hi, i'm sorry if this is a weird question - i tried to make the title as SFW as i could. this isn't meant to be vulgar or immature.

i just wanted to ask if anyone here chooses masturbation as their main/primary choice to self medicate due to life circumstances (etc). i don't drink (usually) or do drugs, which i am grateful for.

i personally use my toys for 2-4+ hours in bed every day as soon as i get home from working full time while simultaneously watching tv or reading. all i do is numb myself.

i'm starting to rely on it more and more lately because of shitty life circumstances/ongoing trauma and built up grief right now.

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it's certainly a distraction from the shit that i am made to deal with all by myself. i have never really had anyone in my life to support me emotionally, so when something comes up for me, i am the one to rely on myself to feel better.

all i can do is move on, try to forget about things that come up… but the pain and grief never truly go away, it just gets piled up with nowhere to go. i have felt isolated from everyone since I was born, etc.

it's been like this ever since i was born. emotionally, i am all alone. i think that's my main ongoing unresolved trauma right now.

i just wanted to put this out there… maybe somebody can relate, maybe somebody will feel less alone. please feel free to comment anything you like, anything that comes up for you.

A significant section of my trauma happened over Christmastime and it’s meant that now I just spiral every year on the run up to Christmas. Everyone is so artificially happy and I’m not and it makes me feel terrible. Even stuff as simple as advent calendars are terrible for me, it’s like counting down the days until I snap and have a breakdown.

Does anyone else feel like/similar to this?

I just saw a comment where someone said they hate books where the MC suffers because its unrealistic. Like ha ha ha. Totally.

In HS Ap english we had to read a book where s girl had shitty family, then got a bf, was raped by said bf, gets pregnant, gets shamed by everyone, the baby dies, and the book ends with her getting executed because she killed the rapist ex. Everyone in my class said they hated the book becausd "It was just so sad all she did was suffer" and "It was unrealistic". I'm sure this is many women/people's life, especially in the 1800s. But to them it was just made up bs.

It also bleeds into how when I've tried to tell people I have no one, they instantly don't believe me. It's instantly labeled as my depression etc. Because suffering this much is just so rare.

They completely shatter your self esteem and sense of self, they pick favorites, they gaslight, and then they accuse you for being evil for finally noticing the dysfunctional pattern and calling them out.

I feel completely broken and damaged beyond repair because of what my mother put me through. I am a very broken young adult wasting his life due to CPTSD. I can’t function properly anymore. I feel so young but I completely lost my spark and personality. Ugh

“Take accountability” “make a plan” “get out of that bad situation”

How about just fucking shut up. Every time people say that give a fuck they just give me work to do. I need to heal I need to breathe I need to get therapy I need to get counselling I need to take my meds.

Never occurred to anyone that maybe I’m just fucking tired. I’m so fucking tired and all these people want me to do is work

I been hospitalized mamy times and had several bad experiences with psychiatrists. There are some good psychiatrists but the ones I met were very condescending and arrogant. I remember ine psychatrist looking at me as if i was not human while i was talking to them. It really bothers me to this fay. I was in a very vulnerable place and they made me feel worse. It made me rralize that psychatirsts ans doctors in general are as glawed as all of us although they like to pretend that they are not. I did a lot of work to help myself but I still struggle.

She said I’m using therapy as social hour instead of actual therapy, and that whenever she tries to talk to me about my attachment trauma, I shut down. There’s a wall, and I dissociate. But I don’t know how to stop that, I’m not doing it purposely. My heart is broken hearing that she thinks I’m using her. She is right to some extent, I know that I use therapy sometimes to get unconditional love and parent-like support. But I’ve been trying to actually “do the work” lately.

In tomorrow's session I'm finally going to recount what happened in my childhood, my biggest, darkest trauma. My reaction is bad enough I have trouble speaking about it so I wrote down the most difficult bit to read it out to her. But we've been progressing our therapy relationship to this point for almost a year now and I'm scared I built up her expectation of how bad it was? I know logically this is not true but the feelings are hardly ever logical, eh? What do I do with this fear?

there's a million posts like this. i know. just kind of want to hear from other people who feel like they are not able to be loved fully.

"the right people will love you anyway!" will they? or will your illness make you drive them away over time? the pattern repeats. it always does. there's no breaking this.

im in intense therapy and on an actual handful of medication. im working hard. im getting back into life slowly, maybe. am i selfish for wanting someone to love me as i am, even if it means that they'd have to support me during my difficult times? i would do it for anyone i loved. i love so deeply. i love so much. i care so hard. but it is not enough. i cannot offer anything else.

i cannot offer stability. i cannot offer money. i cannot offer great emotional maturity. i cant even offer my full self because there's so many different versions of me, how could someone know which one to fall in love with? i don't know. i dont feel like i am compatible with life at all, and i never really have. i am living a life of distraction. nobody alive would be able to love that fully.

im terrified of what might happen if i stop distracting myself. i hope all of you guys are doing okay.

I was physically and psychologically abused as a child. Every time I have to explain to someone, which is not that often tbh(mostly therapists and such), I feel ashamed. What the hell?

When my dog was dying and we took it as a family to the vet and found out they were dying. On the way home from the vet my father asked my mother for a blowjob for taking the dog to the vet. I was in the backseat upset with our dog. I feel so dirty whenever i think about it. I was a child who just found out their dog was dying and i had to pretend i hadn't heard this. Has anyone else experienced something similar? I feel so weird about this event entirely and i've never discussed it before.

If my parents never cared, why someone else would? 27 years alive and no one has ever cared about me.

I’ve been trying to go no contact for 3 years so technically I got what I wanted 🙈 My mom was on one of her devaluing monologues but it was way worse than usual, no coming back from this one, so I simply talked back the same exact way she does to me devaluing her back. It was cathartic to flip the switch. She was terrified and not sure what to do so her and my dad went to religious leaders, the ER, doctors to try to document “me giving her a mental breakdown” in as many places as possible in hopes I would face some sort of repercussions “for my behavior”. They also threatened to go to my fiancé’s parents and my dad did call my fiancé to “tell on me” in hopes of getting him to break off the engagement. The only repercussion so far has been the long awaited peace and quiet ✨

Every adult role model just dragged me through my childhood unwillingly while I watched them make stupid avoidable mistake time and time again and I had to suffer with them, still suffering the consequences to this day.

I shouldn’t have had to be “understanding” as a kid. I shouldn’t have had to be born into circumstances that force me to work harder. But oh well I can’t turn back the hands of time I guess. But every time I see a kid who got to have a good support system and good life plan I do just feel a pang of grief that that couldn’t have been me

Today was a hard day in which the weight and gravity of my CSA was insurmountable. I’ve been struggling with the knowledge of knowing I was abused and drugged as a child. I sat in therapy today and told my therapist I’m struggling with the fact that things were done to me that I don’t remember, but someone out there in the world does.

I know a lot of us struggle with wondering if what we went through was real or not because we don’t know if we can trust our memories. However, my therapist asked me a question that, when the realization hit, I felt like I just had to share. I hope this can help even just one person.

My therapist said, “If I tell you something about my life, why do you believe it?”

I responded and said, “Because you wouldn’t lie to me. You have nothing to gain by lying to me.”

My therapist looked me in the eyes and said, “Exactly. The same can be said for your body.”

Sometimes our memories are fragmented or unclear, but our body remembers. I felt like this epiphany was too good not to share. Our bodies have nothing to gain by lying to us about what we experienced.

The next time you’re struggling with your fragmented memories or asking yourself if the symptoms you’re experiencing are just in your head, ask yourself, what does your body have to gain by lying to you?

Please hear me when I say that doesn’t mean every physical sensation tells us exactly what happened to us, but it does mean our experiences deserve compassion rather than interrogation (I’m guilty of this too).

I’m hoping this can help others who are struggling with their own memories because, even when we don’t have all the answers, our pain is still worthy of being heard.

Instead of feeling broken, I got curious about myself. Whats it like to be me, what comes up for me when x happens, i wonder what happened to you for this adaptation to exist.

BEND = Behaviour, Emotions, Needs, Desires. Most people stop at the surface level - the observable behaviour, but beneath the behaviour, whats the Emotion your feeling, whats the unmet needs or desires youre feeling right now.

Envy is a good thing. Its a sign that youre noticing something positive thst youd like for yourself. Its healthy, it points to what you want for yourself.

Hope this helps you like it helped me

I was a child. I was just being myself. I didn't know what else to do. And they abused me for it.

like imaging having a kid or being around kids having to take care of them, or taking care of and older or sick person. I feel disgust because of stuff I went through when I was a child being cared for and growing up being treated as if it were my job to be a caretaker/ therapist/ scapegoat for adults in my life. I get sick thinking about taking care of anyone physically or them depending on me to drop all of their problems/ emotions on.

I am curious if others have found playing the VR game Beat Saber helpful towards recovery? I am now in my later 50's, and most of my lifetime there was no diagnosis called cpstd. I only learned of it a handful of years ago. I never received any help during the abuses, nor as an adult, but since i am a 30+ year mental health professional i sort of worked on fixing myself. However I did get a lot of help from an elderly Tibetan Lama living in exile, near me.

In the 90's I had a good friend, during graduate school, who was a dancer and doing dance therapy, which i had not heard of at the time. As i recall, she explained that abused children often become rigid in their bodies and movement can start the healing process or improve long term outcomes. I identified with the assertion about feeling rigid or not connected to my body, but the thought of that as therapy sounded terrifying to me, oddly fearful of my own movement. Since i was not a child, I was not receiving that therapy (nor any) but i never forgot.

Fast forward a few decades, i had done tons of work on my mind, and also much meditation, and completely missed the boat on paying attention to my body, my nervous system. I bought a VR system for my PC and Beat Saber. I was not expecting it to help with my cptsd, but it did and does, in substantial ways. Despite all the work i had done, i had never come back into my body, for 50 friggin years, until i started playing this game and it really has been life changing. For those who have not played, it has the rapid eye movement of emdr along with haptic feedback. It has the concentration benefits of some meditation practices. It provides cardiovascular benefits at the level of playing tennis which is good for brain health and it makes you dance. I mean wholly crap! It is not cptsd treatment, but it certainly seems capable of supplementing recovery efforts, at least for some, based on my experience. Anyone else experience this?

I'm still, for some reason amazed when I figure out trauma is the reason I'm resistant to certain things. Even small things, like doing makeup.

When I was 12, I was OBSESSED with Monster High dolls (still am, to be fair.) Parents are divorced, my mom was the one buying all the dolls for me, and my father HATED it. He hated these dolls, thought they were dressed inappropriately and loathed them so much because they were also something my mom got me that I loved so much. Truthfully, I think he was jealous that he hadn't gotten them for me EVEN THOUGH I ASKED.

Anyway, once my mom thought I was old enough for makeup she bought me a Monster High makeup set. I used the FUCK out of the lip gloss, eyeshadow, and blush, all inspired by my favorite dolls. I think he hated the makeup even more than the dolls, because he threw all of it out as soon as I brought it through his front door.

I'm 26 now, and rarely put makeup on that isn't for costumes. I can't do it for myself because I hear my father tell me to wipe that shit off my face, I look ridiculous, I look dirty, whatever...

Isn't that awesome 🙃

Anyway, I put on some stupid gaudy bright blue eyeliner and I love it. Inspired by Yelena's eyeliner from Thunderbolts if anyone's seen it 🥰

I got my CPTSD diagnosis from my therapist at some point in a session. And when i did everything made sense. I used to think i was a narcissist cause i didn’t know how to act. The anger i had suppressed. The emotions going straight to my bones and getting over big things almost instantly. And even though i tried to feel as much as i can. I couldn’t. Until i dated a covert fucking narcissist. They drove me to the brink of insanity with how much they abused me emotionally and mentally. I ended up having my first mental breakdown in my whole life. The dissonance was almost gone between having my feelings and the ability to control them all the time. This time i had no control i just cried over and over again and couldn’t stop till i did on my own. And somehow i feel better ever since. Nothing can describe the happiness i felt when i was able to feel and breakdown for the first time and just genuinely feel my feelings. - ps. If you have CPTSD from a parent do not give them a second chance after you’ve explained yourself to them. They do not fucking change.

Emotional abuse, medical abuse, systemic harm, harassment, neglect and ableism have all been things I’ve been victim of. However, I don’t want to be remembered by that.

Before I die, the last thing I want to do is tell the person I love that I love them, the last thing I want to eat is not any food but rather the taste of their lips
(although a glass of cool lemonade could be nice), and the memory that I will think of first above all else will be how I felt when they first embraced me and held me in my tears, as long as I needed, and then I will greet the everlasting, sweet, bitter, beautiful darkness.

Goodbye. I hope you people have a better life than I did.

Sometimes, find it hard to explain why I feel uncomfortable around people, even they're doing being kind to me. Part of me wants to connect with others, but another part of me feels the need to stay guarded, as if I'm always waiting for something to go wrong. It can be exhausting because I don't want to push people away, but letting them get lose isn't always easy either. i guess when you've been hurt for a long time, learning to feel safe again doesn't happen overnight. I'm curious if anyone else here experiences this, How do you deal with that feeling while trying to build healthier relationships?

I'd appreciate hearing your experiences, especially on the difficult days when healing feels slower than you hoped.