When people talk about leaving an abusive situation, they act like escaping the environment is the end of the story. They think you just step out into the sunlight, breathe a sigh of relief, and magically get your life back.
What nobody tells you about and what I had to learn the hard way is the ongoing, secondary trauma that waiting for you on the other side.
When you get out, you’re already carrying a shattered nervous system. But then you’re immediately thrown into a world of relentless survival struggles. You’re dealing with financial insecurity, housing instability, and the constant, crushing fear of losing your housing. You don't have a family safety net to catch you. Maybe you’re working a job where people treat you terribly, or maybe you're trying to earn enough just to pay basic bills, but you fall into that terrifying middle zone where you make too much to get government assistance or low cost healthcare, but nowhere near enough to actually afford to live, medical, psychiatric, or dental care.
When you live without health insurance or a financial cushion, every single day becomes an exercise in risk management. You’re terrified of getting sick or ending up in the hospital because you know one medical bill could completely destroy you. So you skip the doctor, you skip the dentist, you skip the therapy, and you just keep pushing yourself through the day.
That constant, sustained lack of support where you never get a single moment of true safety or rest is its own form of long term trauma.
When you’re already living with CPTSD and you are forced to stay in a non stop fight or flight state just to keep a roof over your head for years on end, your body eventually reaches a breaking point. It cannot hold that level of stress forever without something giving way.
For me, that ongoing survival state eventually morphed into physical health problems. My nervous system couldn't regulate anymore, and it turned into dysautonomia. My body literally lost the ability to manage basic, automatic functions smoothly because it had been running on red alert for decades.
It isn't a rare thing, and it isn't "all in your head." The science is very clear that chronic, unmanaged stress and severe trauma physically alter your autonomic nervous system. Your body is holding the exact score of everything you’ve had to survive without a break.
Looking back, my body eventually reached a point where it just completely stopped me from functioning altogether, and I had no choice but to put up a GoFundMe just to survive. It has been about a year now since everything crashed, and honestly I am still not anywhere near better. I haven’t made much improvement at all, but I guess the silver lining is that I havent gotten worse either so I will take that as a win. I just really wish I had known to stop and protect my health before my health got this bad, because once your body completely shuts down on you, getting back any kind of baseline is a long slow road. I have read it can take minimum of a decade and I thought that was a joke but a year and now I’m starting to see why because making pretty much zero progress makes me wonder if I’ll ever make any progress at all.
If you are able to donate or even just share my GoFundMe, it helps me so much while I keep trying to stabilize my life and give my body the time it needs.