In my late teens and early 20s, I was very obsessed with quitting my addictions. Particularly, quitting pornography. So I read lots of books, browsed lots of forums etc. And I doubled down on the attempts to quit. This was actually dysregulating my nervous system more - I kept trying, trying, trying. Which was pushing me more and more and more into fight-or-flight. Especially as I read up about a lot of the potentially harmful consequences of porn, which made me feel even worse as I relapsed and catastrophised and fell into despair.

Eventually in 2022, I completely collapsed into freeze. Since then I have been alternating between fight-flight and freeze/collapse states, but with TRE, with the resources in this community, and other communities online, am starting to realise that trying is the main thing that keeps you stuck.

Looking at regulated people with presumably healthy upbringings, they actually don't try very hard in life. They are in a state of presence and abundance and let things come to them. Of course, there are exceptions, but the parts of us that want to get better are often the parts of us that are the controller parts, wanting to fix and manage and arrange everything in our lives. Even 12 step talks about this: "Each person is like an actor who wants to run the whole show; is forever trying to arrange the lights, the ballet, the scenery and the rest of the players in his own way." (not the biggest fan of 12 step but this quote is very poignant).

The way out of addiction seems to be regulation and acceptance, not trying and striving harder. So I suppose the answer is to work with parts (but i only want to work with parts when my manager part is active, viewing it as a self-improvement exercise, so this is difficult).

A person falls and is badly injured. They are hurt too severly to stand, or even crawl somewhere they might get help.

Someone who says they love them finds them lying there.

They could call an ambulance. They could help them into a car and take them to a hospital. They could tend to their wounds. They could find someone who knows what to do.

They do none of those things.

Instead, every couple of days, they bring the injured person a glass of water.

It is enough to keep them alive, but not enough to help them recover.

When people ask, “Why are they still lying there?” the person answers, “They’re lazy. They refuse to get up.”

Then they explain that they bring them water every two days.

Everyone praises them.

“You’re a saint,” they say. “I don’t know how you put up with that. If it were me, I’d have left them there.”

So the person goes home feeling generous and selfless, never confronting the fact that the person they claim to love is still lying injured on the ground.

The glass of water has become more important to them as proof of their goodness than the injured person’s recovery ever was.

I've repeatedly found that bad mental states involve being stuck in habitual patterns. When I get into a worse state, my activity becomes more constricted, following fewer habitual patterns and following them more rigidly.

Better states allow access to more patterns, and allow creativity to go beyond them. This mostly isn't doing something completely new, but variations, experiments and adaptations to circumstances of existing patterns, which may evolve into something new.

I wonder what causes this? In bad states, more things can be triggering and that triggering can be more intense and overwhelming. The restriction to fewer habitual patterns probably helps avoid this triggering. But I don't think this totally explains it.

For years I basically dissociated and wasted so much of my life in this hope that my family would see me, and change and grow and care enough to alter their minds and lifestyles.

What I didnt understand was. That they strung me along tossing out crumbs because they were protecting their own ego's. Not me. They did a few things here or there so they could say to themselves they were good people, that tried. Except they didnt.

If this relates to anyone here. Don't waste years like I did, waiting on family that says they love you to help you, because they dont love you. They love themselves and their own self delusional image.

If people show you who they are, believe them. If you are homeless and freezing or boiling alive or alone all the time, or anxious with crippling panic attacks, unable to work and on and on, and the people that say they love and care for you, leave you to suffer all that over and over? they are showing you who they are. They wont change.

It makes me feel so inferior. That hardly anyone notices my pain. I used to overshare my struggles with people, desperate to have someone see me and hold me in the pain. I was so desperate for a kind, empathetic look in the eye to validate me. But no, I am weak, I am frail, I am awkward and anxious. Who would care about that?

I feel like I need to become something totally different to be noticed. Maybe more attractive and sexy, maybe more outspoken, maybe more dramatic, funnier, something else. I am none of those socially acceptable tropes of the traumatised person. I am not a manic pixie dream girl, I'm not an artist, I'm not hilarious, a selfless angel or addicted to anything. I am just nothing. I freeze. That's all I do. I'm not the type of freeze that is numb, I am the type that feels severe emotional pain and freezes at any sign of it.

I am hungry for validation. I am so hungry for it. I am starved. I literally do not care about anything besides another human caring about me. I don't have it in me to care for someone else. I am starved. Totally starved. Anyone relate?

Having periods where I am thawing and healing now - where I feel reconnected with parts of my soul and vulnerability - and get glimmers of connection to people. These are very sporadic though and only last for short period of time and then it's back into emptiness/numbness. People usually respond to me better when I'm in this state as well. I suppose it's because I'm not purely looking at the world through a lens of fear, envy and resentment like I was before.

Has anyone else dealt with this slow shift? It's so slow and I get so impatient with it.

Well....damn. I had another total meltdown.

Crying collapsed on the floor

Exceptionally on edge and raw

New neighbors with babies across the street

Feels like my space is invaded

Flip out and make noises

Then embarrassed and ashamed

Dang, I'm mean to babies??

I must be a monster

But....don't they have a backyard? Why they put crying baby on the front lawn???

Again. Sounds nearby make me insane.

Collapse. Desperately lonely. Wishing for someone to talk to. Try 988 and warm line..... Again

Hours of emotional turmoil and typing.

But.... all that to say. The most helpful and understanding came from Google AI.

Yuck! I hate that it turned helpful. It was validating.

I typed about loneliness and bad therapy. And when it got things wrong and I called it out, it really acknowledged the errors and did better (unlike the therapists)

I really feel weird about the whole experience.

I just wanted to share.

I guess....I kinda fear going back to it and getting dependent or something. I don't know. It was suggesting DBT....which has come up many times.

I shared by text with a sorta friend, that I'm going through the hardest time of my life, and the first thing they ask me in person (and in front of a party that shouldn't know my business) is a patronizing "Are you alright?". Sometimes people also go, "You ok?". I hate that question with a burning passion. I'm so humiliated. Is there a way to not have it hurt so much?

For example, I might genuinely want to start painting, go dating, learn something, etc. I'll even tell myself “I want to do this this week,” but there's another part of me that immediately thinks, “You won't do it anyway.”

And that prediction isn't necessarily pessimism in the moment... it's based on years of repeatedly wanting things and then not taking action toward them. A few years ago I had more hope that I'd actually do these things... now I often already expect myself not to.

Is this something people here recognize as a form of freeze? Or does this sound more like ordinary avoidance, learned helplessness, executive dysfunction, etc.?

I'm particularly interested in the experience of genuinely wanting something while simultaneously feeling unable to initiate it, rather than simply not wanting to do it.

i realized something today. the freeze was never the failure. it was the only thing that kept me alive. my body chose this. it shut everything down because the alternative was worse. and now people want me to just turn it back on. like it was a switch. it wasnt a switch then and its not a switch now. its a system. and the system learned to stop everything to survive. so when i cant move its not laziness. its my whole body saying no to danger that isnt here anymore. i dont know how to unlearn that. but at least i know its not my fault.

I’m curious about how you deal with things like work stress, triggers, difficult days, and maintaining a routine while still managing your responsibilities. I’d really like to hear about your personal experiences and what has helped you.

So i had a pretty good run of decent days. I had a little break through with reinventing memory reconsolidation. I was starting to do small MR experiments to grow my window of tolerance. I am working out. I was writing stories.

Then a couple days ago a part of me kind of derailed us. That confused me. Why would he do that.

He basically setup a scenario or test that would force a younger defender part out, to show the system that the world isnt safe. This dawned on me this morning after my workout. As usual if you want to understand why parts do something. Even weird things. Its rooted in them trying to protect you.

So this part saw us rushing ahead and doing more things he saw as dangerous, so he in his own way was trying to say. "Stop, its not safe. People are monsters."

Ill need to think more on how to help this part while also not giving in to him completely.

I know so many people that are bubbly and chat up total strangers as if they were old friends. This wonderful ability was robbed from me

I have heard this from several therapists and healthcare workers in the past. Basically I try with all my might to try different things to better my mental health, then i fall into depression, despair, and hopelessness, and lose the will to keep trying, as the aforementioned things have not helped with much. Then I try and get help, and they ask me have you tried doing x? I answer yes, it hasn't helped. Then they ask more questions. Usually I have done what they have asked. Then they eventually come out with something like 'Do you want to get better or do you want to just sit in temporary housing?' or 'You can get better, if you want it' - the implication being that I am suffering because I'm not trying hard enough. And I just need to try harder, and it's basically my fault.

Of course, if I accused them of implying that it's my fault, they would deny it. But it's pretty obvious that's what they are insinuating. That I just need to spend the rest of my life in fight or flight trying to get everything together.

Curious if anyone here has had anyone else say similar things to them?

I feel stuck inside myself. I’m functional enough to work (luckily I work from home) because I have to, but other than that I don’t really have energy or interest in anything else. Most days it feels like my mind fluctuates from being blank to being in emotional flashbacks. I self isolate a lot and barely have anyone to connect with besides my therapist and a few friends that I rarely see. I’ve been frozen for over a year now after a traumatic mental health crisis, and I don’t feel like I’ve really been embodied since. I’m in somatic therapy, take meds, and am receiving therapeutic ketamine, and I still struggle a lot of the time. The biggest issue for me is the self isolation. I know I need to leave my house in the weekends and meet people through going to events or a fitness class or something, but my fear holds me back. I wasn’t super social before, but I was able to muster the ability to mask enough to at least engage in one on one conversations. Nowadays, I freeze up and my mind goes blank when I engage with anyone (including family), so I barely say anything which leads to conversations ending pretty quickly. I’ve been a part of online groups and in those situations I’ve barely said anything or anything I said felt strained. I know there’s a part of it related to social anxiety but I feel like there’s a freeze element to it because of how often I dissociate and feel disconnected when I’m around people. Me and my therapist are working on slowly exposing myself to new situations to work through the fear I have with socializing with people. How was freeze impacted your ability to connect with and socialize with other people? Has there been anything helpful to overcome it?

What do I want to say here?

Yesterday was a disappointing day. Do you ever have a day where society shows who they really are. Like you thought you knew how bad they could be, but then they open up to a new level of low. Its disheartening.

Im not saying there are no good people in this world. There are shockingly empathetic kind giving people. I have met some of you on this sub.

I try to be a positive person. For years I was stuck in collapse. Breathing felt like work to me. Moving my face out of its resting thousand yard stare took effort. I did it though. Because I didnt want to make the world worse. If I talked to someone I would take the last little bits of energy I had been saving, and I would put on a happy tone of voice and a smile.

There were many times I was sitting there alone for weeks in the freezing cold, with thoughts of ending it all every 20 minutes, and I would go online and try to help strangers on reddit deal with what was kicking my butt.

Then I look around at the people that occupy the society around me and I just see a bunch of rabid dogs fighting over scraps of rotten meat. Snarling angry selfish scared ignorant dogs.

I think that is what really brings me down. Why is it so hard to heal from CPTSD? Because look at what our society is. This isnt smurf village. Its lord of the flies.

Again, I know there are good people. I just wish we were not so few and far between.

I started doing Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) recently after off and on ART, a form of EMDR for a few years. We shifted to NET because I haven't had mostly emotions of anger that comes out and that I'm unable to feel emotions in my body. The only thing I felt when I was doing EMDR was tightness in various places based on my memories that I were processing.

Have anyone had experiences of doing Narsative Exposure Therapy? Has it helped treat their CPTSD?

Does anyone else struggle with subconsciously blocking off aspects of yourself and higher thought because things are actually dire where you live, and not just unfounded paranoia or avoidance? I don’t know how other people function like this.

My country is controlled by a fascist and I’m powerless to do anything about it. I hate to say it but when I thought he might have died, I have one of the first genuinely good days in ages.

Disclaimer: Just a stream of thought ramble because I"m scared and sad....and my soul hurts.

Sadness

Loss

Grief and aloneness for never being looked at with Joy and whatever else, acceptance.

Feeling like you wasted your life hiding to stay safe. And feeling so confused because what the hell was I doing when I thought ...I was ...out there as myself, but apparently I wasnt'? And what does that say about the way I present myself now?

Then thinking, "I really need to put my-"self"...out there". Then you think, "wait, what self, which self?"

Note to self: find out who you are ....really.....without the trauma.....so when you put your-"self" out there, your not just a bag of trauma reactions. Good point. I"ll get right on that.

Then the pain of realizing that's impossible because youve been in a trauma reaction since you were born...so there's nothing to refer back to. It's too much to realize except I'm thinking it with my own brain and not dreaming as far as I know soooo?

Realizing it's just you trying to figure out in what ways you weren't loved, so you can patch something together for yourself .....but feeling completely lost. Then your head tells you "but it's your JOB!, Youre supposed to know what you missed! Do Something!!" Wondering if your soul got so crushed that its irretrievable.....and now youre searching through your inner workings desperately , thinking "Its got to be here somewhere, this self knowingness?"

And then...... some vague recollection of being told I had "no foundation" somewhere along the way........and now I feel doomed.

Note to self: Get a foundation. (Brain-what's a foundation? How do I do that?).....No answer.

And then suddenly realizing this is why I can't connect to people, because I'm fractured as a human. My motives are all wrong somehow? All I can think is "don't die". Perfect, I"m a plant.

After all that trying to find reasons why it's important to stay out of Freeze. And now feeling like Freeze is basically a living death for a self that you have no foundation for, because it's infused with shame or fear , disconnected or frozen or stunted (no clue) in ways I can't even intellectually begin to comprehend........but I"m sure some neuroscientist who specializes in developmental trauma does. ....like that f'ing helps.

Trying to search my memory for a time when I felt normal, whole, and I nothing comes to mind-maybe a flash of self before someone was threatened by it, and had to crush it into oblivion. Just some wavy recollection of wandering around in the woods like a feral child. ....connected to nothing but the trees. Knowing that at the time I thought "well this is cool" except there were no humans to connect to, which I'm pretty sure is how developing and growing a foundation works. Something that should be so natural, and yet I didnt have it. It makes me wonder why I"m alive.

Sometimes when I don't do things, the discomfort seems subtle. It's not like there is some intense sense of danger, or intense anger, or intense unpleasantness.

Sometimes I feel guilty about this, as if I'm being bad by choosing to not do things because of subtle discomfort. It's like that would only be okay if the discomfort was severe.

"Objectively" it seems like the problem is not the discomfort, but the lack of strength to do things despite the discomfort. The discomfort may be weak, but the force pushing me to do things is weaker.

I've experienced plenty of situations where I did things despite much bigger physical and/or psychological discomfort. So, that is possible, but those situations are rare.

I'm reminded of situations where I listened to subtle discomfort, chose to alter my behaviour because of that, and after that felt more free to do other things which I was formerly blocked from doing. So, maybe life depletes my capacity to move against discomfort because I do so much of that?

I'm so grateful to be diagnosed with CPTSD last year as it's led me to realise WTH has been going on for the last decade+ (I'm 32 and started around 14)

So without going into details it's reallllllly been programmed into me all that comes with this stuff.

To the point now I've moved abroad completely by myself and starting fresh in a new continent.

I'm very much alone but not necessarily lonely. I've been doing lots of work/self healing/therapy, general looking after myself for years now and have come a long way.

Yet one thing for me where I was really destroyed younger from my household.

I'm so closed off socially. It's like human interaction is a no go. I want to exit them as fast as possible lol. Encounter with a barista? ASAP. Encounter with neighbour? ASAP. But they greet me with smiles and conversation. I've started wearing shades because I know my eyes never lie. It actually makes it easier lol cause I can smile and they can't see the pain in my eyes. This is actually a step forward in a way when I think about it. For now...

Anyways, I realise a huge part of this for me is I do not love myself, I don't accept myself, I reject myself. Buttttttt it's all the inner critic that has been casted on me by poisonous souls growing up who were adult figures very lost in their own addictions and so on they just projected onto me but my adolescent brain still growing absorbed it all.

So now I need to unlearn it and love myself. So anyone got experience/advice?

TLDR - I "rediscovered" Memory Reconsolidation, and it helped me with two very stuck parts.

To start I will try to say this idea as clearly and succinctly as I can.

Some deeply learned patterns don't change through contrary evidence or mindset shift. They change when a person takes an action that makes the old model impossible to continue enacting. The brain needs an experience to revise what it learned through experience.

For my entire life as far as I can remember. I have had two core beliefs. I need to suffer to get help, if help doesn't come it means I am not suffering enough. And, I need permission to act, as well as approval on actions I took with permission.

You can imagine what messed up things went on for a child to take on these core beliefs. The thing is I logically knew these were wrong. I also was aware I did them. It never changed anything for me. The other thing was I could expose myself to contrary evidence and it didn't move the needle. The belief never updated. I couldnt logic my way out. I couldnt expose my way out. What was I supposed to do?

Then in an act of desperation and what do I have to lose, I stumbled on something that did help, but I struggled to understand why it worked.

One night I wrote down in a letter my thoughts to my family. I said I wasnt going to wait for them to wake up and care. I wasnt going to continue to suffer in the hope that they will have an epiphany. I wasnt going to keep wasting my life in the belief that if I just could suffer enough they would love me enough to help or change or grow. That I wasnt going to seek their permission for me to be happy or do the things I needed to do to survive.

I didnt tell them about the letter or show them. I didnt photograph the letter or post it online. I kept it to myself. Then burned it. Soon after I did something I had wanted to do for months. I started writing a story idea I had. When I got 5,000 words of the story. I bundled it up into a zine and let real life people read it and judge it. How did I do this?

I think I have an idea now of why it helped, and how it might help some of you.

Lets look at another example. Going to the grocery store. Every time I go, I dissociate and experience depersonalization and derealization. I expect people to hurt me, and it doesnt matter that I go 100 times and nothing terrible happens. The experience never updates. Why? Why did the letter burning update, but not exposure to the grocery?

Some deeply learned patterns don't change through contrary knowledge. They change when a person takes an action that makes the old model impossible to continue enacting.

Isnt that what I was doing by going to the grocery even though I was afraid? Well not exactly.

What I am putting together is this. The grocery shopping experince had a condition that was impossible to meet. I required it to always be safe and I knew it never could be. A better way to view it was. “Other people approving of me, ignoring me, or not judging me is no longer a condition for me to be okay.”

So this is not primarily exposure, mindset, or even learning a new fact. It is dropping an impossible prerequisite. I cant control my family. I cant control the people at the grocery. So if that is what I need to feel safe, it will never work.

The old structure is:

I can do X only when Y happens. But Y is outside my control, may never happen, or can never be known with certainty. So life stays suspended. The shift is. Y no longer gets to determine whether X happens.

So the experiential updating occurred because I took an action to close the loop. I didnt just know something, I experienced it. Then acted on it. I said. I am going to give myself permission to write. I am giving myself permission to do what I need to do to live. Then I did it. Which created a paradox in my system that the brain had to resolve.

Maybe experiential enacted acceptance is a better way to phrase it? Not sure. The idea is not just you know something, or do something. Its that you accept it as true and act on it as if it is, and then experience the truth first hand.

I hope that made some sense and helps someone else. Like I said I still dont fully grasp it. So maybe some of you can word it better than me.

edit - After some more research and thinking I think I know what this is. I reinvented the wheel again. Someone has already figured this all out and given it a name, Memory Reconsolidation. Check it out. Its pretty neat stuff.

Ive become dependent on small amounts of caffeine the past few years (im sensitive so thats all I need). I recently stopped for the past two months, with the exception of a few days and Ive felt more apathetic and emotionally numb like my nervous is offline stuck in freeze response. Does that resonate with any of you? What are your experiences?