C-PTSD flashback

Ah, I just started this book on C-PTSD again (I first started reading it at a time when I felt like I was continuing to be traumatized and now might be a better time). It reminds me that what I experienced today is an emotional flashback of some sort and I guess that is kind of comforting: “Emotional flashbacks are also accompanied by intense arousals of the fight/flight instinct, along with hyperarousal of the sympathetic nervous system, the half of the nervous system that controls arousal and activation. When fear is the dominant emotion in a flashback the person feels extremely anxious, panicky or even suicidal. When despair predominates, a sense of profound numbness, paralysis and desperation to hide may occur.”

I should clarify that I have experienced suicidal ideation and fantasies over a very small fraction of my life. It is not a common thing for me but all this trauma around my dog is like the key that triggers it hugely these days and I don’t know how to ever unravel it. I wonder if EMDR therapy might help but as it is C-PTSD and not PTSD I am dealing with it is not like there are many specific events that come to mind that outweigh all the others in terms of trauma. I was just thinking so much of my childhood wounding came with an intense desire for things to be different, to make them different at any costs, and my orimary motivation for all of this was just loving my mother to the ends of the earth and wishing despairingly for her to be happy, for me to be understood, and to feel loved. Acknowledging that my mother had something to do with the trauma I experienced is actually hard; I think it is a different situation than just being unloved and abandoned as a child and then wanting to get away from it all. It is complicated because attached to the wounds are this huge unrelenting love that would do anything to make things better though that is what I was always powerless to do… and I liked to escape into fantasy. I still do, though I haven’t done it consciously (like reading fantasy and r playing video games) in a while. Fantasy was one of the only tools I could come up with to deal with my pain; I only wish I had known then that it can backfire…

I think it is important to remember that C-PTSD is often diagnosed as a whole lot of other things though sometimes they occur together. Keep it simple, focus on what is most relevant. Though I have a lot of symptoms of ADHD I think probably that is actually C-PTSD. The author, Pete Walker, says that this, and OCD, are sometimes more accurately described as fixated flight responses to trauma. That feels so perceptive and so true in my case. Depressive and dissociative disorders, on the other hand, can be seen as fixated freeze responses to trauma. That is cool. Oh, I am remembering that I love psychology.

I think probably I do not have a depressive or anxiety disorder exactly but those symptoms are also C-PTSD in disguise and that is what needs to be treated, at the core. If I tried to treat depression or anxiety without considering C-PTSD it probably wouldn’t be very effective. I *am* neurodivergent, though sometimes C-PTSD is misdiagnosed as autism, and being neurodivergent with C-PTSD has to be one of the hardest things ever…