Tag: complex PTSD

How to Cope with Christmas If You Have Complex PTSD

Blogging and Bloggers, Mental Health

This is an excellent holiday survival guide for people with C-PTSD and PTSD.

Fighting for a Future

Merry-christmas-messages

The holiday season is stressful for everyone.  But for many with Complex PTSD and dissociative disorders, it can be the absolute worst time of year.  While there are often bright spots, there are unique struggles that trauma survivors undeniably face as the year comes to a close.  Whether out and about, or gathering with family, the holidays can be so loud and busy and overstimulating – in other words, a nightmare for anyone with a posttraumatic condition. But there are countless hidden things survivors can often struggle with that many may not even realize – including survivors with a different history.  Many of you will have to face family or extended family that were the source of your trauma.  Others will have to gather around unsupportive or toxic family/friends who don’t value your mental health or personal wellbeing.  For many survivors, the holidays are actual anniversaries of past trauma or violence…

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The “Four F’s” of C-PTSD

Blogging and Bloggers

Great post. We need to understand the extensive damage we do to people when we let them suffer from things we can prevent. C-PTSD is crippling and it can be prevented.

Lucky Otters Haven

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I just began reading “Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving” by Pete Walker. I can already tell I won’t be able to put it down (I will write a book review when I’m finished, which shouldn’t take long). I’m also going to bring this book to my next therapy session because I want my therapist to see it.

Walker, who is a therapist and also a survivor of narcissistic abuse and sufferer of C-PTSD, is an engaging writer and definitely knows his subject matter. In one of the first chapters, he discusses the “Four F’s”–which are four different “styles” of coping that people with C-PTSD develop to cope with their abusive caregivers and avoid the abandonment depression. Whatever style one adopts may be based on several factors–natural temperament, the role in the family the child was given (scapegoat, golden child, “lost” or ignored child), birth order, and other factors.

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Available…

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Jeff Brown about why people try to shut down those who have the courage to deal with the truth about abuse

Blogging and Bloggers, mental health

May we all speak our truths, before our buried truths destroy us. Out with the old, in with the true…

Healing From Complex Trauma & PTSD/CPTSD

“So many people get judged when they refuse to put their pain away. They get judged for showing it, for speaking it, for insisting on sharing their memories of abuse with those they know.

I am not talking about those overwhelming strangers with their stuff—I am talking about legitimate sharings with those they are connected with in daily life. All too often, they are fed one repressive message or another: “Don’t look back,” “What’s done is done,” “Don’t be a victim,” “Your feelings are an illusion,” “Be strong.”

What is ironic about this is that those who insist on embodying and expressing their feelings are actually the courageousones—unwilling and unable to live a false life. Their stuff is breaking through their defenses because they are tired of carrying the weight of buried truths. They want a healthier and more authentic life.

Those who seek to shame their…

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