I watched ep. 4 last night and I'm dealing with similar feelings, although I'm trying to pay-as-you-go here. It's bringing up a lot to work on, but it has really upset me. I don't think I would unwatch it, though. I'm actually grateful for it. But I think I might not feel that way if I had binged it. Are you doing any better now that a week's gone by?

I'm four episodes into Baby Reindeer and it is brutal. But it's stirring up things in me that I am happy to meet again and integrate. The last time a show had this deep and painful an effect on me was also on Netflix, a show called Unbelievable. If you want another dose of this, give show that a shot.

A little late but I really appreciated these posts. I saw them a couple days ago and I've already gotten good mileage out of the idea that when I'm avoiding, I'm already triggered. Many other gems here as well. Thanks for sharing all this work that you did!

Excellent book. I read this and then followed it up with Why Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold Kushner. The two answer a lot of difficult questions about suffering.

Nowhere in this thread did anyone ask for feedback, and I'm not the OP.

I don't really see how it's patronizing to point you to a community you might benefit from, but I guess I'll stop. Have a good one.

I meant back then, lol. Seriously, take a breather and check out NSC. A friend and I spent weeks imagining it and creating policies for it, then spent months trying to build a little self-sustaining community, which we did. And I did that for literally no personal gain specifically to give people like you a place where they could heal. So go check it out. I'm not involved anymore so you won't have me moderating your posts or anything.

I think you're just not showing compassion for the difficulty of being in charge of a community like that, with thousands of voices all saying different things, with all the responsibility that entails. I stayed humble and tried to listen to what the crowds told me. You are the one staying firm with a personal opinion informed by a handful of posts.

I was going to recommend you check out /r/CPTSD_NSCommunity, the sister subreddit to this one that we created so people like you could have a less heavy community experience, but I guess you're not interested!

Just FYI, I've been talking in past tense because I haven't been a mod there in .. I think a year and a half or two years. But I was head mod for 4 years or so, and I'm telling you that in that time, we took tons of feedback. People told us all kinds of things, good and bad, and we created the space we thought reflected what people wanted and needed. It is still basically the same as it was back then, which is why I'm explaining to you why it is the way that it is.

I'll be blunt: I think you're taking your personal experience and painting it across everyone else, but that's not reality. The reality is that people had a lot of different opinions and experiences on /r/CPTSD, and a substantial number of those opinions were neutral or positive. There were also negative opinions, many of which led to policy changes over time, as well as the creation of this space right here, for people who wanted something different from /r/CPTSD. We could only respond to opinions that were shared, not ones we imagined people silently having. (And it felt back then that many people with negative opinions about /r/CPTSD are as eager to share them as you are.)

And you'll notice that despite us trying to get the word out about /r/CPTSDNextSteps, it has always been small. It spent a year being tiny. This is not where the demand is.

People who use /r/CPTSD shouldn't subscribe and keep it in their main feed, no way. Our recommendation was (past tense, by the way; I'm retired) to make an alt account and keep it in its own silo that you only visit intentionally. It's not the kind of thing you want mixed into an algorithm.

If it wasn't for you, it wasn't for you. Everyone's path is different.

This is exactly why we never claimed it was safe, only "safe-ish." We'd recommend that people only browse the sub when they were feeling resilient.

A lot of people told us that spending time there was an important phase of their recovery, that they didn't like it anymore but didn't regret being there. There were (and probably still are) regular threads where people said they were "graduating" from it, that it wasn't suiting them anymore and it was time to move on, but they speak of it as something they used to need and no longer want. I and a few people on the mod team over the years had similar experiences. I only hold this opinion because it was the most common one I heard. The person who commented on this saying that sub made them worse is actually in a stark minority; if you want a better sample data set, you would want to ask what the people on /r/CPTSD think, not the subreddit for people who don't like /r/CPTSD.

I think you're focusing on the absolute worst possible consequences of a policy that had a lot of positives. That specific policy is that we did not police content on /r/CPTSD as long as it was roughly on-topic, with the justification being that there is a phase of early recovery where what people need most is to be heard, seen, and validated, and to see other people saying those same things to learn that they aren't alone. So we allowed that, but that means people are venting out their absolute worst emotions and feelings, and eventually the sub became pretty difficult to spend time in if you weren't also in that early phase.

That's part of why we created this subreddit + NS_Community. The fact that you don't like /r/CPTSD doesn't mean it's bad; it means it just isn't for you.

As for suicidal posts, I want you to put yourself in the shoes of a moderator and really think about what it would mean to remove a post from someone desperate for a reason to not kill themselves. I personally couldn't do it.

And as for people encouraging suicide, if you mean actual suicide and not just talking about medically assisted suicide (which are two VERY different things), please report that immediately. That has never been allowed on /r/CPTSD or on Reddit in general. And that person talking about stalking a girl, I hope you reported that, too, because we also tried to remove posts if someone seemed unstable and hostile. If these were reported and left up, I would actually say that the new (and as I understand it, fairly overwhelmed) mods do need some more help.

I always wanted to get away from them, live somewhere else, I was never happy or glad to spend time with them. Being with them seemed like a punishment or something to endure, I never felt like they would protect me from the world.

I deeply loved my parents, and what you're saying here was exactly true for me as well. I couldn't stand to be around them. But I look back now and I know I was avoiding the guilt and pain of making their lives worse. I blamed myself for all of it, for all of how they treated me and how miserable they were to each other. They communicated to me in so many ways that my presence was a burden on them, and so I wanted to be apart from them so I wouldn't hurt them anymore. Simultaneously and very confusingly, I hold a lot of anger from that time, both at them and myself, along with a lot of other emotions that make everything tangled up.

Basically, the only way I got anywhere in recovery was to take on faith that there was love at the bottom of everything, and that if I could think of things through the lens that it was either my love for them or for myself that drove me to do everything I did, I would be able to untangle it and make sense of it. And I've been proven right, at least in my own recovery journey.

Yep, it's been six years and my opinion on this has changed: I feel like I've moved on from a lot of my trauma. And I don't believe you need to avoid barbecuing food forever. You'll be able to do it again after you've worked through and processed whatever old emotions/memories you have surrounding it. Sometimes you can do that directly, but other times it'll wrap up into a whole complex of different traumas, and then it takes more time and effort. But until then, I wouldn't try to force the issue; exposure therapy is not a good treatment for trauma.

His book Still the Mind: An Introduction to Meditation. It's the most confident distillation of his ideas; previous works are the same content, just less concise and effective. It's the kind of book that's best read in tiny chunks, where you read a few paragraphs and then just think for a few minutes. And it takes a long time for the ideas to sink in. I've reread it every year or so for the last decade.

It's actually fun to have this stuff dug up! What I said in that second paragraph is what helped me: Reflect on time-of-day-specific emotions that may be lurking in the background, and then process and work through them. I don't have this problem anymore, like at all. I wake up and work on hobbies and projects until it's time for work.

Just keep trying. They're notoriously difficult to get ahold of and there's really no trick. I would just be more aggressive, contacting individual mods once per day as you can.

I wrote an article about recovery, The Inevitable Positivity of Trauma Recovery. I hope self-promotion is still allowed in the weekly thread as this definitely qualifies, but I think people here will appreciate it. DM me if you get paywalled!

That's exactly right, and a great example. Drinking gas would be repulsive, but that's distinct from something like rotting food, which gives us that deep, visceral, nauseating disgust. And for me it's worked the same for emotional responses as well.

My therapist defined disgust as a mixture of "want" and "don't want." Hence rotten food, and situations like these. That's been a good way for me to process disgust, because I can more easily pin down exactly what's drawing me and what's pushing me away.

In eight years of trauma therapy, actually no, I've seen almost zero shift in my music taste. It expanded just a little bit, like it was doing pre-recovery.