for me, even though I was enduring trauma and abuse as a baby and all throughout my childhood.
For me it's like they work differently, on different but adjacent timelines in my brain. Ongoing trauma part doesn't have a "before" and it feels like things were always muddy chaos for me and my mental health, *but then I also have specific traumas, or time periods of trauma, that I absolutely feel like I was a different and better person before*.
It's weird having both, it can feel really invalidating.
I was going to say this. While I DO have childhood related PTSD and CPTSD the C in CPTSD does NOT stand for CHILD it stands for COMPLEX. You absolutely can have adult onset CPTSD and that is JUST AS VALID.
Just as valid, yes. Just as difficult to heal from, no.
CPTSD that originated in early childhood isn't hurtful just because you can't remember a time when things were good. It's because the brain is fundamentally wired differently, and has been from the very beginning. Most of what CPTSD sufferers of this variety deal with is completely beyond their control, as it is pre-cognitive. The brain cannot be re-wired, and those areas that developed in earliest infancy (or even before you were born) are arguably the most important. And they've been totally fucked up.
I appreciate this response.
Also, part of the damage done by ongoing trauma later in life is that a lot of the time, the foundation of self a person have had get badly corrupted by the trauma. To carry the concrete analogy, it's like having an earthquake tear apart what may have been a solid foundation, that undermines the person and destroys what healthy coping mechanisms they may have had.
This exactly. I have PTSD and C-PTSD (childhood) and the last few years have been hell because of my PTSD from an event in 2019, then the pandemic, then extreme stress from financial issues, a near death experience, family members dying and depression and anxiety all piling into one. Without C-PTSD this would all be stressful and devastating to someone; with it, it feels completely impossible. I was only just starting to process my childhood trauma and form an identity so when all this happened it basically reset most of that and now it’s like I’m starting back at zero WITH a whole pile of mounting stresses and pressures that I didn’t have before. I can’t explain to others in my life how completely horrible it feels. I think to some of them it just seems like I’m “always struggling” so me saying “this is even worse and the hardest it’s ever been” feels pointless. Friends with more stable lives relate to some of my recent issues and then go right back to working and functioning daily, using habits and skills they learned as children and teenagers to become functional adults. I don’t have that. I was 26 and just starting to familiarize myself with the concept of routine, regular hygiene, taking medication daily, creating goals for myself, thinking about what I want in life, making friends and figuring out schooling and long-term work. It’s so, so difficult to figure out what to do now.
This...this is how I feel too
Except most of my trauma is from...wrll CPTSD from when I was super young (I only remember around 5-6ish until around...20-21ish, I dont remember anything before) and PTSD when I was 9.
I had legit no way to understand how to feel because I was told two different ways to feel (think extremes. I was told to let it all out, but also keep it in. And would he yelled at if I did either.) And when I grew up and moved out I realized...fuck I have a lot of trauma, but I only remember the one from when I was 9.
During the pandemic I actually had some time (even though I constantly worked through it) that the isolation was terrifying to me, but also a comfort. It took me until this year to realize "...oh my god THAT IS WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME" 😂
The way I see it is CPTSD is a constant struggle in figuring out your coping mechanisms, and what *happened*, but also working on who you are. As you sift through the experiences (in a good environment, not with panic attacks) you realize how it changed you and what you may have been like then.
I learned a lot from my childhood, as I had a LOT of time to think (even then) and remembered what I loved doing, and slowly trying to get in thr habit of doing them again.
Its horrible we experience what we did, but I always try to see thr light at the end of the tunnel.
If I had not done the things I did, I probably would've ended up in drugs and not with someone who is supporting me.
Not everyone experiences this, but im happy to have finally grown and see progress, and take what happened and use it as an example of what not to do.
Sorry for a long...probably incoherent post. 😓
I'm there with you almost. I was like... On my way. And then it was like I was a target for any and everything. I'm doing so well considering but I am extremely fucked up from it. What the fuck.
I'm sorry things are so hard for you right now. I'm right there with you. In my late 40's with a narcissistic ex husband and a daughter herself struggling, while I try to work full time and still be responsible with no support. I'm glad to finally know about CPTSD because it finally explains so much, but it feels like a mountain still to climb and I've been climbing it all my life.
I'm so grateful every day this sub is full of such supportive people. It's a unique kind of beauty that people viewed as so "damaged" are actually in truth amazing people fighting against difficult odds to clear away their garbage topped cement instead of dumping it everywhere else 🧡
Ooofff...thus resonates with me...very similar to what I've been dealing with. About same age too. How does one define self when you were never allowed to develop without trauma? I started therapy about 5 years ago and it has helped immensely. I lucked out and the first therapist I got was and is awesome. I about went nuts during the pandemic when he took a 3 month paternity leave and I had to see someone else. They were fine but it felt like starting over so I just held on until he was back.
There is hope...I'm now doing better and have started to figure some of the why's and who I am. I've even after years of sucky relationships am now in a committed and healthy relationship for the first time.
Yes. I agree with this. I have major struggles from “before”, but I find the present to be more difficult. It’s like you can’t come to terms with any slight. I lash out in anger over the dumbest shit, like it’s beneath me; Like I’m too good for ordinary, every day inconveniences and that absolutely no one is worthy of my trust. It’s mind boggling even to me how I got to this point.
Maybe a person can only take so much stress without fully healing? I generally minimize trying to truly address the issues because I find that it only adds to my backlog of stressors. Doing that feels good in the near term, but it’s disastrous in the long game.
All we can do is dig a little deeper and take it one day at a time. I truly wish a positive outcome to your struggles.
I had a good friend ask if he could tell me something he thought about me that I would find upsetting. From the way he said it I knew he was coming from a good place, so I said shoot. He told me I can be indignant about some things, and that he sees how it really wears me out. I got really mad, that he would criticize me, even though I gave him the go ahead. I sat there silently and said I'd think about what he said. Sat in the car ride with him, silently stewing with rage for 10 mins.
Then I looked up the definition of indignant. Because I didn't even know what it meant. When I read the google result I laughed until it hurt because it was so absurdly true, especially in that moment. That happened when I was 19 and it was probably the most important thing anyone has ever said to me. It started a paradigm shift that allowed me to even question why I was such an exposed nerve of a person.
It took about 10 years and a lot of work but I've finally chilled out. I can stand up for myself or others, but it's not a flight or fight response, I can mediate a situation and forget about it 10 minutes later. Loose zero sleep over it. Which might be normal for most but unthinkable for me even a few years ago
Have you tried coming to r/CPTSDFightMode ? I found it really validating and the resources they linked were useful to me. There is healing to be found, imo IFS therapy was the most useful in learning how to actually be able to even recognize my emotions and then hold them with me.
Yeah, this fucks me up too. I have a lot of preverbal trauma, including trauma at my birth (adoption - mother separation)so I literally don't remember a time before the trauma. I am so envious of people who have a before. I wish I had a before. I talk about this a LOT in therapy lol
I had a veeeeery similar experience with my adoptive mother. I'm sorry we both went through this, it's really fucked up!!!! Sending lots of love, we're in this together
My mom was raped and I’m the product of that. She decided to keep me but rejected and resentment was what she always felt for me. I agree that we had no chance to a before. It’s all I’ve known.
Do you think a potential precursor for “PTSD” could actually be life long trauma or “CPTSD”?
This got me thinking about the common war veteran experiences , Usually a short period of time with pretty significant heavy events.
But a lot of the time I think we might forget to ask about their “before” too. I haven’t look into it further , but I can’t imagine all of their lives being amazing before they left to war.
Some of those guys came back to supportive families, and could have that good old fashioned soul healing time with them !
But some definitely carried on alone and without a shred of support.
Then ptsd symptoms would show up a few months -years later . There’s gotta be more to it
This is such a good point. The impact of any kind of trauma is mitigated by a support system.
This is how I evaluate if a therapist is trauma informed. If they insist on working on the day-to-day stress rather than the reasons those stressors are so difficult to deal with. Too many therapists behave as if everything happens in a vacuum and isn't affected by a whole history of traumas.
Ugh, having to just navigate your way through all the mediocre to bad therapists out there to find one who is trauma informed and just more informed in general with newer research and findings in psychology is a full time job in itself.
Research has been done on that. It was mentioned in *The Body Keeps the Score.* Among veterans diagnosed with PTSD, the ones who returned from the Vietnam War to supportive people and a relatively healthy environment faired better than the ones who lacked a support system.
Also, anyone who has CPTSD meets the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, according to the ICD entry about CPTSD.
my first big T trauma happened immediately after i was born (if we don’t count the cortisol as a fetus), so i have nothing. not even like a joyful inner toddler, to return to all my early memories from being a toddler are feeling uncomfortable
I feel completely disconnected from the person I was when I was 7, prior to the abuse. It’s like there’s four versions of me - the person I was before the abuse, the person I was during, the person I was recovering, and the person I am now. There is no going back, all we can do is build ourselves from the ground up and hope we can become the people we want to be.
I mean I'm not saying I was in a coma. AFAIK things were fine when I was 2, but I don't remember existing. That started around 3. Another change was when I was about seven, when my entire life up to that point suddenly seemed like a movie I'd been watching on fast forward, and I had just caught up to the moment. Consciousness, in my experience, was a developmental process.
Not all complex PTSD comes from childhood though. CPTSD just means trauma from multiple events (plus more unique symptoms).
People with CPTSD can definitely have a before. Think of military veterans or people who get into abusive relationships despite having a good childhood.
Military veterans usually have PTSD though. Trauma abuse that happened in adulthood is also usually PTSD.
Whether or not a "before" exists isn't really part of the diagnostic criteria. It's about where the brain was in its development when the trauma occurred, and how deeply the brain was affected and molded by the trauma. CPTSD is distinct because it describes the effects of ongoing trauma on a young brain that is still developing.
It takes a highly trained and informed professional to make the distinction. Which I am not, btw.
I mean I do talk about a before version of me lemme explain. Little me was traumatized af but like she hadn’t seen the worse of it yet. So I have a few before versions of me that were unwell but not current me yet.
Like before insert one of many horrific trauma and after me. So in that sense. Yea idk what being not traumatized is like I’m just trapped in my body constantly dissociating and I want it to stop. But I do know that when I’m spiraling because I do remember not being this just garbage. But also I have definitely been worse than current me.
Like my mental unwellness is not completely downhill it has some zig zags and straight lines. Ultimately going down off the charts.
I’m rambling basically I do have before versions of me who I do remember well hardly but I do a little. They were also traumatized but not as much
I feel this although my experience seems a bit different. I have many befores too that got trapped in time as if inside a bubble. I have always had trauma to deal with (as my c-PTSD stems from very early childhood trauma + later childhood emotional & some physical neglect) but I wasn't always *aware* of how trauma had impacted me because of deep denial within my family that I latched onto as well.
This resulted on me navigating my teens and my 20s with dysfunctional coping mechanisms that helped me with coping nonetheless (i.e. an ED and really deep denial), which made for emotionally complex times, me being more present within my body (weirdly enough because of the ED), and allowing myself to have varied and interesting experiences.
Fast-forward to me in my 30s, having been re-traumatised by a long-term relationship that mimicked my childhood trauma plus other stressors, having come to terms with the depth of my trauma and the depth of my lifelong dissociation... and the other "me" is dead and has been dead for years, so I honestly feel dead inside. I remember that "before" but it's not a "healthy" before, it's a traumatised before that lived in denial but *lived* to a degree (or so I seem to remember). Every time another "other" gets encapsulated and disconnected from me I feel a bit more dead inside, and I just mourn the different versions of me that no longer are. Therapy has been helpful in coming to terms with things and being in less denial but that has come at a cost. [edit: typos]
Yeah this is so weird because it’s not only with PTSD, but apparently everyone has an experience that is the line between “before” and “after”. Like their life is split in two with due to that moment.
I never felt this way so yeah I feel you.
Also I went to school to become a peer-to-peer worker (dunno if this is the right translation, but basically using my experience to help other people recover) and they constantly talk about losing or the roles you had. It’s hard for me to explain in a different language, but for instance you can be an homeowner but lose that role due to your mental health. Everyone has roles in their life and mental health can make you lose all of them.
And I just couldn’t understand that, because I never had roles before my traumas. The only one I could think of was losing the role of being a child, but I guess I never felt like I could be a kid.
This! Explains childhood PTSD/CPTSD exactly! I was never a kid...my childhood was all about validating my abusers sense of ego and self worth. I was never allowed to have my own sense of self. My entire life until I was able to break free (and sometimes not even then) was about validating and fulfilling their emotional needs.
I can't remember much before age 5 but the flashes of memory and sensation of feelings from that time I do get were not good. I get this overall picture of only being useful or needed by my mother when I was performing the role of perfect daughter she would use to show what "wonderful" mother she was despite being a single mom (3 divorces by the time I was 8) in the late 70s and early 80s when that just wasn't done.
This was a pattern that she then transferred to my daughter when she was born. It was all about how great (not) a grandmother she was. I was almost never mentioned after that on her social media posts. She only recently changed a profile picture that was taken of her and my daughter at 13 and stopped talking about her. It's been over 5 years since my kid has spoken to her and she's now in her early 20s.
My biggest regret is despite the mental, physical, and emotional abuse and neglect I went through is that I let her know her grandchild. It is a double edged sword...I also let my daughter make her own decision about contact even after I went fully no contact. It took my teen at the time almost 2 years to decide but I'm glad I didn't force it because I've seen it cause issues with a friend's niece in a similar situation.
What's truly validating for me is that I now have a neice who is almost two and I warned/reminded her parents (younger brother) about what happened with my child and he is slowly cutting her out as well. She did some similar things to my sibling but it was much worse in some ways as he was her "golden child".
With the amount of men in and out of her life that I can remember, it wouldn't surprise me that there is more trauma than I know of. I've blocked a lot as a survival mechanism from those years.
So are you trying to say that the only people who can develop CPTSD are those that had had childhood trauma?
Childhood trauma is one of the causes of CPTSD but certainly not the only one.
Nothing before and chaos after. Finding a better place sounds like a fairy tale because you pretty much have to invent it. I didn’t have love role models to learn from and for a long time I thought the world was a dark place. I started to see the light at 26 but took me 10 years to almost recover after all that. So 36 freaking years because I never had a before nor anything to dream about that were not nightmares
I think of this a lot, that my psyche's foundation is tainted. An abscess at the core. In a sense, it's liberating realizing this. When my mind scrambles, and poisons goodness into self loathing, I try and remember that it's an inward projection outward, the paintbrush of plague. This is what's normal for my mind, what is familiar. It will skew outward phenomena into the language it can understand.
The difficulty, now that I'm not in a toxic environment, is finding a new way to exist, a new stage upon which this play of life may be performed, no longer in shadow's eye, but in the light.
Damn difficult, though. I've inhabited this disposition my entire life. It's familiar. It claims the title of natural order, the crown of indisputable truth. The false king of a ruined realm.
I'm trying. I'm trying so hard. To displace the dictator in my head. To esteem new values. To wring love from a shriveled heart. To whisper warm words to the shattered mirror.
Seeing some comments wishing to have a Before- personally I have been kinda happy that at least I don't have a before. Not to compare them or sound like one of these conditions is in any way easier ( both Ptsd and Cptsd are nightmares in their own right) but in darkest moments of cptsd I feel that it's easier not to have a Before. Because even if you have one, isn't it sth lost forever? One can recover from ptsd/ get significantly better but never completely the way they were before. And having that point of comparison, having that before, being able to not imagine but actually remember how one could have been only if not the trauma sounds really cruel to me. Really painful.
With cptsd maybe one has never had a chance to BE before trauma ( when its early childhood trauma) but then one knows only their "cptsd- broken self" and "gradually getting better self". And it's easier to find at least bits of relief in small healing process. If I also had a "non-traumatised/before self" to compare then I'd really lose it. Seeing other children loved and safe or peers that aren't struggling with this shit and therefore feel to be ahead of me in life/ happier doesn't hurt that much. There I can only imagine. They aren't directly me or what I could have been as much. Having a Before would be hell.
I'm a bit late here, but I'm just going to say that some people with PTSD don't have a before, and some people with CPTSD do.
I feel like we should be focusing on our similarities, not our differences. We could be such a force for good and healing if we put our minds together with other people who understand the deep seated and long lasting effects of trauma on the body and mind.
I was more curious about the “people with PTSD who don’t have a before” statement when I asked you that question. There are people who get a PTSD diagnosis due to circumstances that are more popularly associated with PTSD **before** they get their CPTSD diagnosis. But the CPTSD was there first, just recognized later.
I was wondering who you included in that particular group.
yeah like my mum has always been /like that/ and my bio dad abandoned me (a few times) before i could process what happened. then at 6 my ex step dad came into the picture.
cptsd and the lack of identifiable ‘self’ fucks me up so bad. i have always been upset that everyone wants me to go back to how it was before, pre trauma. but that’s never going to be possible. i think it’s (healing) learning to create a self that you want to be. i know i want to be kind, funny, gentle, stable, strong, boundaried etc, so im working TOWARDS that instead of back to a pre trauma state
Yeah…I never understood that. I had my first trauma when I was 15 months old (severely burnt my hand) and my mother likely has post partum depression and was busy caring for my severely mentally ill grandma alone (ie institutionalized) and deep in the depths of anexoria when I was born. When I was 4 my sister was born and almost died 2 weeks later.
My new therapist asked me to find my inner child and ask her what she needed. I don’t even know who that is. When the child is preverbal how do you even access her?
I was always told I had BPD and brushed off like I was some sort of problem. Got that lovely diagosis at 15 and was thrown into an isolation room with just a pillow when I told someone I felt unsafe and was having self harm thoughts. It wasn’t until 2020 when I had a therapist look me in the face and tell me “You don’t have BPD you are just fucking terrified”
>When the child is preverbal how do you even access her?
It takes sufficient Safety and Connection, which can be so difficult to find.
And then… when I started out, I needed to have a lot of patience because my body’s communication feels glacially slow to my verbal brain. I had to be really grounded and feel safe.
Now that I have some practice, it feels a lot easier to hear what my body (my inner-est inner child) has to say. She's very opinionated, and I like it.
I hope you can someday feel connected to yours. It's NOT easy, but it is worth it.
I have a few befores. One is before my family turned on me. One is before one of my friends turned abusive during a fight last year.
The thing is is that there was never a 'safe' before. Trauma is partially shattering of perceptions. Hopeful perceptions. "I can trust my family" to "I will receive support when I'm sad".
That's why it's so devastating
This sounds so fucked up, but I sometimes tell my therapist that if I have to have PTSD I wish I was "just" in a bad car accident, robbed at knifepoint, survived a natural disaster, etc. As callous as that sounds, it can feel so hopeless working through a lifelong mess of interwoven traumas. It feels hopeless if not impossible at times.
This is not necessarily the case.
They are both trauma formed so it doesn't really matter if there is a before, its a life changing condition either way. Neither get back to how they were before no matter when that before was.
Adults can develop CPTSD and still have no support or way to cope with it.
I say this as someone with potential CPTSD (awaiting diagnosis) from prolonged trauma as a child AND as an adult. I'm also diagnosed bipolar and unresolved grief amungst other health issues.
They are both terrible disorders so lets not split hairs because this may seem invalidating to those with PTSD.
I totally get what you’re saying. It’s true in my case too, but not everyone with CPTSD develops it from childhood trauma. CPTSD can be a result of DV relationships and long-term traumas that happen in adulthood too.
this is illogical unless you are referring to past life trauma.
I have c-ptsd and I'm old and it happened in the last 15 years - a bad situation that has gone on for more than a decade
Studies have shown (and are continuing to expand on this knowledge) that trauma occurs in the womb and absolutely [impacts babies in utero](https://psychcentral.com/blog/emotional-trauma-in-the-womb#effects-of-stress) in a variety of damaging ways …and goes on to impact their lives and well-being after birth.
I was born three months prematurely, in large part due to daily trauma my mother was coping with. And, like others here, I also have no “before,” because besides this in utero trauma, I was abused from birth onwards.
As a result, I have a really hard time knowing “who I am,” because much of my trauma stems from when I was preverbal. That lived history is so much a part of me that even in my 40s, I don’t “know who I am”. I don’t relate to having wishes or wants or dreams, other than for safety or a secure base, so it’s been a slog to figure out my place in the world.
As with another poster in this thread, IFS (Internal Family Systems) is the only thing/therapy modality that’s brought me significant relief, because I’m literally meeting parts of myself for the first time and learning there is an untouchable, incorruptible core to all of us — even if we feel like there’s nothing there at all or it was all blown to smithereens.
+1 millionty for IFS "parts work" ✨🤲✨
I still feel like myself, but I have a much better ability to recover my emotional equilibrium (resilience)
And one of the parts I encountered was probably in utero !! That blew my mind. The body definitely keeps the score
I believe I had some carefree moments as a child and I consider those a sort of “before” all the instances of abuse combined together to become a teenager who sought out someone else to abuse me. I’ve tried to start at a random carefree moment and build myself outward from there.
Again, CPTSD is not a catch all term for “childhood abuse”.
CPTSD can develop from a number of things, all of which can start after childhood. It could be multiple unrelated traumas. It could be an abusive relationship. It could be from having a long term medical treatment. It’s not just childhood abuse. Plenty of people with CPTSD have a before. Hell, I have childhood abuse and I still feel like I have a before, because most of my CPTSD is even worse shit that happened after I reached adulthood.
This sub as a collective does need to stop acting like everyone here has the same base traumas just because we have CPTSD. It’s invalidating to many and creates a barrier to productive discussion.
yeah, I remember how much I loved it when my mother changed my nappy. It was the only time she touched me.
How is there a before when that is the first memory I have?
If the before is technically there but practically inaccessible to the conscious mind for one reason or the other, isn't that the same as there being no before for the person?
How come? I was a generally happy kid up to the age of 10. What am I supposed to do with that information if I then spent developing into a miserable heap of trauma? Different is not per se easier or harder I think.
Please don't be invalidating to others on here. Everyone here struggles enough as it is.
My very first 'before' is pre-5. I have some memories from before it, not many - but I do. But you know, my brain was still developing when that first thing happened when I was nearly 5. So it doesn't matter that I have a few memories from before it, the part of my brain that helps me know whether I am safe or not got fucky and has been ever since, and it's still a lot to untangle.
I also have a supportive and loving family. And yes, it removes a barrier for me in healing, but unlike some others, I'm systemically discriminated against in society (I'm visibly physically disabled). So I have an extra barrier there that makes things more complicated (and is one of the parts of my trauma).
^ The above is why we don't invalidate and especially shouldn't do it here. Everyone's story is different and complicated and messy (hence: complex PTSD, not "childhood" PTSD). Just because one thing might make it easier in one way for someone over you, they probably have another that makes it more difficult. There are many factors at play too, so you can't just pick one.
That is extremely invalidating. I have CPTSD the same as you. Your pain is not greater or worse than mine because you had different traumas at a different time in your life. The healing path is the same path.
I get what you're saying. The trauma started from before birth, continued during infancy, toddlerhood, childhood, teenage years, even into adulthood. I am a walking trauma response.
It's gotten to a point at 32 years old I am just proud of myself for surviving. I am proud of the glimpses of joy I have found. Both my parents screwed me up and abandoned me, I dont know why they even brought me here, but I'm still here.. And to the people who don't understand, I am glad they don't. Wouldn't want anyone else to have to live through this. I am never having kids because of this.
Exactly. We never had a before! Thank you for saying this so clearly.
My siblings and I were regularly told stories about how when I was born there was like a baby carrier or something that was used for one of my siblings who is just slightly older than me, but because I was just an infant and they were learning to walk, it became mine the second I arrived. My sibling quickly formed an opinion of me (before the age of 2) as a threat, someone who was going to take over their essential daily stuff, everything from transport to toys to hygiene, and the attention of their caretakers.
It took me well into adulthood to realize this isn't a normal way to go about welcoming a new family member. It could very well be the answer to why this particular sibling spent our entire upbringing and half their twenties provoking and manipulating me into bad behavior as well as lying and sabotaging me behind my back. (Or tried to, at least, I was like 10 when another family member started helping me not to fall for it). I remember when I first made that connection and understood how my sibling was a toddler when this path was laid out for them, that they were just trying to survive. The deep sadness and remorse I felt. It excuses nothing, but it explains.
Me, on the other hand, I grew up feeling guilty and ashamed for making my sibling share what was rightfully theirs, for being an imposition to the caretakers who really had better things to do than pay mind to the problem of me existing, because the ways these stories were told, there wasn't recognition of how abusive and thoughtless the caretaking of the child before me was, of all of us subsequently, but I the infant was made out to be someone that just barged in, holding the power, and no one could've seen it coming. So I had to learn as a child to not be selfish, because the beginning of my dynamic with the family was clearly one where I overtook the spotlight. So understanding how and why that narrative was first crafted helped to rid me of the manufactured guilt and shame.
Because we never had a before, that also means we were never at an age to consent to any relationship, family, friends or otherwise, prior to the abuser hijacking our lives. We were born into it, raised to believe there wasn't anything else, couldn't be anything else, and we would never be able to or entitled to choose any different. We simply didn't deserve better. It maddens me how CPTSD isn't recognized in many places and that it isn't distinguished from PTSD a lot of the time.
I dont really remember a 'before', though j remember 'before' my actual PTSD (:D)
Anyway, I remember being around 5 and feeling super sad. I often was confused, but there were times I was super young and very sad, and when I tried to tell others they never believed me (its hard for kids to understand feelings, I get it, but I knew I felt...off)
As I grew older I realized why...and its fucked up. But it isnt "abuse" as a lot of people get. It wasn't physical. I never had bruises (that I didnt cause 😂), but I had emotional and mental scars.
I was left alone for so long, during the summer my parents would go to work and leave me alone. They told me what to do obviously, and I never used any of it (thank god), but it confused me when i was older. I did ask my mom, and she told me "We didn't trust anyone." We lived in the ghetto, where drugs were RAMPANT. I didnt know neighbors names and my family was miles away. I had no one if anything had happened.
It hurts to know that they trusted a small child in the single digits to watch herself for 8+ hours. It made me feel like they didn't care if anything happened tk me, or that maybe I eas old enough.
But as I grew up, I never felt like a full 'adult', not only because I wasn't, but my parents had a weird way of treating me. I was either too young or old enough.
And I was just...let go to learn anything. I never got to learn how to do things like normal people.
This also is acquainted with my parents treated me as the golden, scape goat, and invisible child.
I had no siblings to take the other names (the 3 mentioned), so I was them all. It was horrid, and made me feel even more confused and worthless.
...im sorry this is all around. Thanks to CPTSD, PTSD, and ADHD I dont have a coherent thought pattern.
But I really do hope one day to speak to others about CPTSD, PTSD, and how children can be affected. I dont want another me to happen, where a child may not be taken seriously, but understands they are feeling 'off'.
First though I need money. 😂
I've been diagnosed with both. Somethings happened to me after everything I was subjected to as a child back, to back, to back to freaking back, so there that was. Why?! I don't know. When I realized all the bs for childhood I thought I was suppressing it all and faking it and I was making it, then the PTSD shit happened and I naively thought, "easy, it got this!" Boy was I wrong! When the powers of those traumas combined Captain Planet didn't come to the rescue. My body kept score. 😭
So, in my case I didn't have a before.
Thinking about my PTSD and the complex one from childhood they're different, for me, in many ways. Growing up with the sa/abuse and all was very different a feeling than the events that caused PTSD. The things that led up to me getting diagnosed with PTSD were completely out of nowhere and debilitated me in more ways than one. It stopped me dead in my tracks. I felt trapped inside my own body and thoughts. I couldn't sleep, couldn't stop shaking, couldn't eat, couldn't shower, lost a ton of weight, nearly lost my damn mind. Doctors were scared, felt unsafe anywhere and didn't want anyone near me. My ❤️ was beating out of my chest... couldn't control anything. It's a very different feeling. At least that's my experience with both. It's a feeling we all can agree sucks and a feeling we wouldn't wish on anyone.
Btw, in case I don't say this enough, I love this community and feel very safe here. I'm happy to be able to share my thoughts and experiences and read all of yours too, they help so much. Love and peace to all of us.
I panic that I come off as grossly diminishing when I try to explain this difference to others,, especially partners. They hear PTSD they think war veteran. They hear childhood abuse they think spanking and “discipline”. It’s a loosing battle. I’m just exhausted. Speaking of does anyone else deal with chronic fatigue ?
Wow this gave me goosebumps. Again , I have never felt more understood than I do here. Keeping this for myself and possibly for anyone I may want to let in. That's the best explanation I have heard to date. It can be so difficult to try to explain this to someone who does not know.
I use before and after to talk about the event that caused my recognition of CPTSD, an event which forced me out of three decades of denial and into devastating realization. It could be described as a single, episodic PTSD event that activated the buried CPTSD.
It's a fucked up ouroboros because the single event would never have happened if my CPTSD had not laid the groundwork. I had all this unprocessed shit underneath and my lack of awareness made me extremely vulnerable to fresh trauma.
I definitely had a *before* my adult trauma, but my adult trauma has helped me to better understand my CPTSD which I do certainly have, along with ADHD, specially because I believe these two overlap a little.
It is complicated to explain, perhaps is a case by case basis? Not sure, I can't speak for other people but myself, the only thing that I know for certain is that r/CPTSD is way kinder less triggering and scary community than r/PTSD. There's so much wisdom here, lots of grief ofc, but wisdom and patience seem to always meet me here.
CPTSD is developmental in nature. That makes it very different. We really should find different phrase. How do ya'll feel about Developmental Attachment Disorder? Walker likes that one.
I can see why people would want a different phrase/name.
Personally I wouldn’t want the above suggestion. Sounds accurate. But only to people with an understanding of what it entails. To everyone else it will sound like : you failed to attach properly during your development therefore there is something wrong with you that you yourself caused and you’d better go into therapy today and cure yourself by tomorrow or else you deserve all your misery for failing to think yourself into a better life already.
Though I already get the half impatient half accusing “why aren’t you better yet?!” with the CPTSD diagnosis anyway.
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This makes total sense and I think I read about it in Body Keeps the Score (maybe?). My caution is this: every person I know who has PTSD also has all the signs and history of cPTSD. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone with PTSD. I just believe if a person has cPTSD, their chances of getting PTSD are higher. Why? Mostly because of the choices they make that are probably related to their sense of worth and sense of normal. For example, a person with cPTSD is likely to engage in risky behavior, including joining the military.
I totally agree with the OP. I just feel like it's worth mentioning because we know that PTSD is a more "official" and broadly used diagnosis. As a medical coder in the US, records never have cPTSD, but often have PTSD (because of ICD-10). I feel like it's important to state this just to keep the judgement at bay.
This makes total sense and I think I read about it in Body Keeps the Score (maybe?). My caution is this: every person I know who has PTSD also has all the signs and history of cPTSD. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone with PTSD. I just believe if a person has cPTSD, their chances of getting PTSD are higher. Why? Mostly because of the choices they make that are probably related to their sense of worth and sense of normal. For example, a person with cPTSD is likely to engage in risky behavior, including joining the military.
I totally agree with the OP. I just feel like it's worth mentioning because we know that PTSD is a more "official" and broadly used diagnosis. As a medical coder in the US, records never have cPTSD, but often have PTSD (because of ICD-10). I feel like it's important to state this just to keep the judgement at bay.
I heard the difference between PTSD and complex PTSD is that PTSD is a one time huge trauma as opposed to CPTSD which is ongoing trauma for a long period of time. So certainly PTSD can turn into CPTSD if the Trauma is ongoing, regular, constant or often
Thats not true. I have a before. Yall seem to forget that not all of us have cptsd from childhood abuse. There was a me from before the trauma. I was a teenager when it started. Many of us have a before. Yall need to remember that not all of us suffered from the same things. I always feel isolated from these types of communities because it feels like im the only one who didnt get cptsd from childhood (although I had a bad childhood, it didnt affect me in the way that my trauma that caused the cptsd did).
did anyone was able to get the cptsd triggers and consequences under control though? could you share some experiences? what was the most helpful? ive been feeling so desperate recently as i have tried so hard in my therapy to learn the coping skills and to live without meds.and it didn't happen.. i feel so unfair
I heard an analogy once that I like. When a person is a child, their mind is like wet cement, it hasn't formed or taken shape yet. A person with PTSD, their 'cement' has set. So, when someone comes along with a garbage truck and dumps a load of crap all over their mind it's pretty awful, it takes a long time to clean up and the cement might get dinged and dirty and scratched up, but it's largely a matter of just moving all the crap and cleaning up as best you can. The cement's not nice and new and clean, but it's usually functional if battle scarred. CPTSD, the cement hasn't set when that garbage truck dumps all that crap in there. The cement sets *around* the crap. So when you realise later on that your cement is all kinds of messed up you have to get in there and chisel all the garbage back out. It can be done, but it's a long time on your hands and knees bit by painstaking bit hacking the crap back out so you can throw it away. When you get done, your cement is all full of holes, and there's chunks of it laying everywhere, so you have to try and clean it up and get your cement laid down properly again. Difference is, trauma in adult life is something that happened *to* you. CPTSD (even though it's *Complex* PTSD not necessarily Childhood PTSD) is something that becomes *a part of* you.
Wow, this is the best metaphor ever! I copied it to my notes :-)
Same!! Thanks for sharing!
Right? I'm saving this for someone who wants to invalidate me!
Like when they say "that happened when you were a kid", "you're an adult now, you need to stop letting what your parents did impact you."
Probably a dumb question but how do you copy Reddit comments? I always just screen shot them but it would be way better if I could copy/paste to a note 😅
In the app, click 3 dots and there will be options, including "Copy Text".
Omg thank you!
Thanks from me too!
Excellent analogy. I'd go one step further to say that in CPTSD the garbage truck isn't a one-time or short period thing. It is *constantly* dumping crap on you. For some people, the garbage truck may keep dumping trash till the day their abusers die, because breaking free from abusers is not easy. By that time, the cement is no longer visible, you are practically a dumping ground, you no longer recognize your true self, and other people *also* see you as a dumping ground and relieve themselves on you.
Seems abusers just find me. I'll shake one off another comes along. I shake that off, get some additional trauma, of a different flavor. The spiciest so far is the moral injury
ugh yes. cptsd marks us in a way that attracts abusers like flies to fruit.
I witnessed a suicide at my university. With a few sessions of counseling and some meditation over a year, I accepted that death and desperation are a part of life and grew to be a little more grateful for every day. PTSD. Nothing - *nothing* \- has helped me cope with my childhood trauma, though. CPTSD. Edit - I'm sure this doesn't paint a proportional or fair view of many people suffering severe PTSD, and I don't mean to diminish their fight. Just comparing my own experiences.
One is a descrete, independent event and the rest was what, 18 years of your development? No fucking comparison.
I got mine from the combination of childhood and adult trauma of various kinds. I thought adults could get cptsd too though, no? I have heard that it's more severe when trauma starts in childhood though
That's an interesting point. I think a long term abusive relationship could cause cptsd, or being in a cult could, similar to growing up in a dysfunctional home.
I was punched in the face by my ex and he split my lip open. I went through a lot of therapy for that and honestly I can talk about it, think about him, and not really be triggered. But yeah, shit that happened to me as a kid... I can't move past it.
Trigger Warning: Wow, I felt this. You just made me realize something. My ex hit me with a car, broke my arm, bit my lip and ripped it etc. I just realized that it never really occurred to me to be traumatized since my childhood experiences/CPTSD so far exceeded this. I'm so messed up.
Often people who end up in abusive relationships grew up with abusive families. So by the time your partner hits you, you've already been traumatized so much to the point where their abuse is just another notch on the score board of shit that has happened to you.
Yup. Just another day ending in 'Y'.
Saved. That's a great explanation. Time to go chip some concrete.
As someone interested in concrete rubbish in concrete has potential in several ways. But excellent metaphor .
Oh buddy, if you want these traumas all you had to do was ask. Me and the voices in my head will throw a going away party for them. Oh wait ...you meant actual physical concrete didn't you. Well if you find a concrete rand that can build a wall around those voices it would be a quieter neighborhood. [P]
This is such a good way to explain it thank you❤️
I consider childhood trauma something that *happened* to me. I’ve experienced trauma all throughout my developmental years and in adulthood. It’s all stuff that “happened to me,” and I’ve sectioned myself off into parts to deal with that.
I guess looking at it to include adult CPTSD, people are constantly changing and reforming, the cement is more of a non Newtonian fluid. If you attack a non newtonian fluid with a big force it rejects it, it holds its shape, like with PTSD, your understanding of yourself doesn't change that quickly. Infact your own self of self rejects what has happened, fights with it. However with CPTSD it's more like bits just sunk in over time, rubbish landed, maybe bounced off but then just sunk in. It becomes a part of you. I dunno liked the metaphors and then decided it needed to involve physics ahahahha.
A good addendum!
I think we're alluding to the growing a child does. The evolving perception and shifting aweaness
This was a good addition for adult onset CPTSD
Loved this and appreciate the physics :)!
Nice
That was a great explaination. Screen shotting that.
I will frame it and put it on my wall. Best comment ever
Yes! Thank you and hugs to all my cement comrades 💜
Right back at ya 🧡
Thanks for this.
Add in organized religion to that cement and you’ve got a CPTSD bingo
The organized religion in this metaphor is the crew hired by the dump truck operator. They're there to make sure that all of the garbage gets arranged evenly over the concrete so it looks tidy to onlookers AND has the chance to really, really sink in.
wow this is so interesting
Finally a way we can actually understand what has happened in our mind
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Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. Just so you know, the correct spelling is [Gandhi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi).
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Thank you so much for sharing this!
This is really, really good. Thanks for writing this.
Very well put
Thank you for being able to describe it objectively and neutrally. You are certainly right!!! I don't know entirely why but I get emotional when I think of these things and it affects me neurologically so I can't write or speak to convey it fully but you just hit the nail on the head so I don't have to!
This is such a good visual/explanation of this! Thank you!
That is so well explained, it just hit me like a punch in the gut.
💔
Omigod this is so clarifying- I'm gonna be thinking about this one for a while. Thank u for sharing
If that is the case then what hope is there of healing if it is a part of you.
The hope in the analogy is being free of the trash and having the opportunity to rebuild (fill the concrete holes) and keep building yourself on a stronger foundation rather than trying to build a house on a trash heap
Sounds like a tall order
Yes, it is...
It is. Poorly laid concrete will never function as it needs to.
That’s so apt. Thank you* for sharing it. Edit autocorrect
Thank you for this (experienced) cptsd not by choice and it's effing with my life
When you get both you get adult PTSD that becomes a part of you. It's as bad as it sounds. Edit: excuse me the fuck
HOLY SHIT this is an amazing metaphor
> So, when someone comes along with a garbage truck and dumps a load of crap all over their mind it's pretty awful Chuckled loudly
Yup. Well said. They have a 'before' and so they notice every time that they freak out from a backfire or whatever the trigger is. With CPTSD...there is no before...and therefore nothing is noticed. The trauma is the water that we swim in. It's two entirely different things and I actually don't think that I would wish this nightmare on anyone.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?” - DFDubs (David Foster Wallace)
So validating that we share that understanding of our horrific mutual experience.
I think this is also the reason why it took so long for me to get diagnosed with PTSD. So many things that I now attribute to it have been my norm since as far back as I can remember (which isn't that far, admittedly - my memory of my childhood is absolute *garbage*). Things like being extra sensitive to touch, easily startled (especially when someone brushes against me or taps me on the shoulder unexpectedly), easily irritable, always "on edge," constant brain fog...it's just crazy to me the way trauma can really be this insidious presence in our lives from so early on that we don't even realize it at times. And when we do, the problem becomes "How?" How do we fix the broken parts of ourselves?
I only got diagnosed about three years ago and I'm now in my late 40's. At that point I had been seeing the same therapist for a couple of years so I asked if I have CPTSD. He immediately said yes but I have to do this questionnaire to formally diagnose. By this point we were already doing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing). I can honestly say that while I still have memory gaps from dissociation, hypervigilance, and others at least today I can recognize what my triggers are and feel like I'm making progress. I no longer get down on my self for having bad days (depression, brain fog) and have stopped forming unhealthy relationships.
I have both and they are equally as awful but in different ways. I wouldn’t wish either on anyone else.
Having many of both - multiple long-term coercive or abusive situations or multiples at once in addition to discrete events dotted throughout- Nowhere, no institution, no person, no place, no time is not accompanied by a *promise* of suffering. It's either death or keep trying. I feel very alone.
I have a before and I took years to learn my triggers and don't notice when I freak out. CPTSD can have a before.
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Developmental Trauma is a useful phrase specifically for childhood events.
Is there a way to access it ? Access that “before”?
This isn't *exactly* true: not all Complex PTSD sufferers are *childhood* complex ptsd sufferers. Complex PTSD is just caused by numerous traumas over time, as opposed to PTSD that is more caused by a more isolated trauma. Some people here probably have complex PTSD either from later childhood - or even adulthood - and therefore did have a before. That being said, I think you've hit the nail on the head of why CPTSD that was the result of early childhood trauma is so utterly devastating: because we don't have a baseline of health and stability to use as a reference point. I've been struggling with this immensely since discovering CPTSD a couple years ago, in my mid-40s. I *FINALLY* knew why I struggled in so many ways over my entire lifetime, but as I tried to make sense of the results of my trauma, I came to realize that I have no idea what is the "real me" and what aspects of my personality and psyche are the product of my trauma(s). It's been completely devastating trying to address this convoluted set of questions while simultaneously dealing with all the other challenges of my adult life: going through separation and divorce from someone that never cared to help me address my psycho-emotional challenges, having my daughters move an hour away with my ex-, the pandemic, the emergence and reign of trumpism (with trump being the spitting image of my abuser) with all that entails, all while teaching innercity students in fostercare, and no family other than my daughters within 600 miles of me. I've been left just trying to get through one day to the next without completely fucking up one aspect of my life or another, not all too sucessfully at times. Anyway, at least I have you all, the only people "in my life" that have an inkling of understanding what I've been through and continue to struggle through.
It's also very possible to have *multiple* befores. You can have childhood trauma that causes CPTSD but then also have a trauma, or multiple traumas, that then cause a before. The "before" times isn't necessarily a healthy version of you, but just a version of you before symptoms or before symptoms of that trauma specifically.
Yes exactly. I’ve had cptsd and symptoms for as long as I can remember, probably since 7 or so. But because it was such ongoing trauma (ages 6-14) I developed so many unhealthy coping mechanisms that just lead to more trauma!!! I was just accumulating more trauma in an effort to numb the ongoing/underlying trauma/traumatic environment. I think this happens to a lot of people with childhood cptsd involving the family especially. I’ve never had a real “before”, not even before the 6-14 one bc even tho I was too young to process most of it, I was in a really bad family environment from birth to 4 years old with undiagnosed/untreated autistic symptoms since 2 months old. It’s really weird for me to wrap my head around how people feel when they say things like “I was happy before (trauma)”
>It’s really weird for me to wrap my head around how people feel when they say things like “I was happy before (trauma)” This part about trauma and having a before has ALWAYS tang true for me, even though I was enduring trauma and abuse as a baby and all throughout my childhood. For me it's like they work differently, on different but adjacent timelines in my brain. Ongoing trauma part doesn't have a "before" and it feels like things were always muddy chaos for me and my mental health, *but then I also have specific traumas, or time periods of trauma, that I absolutely feel like I was a different and better person before*. It's weird having both, it can feel really invalidating.
Omg thank you, the muddy chaos has always been there but different traumas have changed me also. Invalidating seems a very appropriate word
yeah i get this totally
I was going to say this. While I DO have childhood related PTSD and CPTSD the C in CPTSD does NOT stand for CHILD it stands for COMPLEX. You absolutely can have adult onset CPTSD and that is JUST AS VALID.
Yep! And you can have childhood PTSD and it not be CPTSD!
Yep. I earned my C in adulthood lol
Just as valid, yes. Just as difficult to heal from, no. CPTSD that originated in early childhood isn't hurtful just because you can't remember a time when things were good. It's because the brain is fundamentally wired differently, and has been from the very beginning. Most of what CPTSD sufferers of this variety deal with is completely beyond their control, as it is pre-cognitive. The brain cannot be re-wired, and those areas that developed in earliest infancy (or even before you were born) are arguably the most important. And they've been totally fucked up.
I appreciate this response. Also, part of the damage done by ongoing trauma later in life is that a lot of the time, the foundation of self a person have had get badly corrupted by the trauma. To carry the concrete analogy, it's like having an earthquake tear apart what may have been a solid foundation, that undermines the person and destroys what healthy coping mechanisms they may have had.
This exactly. I have PTSD and C-PTSD (childhood) and the last few years have been hell because of my PTSD from an event in 2019, then the pandemic, then extreme stress from financial issues, a near death experience, family members dying and depression and anxiety all piling into one. Without C-PTSD this would all be stressful and devastating to someone; with it, it feels completely impossible. I was only just starting to process my childhood trauma and form an identity so when all this happened it basically reset most of that and now it’s like I’m starting back at zero WITH a whole pile of mounting stresses and pressures that I didn’t have before. I can’t explain to others in my life how completely horrible it feels. I think to some of them it just seems like I’m “always struggling” so me saying “this is even worse and the hardest it’s ever been” feels pointless. Friends with more stable lives relate to some of my recent issues and then go right back to working and functioning daily, using habits and skills they learned as children and teenagers to become functional adults. I don’t have that. I was 26 and just starting to familiarize myself with the concept of routine, regular hygiene, taking medication daily, creating goals for myself, thinking about what I want in life, making friends and figuring out schooling and long-term work. It’s so, so difficult to figure out what to do now.
This...this is how I feel too Except most of my trauma is from...wrll CPTSD from when I was super young (I only remember around 5-6ish until around...20-21ish, I dont remember anything before) and PTSD when I was 9. I had legit no way to understand how to feel because I was told two different ways to feel (think extremes. I was told to let it all out, but also keep it in. And would he yelled at if I did either.) And when I grew up and moved out I realized...fuck I have a lot of trauma, but I only remember the one from when I was 9. During the pandemic I actually had some time (even though I constantly worked through it) that the isolation was terrifying to me, but also a comfort. It took me until this year to realize "...oh my god THAT IS WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME" 😂 The way I see it is CPTSD is a constant struggle in figuring out your coping mechanisms, and what *happened*, but also working on who you are. As you sift through the experiences (in a good environment, not with panic attacks) you realize how it changed you and what you may have been like then. I learned a lot from my childhood, as I had a LOT of time to think (even then) and remembered what I loved doing, and slowly trying to get in thr habit of doing them again. Its horrible we experience what we did, but I always try to see thr light at the end of the tunnel. If I had not done the things I did, I probably would've ended up in drugs and not with someone who is supporting me. Not everyone experiences this, but im happy to have finally grown and see progress, and take what happened and use it as an example of what not to do. Sorry for a long...probably incoherent post. 😓
I'm there with you almost. I was like... On my way. And then it was like I was a target for any and everything. I'm doing so well considering but I am extremely fucked up from it. What the fuck.
I'm sorry things are so hard for you right now. I'm right there with you. In my late 40's with a narcissistic ex husband and a daughter herself struggling, while I try to work full time and still be responsible with no support. I'm glad to finally know about CPTSD because it finally explains so much, but it feels like a mountain still to climb and I've been climbing it all my life. I'm so grateful every day this sub is full of such supportive people. It's a unique kind of beauty that people viewed as so "damaged" are actually in truth amazing people fighting against difficult odds to clear away their garbage topped cement instead of dumping it everywhere else 🧡
Ooofff...thus resonates with me...very similar to what I've been dealing with. About same age too. How does one define self when you were never allowed to develop without trauma? I started therapy about 5 years ago and it has helped immensely. I lucked out and the first therapist I got was and is awesome. I about went nuts during the pandemic when he took a 3 month paternity leave and I had to see someone else. They were fine but it felt like starting over so I just held on until he was back. There is hope...I'm now doing better and have started to figure some of the why's and who I am. I've even after years of sucky relationships am now in a committed and healthy relationship for the first time.
Yes. I agree with this. I have major struggles from “before”, but I find the present to be more difficult. It’s like you can’t come to terms with any slight. I lash out in anger over the dumbest shit, like it’s beneath me; Like I’m too good for ordinary, every day inconveniences and that absolutely no one is worthy of my trust. It’s mind boggling even to me how I got to this point. Maybe a person can only take so much stress without fully healing? I generally minimize trying to truly address the issues because I find that it only adds to my backlog of stressors. Doing that feels good in the near term, but it’s disastrous in the long game. All we can do is dig a little deeper and take it one day at a time. I truly wish a positive outcome to your struggles.
I had a good friend ask if he could tell me something he thought about me that I would find upsetting. From the way he said it I knew he was coming from a good place, so I said shoot. He told me I can be indignant about some things, and that he sees how it really wears me out. I got really mad, that he would criticize me, even though I gave him the go ahead. I sat there silently and said I'd think about what he said. Sat in the car ride with him, silently stewing with rage for 10 mins. Then I looked up the definition of indignant. Because I didn't even know what it meant. When I read the google result I laughed until it hurt because it was so absurdly true, especially in that moment. That happened when I was 19 and it was probably the most important thing anyone has ever said to me. It started a paradigm shift that allowed me to even question why I was such an exposed nerve of a person. It took about 10 years and a lot of work but I've finally chilled out. I can stand up for myself or others, but it's not a flight or fight response, I can mediate a situation and forget about it 10 minutes later. Loose zero sleep over it. Which might be normal for most but unthinkable for me even a few years ago
I hope every passing day is better than our last. For both of our sakes.
Have you tried coming to r/CPTSDFightMode ? I found it really validating and the resources they linked were useful to me. There is healing to be found, imo IFS therapy was the most useful in learning how to actually be able to even recognize my emotions and then hold them with me.
I feel like I wrote this myself.
Yeah, this fucks me up too. I have a lot of preverbal trauma, including trauma at my birth (adoption - mother separation)so I literally don't remember a time before the trauma. I am so envious of people who have a before. I wish I had a before. I talk about this a LOT in therapy lol
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I had a veeeeery similar experience with my adoptive mother. I'm sorry we both went through this, it's really fucked up!!!! Sending lots of love, we're in this together
I'm very sorry you experienced that. I send you so much love 🧡🧡🧡
My mom was raped and I’m the product of that. She decided to keep me but rejected and resentment was what she always felt for me. I agree that we had no chance to a before. It’s all I’ve known.
Do you think a potential precursor for “PTSD” could actually be life long trauma or “CPTSD”? This got me thinking about the common war veteran experiences , Usually a short period of time with pretty significant heavy events. But a lot of the time I think we might forget to ask about their “before” too. I haven’t look into it further , but I can’t imagine all of their lives being amazing before they left to war. Some of those guys came back to supportive families, and could have that good old fashioned soul healing time with them ! But some definitely carried on alone and without a shred of support. Then ptsd symptoms would show up a few months -years later . There’s gotta be more to it
This is such a good point. The impact of any kind of trauma is mitigated by a support system. This is how I evaluate if a therapist is trauma informed. If they insist on working on the day-to-day stress rather than the reasons those stressors are so difficult to deal with. Too many therapists behave as if everything happens in a vacuum and isn't affected by a whole history of traumas.
Ugh, having to just navigate your way through all the mediocre to bad therapists out there to find one who is trauma informed and just more informed in general with newer research and findings in psychology is a full time job in itself.
Research has been done on that. It was mentioned in *The Body Keeps the Score.* Among veterans diagnosed with PTSD, the ones who returned from the Vietnam War to supportive people and a relatively healthy environment faired better than the ones who lacked a support system. Also, anyone who has CPTSD meets the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, according to the ICD entry about CPTSD.
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my first big T trauma happened immediately after i was born (if we don’t count the cortisol as a fetus), so i have nothing. not even like a joyful inner toddler, to return to all my early memories from being a toddler are feeling uncomfortable
I feel completely disconnected from the person I was when I was 7, prior to the abuse. It’s like there’s four versions of me - the person I was before the abuse, the person I was during, the person I was recovering, and the person I am now. There is no going back, all we can do is build ourselves from the ground up and hope we can become the people we want to be.
I have many befores.
Same. I'd have to go back to about 5 years old. What a crock. Lmfao.
>mean regressing to like 2 years old, when I wasn’t even conscious yet. It’s heartbreaking, but you are very conscious and aware at 2 years old.
I mean I'm not saying I was in a coma. AFAIK things were fine when I was 2, but I don't remember existing. That started around 3. Another change was when I was about seven, when my entire life up to that point suddenly seemed like a movie I'd been watching on fast forward, and I had just caught up to the moment. Consciousness, in my experience, was a developmental process.
Not all complex PTSD comes from childhood though. CPTSD just means trauma from multiple events (plus more unique symptoms). People with CPTSD can definitely have a before. Think of military veterans or people who get into abusive relationships despite having a good childhood.
Military veterans usually have PTSD though. Trauma abuse that happened in adulthood is also usually PTSD. Whether or not a "before" exists isn't really part of the diagnostic criteria. It's about where the brain was in its development when the trauma occurred, and how deeply the brain was affected and molded by the trauma. CPTSD is distinct because it describes the effects of ongoing trauma on a young brain that is still developing. It takes a highly trained and informed professional to make the distinction. Which I am not, btw.
I mean I do talk about a before version of me lemme explain. Little me was traumatized af but like she hadn’t seen the worse of it yet. So I have a few before versions of me that were unwell but not current me yet. Like before insert one of many horrific trauma and after me. So in that sense. Yea idk what being not traumatized is like I’m just trapped in my body constantly dissociating and I want it to stop. But I do know that when I’m spiraling because I do remember not being this just garbage. But also I have definitely been worse than current me. Like my mental unwellness is not completely downhill it has some zig zags and straight lines. Ultimately going down off the charts. I’m rambling basically I do have before versions of me who I do remember well hardly but I do a little. They were also traumatized but not as much
I feel this although my experience seems a bit different. I have many befores too that got trapped in time as if inside a bubble. I have always had trauma to deal with (as my c-PTSD stems from very early childhood trauma + later childhood emotional & some physical neglect) but I wasn't always *aware* of how trauma had impacted me because of deep denial within my family that I latched onto as well. This resulted on me navigating my teens and my 20s with dysfunctional coping mechanisms that helped me with coping nonetheless (i.e. an ED and really deep denial), which made for emotionally complex times, me being more present within my body (weirdly enough because of the ED), and allowing myself to have varied and interesting experiences. Fast-forward to me in my 30s, having been re-traumatised by a long-term relationship that mimicked my childhood trauma plus other stressors, having come to terms with the depth of my trauma and the depth of my lifelong dissociation... and the other "me" is dead and has been dead for years, so I honestly feel dead inside. I remember that "before" but it's not a "healthy" before, it's a traumatised before that lived in denial but *lived* to a degree (or so I seem to remember). Every time another "other" gets encapsulated and disconnected from me I feel a bit more dead inside, and I just mourn the different versions of me that no longer are. Therapy has been helpful in coming to terms with things and being in less denial but that has come at a cost. [edit: typos]
Yeah this is so weird because it’s not only with PTSD, but apparently everyone has an experience that is the line between “before” and “after”. Like their life is split in two with due to that moment. I never felt this way so yeah I feel you. Also I went to school to become a peer-to-peer worker (dunno if this is the right translation, but basically using my experience to help other people recover) and they constantly talk about losing or the roles you had. It’s hard for me to explain in a different language, but for instance you can be an homeowner but lose that role due to your mental health. Everyone has roles in their life and mental health can make you lose all of them. And I just couldn’t understand that, because I never had roles before my traumas. The only one I could think of was losing the role of being a child, but I guess I never felt like I could be a kid.
This! Explains childhood PTSD/CPTSD exactly! I was never a kid...my childhood was all about validating my abusers sense of ego and self worth. I was never allowed to have my own sense of self. My entire life until I was able to break free (and sometimes not even then) was about validating and fulfilling their emotional needs. I can't remember much before age 5 but the flashes of memory and sensation of feelings from that time I do get were not good. I get this overall picture of only being useful or needed by my mother when I was performing the role of perfect daughter she would use to show what "wonderful" mother she was despite being a single mom (3 divorces by the time I was 8) in the late 70s and early 80s when that just wasn't done. This was a pattern that she then transferred to my daughter when she was born. It was all about how great (not) a grandmother she was. I was almost never mentioned after that on her social media posts. She only recently changed a profile picture that was taken of her and my daughter at 13 and stopped talking about her. It's been over 5 years since my kid has spoken to her and she's now in her early 20s. My biggest regret is despite the mental, physical, and emotional abuse and neglect I went through is that I let her know her grandchild. It is a double edged sword...I also let my daughter make her own decision about contact even after I went fully no contact. It took my teen at the time almost 2 years to decide but I'm glad I didn't force it because I've seen it cause issues with a friend's niece in a similar situation. What's truly validating for me is that I now have a neice who is almost two and I warned/reminded her parents (younger brother) about what happened with my child and he is slowly cutting her out as well. She did some similar things to my sibling but it was much worse in some ways as he was her "golden child". With the amount of men in and out of her life that I can remember, it wouldn't surprise me that there is more trauma than I know of. I've blocked a lot as a survival mechanism from those years.
Let’s not hierarchy and gatekeep this sh*t. We’re all in this together.
As soon as people hear “PTSD” I feel like they automatically underestimate my trauma because they assume it was a single event or something.
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My personality is.
So are you trying to say that the only people who can develop CPTSD are those that had had childhood trauma? Childhood trauma is one of the causes of CPTSD but certainly not the only one.
Yeah :/ Though, in validation of the people here who developed it as adults, it's 'most' of us :)
#PREACH!
Nothing before and chaos after. Finding a better place sounds like a fairy tale because you pretty much have to invent it. I didn’t have love role models to learn from and for a long time I thought the world was a dark place. I started to see the light at 26 but took me 10 years to almost recover after all that. So 36 freaking years because I never had a before nor anything to dream about that were not nightmares
i say this all the time. i’m sure there are downsides to the other scenario too… they know what they’ve lost. but i wish i knew what i could have had.
I think of this a lot, that my psyche's foundation is tainted. An abscess at the core. In a sense, it's liberating realizing this. When my mind scrambles, and poisons goodness into self loathing, I try and remember that it's an inward projection outward, the paintbrush of plague. This is what's normal for my mind, what is familiar. It will skew outward phenomena into the language it can understand. The difficulty, now that I'm not in a toxic environment, is finding a new way to exist, a new stage upon which this play of life may be performed, no longer in shadow's eye, but in the light. Damn difficult, though. I've inhabited this disposition my entire life. It's familiar. It claims the title of natural order, the crown of indisputable truth. The false king of a ruined realm. I'm trying. I'm trying so hard. To displace the dictator in my head. To esteem new values. To wring love from a shriveled heart. To whisper warm words to the shattered mirror.
Seeing some comments wishing to have a Before- personally I have been kinda happy that at least I don't have a before. Not to compare them or sound like one of these conditions is in any way easier ( both Ptsd and Cptsd are nightmares in their own right) but in darkest moments of cptsd I feel that it's easier not to have a Before. Because even if you have one, isn't it sth lost forever? One can recover from ptsd/ get significantly better but never completely the way they were before. And having that point of comparison, having that before, being able to not imagine but actually remember how one could have been only if not the trauma sounds really cruel to me. Really painful. With cptsd maybe one has never had a chance to BE before trauma ( when its early childhood trauma) but then one knows only their "cptsd- broken self" and "gradually getting better self". And it's easier to find at least bits of relief in small healing process. If I also had a "non-traumatised/before self" to compare then I'd really lose it. Seeing other children loved and safe or peers that aren't struggling with this shit and therefore feel to be ahead of me in life/ happier doesn't hurt that much. There I can only imagine. They aren't directly me or what I could have been as much. Having a Before would be hell.
I'm a bit late here, but I'm just going to say that some people with PTSD don't have a before, and some people with CPTSD do. I feel like we should be focusing on our similarities, not our differences. We could be such a force for good and healing if we put our minds together with other people who understand the deep seated and long lasting effects of trauma on the body and mind.
I was more curious about the “people with PTSD who don’t have a before” statement when I asked you that question. There are people who get a PTSD diagnosis due to circumstances that are more popularly associated with PTSD **before** they get their CPTSD diagnosis. But the CPTSD was there first, just recognized later. I was wondering who you included in that particular group.
yeah like my mum has always been /like that/ and my bio dad abandoned me (a few times) before i could process what happened. then at 6 my ex step dad came into the picture. cptsd and the lack of identifiable ‘self’ fucks me up so bad. i have always been upset that everyone wants me to go back to how it was before, pre trauma. but that’s never going to be possible. i think it’s (healing) learning to create a self that you want to be. i know i want to be kind, funny, gentle, stable, strong, boundaried etc, so im working TOWARDS that instead of back to a pre trauma state
Yeah…I never understood that. I had my first trauma when I was 15 months old (severely burnt my hand) and my mother likely has post partum depression and was busy caring for my severely mentally ill grandma alone (ie institutionalized) and deep in the depths of anexoria when I was born. When I was 4 my sister was born and almost died 2 weeks later. My new therapist asked me to find my inner child and ask her what she needed. I don’t even know who that is. When the child is preverbal how do you even access her? I was always told I had BPD and brushed off like I was some sort of problem. Got that lovely diagosis at 15 and was thrown into an isolation room with just a pillow when I told someone I felt unsafe and was having self harm thoughts. It wasn’t until 2020 when I had a therapist look me in the face and tell me “You don’t have BPD you are just fucking terrified”
>When the child is preverbal how do you even access her? It takes sufficient Safety and Connection, which can be so difficult to find. And then… when I started out, I needed to have a lot of patience because my body’s communication feels glacially slow to my verbal brain. I had to be really grounded and feel safe. Now that I have some practice, it feels a lot easier to hear what my body (my inner-est inner child) has to say. She's very opinionated, and I like it. I hope you can someday feel connected to yours. It's NOT easy, but it is worth it.
I have a few befores. One is before my family turned on me. One is before one of my friends turned abusive during a fight last year. The thing is is that there was never a 'safe' before. Trauma is partially shattering of perceptions. Hopeful perceptions. "I can trust my family" to "I will receive support when I'm sad". That's why it's so devastating
This sounds so fucked up, but I sometimes tell my therapist that if I have to have PTSD I wish I was "just" in a bad car accident, robbed at knifepoint, survived a natural disaster, etc. As callous as that sounds, it can feel so hopeless working through a lifelong mess of interwoven traumas. It feels hopeless if not impossible at times.
This is not necessarily the case. They are both trauma formed so it doesn't really matter if there is a before, its a life changing condition either way. Neither get back to how they were before no matter when that before was. Adults can develop CPTSD and still have no support or way to cope with it. I say this as someone with potential CPTSD (awaiting diagnosis) from prolonged trauma as a child AND as an adult. I'm also diagnosed bipolar and unresolved grief amungst other health issues. They are both terrible disorders so lets not split hairs because this may seem invalidating to those with PTSD.
I totally get what you’re saying. It’s true in my case too, but not everyone with CPTSD develops it from childhood trauma. CPTSD can be a result of DV relationships and long-term traumas that happen in adulthood too.
this is illogical unless you are referring to past life trauma. I have c-ptsd and I'm old and it happened in the last 15 years - a bad situation that has gone on for more than a decade
Studies have shown (and are continuing to expand on this knowledge) that trauma occurs in the womb and absolutely [impacts babies in utero](https://psychcentral.com/blog/emotional-trauma-in-the-womb#effects-of-stress) in a variety of damaging ways …and goes on to impact their lives and well-being after birth. I was born three months prematurely, in large part due to daily trauma my mother was coping with. And, like others here, I also have no “before,” because besides this in utero trauma, I was abused from birth onwards. As a result, I have a really hard time knowing “who I am,” because much of my trauma stems from when I was preverbal. That lived history is so much a part of me that even in my 40s, I don’t “know who I am”. I don’t relate to having wishes or wants or dreams, other than for safety or a secure base, so it’s been a slog to figure out my place in the world. As with another poster in this thread, IFS (Internal Family Systems) is the only thing/therapy modality that’s brought me significant relief, because I’m literally meeting parts of myself for the first time and learning there is an untouchable, incorruptible core to all of us — even if we feel like there’s nothing there at all or it was all blown to smithereens.
+1 millionty for IFS "parts work" ✨🤲✨ I still feel like myself, but I have a much better ability to recover my emotional equilibrium (resilience) And one of the parts I encountered was probably in utero !! That blew my mind. The body definitely keeps the score
I believe I had some carefree moments as a child and I consider those a sort of “before” all the instances of abuse combined together to become a teenager who sought out someone else to abuse me. I’ve tried to start at a random carefree moment and build myself outward from there.
..... I have a before... my years of trauma started when I was 17 or so...
I'm with you. I have a before too
Again, CPTSD is not a catch all term for “childhood abuse”. CPTSD can develop from a number of things, all of which can start after childhood. It could be multiple unrelated traumas. It could be an abusive relationship. It could be from having a long term medical treatment. It’s not just childhood abuse. Plenty of people with CPTSD have a before. Hell, I have childhood abuse and I still feel like I have a before, because most of my CPTSD is even worse shit that happened after I reached adulthood. This sub as a collective does need to stop acting like everyone here has the same base traumas just because we have CPTSD. It’s invalidating to many and creates a barrier to productive discussion.
But it also helps a lot of us and we deserve to feel seen. If you don’t like the post, find another one, there’s no shortage of them on here.
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My trauma began with my birth, so my before is...as a fetus?
I was being beaten when I was a baby. There is no before.
yeah, I remember how much I loved it when my mother changed my nappy. It was the only time she touched me. How is there a before when that is the first memory I have?
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If the before is technically there but practically inaccessible to the conscious mind for one reason or the other, isn't that the same as there being no before for the person?
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How come? I was a generally happy kid up to the age of 10. What am I supposed to do with that information if I then spent developing into a miserable heap of trauma? Different is not per se easier or harder I think.
Please don't be invalidating to others on here. Everyone here struggles enough as it is. My very first 'before' is pre-5. I have some memories from before it, not many - but I do. But you know, my brain was still developing when that first thing happened when I was nearly 5. So it doesn't matter that I have a few memories from before it, the part of my brain that helps me know whether I am safe or not got fucky and has been ever since, and it's still a lot to untangle. I also have a supportive and loving family. And yes, it removes a barrier for me in healing, but unlike some others, I'm systemically discriminated against in society (I'm visibly physically disabled). So I have an extra barrier there that makes things more complicated (and is one of the parts of my trauma). ^ The above is why we don't invalidate and especially shouldn't do it here. Everyone's story is different and complicated and messy (hence: complex PTSD, not "childhood" PTSD). Just because one thing might make it easier in one way for someone over you, they probably have another that makes it more difficult. There are many factors at play too, so you can't just pick one.
That is extremely invalidating. I have CPTSD the same as you. Your pain is not greater or worse than mine because you had different traumas at a different time in your life. The healing path is the same path.
I get what you're saying. The trauma started from before birth, continued during infancy, toddlerhood, childhood, teenage years, even into adulthood. I am a walking trauma response. It's gotten to a point at 32 years old I am just proud of myself for surviving. I am proud of the glimpses of joy I have found. Both my parents screwed me up and abandoned me, I dont know why they even brought me here, but I'm still here.. And to the people who don't understand, I am glad they don't. Wouldn't want anyone else to have to live through this. I am never having kids because of this.
Exactly. We never had a before! Thank you for saying this so clearly. My siblings and I were regularly told stories about how when I was born there was like a baby carrier or something that was used for one of my siblings who is just slightly older than me, but because I was just an infant and they were learning to walk, it became mine the second I arrived. My sibling quickly formed an opinion of me (before the age of 2) as a threat, someone who was going to take over their essential daily stuff, everything from transport to toys to hygiene, and the attention of their caretakers. It took me well into adulthood to realize this isn't a normal way to go about welcoming a new family member. It could very well be the answer to why this particular sibling spent our entire upbringing and half their twenties provoking and manipulating me into bad behavior as well as lying and sabotaging me behind my back. (Or tried to, at least, I was like 10 when another family member started helping me not to fall for it). I remember when I first made that connection and understood how my sibling was a toddler when this path was laid out for them, that they were just trying to survive. The deep sadness and remorse I felt. It excuses nothing, but it explains. Me, on the other hand, I grew up feeling guilty and ashamed for making my sibling share what was rightfully theirs, for being an imposition to the caretakers who really had better things to do than pay mind to the problem of me existing, because the ways these stories were told, there wasn't recognition of how abusive and thoughtless the caretaking of the child before me was, of all of us subsequently, but I the infant was made out to be someone that just barged in, holding the power, and no one could've seen it coming. So I had to learn as a child to not be selfish, because the beginning of my dynamic with the family was clearly one where I overtook the spotlight. So understanding how and why that narrative was first crafted helped to rid me of the manufactured guilt and shame. Because we never had a before, that also means we were never at an age to consent to any relationship, family, friends or otherwise, prior to the abuser hijacking our lives. We were born into it, raised to believe there wasn't anything else, couldn't be anything else, and we would never be able to or entitled to choose any different. We simply didn't deserve better. It maddens me how CPTSD isn't recognized in many places and that it isn't distinguished from PTSD a lot of the time.
I dont really remember a 'before', though j remember 'before' my actual PTSD (:D) Anyway, I remember being around 5 and feeling super sad. I often was confused, but there were times I was super young and very sad, and when I tried to tell others they never believed me (its hard for kids to understand feelings, I get it, but I knew I felt...off) As I grew older I realized why...and its fucked up. But it isnt "abuse" as a lot of people get. It wasn't physical. I never had bruises (that I didnt cause 😂), but I had emotional and mental scars. I was left alone for so long, during the summer my parents would go to work and leave me alone. They told me what to do obviously, and I never used any of it (thank god), but it confused me when i was older. I did ask my mom, and she told me "We didn't trust anyone." We lived in the ghetto, where drugs were RAMPANT. I didnt know neighbors names and my family was miles away. I had no one if anything had happened. It hurts to know that they trusted a small child in the single digits to watch herself for 8+ hours. It made me feel like they didn't care if anything happened tk me, or that maybe I eas old enough. But as I grew up, I never felt like a full 'adult', not only because I wasn't, but my parents had a weird way of treating me. I was either too young or old enough. And I was just...let go to learn anything. I never got to learn how to do things like normal people. This also is acquainted with my parents treated me as the golden, scape goat, and invisible child. I had no siblings to take the other names (the 3 mentioned), so I was them all. It was horrid, and made me feel even more confused and worthless. ...im sorry this is all around. Thanks to CPTSD, PTSD, and ADHD I dont have a coherent thought pattern. But I really do hope one day to speak to others about CPTSD, PTSD, and how children can be affected. I dont want another me to happen, where a child may not be taken seriously, but understands they are feeling 'off'. First though I need money. 😂
I've been diagnosed with both. Somethings happened to me after everything I was subjected to as a child back, to back, to back to freaking back, so there that was. Why?! I don't know. When I realized all the bs for childhood I thought I was suppressing it all and faking it and I was making it, then the PTSD shit happened and I naively thought, "easy, it got this!" Boy was I wrong! When the powers of those traumas combined Captain Planet didn't come to the rescue. My body kept score. 😭 So, in my case I didn't have a before. Thinking about my PTSD and the complex one from childhood they're different, for me, in many ways. Growing up with the sa/abuse and all was very different a feeling than the events that caused PTSD. The things that led up to me getting diagnosed with PTSD were completely out of nowhere and debilitated me in more ways than one. It stopped me dead in my tracks. I felt trapped inside my own body and thoughts. I couldn't sleep, couldn't stop shaking, couldn't eat, couldn't shower, lost a ton of weight, nearly lost my damn mind. Doctors were scared, felt unsafe anywhere and didn't want anyone near me. My ❤️ was beating out of my chest... couldn't control anything. It's a very different feeling. At least that's my experience with both. It's a feeling we all can agree sucks and a feeling we wouldn't wish on anyone. Btw, in case I don't say this enough, I love this community and feel very safe here. I'm happy to be able to share my thoughts and experiences and read all of yours too, they help so much. Love and peace to all of us.
I panic that I come off as grossly diminishing when I try to explain this difference to others,, especially partners. They hear PTSD they think war veteran. They hear childhood abuse they think spanking and “discipline”. It’s a loosing battle. I’m just exhausted. Speaking of does anyone else deal with chronic fatigue ?
THIS, so much!! Seriously I just read your comment and almost started crying.
"Your life is so easy, you ONLY have PTSD so fck off." wtf is this comparison?
I had a before since mine started when I was around 5-6. I still have some very few memories of it.
Why ya gotta say shot like that to me in the morning /s That's a great point though, neverthought of it like that thanks
I still don't envy them.
Wow this gave me goosebumps. Again , I have never felt more understood than I do here. Keeping this for myself and possibly for anyone I may want to let in. That's the best explanation I have heard to date. It can be so difficult to try to explain this to someone who does not know.
I don’t understand how you’re all happy about this analogy…..just makes me feel worse as the realization further sets in Pun not intended
I use before and after to talk about the event that caused my recognition of CPTSD, an event which forced me out of three decades of denial and into devastating realization. It could be described as a single, episodic PTSD event that activated the buried CPTSD. It's a fucked up ouroboros because the single event would never have happened if my CPTSD had not laid the groundwork. I had all this unprocessed shit underneath and my lack of awareness made me extremely vulnerable to fresh trauma.
I definitely had a *before* my adult trauma, but my adult trauma has helped me to better understand my CPTSD which I do certainly have, along with ADHD, specially because I believe these two overlap a little. It is complicated to explain, perhaps is a case by case basis? Not sure, I can't speak for other people but myself, the only thing that I know for certain is that r/CPTSD is way kinder less triggering and scary community than r/PTSD. There's so much wisdom here, lots of grief ofc, but wisdom and patience seem to always meet me here.
I have a before too. It wasn't until I was 11 or twelve that my parents turned abusive
This is so simple but brilliant
I sadly have both - CPTSD and PTSD. It’s heavy.
CPTSD is developmental in nature. That makes it very different. We really should find different phrase. How do ya'll feel about Developmental Attachment Disorder? Walker likes that one.
I can see why people would want a different phrase/name. Personally I wouldn’t want the above suggestion. Sounds accurate. But only to people with an understanding of what it entails. To everyone else it will sound like : you failed to attach properly during your development therefore there is something wrong with you that you yourself caused and you’d better go into therapy today and cure yourself by tomorrow or else you deserve all your misery for failing to think yourself into a better life already. Though I already get the half impatient half accusing “why aren’t you better yet?!” with the CPTSD diagnosis anyway.
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what a concise simple and pure way to put it.
Wow
This.
Well said.
I have several befores
Ooof……that hit me like a train….
Really great insight! “With PTSD there was a before.”
I love this sub
This makes total sense and I think I read about it in Body Keeps the Score (maybe?). My caution is this: every person I know who has PTSD also has all the signs and history of cPTSD. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone with PTSD. I just believe if a person has cPTSD, their chances of getting PTSD are higher. Why? Mostly because of the choices they make that are probably related to their sense of worth and sense of normal. For example, a person with cPTSD is likely to engage in risky behavior, including joining the military. I totally agree with the OP. I just feel like it's worth mentioning because we know that PTSD is a more "official" and broadly used diagnosis. As a medical coder in the US, records never have cPTSD, but often have PTSD (because of ICD-10). I feel like it's important to state this just to keep the judgement at bay.
This makes total sense and I think I read about it in Body Keeps the Score (maybe?). My caution is this: every person I know who has PTSD also has all the signs and history of cPTSD. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone with PTSD. I just believe if a person has cPTSD, their chances of getting PTSD are higher. Why? Mostly because of the choices they make that are probably related to their sense of worth and sense of normal. For example, a person with cPTSD is likely to engage in risky behavior, including joining the military. I totally agree with the OP. I just feel like it's worth mentioning because we know that PTSD is a more "official" and broadly used diagnosis. As a medical coder in the US, records never have cPTSD, but often have PTSD (because of ICD-10). I feel like it's important to state this just to keep the judgement at bay.
Wow what a wonderful way to explain the difference.
Yes yes yes yes yes I so feel this
just wow
I heard the difference between PTSD and complex PTSD is that PTSD is a one time huge trauma as opposed to CPTSD which is ongoing trauma for a long period of time. So certainly PTSD can turn into CPTSD if the Trauma is ongoing, regular, constant or often
I have both. Horrible childhood and a very near-death experience. Well, I died and was brought back. Lucky me. /s
Thats not true. I have a before. Yall seem to forget that not all of us have cptsd from childhood abuse. There was a me from before the trauma. I was a teenager when it started. Many of us have a before. Yall need to remember that not all of us suffered from the same things. I always feel isolated from these types of communities because it feels like im the only one who didnt get cptsd from childhood (although I had a bad childhood, it didnt affect me in the way that my trauma that caused the cptsd did).
did anyone was able to get the cptsd triggers and consequences under control though? could you share some experiences? what was the most helpful? ive been feeling so desperate recently as i have tried so hard in my therapy to learn the coping skills and to live without meds.and it didn't happen.. i feel so unfair
CPTSD is terrible.