Writer’s Note: In this post, I discuss my experiences with psych medications. I am not against psych medications and tried many over the years. But for me, they did not resolve my symptoms and created more side effects since my issues were chronic and a result of trauma. Do what works best for you, and always consult with a doctor. Never stop or taper off medications without medical supervision.
“Anger” is a loaded word, especially when used against trauma survivors who retain anger as a natural reaction to their abuse.
My years of trauma caused a lot of built-up anger in me. But, once I started to heal and gradually escaped my constant fight-or-flight mode, I realized that I was not a naturally angry person at my core. This surprised me because I had previously accepted the fact that I was just born an angry person and that, as a highly sensitive person, I was just naturally set off by small things.
I Wasn’t Really an Angry Person
Discovering that anger isn’t my natural state but that my anger was a result of my body storing a great deal of trauma was a watershed moment for me. For so long, I had a seething mass of internal anger that ate me alive and made me hate living in my own body. I would go home, lock myself away, and scream obscenities at myself in the mirror, all while trying to fathom what I had been through. In retrospect, my body was trying to release the anger that had been stored up from years of trauma that I had not fully faced or released. While I believe it is necessary and even healthy to release those emotions constructively, I held it in publicly and chose to take it out on myself when I returned home. (Which, at the time, was the only way I knew how.)
What was I so angry about? I wasn’t so sure at the time. I just looked in the mirror, opened my mouth, and let the bile and hatred pour out of me, and it felt uncontrollable. I thought screaming these things would make me feel better and offer me some form of closure on what I had been through, but they didn’t. The more hatred and vitriol poured out of me, the angrier I became.
But looking back, I was simply angry about the trauma I had suffered. The things that had happened to me? They made me angry.
Trauma survivors, I want to assure you of something. Those things that happened to you and to me? They are not fair. They are not okay. They are not right. But guess what?
Your anger is valid. Your anger is real. Your anger needs an outlet. But you have a choice.
You can let the anger consume you for the rest of your life or do something else entirely.
You Have a Choice
I actually used to get really angry when people told me: “You have a choice.”
My 90-year-old grandmother, one of my best friends, was someone who would tell me this all the time. She would end her calls with a saying that she loved, and I could hear her smiling through the phone. She said, “If it is to be, it is up to me.” It’s a quirky saying, and I really do love it now, but I would often scoff after I hung up the phone. She doesn’t get it, I would think. (Looking back, maybe I should have understood that she had more than six decades of life experience with me.)
After hearing so many people tell me that I have a choice, I would just get angry again. I would think: I really don’t have a choice. These flashbacks, thoughts, and memories are so intrusive. They just don’t get it because they don’t have C-PTSD. If they had been through what I had been through, they’d understand and be angry. Being told that I’m making the choice to be miserable is so insensitive. And I would let the anger continue to consume me.
These are the kinds of thoughts I had. While there’s some truth to them, especially in thinking that some people don’t understand my traumatic experiences, the fact that we all have a choice regarding our anger does not minimize the truth.
Once I accepted the fact that I did have a choice as to whether I let these flashbacks take over my mind for the rest of my life, I got to work on making the choice to overcome my symptoms.
Healing starts with a choice
It doesn’t mean that these things will clear out overnight. In fact, for some, it may be years, even decades, before they do. I know C-PTSD survivors in their 50s and 60s who still struggle in this way, and that is not their fault; they just haven’t been helped in the proper ways.
Take Baby Steps to Heal Your Nervous System
Healing is about implementing the proper tools little by little. Make the choice to take baby steps that result in a healing journey.
One of my baby steps in controlling my nervous system was getting outside for 5 to 10 minutes a day. It doesn’t sound like much to some people, but I had been so isolated for so long and my body and nervous system were so frail that I was not used to being outdoors hardly at all. I had also been heavily medicated on psych medications for many years, and being in the sun while on those medications can cause harmful side effects.
Once I had gotten off all my psych medications (all tapered off with the help of my psychiatrist—do not taper off medications on your own!), I made time daily to be outside in natural sunlight. I would go outside for those few minutes, ensuring I had enough skin showing by wearing a tank top so the sun could beat down on my shoulders, sitting by the lake for 5 to 10 minutes with my feet in the grass. I would set my timer, practice breathing during my time outside, and go back inside once it was done. The whole experience was so intense that I would have to go back inside and sleep for a few hours because that’s how exhausted my body was just being exposed to the sun and the outside world after years of isolation.
I kept doing this daily, gradually increasing my time outside, and my efforts sparked results. This year, I am able to spend hours outside. I will even bring my laptop to the park and work remotely for a few hours. I will lie down in the grass and practice my breathwork, and the sun feels amazing on my skin. I still do feel exhausted after being in the sun, but it’s a healthy level of exhaustion, and it’s to the point where I can continue on with my day without taking a nap.
After understanding why I had so much anger in my body and making the choice to work through it, I discovered that, at my core, I’m not an angry person. There’s little that makes me that angry anymore. It’s so freeing to feel this way because I never thought I could get to this point. In the past, small things would spark anger, making my daily life unmanageable. But today, anger is the exception, not the rule. I feel a consistent amount of peace and freedom. Many people, even those who don’t identify with C-PTSD or PTSD, struggle with road rage. I will unashamedly raise my hand and say that I was one of them, especially after living in big cities for so long. But I practice driving very calmly now and do not experience road rage. Even when someone cuts me off in traffic, I don’t feel anger and don’t scream and yell—I just brush it off and chalk it up to that person having a bad day and continue focusing on driving safely. Or, if I’m in public and someone says something stupid to me or gets angry at me, I can stay calm and not angrily lash back at them. In the past, I would have felt the need to fight back and prove them wrong; now, I just move along and let them feel their anger—because it is not my own.
To all trauma survivors who struggle with anger, have patience with yourself and understand that it was never your anger to begin with. Take baby steps to realize you can work through it, you can release it, and that a consistently calm world is waiting for you at the end of the path.
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels
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For the longest time, I thought I was inherently “messed up” and broken beyond repair. I spent about a decade running around in circles in the medical system trying to figure out what was “wrong” with me and how to “fix” it, managing all this while attending school and holding full-time jobs. I thought the way I felt in my body was “normal” because I had no sense of what the other side was. My complex trauma symptoms manifested as crippling anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (in the form of religious/moral scrupulously), other specified dissociative disorder, insomnia, sleep paralysis, night terrors, and narcolepsy. My symptoms began at age 13 and continued up to my mid-twenties. I will only speak in generalities about my trauma in my writings. In general, I endured multiple types of traumas throughout my formative years, including numerous situations of both individual and large-group interpersonal cruelty, some of which caused me to have to switch environments. Due to what I was going through, my body couldn’t fathom what was happening, and my nervous system shut down. I felt guilty for simply existing. I saw danger everywhere, operated in a panicked survival mode, and lived in fear, anxiety, and isolation. I did my best to appear “normal” on the outside, keep a smile on my face, and control what was happening on the inside, distracting myself with extreme workaholism and doing nice things to serve others. I took active steps to keep branching out in confidence again, but these traumas kept piling onto each other and overlapping, so I couldn’t fathom what was going on. I wasn’t ready to give up yet, though, because I knew my family and friends would be distraught if I did. The most difficult and heartbreaking part of my story is that the two communities I set out to seek healing in—religion and the medical system—caused further trauma when some religious leaders, congregation members, and medical professionals chose to take advantage of my vulnerability for their own motives, and I was further punished and criticized for simply existing. In most of these situations, I didn’t even realize I was a victim until outsiders pointed it out for me and that my vulnerability and naïveté made me a target of malicious people. Each future situation of being targeted was just salt on the wound of the original incident. As an extreme empath, I absorbed the negative emotions of others as if they were my own, and I did not know how to release them from my body. In my solo healing process, I had to quite literally disappear from everyone and everything to protect my vulnerability and allow myself to process what I had been through during my formative years using my own mind and body without the persuasion or invasion of others.
What I went through all those years was so severe, and my symptoms and physical body reactions as a result were so excruciating that I went as far as to see a neurologist, concerned that my symptoms were the result of some sort of nervous system disorder. However, he returned with no paperwork in his hands to inform me that there was nothing wrong with me but that I was simply completely traumatized, and my body reacted accordingly. I finally realized that my symptoms were not the result of an inherent mental or physical illness and began to take a trauma-based approach to my healing after many years of believing that I was “sick” for the rest of my life. My true progress began when I finally rejected the lies that were told to me that I would have to “manage my symptoms” for the rest of my life and made the decision to believe for myself that I was fully capable of healing from my excruciating pain, even if others did not believe in me. I still do have tough days and moments, but I have gotten to a place where I am consistently living a quality of life that provides peace and comfort in my mind and body since I have given myself the tools to overcome my tough moments when they return.
Many C-PTSD survivors receive numerous diagnoses before ever hearing anything about complex trauma, and some are overmedicated to try and “fix” their symptoms, usually to no avail and with further side effects. I was told I would need to “manage my symptoms” and be on medication for the rest of my life. It was all lies. Today, I am on zero medications (including sleep medications) and am completely divorced from the disease management system.
I am excited to share many tips for natural, somatic, and holistic healing that have helped me overcome my complex trauma symptoms, such as extreme dissociation, excruciatingly painful flashbacks, severe sleep challenges, anxiety, hypervigilance, worthlessness, and more. I began to pursue unique methods of healing after many years of not seeing much progress through westernized care, and this was the catalyst for fast-tracking my healing. I have so many exciting tips to share related to grounding, nervous system regulation, somatic healing, and more to offer survivors other ways they can learn to regulate their nervous systems on their own without spending any money. I aim to help survivors overcome their feelings of self-guilt, blame, and humiliation and help them realize that their bodies had normal reactions to abnormal situations.
I am on a journey of rediscovering who I am at my core after letting so many other people infiltrate my mind for far too long. The five most important things to me in my life (in order of importance!) are: my health, my happiness, my family, my friends, and my creativity. My parents, my sisters, and my friends are my absolute rock and biggest cheerleaders. They were cheering me on all those years, fully believing that I was capable of overcoming my excruciating pain, even when I did not believe so myself. They know that I never set out to intentionally hurt anyone and was always doing my best, and that’s all that really matters to me. While I was repeatedly able to forgive others and extend the olive branch, I was never able to forgive myself. My loved ones kept telling me that there is nothing I need to feel humiliated about and that I should be able to see what everyone else sees in me. I have finally given that kindness to myself and have started to see what other people saw in me all along.
I am so glad I didn’t give up when my pain felt unbearable. I know what I’ve survived. I know the work I’ve put in to overcome it. I know that I still chose to keep a smile on my face and be kind in the face of it all. In reality, it’s because I didn’t want another person to go through even one ounce of the suffering I was in. Once I overcame everything, it all became child’s play to me, and I laughed about how petty much of it was. I am finally living a life of consistent peace and contentment, and I am sharing my story from the other side. My story is not a story of defeat but a story of victory.
I have enjoyed embracing the free spirit I always was and adopting a simpler life to focus on the things that are meaningful to me. I am still healing every day. I believe our healing is a lifelong process. I made the decision to escape my version of the rat race (big city life) and move to my happy place. I am catching up on many hours of much-needed rest and spending lots of time outdoors. I am reconnecting with the people I lost while I was in isolation. I invited the passion that saved my life growing up—dance—back into my life. I am passionate about fighting for other survivors in any way I can.
I often question why I had to go through such an extreme amount of suffering for 13 years. However, in a weird way, I am grateful for all I went through. I am ten thousand times stronger and am sharing my story with those who need to hear it. I hope that by sharing my story, I can convince other survivors that there was never anything wrong with them to begin with and that they are capable of living healthy, happy, and fulfilled lives. I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I did not become a voice for the voiceless and share how I overcame it. I aim to live my life in love of both others and myself, understanding that everyone has a story of their own. I am grateful to the CPTSD Foundation for giving me an opportunity to share my story.
“My story isn’t sweet and harmonious like invented stories. It tastes of folly and bewilderment. Of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.” ~ Hermann Hesse
Your story struck a familiar chord with my own diagnosis of CPTSD.
This came about after some inner contemplation of what was really going on with me and my seemingly ‘odd’ behavioural patterns. I wanted to know from where was it all coming from.
Much resources and support, which I am readily accepting, is now helping me on my healing journey.
Wishing you the best in yours.