It's just the standard brush-off for when the person you're talking to doesn't want to deal with your trauma but also wants to seem kind and knowledgeable. 

Even when you have a good therapist it's insulting. Like, really, "go to therapy"? Wow you're such a genius for coming up with that, do you also tell fat people to just eat less and exercise like it's the most brilliant idea they've never heard  857285828572948 times?

I recently got a related brush off from an actual mental health professional. Basically I did a TMS eval and the doctor told me TMS wouldn't work on me and instead I should see a regular psychiatrist for "medication management". After already hearing from me about the like 10 psychiatric drugs I already took that didn't work. I felt like punching her through the phone.

If I was invincible then I wouldn't have to smash anyone's face in, right? I could just sit around being invincible instead of having to convince potential rapists that I could and would kill them if they try anything. I wouldn't have to calculate ways to physically hurt people, I could just sit around being invincible. 

Maybe I've been getting the wrong kind of EMDR? 

First I had this one EMDR therapist and we went into some heavy childhood trauma stuff which made my triggers worse short-term but I was thinking it would get worse than get better, but then she basically dumped me as a therapist saying she had to cut back to bimonthly sessions and didn't think I was well enough to handle that so she told me to find someone else. That was with the kind of EMDR where you cross your arms and tap your shoulders or else refocus your eyes from side to side while remembering stuff.

Then I had another EMDR therapist but we ended up not so much going into the childhood trauma but instead doing guided meditations of positive scenes while I alternately tapped on my thighs, but I didn't feel like it was doing much and then she just kind of slid into being a talk therapist for me instead. 

No mania. Just a lot of self directed anger. 

I remember one of my dad's coworkers gushing to me one time "your dad is such a wonderful person" and me standing around feeling awkward because of course, the side she saw was the polite side he shows to adults. I guess it was a happy friendship they had, but I doubt it was very intimate. I remember my parents having their friends over for dinner and being very bored because it was all "what did you do on your vacation" superficial talk and I thought all adult conversations were like that. As for my dad's relationship with my mom, maybe they love each other I don't know. I think she loves him. But I also think she's a child of divorce who wanted a nice normal family and didn't have a good local support system to turn to if she divorced him, so she had plenty of incentive to look the other way during abuse 

1 or 2 please. And I say this as someone who does get triggered by the really hopeless sounding posts, but at the same time I think we have a responsibility to not turn people away who are experiencing CPTSD pain and unfortunately SI is a common reaction to that pain. And also "planning" isn't always...like sometimes it's just that you hear people around you saying stuff like "lol this bad grade is making me suicidal" and your mind just goes to the specific methods to distinguish it from that jokey stuff, and who can tell really who might actually do it? You can't. So just, let people be able to reach out for support here even if how they do it can trigger others. The NSFW tag (option 2) will probably help with the trigger aspect.

That's awesome!

For me though...I was honest and they basically told me I was too fucked up for TMS to help. (Just posted about it.) And now I can't tell  if TMS is really useless for my issues, or if it could actually help but they just refused to treat me because they didn't like me. Did TMS help you with feelings of self hate, like the "you deserve horrible things because you're weak/lazy/pathetic" type stuff?

Thanks everybody for your input! I just spoke to the intake coordinator about some of my concerns with the form. I didn't talk about suicide or self-harm, just said that a bunch of the questions were vague and I was concerned about the people treating me having a false picture of me in their written records. She said that in that case, it was ok if I didn't fill out the form prior to the evaluation but just explained my issues to the doctor during the evaluation. I sent a written message explaining my reasoning (again, not mentioning self-harm just that the questions were too vague), so everyone would understand why I wasn't filling out the form beforehand. I think that once I'm able to explain to the doctor in my own words what is going on, it will be okay.

Following. I could've written this post lol.

No advice on conquering the urge to self harm, but I feel like the Habitica app could be helpful for the being productive through triggered states bit? Something about that little video-game-style "ding" noise and "you earned gold!" notification that you get when you complete a whatever, kind of triggers the same reptile-brain reward system you activate when using your procrastination tech.  

Choke by Kittie: "you fucking pedophile"

Dead Bodies Everywhere by Korn: "you really wanted me to be a good son, why'd you make me feel like I'm no one" Children of the Korn: "something's got to give, parents or the kids, it won't be the kids" Counting: "as I'm screaming all my pain, you will be their counting"  (actually most of their songs are great CPSTD rage songs)

One Step Closer by Linkin Park for emotional abuse

I like that you use specific amounts of time. Not "when you're ready" or some other arbitrary thing that involves guessing what an adult wants, but something you can see on a clock.

sorry I don’t like using that word when referring to children needing coaching when they make a mistake

children needing coaching when they make a mistake

It must be amazing to live like that. No...just mistakes and coaching. I want that.

Truth truth truth truth truth.

(Although, if someone tries I often think "they're doing this because they want power over me and/or sex")

Your body and heart are telling you loud and clear: LEAVE HIM.

He is a manipulative POS who treats women like shit and blames it on them. You fell for it because you were young and naive, it happens to the best of us and it does NOT have to shape your life going forward.

At this point probably the best thing for the kid is for you to divorce him and get full custody. Not having to deal with the man who traumatized you will allow you to heal which will make you a better parent, and he has already shown that he doesn't give consistent affection which is what kids need growing up.

I think it is kind of an inverted fight response. You are dealing with stress and it reminds you of situations where you were a target of physical violence so your first reaction is rage and the desire to do violence in turn, but you don't want to really hurt others in the present day because your conscience won't let you, and also the stress isn't really something you can punch, a person physically attacking you makes sense to fight against but how do you punch a deadline? Or a faceless technology company? So all that rage turns inward and you start calling yourself names. And if you are around other people you can let it slip how you're feeling about yourself, ie calling yourself worthless to a teacher or job supervisor when they talk with you about how to improve your work.

But all this is just adaptations to a bad situation that then become the default response for all stress because of how often you felt like you had to be strong and alert all the time to defend yourself and the fear of weakness of any kind making you a target again. It is like adjusting to college life after previously being involved with street gangs.

Thank you, I needed to hear that.

I deal with stuff like that too only in the form of self hate. For instance, if I get overcharged for something I'll think, "that's all you're good for, being a cash cow for assholes". Even if the amount was fairly negligible.

But even though I recognize intellectually that it's ridiculous, the ridiculousness of it then becomes another avenue for self hate: "how can you be so pathetically oversensitive that something this small can trigger you this much?"

It scares me because I feel like it's getting worse, even with therapy.

Also you can have a sort of generalized empathy for them, in a sort of "I understand that you were passing down inherited trauma" way, and also recognize that further contact with them is a pointless waste of time and will only harm you more.

I read a novel that encapsulates that insight very well: "Will and Testament" by Vigdis Hjorth. It's a kind of blow by blow of the inner conflict around dealing with family members who want to pretend like the abuse never happened.

Yeah, we kind of went as a society from "ugh I don't want to date/befriend crazies" to "mental health and erasing stigma is super important, but also your mental health is 100% your responsibility so I won't date/befriend anyone with mental health issues unless they're so medicated/therapized that they're indistinguishable from a happy normal person".

Right now I'm at a level where I'm constantly masking my pain to make money at my job, then masking some more around people at social events because I don't have a local support system and so I have to put myself out there to make friends but I'm afraid of alienating them by "trauma dumping", and when I get home I have the inner critic screaming at me from morning til night that I'm a worthless piece of shit for not working on meaningful career stuff

Has anyone had experiences of being in a close relationship with a "normal" person and it working out?

Yeah, but I think "have you been in therapy" (or better yet, "are you in therapy") is still a good question to ask, because it tells you how much experience the therapist has being on the other side of the power dynamic. Similar questions : "have you experienced trauma", "have you been diagnosed with a mental illness", "have you been a patient in an inpatient psych ward", etc.

I second all of this except imagining yourself physically hurting people. You don't want those violent thoughts in your head. At one point it got with me to the point where I was imagining physically hurting people for even small things and then when I remembered that would be bad, feeling an intense urge to physically hurt myself instead.