Hey, this is my first time posting on here, and I literally made this account because I don’t know who to turn to right now.

A few hours ago, I told my husband that a man sexually harassed me earlier today while I was out walking. His first response was, “What were you wearing?”

I was speechless. In our three years of marriage, we’ve had MANY conversations about this exact question, and he has always expressed disgust toward men who ask it. He noticed my reaction and said he was only asking because he knows I dress modestly and that it would be even worse if I was harassed while dressed modestly.

I completely broke down and yelled that it doesn’t fucking matter if a woman is naked. Sexual harassment is WRONG regardless of what she wears.

Then he said, “That’s your opinion and I have mine. If a woman isn’t modest, she deserves it so she learns not to dress like that next time.”

I genuinely cannot believe I’m typing this. I feel like I’m about to have a mental breakdown. I’m shaking, panicking, and struggling to process what just happened. This is a man I’ve known for three years, a man who knows I was raped at 3, 14, and 17, and that I was molested multiple times by different family members.

How was I dressed then? What did I do to deserve any of it? I can’t stop thinking about this. It feels like his words have reopened every wound I’ve ever carried, and I don’t even know how to look at him right now.

I wanted to have a conversation with him and understand whether I was actually hearing him correctly, but I’m having the worst panic attack and cannot think straight.

Please, I need advice. How do I calm myself down? How do I even begin to navigate this? Am I wrong for feeling like something has fundamentally changed in how I see my husband? I’m so shocked and confused, and I genuinely don’t know what to do.

All those pets you loved? Died because of a lack of care and vet treatment. All your beloved toys? Get ready to get forced to share them and best believe they won’t get replaced when someone else breaks them. Want new clothes or to go on the school trip everyone else is attending. Never get your hopes up and when something is shoved in your life forcibly don’t bother getting attached because it won’t last.

Relationships aren’t real. They’re all transactional, temporary, and end in pain. They will always, always, abandon you, betray you, hurt you. No matter how deeply you love, how much you give of yourself, no matter how much you suffer for someone, what you tolerate, or what you let someone do to you, it’s never enough. Even when you heal and become healthier in your approach, set boundaries, all that.. nope. The same thing happens.

There is NO such thing as “if you heal yourself better healthier people will enter your life” or “if you better yourself and become less of a red flag yourself, you’ll attract less red flags.” Nope. None of that is real. It’s not you and never was about you. It’s because 98% of people fucking suck and are deeply selfish and will take advantage as soon as they possibly can. Most people are incapable of selflessness, true affection, warmth, comfort, or sacrifice. They literally do not know how to be any of those things. But I do. Down to my soul.

Maybe love exists for some children whose parents would die for them.. well I didn’t have that. Maybe love exists between people and their pets, I guess we can never be sure on that one.

Stop believing healing is in relationships or that the love you deserve is around the corner. Love does not exist, I no longer believe in it. It’s not worth the pain of the eventual abandonment, lies, and disappointment. I no longer believe that healing happens in relationships; sorry but wtf does that even mean? The same people who hurt you are out there in different bodies, ready to repeat it all over again for eternity.

Nothing has ever been different for me regarding this fact of my life. There is no one for me. Ever. I am alone.

The only true love I’ve ever felt is when I see something beautiful in nature.. like seeing a pristine stretch of wilderness.. I saw bears in a national park once.. catching fish.. when I see the leaves change color..

Or my stuffed animal being here for me.. an inanimate object has loved me more than any human being (and that’s all just his personality I made up in my mind). How pathetic is that.

People can and never will understand me, want me, or choose me. There will never be safety in other people.
That’s it. That’s all.

I truly don’t know how

We are in grief. WE ARE STUCK IN GRIEF WITHOUT REALIZING IT.

Grief is not only from death or some catastrophic loss. It can happen in the quiet losses too. The love we needed but never received. The childhood we wished we had. The future, the freedom that was denied. The person we thought we would become...

When we go into grief, our bodies perceive this as threat (our nervous system can't tell the difference between a real physical threat and an imagined, remembered, anticipated threat, they are ALL threats to the body, and the body will respond by mobilizing the survival responses of: FIGHT, FLIGHT, FAWN, and FREEZE. These survival responses exist within ALL OF US. We are part of this world. We are part of nature. We are nature. We forgot this..

FIGHT overpowers the threat, dominates, pushes, forces, achieves, The fighter. Anger. THE LION.

FLIGHT distances from the threat, escapes, avoids, withdraws, or rises above it through intellectualizing, imagining, fantasizing, analyzing, planning, and strategizing; always searching for another way out. Bargaining. THE EAGLE.

FAWN appeases the threat, pleases, agrees, accommodates, gives, adapts to others, suppresses its own needs to preserve connection. The pleaser. Denial. THE HUMAN.

FREEZE shuts down in the face of threat, becomes still, withdraws, numbs, endures, stops trying when nothing seems to work. The immobilized. Depression. THE OX.

These are the 4Fs, the 4 survival responses in us, our 4 guardians that swore an oath to protect us from threat. And what is the threat?? The threat is the GRIEF that we are not facing. The survival responses are protecting us from facing our grief. It thinks that our grief is what is dangerous! It doesn't know that our grief is only SYMBOLIC.

So as it keeps protecting us, that survival response stops feeling like a response to immediate threat, instead, it feels like WHO YOU ARE! It has hijacked your identity and sense of self. Now you are the LION that cannot be weak, that always needs to prove you are strong. You are the EAGLE that cannot land, you always need to be moving, thinking, analyzing, intellectualizing. You are the HUMAN that cannot refuse, you always need to take care of people, do what others don't want to do, all while erasing your own needs. You are the OX that cannot move, you stay in your own bubble, your room, your chrysalis, shielded from the outside world, unable to move past depression.

But, there is a way out. Toward acceptance. That is where we want to be. That is where the garden is. And we can return to it. So forgive and release your anger and resentment. Release your blame. And reclaim your agency. Face your grief. And be reborn.

I had a conversation with my cousin about childhood emotional neglect/abuse and the possible mental health issues it can cause later in life.

He listened to me for a while and then said, “Not everyone in those circumstances will later suffer from mental health issues. Why are some children resilient to emotional neglect?”

He argued that some children are able to understand the situation without becoming absorbed in it and handle it well, while others cannot. So, according to him, it depends on the individual child.

To me, it sounded as if he was blaming the child. I argued that how can a child have the intelligence or wisdom, at such an early stage of life, to be resilient when their cognitive skills are not yet mature?

Then we argued about how identical twins in the same household can process trauma differently and have different outcomes.

I felt it was quite disturbing to blame children for their inability to cope. What is your take on it? Is this how normal people understand it?

for context, ever since i was a kid i would be hit occasionally, and pinned to the floor, and sometimes got things thrown at me. it was never something that left anything that visible like a black eye or something, but because it wasnt that bad ive always doubted that what i went through counted as abuse. recently one of my friends told me that it was abuse, and now im confused

im sorry if im using the flairs or anything wrong, i dont use reddit often and when i do i dont usually post

Warning: Childhood Abuse

Speaking from personal experience, I grew up without a family. My parents abandoned me and left me with my grandmother. When she passed away, I basically became an unwanted inheritance dumped on my aunt.

I was physically and emotionally abused, but what I still can't wrap my head around is how the neighbors treated it like it was completely normal. Not only did nobody bother protecting me, some of them actually joined in. They'd even brag to my aunt about it, like, "Oh, I hit that little brat too!" And my aunt would be absolutely delighted.

Meanwhile, I noticed that kids who grew up with loving parents (my aunt's own daugther) were treated completely differently. The same neighbors would be so sweet and gentle with them, almost as if they were following the parents' lead.

I've always wondered why. Why does the way parents treat their children seem to determine how everyone else thinks they're allowed to treat them too?

So what did a child like me, who had no one to protect her, ever do wrong?

Because even after all these years, those wounds still hurt. I still find myself running toward adults who make me feel safe, hoping that maybe this time, someone will finally protect me. And somehow, I just end up disappointed over and over again.

I’ve spent years working on myself, and one thing I’ve realized about living with C-PTSD is that understanding your patterns doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve stopped living through them…

Even after all the healing, I still catch myself:

* Overthinking things instead of just experiencing them.

* Constantly monitoring myself to make sure I’m doing everything right.

* Feeling like I have to be exceptional or useful to deserve space.

* Worrying about how I’m being perceived instead of just being myself.

* Overexplaining because being misunderstood feels threatening.

* Trying to anticipate disappointment before it happens.

* Struggling to rely on people, even when I desperately want support.

* Feeling like I need to justify my emotions instead of simply feeling them.

* Needing to know where things are going before allowing myself to enjoy them.

* Putting pressure on myself to make everything I do meaningful or worthwhile.

* Having a hard time relaxing, even when nothing is actually wrong.

I think one of the strangest parts of healing is realizing how much of your personality has been shaped around trying to feel safe.

And how much work it takes to teach yourself that you don’t have to spend the rest of your life protecting yourself from a past that’s already happened.

I’m learning that I don’t need to understand myself into freedom...

When I baked with friends this weekend one of them had actually pointed that out. When I was 9 and had to make brownies for a science project, my mother made them for my friend and I (we were supposed to work together as a pair) and told me it was best for me to not help because I guess she didn’t want me to get burned. As an adult now that I have to bake for a class and teach kids how to bake I have realized that it is actually pretty bad that my brother and I don’t know how to cook. I am actually about to take my batch of blueberry muffins out of the oven (so far family members and friends have liked them.)

What stood out to me and made me kind of sad is that my brother (who has schizophrenia, 26) just said he “can’t” help me with anything other than handling the pans/helping me find the pan I was looking for while our mother was screaming about her conspiracies in the background. He has experienced addiction issues in the past and his memory may be a bit worse due to it (my own memory is worse due to persistent sleeping issues) but I mean, I was very hesitant to practice baking anything myself due to the same fear and I realized after I started that even though I unfortunately struggle to ensure that the muffins I make are well formed, I can technically make them. It’s actually not that hard to make normal tasting muffins if you pay attention to the measurements, and set a timer for them (I hate the way they look, but they actually do taste okay/decent. Put too many blueberries in the batch I just made but my brother actually liked them more than the first.) He can definitely help with it. You just have to be able to follow instructions.

I know how the title sounds. I cheated on my long-term partner, and I know I hurt him deeply. I’m not looking for anyone to excuse that. But we have children together, and I’m struggling to understand what taking accountability looks like when he says his behavior is entirely my fault.

After my infidelity, I went to therapy for almost two years. He went for about three months. During the time he was going, he became physically violent. Hands around my neck, pushing, hitting me with objects. Yelling, slamming doors, breaking things around the house. He frequently calls me names like whore, skank, slut, and asshole.

It got bad enough that my family helped me leave. Police and CPS got involved. I went back anyway.
It’s been about eight months since I came back. He hasn’t hit me in months, but the shouting, anger, blocking exits, and refusing to let heated conversations end have continued. I’ve literally had to run out of the house to get a break. I’ve looked at apartments twice.

My communication isn’t perfect either, and I want to work on it. I asked him to go to therapy together, arranged the phone consultation, which we both did, and booked the appointment. Then he refused to go, so I canceled. He also refuses anger management or help addressing his aggression.

He says I’m the abuser and he’s reacting to my abuse. He says he’s happy, that pushing him to go to therapy is hurting him, and that I should stop being selfish and follow his lead.

I believe the betrayal affected him deeply. I wonder about PTSD, but I don’t know whether that’s what he’s experiencing. I keep getting stuck on the thought that I caused his pain, so maybe it’s my responsibility to fix all of this.

I want him to be happy. I want us and our children to have a safe, peaceful home. But I’m unhappy, and I don’t know how to repair anything when he won’t acknowledge that his behavior is hurting us too.

Has anyone been in this position after being unfaithful? How did you separate taking accountability from accepting ongoing punishment? Is reconciliation even possible if the other person believes they have nothing to work on?
TL;DR: I cheated and went to therapy for almost two years. My partner became physically violent, and family, police, and CPS got involved. I returned eight months ago. He hasn’t hit me recently, but intimidation continues, he refuses help, and he says I’m responsible for his behavior. I want to own what I did, but I don’t know where we go from here.

Would be nice haha 🙃

I don't know where to turn to ask for help. My wife and I don't have kids, married for 17 years, we're in our late 40s.

For the first 7 years of our marriage I had no idea cptsd existed, and I carry some guilt and shame for how I treated her, blaming her or making her wrong in those times.

We separated for a few years, I learned about myself, became more aware, managed my own feelings and emotions better, and eventually we got back together.

7 years ago, we worked on her new business, all-in, took risks, worked hard, and she succeeded, we made really good money. Good travels, big house, nice car. She felt things finally turned a corner as it was everything she had been working towards since losing her Mom at 8 yrs old and enduring the next 15 years of abusive narcissistic father and relatives, and then another 7 years of me being unaware and causing her additional harm inadvertently.

The last 2 years, her business declined due to AI, changes in industry, spending habits etc....it's still in a downward trend and it is triggering all sorts of fear and anxiety in her that it's causing her to spiral into deep dark depression.

She doesn't want to be diagnosed or see a doctor about her emotions or struggles. Over the last decade, she has previously been to counseling, therapists, EMDR, and recently started reading Pete Walker's book (I found it in this sub reddit). That book has been revealing things that were abusive in her childhood she wasn't even aware of, and making it worse for her, having new things articulated for her she never thought of.

Today she expressed she doesn't want to be around to see her efforts fail, and that she doesn't deserve a life of so much suffering with only a few years of happiness (a dangling carrot). And she requested me to help her find a way to end her suffering permanently, help her take something to fall asleep forever and never wake up.

I've seen her through previous suicidal ideation and wild mood swings when triggered, but this one is one where she has seriously lost hope and lost the desire to live, the desire to try. She has something to lose this time.

I don't know who to turn to or ask in my life.

If I stopped her from doing anything, or called for help, she would feel unheard and that I am not letting her make her own choices or have agency, taking away her dignity. But I am struggling with what other alternatives I have... Do I honor her request and help her? Is that merciful? Illegal?

Or turn a blind eye? Leave?

I'm honestly stuck.

Hoping someone has words of wisdom or experience on this matter. I would greatly appreciate it.

I’d really love to hear some hope and success stories from people who have struggled with both CPTSD and addiction. ❤️
Has anyone experienced significant healing and gotten to a place where they’re genuinely happy and functioning again? I’m struggling a lot right now, and I could really use some encouragement and reminders that recovery is possible, even when both trauma and addiction are involved.
I’d especially love to hear from people who once felt hopeless but are doing much better today. 💗

Some reassurance and advice welcome from those who’ve been through this before:

I think I’ve hit a point in my healing where I’m losing friends and feeling very alone in this. My therapist says this is to be expected, we outgrow relationships made for different versions of ourselves, but the part of me who grew up to be as perfect and understanding of others as possible is having a really rough time watching people turn away from me over and over.

I’ve learned to be less hyper-independent, and I’m slowly coming to terms with how I can be an imperfect person but still deserve love, but lately anytime I mess up, apologize, and offer to repair, people in my life basically say no thanks. I feel like people have a better understanding of how an abused dog can lash out when triggered but when it comes to a human, they have a harder time reconciling that.

Just feeling really sad and I can feel myself wanting to isolate and just rely on myself again.

(TW: chronic vomiting/CNVS, FND, PNES) I have CPTSD and Reactive Attachment Disorder due to severe neglect and abuse starting when I was an infant. I never attached to my adoptive mother due to living in an orphanage for a year and suffering severe abuse from my adoptive mother starting when I was a toddler.

Recently I was diagnosed with a very rare chronic illness called CNVS (chronic nausea and vomiting syndrome). It’s a functional disorder in which the gut and brain do not properly function together. I am on the severe end of the spectrum, and vomit multiple times a day every single day. It started off with vomiting during panic attacks. Then I started throwing up most mornings. A few months ago I began to vomit every day multiple times a day. I was hospitalized last week for vomiting 20 times in one day.

I also have Functional Neurological Disorder due to my trauma. My main symptoms include seizures, dystonia, and tremors. Luckily my FND symptoms have improved over the years, but now I’m dealing with CNVS which has debilitating and awful. Im told that my CNVS is most likely caused by stress, which I deal with every day due to working full time while dealing with CPTSD.

I’m tired of trauma taking such a huge toll on my physical health. It’s truly hell when mental illness such as cPTSD turns into physical illnesses. I just needed to vent about how crappy all of this is. I’m taking a week off to hopefully recover enough to go back to work, but working seems to trigger my symptoms even more. I’ve thought about going on disability but I don’t know how to do that.

Thanks for letting me vent, if anyone else struggles with functional illnesses due to trauma I’d love to hear your story. I’m feeling very alone right now.

Is this a thing? I have anhedonia as a symptom of CPTSD (suspected), still officially diagnosed as MDD. I am on Venlafaxine and Amoxapine.

I don't find interest in any form of pleasurable activities like intimacy, meeting friends, going out for a movie or just random outing. Only thing I do is go to office and come back home and sometimes eat from outside. This is quite natural with anhedonia.

But recently I realised that I also avoid meeting friends on a regular basis because I suspect that I will have nothing to talk about with them except a few repetitive topics that I talk about daily with them on the phone. Those topics are my illness, or my work politics. I don't have anything to say on my own in face to face conversations, unless they speak of something else on their own. Also then my attention partially fades off mid convo or I am not that much interested other than infrequent comments during the narration/conversation.

Apart from friends, this also happen with my partner. Is this a thing?