Does your CPTSD go into a kind of remission in cycles?

[Coco]

I have a cyclical pattern:

Something will happen and it will trigger the body feelings. I will be slammed with intense physical terror, I will dissociate, depersonalize, stop eating, chain smoke, stop being able to sleep, lose touch with the physical world, have intrusive memories and emotional flashbacks, become an absolute emotional and mental wreck. Typically these episodes drive me to seek help through books and other media. I have rarely sought talk therapy and when I have it's either been re-traumatising or too expensive.

Then I will find things to settle myself down, and the whole thing will stop. It seems to go into a kind of remission, like all the overt trauma symptoms are repressed again, driven back down into the body. Then I will spend a long period of time numbed, on a kind of autopilot, with low-level depression, boredom, lack of self, codependent behaviors, mental obsession over people who have hurt me, but more functional in terms of societal norms.

Then something will happen to trigger me, and I stay in that hyper triggered state for weeks.

I actually discovered I have CPTSD YEARS ago, but have never known what to do about it. This is very interesting to me because it illustrates the denial and the hopelessness. I didn't bother to do much about it.

This latest bout has driven me to really look at it and stop expecting it just to go away if I ignore it enough. The strange thing is these bouts of living in an inner warzone are beneficial, because they absolutely force me to address it.

I am hoping that this time I can continue to fight for my own health rather than revert back into the deadness of numbing.

I'm wondering if others have cycles like this, where the PTSD is triggered and really hammers you, then settles down.

[Lostgirl74]

I'm new here.  In fact, this is my first post.  But what you describe is EXACTLY why I came here looking for answers.  I live a life of cycles, where things are 'normal' and then something happens to trigger me and I go into a tailspin.  I'm hopefully coming to the end of my most recent tailspin now, since things seem to be calming down again.  This current situation has really opened my eyes to how damaged I am from years of abuse that I didn't properly deal with, and have allowed myself to get into relationships and situations that compound the problem.    I know this is going to be a long road to recovery, but I'm determined to make it this time.  I wish you the best in your journey as well.

[meursault]

Yeah,  I had lots of years like that.  When I found my current therapist, I said "I'm either going to deal with this or die trying."  It's been close to two years since I first saw her, and I haven't had any remission since.  It's been hard, but she reassures me that as long as I can remain stable (I haven't done very well on that front), this is the hard work that needs to be done.  As she said:  "Real therapy like this is brutally hard work, which is why most people avoid doing it." 

Meursault

[Eyessoblue]

Yes this is me too, just before xmas I felt like I was getting better felt calm and able to sleep better etc then about 3 weeks  later I crashed again and everything too much, the last 2 days have been horrendous, no counselling this week so don't know if that has something to do with it or not, my brain feels like it's left my body and my anxiety is crazy today, I can't make a simple decision or do a simple task without getting it wrong. I don't know what has triggered me which is annoying but I guess simple things can cause 'triggers' that I'm not even aware of just so frustrating.

[woodsgnome]

I have cycles, for sure; but I don't ever feel like the cptsd is very far from surfacing. Usually unexpectedly, as an unwanted visitor.

The most bothersome part is some of this seems self-inflicted. Thoughts come racing in about stuff that happened decades ago and it'll ruin whatever I'm doing at the moment. Then I turn on the coping efforts that in turn tires me out...so yes, there's an inane cyclic nature to this.

I had a rather unique creative career which often drew the symptoms down to tolerable levels. Several factors led to my retiring from those ventures, however; and I've noticed a difference. It's like my destructive memories have found freedom to morph into even worse thoughts and I go into self-sabotage, even with no outside triggers. But if I DO run into outside triggers, as happened a couple of weeks ago at a social event (I so need people and I'm so afraid of people) that nearly left me in collapse from which I'm only now turning the corner back to a tolerable level of sanity.

Umm, the best I can come up with at this stage is to try some different forms of meditation, where I don't deny thoughts, but learn to brush them aside, send them back into the outside, wherever/however they showed up in the first place. I'm sure many here know that feeling as well. Knowing the thoughts will come, I'm trying to first accept them, but more immediately let them go. However, I tend to have good intentions sometimes, then get hung up on the someday routine where I know that someday I'll get it, and the technique will save me. Techniques are fine, but I want genuine peaceful feelings, and they're the hardest to attain. Sometimes when it feels like I'll make it, huge dissociation style effects stifle the feelings that seem so close and I revert back to numbness as my operating form of madness.

Motivation is very hard--I have no close friends. I'm trying to reach out and have even signed up to attend an 'intensive' sort of workshop coming up; it derives from a previous one I attended 20 years ago(!) and seemed to garner positive outcomes, for a while. So I'm trying, yes; the back story is the remote life I do live is, typical of a 'freeze' type, peaceful and serene enough of the time to feel less drawn to, or fatigued by trying, to find a better flow to handling the cycles.

Thanks for posting this, Coco--it touches on an important, but often hidden, aspect of this world we've fallen into.

[joyful]

I get the cycles too. I'll be good (numb, dissociated, but happy enough on the surface) for a time, then get triggered and I'll be out of whack for who knows how long.
I'm sorry I don't really have an intelligent comment to add, just me too.

[Blueberry]

I get cycles, too, have been doing for years. You describe it so aptly, Coco! I read it yesterday and thought "Yes! That's what has been going on the past little while". When I was in non-trauma therapy it was actually sometimes worse than in daily life beforehand. But there are people who say it gets worse before it gets better...
Now that I've been in trauma therapy for a couple of years my down phases are shorter and I don't fall quite as far.

Yes, Woodsgnome, I know all about the coping efforts that tire me out. I'm glad I'm not alone with this. That means it's a symptom, not a personal failure of Blueberry (yay!!).

[sanmagic7]

yes, as much as i hate to admit it, as much as i sometimes  feel like i've got this all 'managed' it'll hit me again, and my brain goes whacko with ruminations, anxiety, and just plain feeling crummy.  i don't know how much of this might be physical, but i do know that they go hand in hand.

my latest has been picturing myself at my ex's funeral, getting up to speak, and spewing about how awful he was that no one saw!  the justice/revenge cycle.  that one hits me especially hard, and it seems like it's never very far away.  i absolutely hate it!  ugh!

[Coco]

sanmagic, maybe it would be cool to set up some kind of makeshift pew, dress in black, imagine the mourners at his funeral, put yourself there with your feelings (we're good at this imagination stuff!) and physically actually say all those things! Gesticulate! Shout it! Spit on his grave! Cry while you talk if you need to, or scream. Act that recurring fantasy out once and for all, and see if that gets it out of your muscles and cells so it doesn't have to play in a loop any more. Everything you want to say is no doubt the truth. Maybe you deserve the experience of actually doing it. We automatically resist these impulses in us but by jingo, all the things we want to say to/about these people are valid!! We deserve the chance, even in the privacy of our own homes.

That's the kind of thing I'm going to be doing from now on, to release some of this from my system. How many millions of times have we choked our expression, controlled ourselves, betrayed ourselves, not spoken up, not acted out, not said or done what our bodies needed us to, berated ourselves for feeling, critiqued & rejected our own natural responses? We're ANIMALS! Not cyborgs. I'll be buggered if I'm going to continue to pay the physical penalty for other ppls' actions for all eternity. I know you are much, much more experienced and well versed in therepeutic options than I am, so I say this in all deference to your wisdom. It's a fun idea. I might role play saying some of the things my mind keeps saying to my sister obsessively, see if it makes a difference. I'm in an experimental mood.

OK so it's really, really good to know others experience this cyclical pattern. The challenge for me is that when it all goes down into the murky depths and my body isn't behaving as though a lion's about to eat it 24/7, I don't want to revisit all these topics of trauma, because it's so heavy. I want to think about happy things and give myself a break from it all. When the trauma is triggered, it's ALL I can think about obsessively, without control. When it goes away I don't want to just spend my whole life chasing it down wallowing in it. But if history's anything to go by, simply 'getting on with my life' doesn't work either. All this has to be integrated so I'm healthy in the downtimes too. I'm confident we'll all find our way.

Many thanks to all respondents, it's a true comfort and I enjoyed the ways you all described it.

[sanmagic7]

coco, what a great idea!  my therapeutic experience aside, i sure as * don't have all the answers to this, but i do believe you've opened the door on a new technique for me to use.  i've had ritual funerals in my journal at home, images of funeral flowers and wrote all that crap out, but saying it out loud like that is something i never thought of.  thank you so much.  i'm going to find a good energy day and do just that.  i have a bunch of snow globes he's given me over the years, and i'm going to set them up as the mourners, in rows, as if they're in the pews, and speak to them just like you suggested.  spitting on them sounds great!  maybe even breaking them.  this may be why i kept them all this time. 

big hug to you for this suggestion.  i soooo appreciate it!  together, man, we're gonna beat the crapola out of this beast!

[Coco]

That's great, sanmagic! **happy, safe hugs**

I feel like actually doing and saying these things out loud in safe ways could be super therapeutic, because so much of the trauma is body memory....  just writing or thinking it is still repressive.

[Coco]

 

When I have been badly triggered and it lasts for weeks or months, and I'm full of adrenaline and craziness, in a way it is beautiful because it's like more parts of me come on board and communicate with my main consciousness. I have an urgency to find out what's wrong, plus it's like all these protective defensive walls disappear within me and suddenly I can see and feel and remember all the things I have always been squashing down.

It's like I am on the spectrum of D.I.D, which would make sense as CPTSD is a dissociative disorder. I know we all have subpersonalities and things.... the problem with having one tiny sliver of my awareness available to me, with huge amounts of memory and identity repressed because it all felt so violent and overwhelming, is that I am missing parts of the wholeness of me. I hope these sentences make sense.

I had a main consciousness in charge of daily life and it has been through many phases. For a long time it was full amnesia. My memory was wiped. I couldn't access any longterm memory and my short term memory was virtually non-existant too.

Each time all the stuff I had repressed was triggered, it was very painful and very dangerous because at times I was very suicidal, but at least more parts of me were online, active, communicating..... at least locked-up memories were being dissolved back up into consciousness and I was less split. I've been amazed at some of the things that I'd completely forgotten!

After an episode of the bad CPTSD symptoms being triggered, and more memory surfacing and more of my pain and stuff coming out of hiding and into my awareness, I develop more understanding and compassion for myself. It gets better each time there has been a big onslaught because being totally shut down in consciousness was bad. I had no self. I still have no self but I guess it is getting better.

I don't seem to have separate identities as in D.I.D but I do have, say, child parts, and when I am in a big CPTSD mode sometimes I can hear a part of me screaming in pain and frustration. But they are just parts of me stuck in time. My child parts don't really want to talk to me but I did go shopping with my inner children and bought them some special things they liked.

When it all settles down, each time, I emerge a bit more whole. A bit more aware, and oddly, a bit more resolute and confident and clearer in my mind.

But when the strong triggered feelings die down and my body stabilises, I lose touch with a lot of my inner aspects and I go back to a kind of 'sleep' where I just dissociate a fair bit, and get through my busy stressful life of working, studying, household duties etc.

Many of my symptoms come out in self-care failures.... I don't feel hunger or thirst so literally forget to eat and drink. For some reason I avoid sleep, I have a huge block to going to bed and massive difficulty settling down to sleep. I don't think I have bad dreams - I never, ever remember dreams.

Lack of food and lack of sleep impair me and they are signs to me that I am not in a loving relationship with myself.

I don't know how to change these habits. Any ideas? I have not been to therapy and I am scared of therapy. I don't want someone else to rip the protective bandages off the stuff I'm holding down. I don't want a witness, I don't want to be hurt or vulnerable again. I do not trust anyone and refuse to put myself in that position ever again. Times I have tried therapy have been damaging. I am very scared of my CPTSD because I think it might make me be fired from my job or make people stop loving me or make me homeless or make me lose everything.

I hide from everyone what I go through and I appear to be very competent and my partner obviously knows that I get extremely traumatized for a month or so every now and again because he lives with me, but nobody at work knows. It's very tiring and scary having to hide.

I promise myself I will get enough sleep and then when it is a sensible bed time something takes over and I keep myself up for many hours and don't allow myself to go to bed.

Night time was scary and violent when I was little but can that be the whole reason?

I am always scared of being toppled over by my CPTSD when it gets big and loud and takes over - I avoid it and want it to never happen again but I know that if I avoid everything in the calm times, this pattern of big waves of it might continue forever or for a long time.

I'm so confused and I really want to improve.

Maybe I can get a simpler job I don't really care about and travel to a special place in a big city that specialises in CPTSD? But that would be so disruptive and scary (changing the job)

I'm sorry this is so disjointed and all over the place.

[Coco]

Parts of me aren't communicating with each other.

One part wants to quit smoking and learn how to eat food and have showers and do housework and eat and sleep. It tells me all day that is what we are going to do.

But the part in charge of what I actually DO do, doesn't want to quit smoking or have showers or do housework or eat or sleep. It just wants to do what it has to do to survive then it wants to sit down and dissociate.

I need to find a way to get these two on board. The part of me who carries out the actual actions I take, is automatic and unconscious, on the same level of my awareness that knows where all the light switches are in my house without having to check.

Maybe mindfulness is the key. But mindfulness is like an eyeball trying to look at itself without a mirror. How can a mind become mindful of itself? Particularly when it has so many protective mechanisms and so many disordered ways of thinking?

I refuse to accept that I'm powerless and doomed!

[sanmagic7]

yeah, coco, speaking of cycles, i just got triggered into one right now.  having to be 'perfect', every time i find another part of my c-ptsd that hasn't been addressed, i go into a tailspin, want to fix it right away, and become very anxious.

i just now realized that this anxiety i'm feeling right now is due to my inner critic, which is a surprise to me because i haven't fully consciously been aware of it before now.  part of my coping mechanisms has been to deny criticizing myself.  it's saying that i failed once again.

here come the tears.  will this never stop?!!!  i wish i could be glad about finding out these things like you are, seeing them as uncovering another piece of the puzzle.  i know that's what it is, but to me it feels like i haven't done what i was supposed to do, which is be perfect.

thanks for starting this.  i didn't mean to hijack, but it just came out.   

i wish you'd had better experiences with therapy.  what a drag!  i can relate.  i'm the opposite in that i trust everyone - well, not so much now, but i've always been trusting.  too much, i know that now.  it's so hard to find a balance in this at times. 

[Coco]

You're not hijacking sanmagic, I need you. I need you to show up and talk, to be here with me, regardless of the content. That's why we're here, we need each other. I need to know others' experiences. That in itself is helpful - the experience doesn't have to be pretty, the realness and truth of it is what's important. Anything that 'just comes out' is a blessing to me. In a wider world where we are misunderstood and silent, we can hold space for each other here, and recognise ourselves in each other. So please don't apologise. I'm grateful that you shared.

It makes perfect sense that a part of you would become highly anxious when it discovers an element of CPTSD that hasn't been addressed. That's a very reasonable response beyond your control. It's extremely scary. You've worked so hard for so long. The ramifications of more CPTSD to deal with are huge and heartbreaking. Despair and overwhelm would be a standard response. But of course the perfectionist critic sees that response as a failure, as well as the fact that you have CPTSD at all as a failure. I go through the same sequence of internal events. It's this whole thing about lack of internal co-operation, too. There are STILL parts of us stubbornly refusing to heal after all this time and all this opportunity?

It makes perfect sense that another part of you would shield you from full awareness of the self criticism. You would be getting the emotional flagellation of the self criticism without necessarily being fully aware of the criticism itself. That's pretty normal.

I think it's possible that the part of you who wants to be perfect is really just a concentrated, intensified aspect of the drive within you to be fully healed and free. Its strategy is to bully us into being healed. I guess its intentions are probably good, and it developed for good reasons.

In transpersonal psychology, it's accepted that in all humans there are a cast of subpersonalities, like the critic, maybe a martyr, a child, some protectors, a businessperson, a queen, a mystic, a self-harmer, a saboteur, whatever. These subpersonalities are often in conflict. They want different things, are driven by different things. They take over when triggered and perform an action that other parts of the self don't agree with.

I'm wondering if it would be helpful for us to start recognising these parts of ourselves as 'part of me' instead of 'the full me'.

Part of me wants to smoke and doesn't want to eat. Part of me wants to quit smoking and wants to nourish the body. They're currently at war.

Part of me hates myself for not having fixed my CPTSD, part of me shields me from that criticism, part of me wants to create a new life, part of me just wants to be dead. Part of me is driven to improve, part of me has totally given up. Part of me thinks the prognosis is bad, part of me insists that there can be good outcomes. Part of me wants to prioritise healing and make the effort to travel to the city and do things like EMDR, part of me just wants to forget about it all.

I also think that part of me very close to my everyday consciousness is extremely protective and has the role of shielding me from all negative elements of the CPTSD. It doesn't let me hear the inner criticism clearly. It doesn't let me feel. It's also possible that the perfectionist wants to survive so it can continue fulfilling its role, so is sneaky and invisible and slides around shoving emotional whiplash at us without words, so it is hard to detect.

Bingo. The part of me who doesn't want me to eat, sleep, exercise, be healthy, is protecting me from being inside the body. The body holds memory. If I stay disconnected from the body I don't have the memory. I don't have to know what I know and feel what I feel. I don't have to be present with the muscle and cellular primal emotional wordless memory. The part of me who takes over, hijacks my positive intentions and keeps me in this cycle of self neglect, is my friend. It's trying to help me keep it all together so I can function as an adult. It's obeying an internal command to prioritise day-to-day psychological stability over anything else. This has been very important because I have dependents and I absolutely have to remain calm and normal for them.

So now I wonder if I can change that internal mandate. If I can access the inner 'control center' and create a new mission for the parts. I'd have to convince my subconscious that it's better to be physically strong that physically weak and dissociated. I could put the case to them that not eating means I can't think clearly which inhibits my ability to function well in the outside world.

I hope you begin to feel better and are soothing and loving yourself sanmagic xx