The Prosecution’s Case

If you have CPTSD and you’re reading this, you probably know exactly what I’m talking about.

That emotional black hole we fall into, the one that suddenly starts dragging up every bad thing we’ve ever done, every bad thing that’s ever been done to us, and every awkward interaction since 1997 and somehow uses all of it as evidence that we are, in fact, terrible people.

And man, does it spin fast.

It’s an incredibly efficient, incredibly cruel filing system, isn’t it?

It’s like your brain becomes a prosecutor who has been quietly building a case against you for decades and suddenly decides today is the day for the closing argument.

• Exhibit A: that thing you said three weeks ago.
• Exhibit B: your inability to relax like a normal person.
• Exhibit C through Z: literally your entire personality.

The prosecution rests. And the verdict is always the same: guilty on all counts.

The Anatomy of the Spiral

The speed of that prosecution is what makes it so terrifying.

This is not a slow walk through memory lane. It is a multi-car pileup of every regret, every perceived failure, every old wound, and every moment you’ve ever felt too much, not enough, difficult, needy, broken, embarrassing, or fundamentally wrong.

Your brain takes twenty unrelated incidents, throws them into a blender, and pours out one convincing conclusion:

You are the problem.

Reports from the Inside

I’m writing this from inside one of those spirals.

Not as an observer. Not as someone looking back with neat clarity and distance. I mean I’ve been in it this weekend.

Properly in it.

The kind where your thoughts don’t just drift into shame, they accelerate into it. Where you reread conversations that were probably completely fine, and suddenly they feel like evidence in a trial you didn’t know you were part of. Where your body feels heavy, your stomach sits low, and everything you do feels like you’re doing it wrong somehow.

And even though I know what this is like, intellectually I can name it, map it, write about it, but it still gets me. Managing to pull me under for a while before I remember there’s even a surface.

The hardest part isn’t recognizing the spiral.

It’s not believing it while you’re in it.

Trying to Find My Way Out

So I’ve been trying to work my way out of it. Unsuccessfully at the moment. And that’s the main reason I decided to write about it.

My theory is that if I write down what I’m feeling, I can stop it from quietly convincing me that what I’m feeling is the whole truth. Instead of letting it loop in my head for hours like it’s solving something, I try to get it out onto the page, where I can see it for what it is, instead of what it becomes when it’s left alone in my mind.

After all, it may be loud, but it’s still just a state. A nervous system doing what it learned to do a long time ago.

And I won’t pretend it’s easy to interrupt. Because it’s not.

There’s a kind of gravity to CPTSD shame that makes even small acts of self-kindness feel undeserved. Like you have to “earn” your way out of it before you’re allowed to feel okay again.

But I don’t think that’s how it works. I think you just keep meeting it with something softer, even when it doesn’t immediately land.

When part of you is still sitting in the courtroom, fully convinced the case is open and ongoing.

Because eventually, the spiral does lose momentum. Not because you defeated it. But because you stopped feeding it every piece of evidence it asked for.

A Final Note, From Inside It

If you’re in one of these spirals too, I don’t have a perfect ending for this. Just a shared understanding:

This thing feels absolute while you’re inside it. And when it does, you don’t owe it agreement.

You are not the verdict it tries to hand you.

And neither am I.

Photo by Kateryna Hliznitsova on Unsplash