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moonlit-positivity · 3 months

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You're not lazy, you're depressed. If you were lazy then you would still be able to get up and do the things that needed to be done. The fact that you can't move at all is actually something called "freeze response" and it is a part of your nervous system fight/flight/freeze/fawn. This means your body does not feel safe enough to move. You are literally "frozen" in fear. Let's stop telling people they are lazy for this and start recognizing it for what it is- survival.

Want tips for breaking freeze response? Check out my blog. Happy healing 😊

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desultory-suggestions · 1 year

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It is normal not to be able to recall your trauma. Your memories may be foggy, disorganized, inaccessible, or blank. You are not wrong, you are not dramatic, you are not dishonest. The mind is very powerful, and it will take measures to protect us for fear and harm even if we don’t choose to. Take the time you need to heal what you can feel even if you cannot name it.

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cold1dead1eyes · 1 year

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whumpee is fully functioning during the day. they don’t remember anything. they laugh, smile, make jokes, and it’s like nothing ever happened to them. but when night falls, and they’re surrounded by all of that pitch black, whumpee is right back in whumper’s clutch. they scream, thrash, sweat deliriously through all their clothing as they try to figure out how they could possibly forget pain like this.

then the sun rises, and whumpee forgets. they get out of bed tired and confused, only to do it all again the next night.

#whump #whump prompt #whump drabble #whump scenario #whump writing #recovery whump #traumatized whumpee #no caretaker #memory loss #vince rambles

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tobusysinking · 2 months

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I hate getting flashbacks so much I don’t wanna remember. I wanna repress my brain repressed stuff for a reason why am I remembering it I wanna forget

I wanna forget so bad.

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nothing0fnothing · 5 months

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Did any of you have narcissistic abusers who ruined things?

My page is about narcissistic abuse from the perspective that my parents were the narcissistic abusers, and they loved a opportunity to ruin something I cared about.

Christmas, birthdays, holidays, school events or drama productions I was in. They'd pick a fight and assault me physically either hours before or hours after. Day ruined. On Christmas one year my dad threw me down the stairs of our holiday home over a croissant. And then I had to pull myself together and fix my face so I could deal with all the merriment when our extended family showed up for dinner. Everyone else's day was fine, but mine and my sisters, ruined.

Treasured items like notebooks, photo frames, nick knacks, toys or mementos, especially if they were bought out of my pocket money or gifted to me by a family member, if they were in a bad mood it was things like that that'd get broken, thrown or damaged. I remember days after my birthday my presents from my party getting smashed in a rage in front of me.

Friendships, mentorships or just any genuine or good relationships I had. If I was close with a teacher or a mentor they'd pull me out of classes, if I became close with my friends parents or other adult family members my mom would go into a jealous rage and become violent to really discourage further interactions with them. She would manufacture drama in my friend groups too. I remember being 10 years old when she was called out by a parent of a friend of mine bc the level of interaction she was having with my friend group and causing upset to 4 literal children was weird and inappropriate.

Compliments, awards evenings, after parties, theatre productions and basically anything that was celebrating or supporting me. She always felt times like this were the opportune moments to bring up some unrelated way that I'd failed. You got an academic award for writing? But they haven't seen how bad you are at maths. You produced and directed that entire school play? This is a great time to bring up how untidy your bedroom is. An auntie says my dress is pretty? Loudly scold her in front of me for ignoring my obvious weight problem. Moment ruined.

From a young age I learned to not seem too excited about anything. If I enjoyed something or was proud of something. It was second nature to get all those positive feelings out somewhere else before taking the news to my parents. If I had a good time at a friends house or really liked a present I knew to keep it to myself because it would be so easy for them to ruin it for me in the future.

#narcissistic abuse #raised by narcissists #toxic parents #vent post #toxic mom #complex trauma #parental abuse #dysfunctional family #childhood trauma #dysfunctional household #traumatic experience #trauma recovery #traumatic memories #actually abused

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furiousgoldfish · 2 years

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I've had to explain this to someone today, and I don't remember if I wrote a post specifically about the way trauma makes us store our memories differently and why we have flashbacks, so I'll explain it here as well.

The memories of traumatic event, and even memories surrounding it, will often feel unreal, like it didn't actually happen, like none of it is fact or solid events, like it's only floating somewhere, unspecific in time and space, unconfirmed and impossible to grasp and see correctly. This is not by a mistake, trauma memories are like that because your brain did not, and could not store them into your long term memory.

Normally, we store our memories in long term memory and they become a part of lived experience, we collect information, knowledge, and progression of events like this. But trauma memories are too dangerous, too overwhelming, too powerful with emotions and potentially a dangerous knowledge to have, they do not get stored the same way. Instead, your brain blocks them, and holds them apart from long-term memory. They’re stored in a different part of the brain, often unavailable, or at least partly-unavailable to you. That's why they feel so unreal. And that's also why the emotions from them are often unavailable, it's why you just feel numb or empty thinking about it, and you can't connect to it properly, you might even feel guilty or ashamed for feeling nothing, when you know you should be feeling something. You might assume you had no reaction to that trauma and that you simply handled it okay, because you're not feeling the pain or the dread of it.

This also means, that you can't learn from traumatic memories the way you do from normal memories. You can't remember the proper progression of events, or the information you were supposed to get, or experience and knowledge you're supposed to now have, you can't use any of it. Instead, the blocked memories will either make you feel distressed and like you shouldn't think about it, or they will overwhelm you with the feelings of dread, threat, panic, grief, shame, guilt, terror. Because this memory is now marked in your brain as 'Event so dangerous and painful, it's unsurvivable'.

This is also why any sudden reminder of it will give you a flashback – your brain has marked this event as something so threatening, it's unsurvivable, and it learned absolutely nothing else about it, not to identify the circumstances, not to be able to defend, not to be able to predict the realistic outcomes, just that if anything similar, anything close to it happened again, you will not be able to survive it. And, to make sure you stay away from any such event, or anything even close to it, it will flood your senses with panic, activate fight-flight-freeze-fawn-fix reaction, and force you to remove yourself from any situation that would trigger the 'unsurvivable danger'. That is normal, until you can process your traumatic memory in order to learn from it, gather information, and identify what about it was dangerous, and what was not, it's best to keep away from all possibilities, not to end up in another danger.

Once you get access to your traumatic memory, the emotional experience will likely be overwhelming, and it will take a lot of time for you to be able to discern what actually happened, and what information you can gain from these events. Once you are able to go thru all of the emotions, and sort the actual events and information from it clearly, your worldview will adapt and your memory will find its way to be stored into the long-term memory, making it a real and solid event that happened. After that, any flashback you might have will just feel like a painful reminder, instead of an overwhelming and panic-inducing experience. Your new information and realizations will help you put everything into perspective, and your feelings about it might change.

This mechanism is created to help you survive events that are often too damaging to live thru. If you were forced to be aware of the traumatic memory, and forced to feel all of the emotions inflicted on you at once, it's possible you wouldn't have survived it. The threat of trauma to your survival is real. Severe trauma can only be experienced in waves, bits and pieces, and with a lot of support and comfort, so it could be felt without destroying you as a human being. Your brain sends you the message of terror because it doesn't want you to be in such danger again. It’s not a shameful thing to be feeling like this. It’s necessary for survival.

#trauma #flashbacks #healing #cptsd #ptsd #trauma symptoms #trauma memories #traumatic memo #processing trauma #healing from trauma #panic attacks #emotional flashbacks #trauma recovery #understanding trauma #understanding memories #why trauma feels unreal

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twoheadedfather · 7 months

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when memories snow, mitski

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valagatorsworld · 2 months

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#actually traumatized #recovery #traumacore #spilled poetry #trauma #mental health #core memory #inner child #childhood #child abuse #trauma survivor

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aestheticemi01 · 1 year

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Gentle reminder;

Not everyone loves Christmas. Far from it, actually. Some people don’t celebrate it, while other people may have had some very traumatic experiences during Christmas-time and therefore, this can be a very hard time for them to go through. Of course, there can be many, many other reasons why someone just don’t like Christmas. 💫

Make sure to support and respect those people and respect their boundaries. If they don’t wish to talk about why they don’t like Christmas, then they really shouldn’t talk about it (all boundaries should always be respected!) ✨

If you are one of these people, I am sending you warmth and plenty of love💕 There is NOTHING wrong with you, if you don’t feel all happy or jolly right now, believe me! Try to treat yourself with as much kindness as possible and have an amazing december!

And remember; It is ALWAYS more than okay to ask for help! 🌸

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moonlit-positivity · 3 months

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Very gentle reminder that your trauma is in the past. It's not happening anymore. You are safe. All you gotta do is sit here and ride the wave.

#recovery #ptsd #trauma #boundaries #mental health #healing #bpd #traumatic memories #flashbacks #nightmares #panic attacks #anxiety #reminders #gentle reminders #positivity #positive reminders #advice #growth

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phalacrocoraxdreams · 1 year

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i could have been such a ballet girlie (transmasc-coded) if my dad hadnt traumatized me maaaaan… couldve played sports too

#teddy #like this isnt how it actually works. but i was really athletic as a little kid :(#i loved to dance and play ball and just like. move my body.#and i couldnt stand to be in my body at all so i quit all my activities :(#a big part of it was also being autistic made team sports and ballet classes and the slight variations in routine really hard for me #but well my parents traumatized me for being autistic too lol i think i could have participated #in those kinds of things pretty easily if i was in a safe home environment/had some support #with things like learning new movements and socializing #but i like totally forgot how to move my body at all bc of trauma #a crazy thing about recovery has been how much easier it is to like. catch a ball. spin in a circle. Walk #the visual processing will be and would have always been hard forever though. its so hard to explain bc my vision is ok #but i dont process images right lol its really hard for me to look AND see AND understand #which everyone else seems able to do just fine…#i cant really process visual information and move at the same time which does make sports uhhh pretty hard #but muscle memory helps a lot if i can build it up!

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nothing0fnothing · 3 months

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I was 9 or 10 and sitting in the front seat of the busted little green car my stepdad used the drive.

I hated sitting in the front seat when he was driving. It was a level of separation away from my friend in the back seat, but it also gave him easy acsess to hurt me when he was sitting across from me. He was an expert at it too. I'd have stars in my vision from being smacked into the passenger window or be screaming in pain from having the pressure points in my knee squeezed and rolled, and he wouldn't even swerve.

He pulled the car to a stop outside of youth group and by the time he was round to the open passenger side window I was just taking my seat belt off and finishing my thought.

I wasn't out of the car fast enough for him, so he jabbed me, hard on the arm, 5 times. So hard my eyes stung with the threat of tears and my arm was still tender and sore a half hour later. I saw why when we were given permission to remove our uniform jackets and I got a look at what my arm looked like in my cap sleeve top. I instinctively pulled the jacket back on over it.

4 blue, sore fingerprints in a straight line down my upper arm. No wonder it was tender, it looked awful. The prints looked massive on me too, painting about a third of my entire upper arm. There was no way it'd look like the result of children roughhousing on the playground. These were unmistakably adult male fingerprints.

I'd gone pale and sick looking when I realised how bad it was. It had happened less than a foot from my friends face in the car and it happened so quick, she hadn't even noticed, literally nobody would beleive me even if I told the honest truth, but I had no way to lie either. I was thinking up a solution where I only wore long tops in the June heat for a few weeks when I got pulled to the back.

"You alright Cor'?" It was the sweet old man who ran the youth group. I always liked him, which made it so much sadder for me to lie to him.

"Fine thanks" I tried to put some pep on it but it just sounded like anxiety. That with the sickly drained face and being the only kid in uniform, he was unsure.

A few minutea later, the two nicest grown ups and I were in the kitchen alone while the other kids played and the other 3 leaders supervised. I was given a sugary cup of milky tea and a biscuit while we chatted small talk for a few minutes. They tried to seem nonchalant in their attitude, probably in hopes I'd be more honest if I didn't know this chat was based in concern, but I was too observant for that. I wasn't a normal nine year old kid, this wasn't my first time involved in a 'casual chat' with some nice grownups who just wanted to talk a little bit about my home life.

It made me want to cry, but I knew if I did it would mean even more concern, so I smiled and chomped biscuits and pretended to be a normal kid. I'd felt confident I had skirted my way out of a talk with my parents about my weird behaviour and it showed. So when they ran a scripted "it's so warm in here we should all take our jackets off" bit, it was incredibly obvious my stomach had dropped into the floor and my blood went cold.

Somebody had seen the bruises.

"Come on Cordelia, you're running around out there you must be very warm with your jacket on."

I looked into my tea and breathed shakily to get myself together. "I'm actually really cold." I said, kicking myself because I knew I wasn't fooling anyone.

"Didn't I see you with it off earlier? Were you not warm then?"

"I was, but I'm cold now." I'd gone from GoGo Juice pep to sullen preteen in 8 seconds. They knew they were onto something.

"You know, when you're a grown up at a youth group your job becomes to look after the kids, and if something was wrong we'd like to look after you."

Now I was staring straight at the table, blinking tears down and sniffling. I knew they'd seen it, but I also knew I couldn't show them for fear of what would meet me in 45 minutes when my parents showed up to collect me.

"Imagine if you were a grown up and you had a kid your age who was sad and wanted to wear their uniform jacket on a hot day, what would you be worried about?"

"That they would overheat." I replied, but when the response back was silence I anxiously filled it. "Or maybe they were hiding something."

"Are you hiding something Cordelia?" Fuck.

"You can check my pockets if you want." I said evasively. It felt horrible to lie barefaced like this. I was sure that this would colour their opinion of me forever, that all of the adults would know I was a lying liar and none of them would like me anymore. I felt so sour about it. No other kid had to pick between being safe at home and being liked at youth group. Being liked by the adults was so important to me too. I hoped I could make this up later, but realistically I knew no adult would like a lying child.

When I sipped the tea it was warm and comforting. I'd gone cold with anxiety. I had been given a grown up, pink ceramic mug rather than one of the Styrofoam cups they usually serve drinks to the kids in. I cupped it in my hands felt the comforting wave of warmth spread through my body.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the shiny surface of my phone screen, I looked sick for sure. My eyes looked beady and black, my skin looked pale and lifeless and all over my face and neck I had prickled goosebumps. This is how I look every time it goes very bad at home, I know because I had watched my own face drain of colour in the mirror once when I saw the results of another bad day blinking back at me. It was something to do with remembering it, it just made me feel like it was happening again.

I sat with the group leaders for the rest of our session, honestly thankful for the cups of tea and the comforting space away from the other children to process what had happened on the drive up. I opened up about some things, school and home and friends. I think at first I thought I was manipulating them away from the bruises on my forearm, but eventually I was crying and sipping teas and eating biscuits and feeling the weights I didn't know I was carrying lift off my shoulders.

They were patient and understanding, and they wanted me to talk as much as I could. I think they thought if I opened up enough I'd would bring the walls down and I'd stop being so guarded about what happened to my arm. I didn't. They never got to confirm what they saw, I never breathed a word about my violent, scary home life and I showed up with long sleeves every subsequent week.

I think they told social services anyway, who came to my school to check. By the time I was sat with an investigator it was weeks later and my incredibly obvious finger print bruises had faded to yellow and green smudges I could have gotten anywhere. I said I got them playing outside. No action needed.

#childhood abuse #traumatic experience #traumatic memory #psychological trauma #traumatic memories #trauma recovery #narcissistic abuse #raised by narcissists #vent post #toxic parents #toxic mom #complex trauma #parental abuse #childhood trauma #dysfunctional family #dysfunctional household

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cruelsister-moved2 · 1 year

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did anyone else see about the teal swan shit because im going insane

#i used to see her on yt...#someone said shes like a sexy alpha horse girl like...yeah..yeah<///3 #but um she like has a whole cult and is gaslighting people into thinking they were abused its insaneeee #i alsofeel bad for her because she was a victim of the whole 'traumatic memory recovery' thing and it obviously fucked her up #being made to 'recover' false memories so i guess now shes doing that to other ppl as well #she basically gets people to RP as eachothers dead parents and then tell them how they were abused or whatever..um yeah

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keepingthepeaceinouterspace · 5 months

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I'd love to understand where my growing dental anxiety comes from because like.

Tooth extracted from roof of mouth, age ~9*

Impacted tooth extraction, age ~15 (this is where I get my nerves about the numbing stuff they put on your gums. Don't swallow it!!! I turned green and vomited - extra unpleasant because I couldn't feel half my face!)

Implant!, age ~17?

4 wisdom teeth, age 19. Just used Novocaine. Was fine.

Gum gap filled (same two teeth that I just had my Ordeal with), age ~21

gum graft, age 31. SO FINE!! A little nervy but so chill

Occasional little filling, once with Novocaine. fine!!!

This fucking filling at age 31?? Racing heart the whole time. Root canal. Racing heart for the whole fucking hour and a half. Unable to focus on anything but the happenings. And it wasn't even that bad!! Like!! The dentist was right, getting an implant was worse! (The roof of the mouth was the worst recovery wise, but the implant was a lot of drilling)

Alright actually I think the extra nerves were due to 1) my frustration with these teeth because I have known they would be a problem since I got my braces off and I feel at fault for that. 2) for today, a fear that the root canal will fail or that I'll need one for my other tooth 3) for today - fear it would hurt and just the whole situation being challenging AF because it's my very rear molar

#*if this were my main experience I would understand because my memories of it are a bit traumatic.#My cassette tape ran out before the surgery was over. My dad carried me out with me crying over his shoulder after.#And I could barely open my mouth wide enough to eat a McDonald's fry.#The procedure itself and the recovery?? Smooth.#Cw: teeth #Cw dentist

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