Living with CPTSD is a Never-Ending Checklist Living with CPTSD, for me, is like living with a checklist that I’m constantly trying to check things off. The symptoms, the feelings, the actions. It’s like I’m carrying around this invisible clipboard. I’ll look at it and think: okay, did I manage my triggers today? Check. Did […]
Why CPTSD Makes Failure Feel Safer
Setting Myself Up To Fail When I first started therapy and learned about my CPTSD, I did one thing over and over: I set myself up to fail. My brain was on a mission to prove its own negativity right. Weirdly, failure felt safer; if it was coming anyway, at least I was in control. […]
CPTSD and the Struggle for True Acceptance
Why Acceptance Feels Like Everything There are many things CPTSD makes harder than they should be. For me, one of the big ones is my need to be accepted, not necessarily liked. I get that people will either like me or not. What I really want is to be accepted for who I am, and […]
The Pressure to Reinvent vs. the Power of Just Being
There’s something that’s always puzzled me: the need people seem to have to constantly reinvent themselves. New year? Reinvent. Breakup? Reinvent. Got bangs? Reinvent. It’s like we’re all supposed to be our own PR team, constantly rebranding to stay relevant, like some sort of personal SEO strategy. (See what I did there? Threw in some […]
Is CPTSD Considered Neurodivergent? Here’s What I Found
The other day, I fell into one of those classic spirals: trauma vs. identity crisis vs. internet rabbit hole. You know the ones. It started innocently enough, I was trying to figure out if CPTSD counts as neurodivergent. Before I knew it, I was eight tabs deep, reading about brain scans, childhood trauma, and how […]
Attachment, Detachment, and the In Between
Living with CPTSD means relationships, whether romantic or platonic, can be both incredibly comforting and completely overwhelming. On one hand, I have always craved closeness, connection, the sense of warmth and safety. But on the other, the idea of losing that felt like the worst thing ever. Detachment, to me, has never been as simple […]