Looking back over everything I’ve had to survive, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make sense of what happened to my body and why my nervous system reacts the way it does. For many years, I felt like my brain was short circuiting over things that other people seemed to handle fine, like a simple text notification popping up on my phone or someone making a demand of my time.
It took me a long time, along with going through therapy, to really understand how the medical system handles this kind of prolonged trauma. In the United States, as an adult, you can’t even get an official diagnosis of CPTSD. They just hand you a standard PTSD label and try to stuff a lifetime of compounding, inescapable chaos into a box meant for a single terrifying event. But there is a massive difference between PTSD which is usually one big scary event you survived and CPTSD, which is what happens when you spend years living inside a warzone of emotional volatility, high stakes demands, and walking on eggshells.
In my experience, there is an even deeper level beyond that. It’s almost like a prisoner-of-war level of trauma that doesn’t have a neat medical name, but it sits under that same umbrella. It’s what happens when someone’s deliberate, sustained goal over years is to control, use, and hurt you.
Realizing this changed everything for me!
It is a biological nervous system injury caused by sustained, severe trauma.
If someone breaks your leg and forces you to keep walking on it every single day without letting it rest or heal, nobody gets surprised when the bone fails to mend correctly and the whole leg stops working. That is exactly what happened to my nervous system after living through prolonged abuse. My visceral reactions, the instant panic, the urge to retreat, my body acting as if it's literally allergic to people trying to invade my space, weren't personal flaws or mental failures. My brain and body were responding completely correctly to an abnormal, unsafe environment.
If you’re reading this and you’ve experienced something similar, I want to share this perspective with you in case it helps you stop feeling crazy. If your doctors haven't given you the full picture, or if people around you act like you should just "get over it" and be a productive economic cog, please know this: you aren't broken. You are dealing with a real injury from things that were done to you. Recognizing that distinction is where taking your power back actually begins.
And the worst part of it all is that being forced to keep going without stopping just made everything ten times worse. Pushing through and letting people pressure me eventually developed into full blown dysautonomia and seizures, and now I am way more disabled than I ever was before to the point where I literally cannot work a normal job at all.
So if you take anything away from this, please listen to your body and do not let anyone push you around or force you past your limits, because if you dont stop, your body will eventually stop you and you could end up completely fucked like me. It is honestly really heartbreaking because I truly wanted to keep working and building my business, but because things got so bad with my health, I just cant do it anymore. If you want to help support me while I try to keep my life stable and navigate all of this, I do have a GoFundMe linked on my page, and every single bit of support or shares means the absolute world to me.