Today I worked on the fact that I always keep a part of myself back from people in order to avoid rejection and hurt, which I see as being inevitable. I’ve had many instances of abandonment and supposedly loving, accepting relationships ending with a click of the fingers when I’ve voiced my opinion or brought my needs to the table. I start any type of relationship already visualizing its ending.

It’s extremely hard to trust in people and to feel part of any group when you assume you won’t genuinely be liked and accepted. I often don’t know what to say to people and shy away from a conversation, scanning for criticism in any interaction. I replay conversations, worried that I talked too much about myself, or said something I shouldn’t and offended someone. I have trouble fully investing because then it will hurt less when the relationship(s) end. The message I give myself is that I’m not good enough, a belief that’s been internalized over many years by abusers and my inner critic, continuing the mistreatment of myself because it’s what I’m used to.

In therapy, I met the part of myself that I’ve kept exiled, and cried hard as she sat with us. I said sorry to her. I felt huge sympathy for her, as she’s been pushed down and not allowed to show herself or take part in my life for so long. That part of myself was too vulnerable to let out into the open and too painful to commune with. It feels as though I’ve perpetuated the bullying of myself. I hugged her (in my mind) and told her I wouldn’t hide her anymore, and now I can feel her walking alongside myself and my younger, child self. I’m more affected by this session than any I’ve done before, very shaken, as though I’m feeling through the exiled version of myself. She’s feeling her way around the life that she hasn’t been allowed to be fully involved in for a very long time, because the pain she experienced was too hard for me to confront and allow to surface. In a way though, she’s the brave part of me. She was rejected for speaking out against manipulation and abuse. I wasn’t actually going to write tonight because I felt that I needed to rest and give myself a break, but the words had to come out. I think she’s making herself heard, and I don’t blame her.

I want to make it clear that this isn’t a case of Dissociative Identity Disorder and other personalities taking over from me. I’m still myself and very much present, but I’m now aware of the parts of myself over the years who’ve been disenfranchised by abuse, and my own need to try and forget about them. It’s buried emotions from past memories rather than actual personalities that are bubbling up and showing themselves. This type of therapy is known as ‘parts work’.

I’ve come to realize that my child self often makes herself known, and was actually at the forefront of my mind, I just didn’t realize where those feelings were coming from. I often felt overwhelmed by adult life, as though I didn’t have the necessary skills to cope with it. A classic case of arrested development – a child playing at being an adult, who somehow found herself with rent to pay, heating bills to keep an eye on and a house to keep. I sometimes wondered how I’d got here because surely I wasn’t old enough to be dealing with such difficult, boring adult problems? I spoke harshly to myself (her), told her to pull herself together, and grow up, because this was adult life and she must be stupid if she couldn’t deal with it. And I felt those words. They hurt, but in a subconscious place, I wasn’t aware of. I just knew that I somehow felt them.

My way of self-harming is emotional, and sometimes I’d deny myself an offer of lunch from a friend, or something pretty and easily affordable from a shop, for reasons I couldn’t even explain. I’d then feel a deep sense of sorrow and frustration that I couldn’t understand. The depth of that feeling seemed out of place, considering how minor my actions were. Denying myself (her) comforting things felt good as well as distressing and torturous. Maybe because it’s a familiar feeling, and this is how I learned that I should be treated. My inner critic bullying my inner child. I still have a tendency to do this, but now try to keep in mind the little girl I’m denying too. I try to accept the offer of lunch from a friend instead of insisting on buying my own because it makes my current and younger self feel special and loved (and makes my friend feel good too). Something as simple as buying a pretty trinket can give me such pleasure, because it’s a present to myself, just because.

A strange thing is happening whilst I work with these former incarnations of myself. I can feel myself becoming more capable, and feeling more like my actual age when it comes to coping with adulthood (let’s face it, most of us are coping with it and not skipping happily along with it). I’m the oldest and therefore the guardian, maybe. They’re compartmentalized and I can recognize them as they pop in and out of my mind or react to certain things, instead of being confused by suddenly changing moods and triggered reactions. My confidence in social situations is growing and I’m realizing that I am liked by the people around me. It’s a very logical way of dealing with my emotional reactions and thoughts, which I’m not used to, but it feels healthier and is definitely helping. It’s almost like having a referee in my mind, reassuring everyone, listening to them, and keeping them in line.

That isn’t to say that things are perfect now when it comes to my emotional regulation. I still have mornings when I wake up depressed and obviously triggered for a reason I can’t seem to place. My moods still change extremely quickly and still affect my everyday life, but now I take the time to search back through the annals of my memories for a trigger or a reference point and try to soothe and reassure myself.

I used to think of my past selves with disdain and embarrassment. I think it’s natural for most of us to cringe at ourselves at various ages, but for those of us with abuse in our past, there’s so much more to unpack. My own behavior in the past has felt mortifying – reactive cruelty, being passive-aggressive, selective mutism in triggering environments, cutting words toward those who really didn’t deserve it, and other emotionally triggered behaviors. Looking back at all those previous incarnations of myself, they all felt confused and bewildered by mood swings they didn’t understand and were at a loss to control. None of it was done from genuine malice.

It’s so easy to look back at our former selves in memories or photographs and disparage them. We perhaps didn’t behave as well as we should have, or we were awkward or lashed out at people because we didn’t know how to deal with our own pain. We weren’t able to develop the self-worth or coping skills that others have because of the abusive childhoods we experienced. We literally didn’t know any better. If we have remorse for our actions, acknowledge that we were wrong and (if possible) apologize to those we hurt, we should go easy on our past selves who were trying to cope as best they could with the resources they had. Hating who we were then doesn’t do us any good if they’re still residing within us, it’s just another form of hating ourselves. It’s a much more pleasant experience to feel that they’re walking alongside us and helping us on our journey toward wellness.

This content was created and written by a guest blog contributor. Views expressed in any guest blog contributor post may not necessarily reflect those of CPTSD Foundation.

Verity Wolfe

A survivor of childhood abuse. Always working on myself and hoping to help others in the process.

Twitter: @Verity_Wolfe

I was diagnosed with depression and generalized anxiety in 2000. It’s a diagnosis that has stayed the same for the last nineteen years, but to me, it never seemed enough to explain the severity of the many symptoms I suffer from. The sheer intensity of emotions; the constant disconnection and loneliness, as though interacting with the world through a sheet of glass; the emotional flashbacks caused by a song on the radio (the 80s music that everyone seems to love is the soundtrack to my abusive childhood), a horribly familiar name, the scent of a certain food; the interpersonal relationships that seem to come so easily to everyone else, but to me are surrounded by pitfalls of mistrust, potential red flags and a paradoxical habit of completely ignoring them in certain people, only to yet again become entangled in abuse.

I know that I don’t navigate the world in a so-called ‘normal’ way, but I was at a complete loss to understand or explain the reasons why. I came to the same conclusion as that of many people who’d worked with or generally interacted with me – I was just weird.

For a long time, I thought that I must have Borderline Personality Disorder, purely because I feel emotions to an intensity that border on the ridiculous. Music is my main trigger. I ride the songs like a rollercoaster, each one bringing to mind a person, memory, a situation real or imagined. I tend to listen to music whilst traveling, so that’s always fun! I look at my cat and well up with tears because I love her so much. I have a huge sense of abandonment due to different life events and can feel very insecure and scared in relationships. But… a lot of the criteria didn’t hit home with me. I wondered if I was a ‘quiet Borderline’. I didn’t see anything wrong with either of these diagnoses and was willing to accept that I fit the description in a slightly irregular way, but it still just didn’t feel right.

I once asked a therapist what my actual diagnosis was, and was asked why I needed one. He told me that labels didn’t help anyone’s recovery, or affect the treatment they were given. At the time I wasn’t confident enough to argue that it was important to me to just know. I wanted to have a concrete explanation as to why I felt so different. A label would have helped me, especially in this age of internet support groups and Facebook pages.

I think most people are self-motivated enough to go diving for information on their own personal symptoms, and with mental health support often being hard to find anywhere in the world, these groups can literally be lifesavers. I don’t know why this isn’t taken on board by mental health systems who don’t like to label people. Surely that should be our own choice? Giving a name to something can help you understand it, instead of just having a cluster of symptoms that don’t make any sense separately. They can cause depression as a symptom, but that doesn’t mean that they are depressed. Of course, CPTSD isn’t an official diagnosis that mental health providers can give yet, but I’m certain that there would have been more to my diagnosis than depression. I wanted to hear their opinion on the personal things I’d shared with them, and discuss a diagnosis as part of a team.

I can’t actually remember the first time I knew C-PTSD existed. It may have been in an article I read on a Facebook page, but I know it was purely by chance and I knew it was what I had. There was such a sense of relief in that, knowing that there was a specific name for all of my symptoms and that other people out there felt the same.

I didn’t feel so ‘weird’ anymore because there was a very valid reason for the way I saw and interacted with the world. It wasn’t my fault, and there wasn’t anything ‘wrong’ with me. Just knowing that was like a form of therapy because it took a lot of weight from my shoulders. And, just as with a physical diagnosis, once you have a name for what’s ailing you, you can begin to work on healing it. I researched articles and searched YouTube for videos about it, a lot of them from people coping with the same condition.

Now when I see my (private) therapist, I feel that it’s a collaborative relationship because I know what needs working on and why I’m affected by certain things. I’m training the logical part of my brain to step in like a nightclub bouncer whenever it senses trouble, to take a pause and look at the emotion I’m feeling, try to recognize where it stems from, and realize that it will pass. Most of all, it’s actually okay to feel it – I don’t force myself to push it back down because I’m ‘being silly’. It’s taught me to be more self-compassionate because the person actually hurting is the little girl who was made to feel less than everybody else.

I really hope that Complex PTSD becomes a mainstream diagnosis because there is such a need for it to be. I feel lucky to have discovered it by chance, but why should anyone have to rely on that to find healing, support, and solidarity with other survivors of abuse?

Verity Wolfe

A survivor of childhood abuse. Always working on myself and hoping to help others in the process.

Twitter: @Verity_Wolfe