Having Complex PTSD Made Me Realize Mental Health is Physical Health

Left: Summer of 2021. Right: Spring of 2023. Complex PTSD is typically considered a mental health diagnosis, but what isn’t spoken about in a mainstream way is that it’s also a nervous system disorder. I lost 30 lbs because I couldn’t feel my appetite due to CPTSD (thanks to my nervous system not working correctly). It’s not just a mental health disorder (frankly no mental health disorders are) and I’m over this blind spot in society.

Trigger Warnings: Emotional experiences are shared that list an array of mental health symptoms and feelings. I’ve also added before and after photos of my accidental weight loss. I know these types of photos can be very triggering, but as someone who wasn’t believed by many that I was losing weight and the whole point of this post is about the connection between mental and physical health, it felt remiss to not use visuals to illustrate my point. If you are not in a place to read and view view these topics, it’s okay! Come back another time as I totally understand.

Even if people only superficially know me, they likely know I’m a puppeteer, am obsessed with my dog, go to cemeteries, my parents are dead, and I have Complex PTSD. At least, that’s what I put out into the world. There’s a lot I keep offline, but those are the things I feel comfortable sharing online. After all, I am a professional puppeteer, have a cemetery show, and my dog is almost an extra appendage to me over “just a dog” so it makes sense that I promote these things online…often with my dog in my lap of course. Understandably, many people wouldn’t put the dead parent thing online and others would also not feel comfortable disclosing a mental health diagnosis. Me though? I lack impulse control when it comes to trying to prevent people from suffering the ways I have suffered. My grief was gaslit and misunderstood so hard in every direction that once I had some wherewithal and 20/20 perspective I wanted to normalize the grief process in hopes that someone, even just one person, would feel slightly less alienated than I did while grieving.

Upon being diagnosed with Complex PTSD in the spring of 2022, I did sit on it for a few months. There was more to wrap my head around the disorder than what I had already understood about CPTSD previously, which was admittedly surface level at best. But eventually I slowly did start to open up about parts of being complexly traumatized (when I felt like being online, which wasn’t often but that’s another story) but even then it’s been slow because it’s an abstract disorder and sometimes I don’t seem to have the words. That said, lately some parts of having Complex PTSD have become so deafeningly loud and clear. Please pay attention because even if you don’t have complex trauma these statements will still apply to you:

Your mental health exists within your physical body.

All symptoms are not “in your head” but living in your literal body- specifically your nervous system.

My sources come from two main places: one is the countless literature I’ve devoured over the past two plus years so that I can understand my brain in hopes of being able to be a functional human. Almost every book mentions physical symptoms of trauma, nearly as much as the mental components. But emotions having physical symptoms are not just for traumatized folks. Everyone has physical responses to their emotions. Have you ever been so nervous that you involuntarily shake? Or start crying- even if you hate crying? Lose your temper? Blank out, throw up, collapse, etc upon hearing terrible news? Generally speaking we’ve been conditioned to look at mental health as some kind of status marker of will power. In society we reward people for putting on a brave face, going to work sick (maybe not post Covid…hopefully), having a stiff upper lip, and so on and so forth. It’s the Will Power Olympics that nobody asked for, nobody needs, but everyone is complicit in supporting. But think about it: if you could have stopped shaking when you were nervous, wouldn’t you have? Don’t you think you would have stopped crying if you could have? Hell, I imagine you didn’t choose to throw up upon hearing sickening or disturbing news…right?

I used to think the mind/body connection was somewhat real but if I’m being honest I mostly thought it was pseudo science. I’m not too proud to admit that when I'm wrong, I'm really wrong, and this is one of those cases! Every single book, podcast, and wherever else I sourced information from the past few years consistently indicates that trauma AND emotions live in the body more than the mind. This makes sense the more one thinks about it. Are you afraid of heights, so much so that even jumping off a medium height diving board is terrifying to you? Terror, anxiety, or whatever else you feel when this happens are emotions. We think we can outsmart how we feel by trying to be rational, which is using our brain. We tell ourselves we aren’t going to get injured if we jump off that diving board. We tell ourselves jumping off is a normal experience that many people consider fun. But when we get to the diving board, we still tremble while climbing up and if we make it to the edge of the diving board we often freeze and can’t physically jump. If emotions were just in our head we could will ourselves into jumping with our minds. But our emotions live in our nervous systems, hence the physical symptoms like shaking and the body refusing to jump by completely locking up. And if you’re not afraid of heights, you may substitute this metaphor for any time you couldn’t rise to any occasion even though intellectually you knew you’d be fine.

What even is Complex PTSD and how does it feel to experience it?

In case anyone is confused before moving forward: generalized PTSD is about a single or short lived traumatic event that wasn’t processed correctly and CPTSD is from ongoing and/or a succession of traumatic events that were not processed correctly.

Trauma and heavy emotions are hard to talk about because most people have some trauma and everyone has emotions. What gets lost in conversations- speaking from personal experience here - is that experiences are rarely comparable and a lot gets lost in translation. Clinically speaking, emotions are neutral as everyone experiences an array of negative and positive emotions (read: emotions are not inherently bad). However there are healthier ways one can deal with those emotions versus not, and depending on the experiences and tools at someone’s disposal people can end up having a disorder. Where trauma is concerned, not all events that are traumatic traumatize people. They will rattle you and throw you around, but sometimes people get to walk on the other side changed but in tact. This happens when someone is able to process what happened. They were allowed to feel their feelings, had appropriate support systems (think people asking how they felt and not telling them to “get over it”), and had enough good things keeping them going. Trauma becomes traumatizing when there are not safe spaces to process trauma (ie: “get over it!”, being told they are strong when they’re in pain to the point where they feel pressure to ignore their feelings and mask up, never catching a break, or having their experience be ignored entirely etc.). Being told your pain isn’t valid, however the message is delivered, is also traumatizing in its own right.

We don’t talk about emotion/verbal abuse much and I don’t have room in this post to go too into it but for the intents of this piece, know that emotional and verbal abuse, as well as emotional neglect are ABUSE. Having one’s emotional needs denied creates physiological changes, like in your nervous system. Your nervous system is like a memory foam mattress that your brain cannot outsmart when you want it to contort and conform differently. Like not wanting to touch a burning stove after being burned once, your nervous system will contort and conform to your past experiences to make you back away from any perceived danger, including being around people who make you feel emotionally unsafe. With Complex Trauma, while there are variations to the types of abuse and trauma that were endured but there is always emotional abuse and neglect in the soup. (For instance, while physical abuse is obviously abuse that is physically, there is often an emotional component of being physically abused. And one can be emotionally abused without anything physical. It’s all valid and all causes damage to our nervous systems.) I’m saying all of this because nobody with CPTSD had their emotional needs met, and because of that we are lonely (even if we have friends, partners, or even family) because most of us don’t feel good enough, certainly feel misunderstood, and often don’t even have the language to get “normies” to understand us because our experiences are not normal. Unlike depression, it’s not “just” in our heads but in our lived experiences.

Complex trauma is a bitch because it’s big responses to abnormal experiences that eventually get connected to more normal experiences and eventually it becomes like an old necklace tangled with other old necklaces in a jewelry box. It feels like it should be simple to untangle and you may even feel dumb for letting the necklaces get so tangled, but here you are anyway and if you want to wear the necklaces again you have to de-tangle them. To the outside world it doesn’t seem like a big deal - it’s just a tangled necklace after all- but what people don’t see in the frustration is that most of our lives have become tangled up as well. We have big emotions to things at times that can feel disportioncate, but upon a zoom out from whatever the triggering event or “tangled necklace” may be and you’ll see a whole damn iceberg hiding in plain sight weighing us down. CPTSD is a lonely disorder because people are not taught to be curious about other people’s pain but rather to advice them on it (or worse, judge them), thus making it all the more lonely and compounding for those of us with CPTSD.

We live in a world of oversimplifications that have burned me out because they been projected onto my literal complex experiences far too often. My world doesn’t work according to your meme about being positive and being patient and all will be good. In my world, people kept dying. My health kept failing. People kept showing me I’m not good enough. I’ve been going at 100mph my whole life, white knuckling it to survive, and then people tell me to smile more or that outside forces that are not in my control (like people dying) will stop happening one day but it never does. Most days it feels like my whole life and existence was a mistake, or I was put on this earth to suffer. It just never gets better. Friends are shocked the longer they know me because I shatter their world views that maybe good things don’t always happen to good people after all. And yet, I get judged for crying when I’m sad that any given day STILL isn’t my day, which is fucked up already but also entirely missing the point that it’s not just that one day is hard but most days are hard and the day I ended up crying or expressing emotion on it was the day the dam broke. Straws that break camels backs are real, y’all!

Hell, we as a human race have regularly used torture tactics -that are more emotionally and mentally grueling than physically- to make people lose their mind and spill the opposing side’s secrets in war or get a confession out of people who are innocent. When we know people are being tortured because it’s part of the plan, we expect people to break. When life is just relentless and tortures people throughout their lives, we expect them to act like nothing is wrong. Either or, many of us (not just those of us with either PTSD diagnosis) are being tortured and traumatized and are suffering in silence because we as a society have not acknowledged that emotions are more complicated than they have been presented to us and nor do we look at emotions in a holistic way that includes how vital they are to our all around health. I’m pretty tired of it. Frankly, it is re-traumatizing.

Many, but not even most of my sources that I have read to understand how trauma messes with your whole body. This was taken in the summer 2023 after successfully (mostly) eating for around 2-3 months.

The downward spiral…

My other main reference of knowing that mental health lives within your body is…me. Somewhere between 2021- 2022 I stopped being able to function normally in many ways. My speech got wonkier than usual as I said the wrong words for things, blanked out mid sentence, fumbled my way through trying to explain something, etc. I stopped being able to sleep. I eventually stopped feeling my appetite. I had developed social anxiety that never existed before. Most people, even people I generally liked, felt unsafe. Groups both terrified me and made me incredibly uncomfortable physically. I wasn’t just not firing on all cylinders; I’m not sure I was firing on ANY cylinders.

Most of 2022 is blurry to me. Now with the second eduction I’ve had to take on understanding the brain, I now see how integral the nervous system is regarding its connection to the brain and how married they are. In short, you could argue my nervous system developed an allergy to how relentless my life has been and the trauma it has brought and shuts me down at any sign of the allergen. I didn’t choose this. I didn’t ask for my parents to die, my life to be threatened by someone I love, the medical trauma I’ve experienced, the stalkers I’ve had, or the other stuff I don’t feel like chatting about on the Internet. I tried to rise above it, put on a brave face (especially since people either told me to, made it known that anything less than that wouldn’t be tolerated, and not to mention I was rewarded for having said brave face) but if you keep sweeping dirt under a rug eventually the rug gets bumpy and gross. Due to all of this, my nervous system in many ways stopped working and nobody, not even my therapist (who I luckily eventually fired for ya know, reasons) told me it was a nervous system problem. Why would I think my trauma induced disorder would also impact my physical health?

Except of course that’s exactly what it did. It was totally my physical health too, and that’s what really did me in. But also, it was the key to getting my healing journey cooking with gas because once I started treating Complex PTSD like a physical health issue I actually had success in healing parts of the mental/emotional aspects of CPTSD.

I look back at 2022 and the first months into 2023 with horror. They are a lost chapter in my life. I was not myself. I was extremely emotionally dysregulated; reactive in disproportionate ways, low key always silently angry (I typically suppress anger so this was uncomfortable AF for me), and was incredibly mean and harsh with myself (calling myself stupid internally, the worst, ugly, etc) at the slightest mess ups. I've never been awesome at being kind to myself but historically I wasn’t super mean to myself either so this was a new low level to unlock. I couldn’t remember conversations I had with people to save my life and it clearly hurt their feelings when they referenced something I didn’t have the foggiest memory of. I'd routinely forget to do what I said I would do, which is highly out of character. I had virtually no work ethic or follow through, which was a major switch from my reputation in the comedy world (pre-pandemic) as being incredibly industrious, reliable- with at times ballsy follow through. I flaked on plans more in that 15-18 month time period when my nervous system went to the deepest pits of hell than I had my entire life combined until that point-and then some! But it gets worse, because of course it does!

Left: August 2021. Right: May 2023. Same vintage 1970s dress, but it barely fit less than 2 years later (and this was a few weeks after I started trying to eat regularly with the help of my nutritional therapist).

So…what actually happened with the weight loss? And how?

CPTSD is an anxiety based disorder, meaning anxiety is likely the largest symptom of CPTSD but it’s not the same thing as having generalized anxiety. Sometimes anxiety (and depression, which is also a symptom of CPTSD that is slightly different than generalized depression) can cause one to lose their appetite. This happened to me, and it was a life changing experience for the worst. There is evidence that I was complexly traumatized most of my life, as I have no memories without anxiety and existential dread thanks to some too weird and too abstract for this post things that occurred in my early childhood that apparently never got processed correctly (which is how you don’t end up traumatized…who knew?). And then every few years a new trauma presented, my family started dying, my still alive immediate and extended family somewhat imploded or scattered, I had a ton of health issues including a failed heart procedure a little over a decade ago, plus “normal people problems” like bad relationships, breakups, and friendship falling outs. There has been very limited tranquility in my life. My set point is surviving. Reacting. Being hypervilant because I literally couldn’t let my guard down. I was always fixing or dealing with something. I'd laugh in people's face when they’d say there’s equilibrium to the universe or that eventually good things happen to good people. Huh? It was absurd that could be someone’s sincere baseline and I'm not too proud to say it made me jealous.

Being a pro at masking a lot of my problems, I moved to Los Angeles-arguably the least stable and least grounded place one earth, that I actually do love and miss and can’t wait to return to in 2025- and threw myself into the comedy scene in the fall of 2017. Then my mom died in June of 2018. I kept an insane backbreaking schedule, saying yes to everything, and taking on way too much despite my grief. Thankfully I still did grieve her and process the loss as I didn’t mask or bury my emotions, but I was not exactly gentle to myself in this process. Even then I knew that I was doing too much, specifically one morning driving deep into the Hollywood Hills from North Hollywood in the summer of 2019 at 6am for a music video shoot after getting home from a live comedy show I hosted at 2:15AM while cursing myself for knowing how not sustainable this schedule was. (Told ya I had work ethic before my nervous system crashed!) I finally got a rest…when the pandemic happened. Initially as freaky as it was, I handled the pandemic okay. Getting to stay home, write some screenplays, and hang with my elderly dogs at the time was far from the worst thing to happen to me. But nobody got out of the pandemic unscathed, and I suppose my story is that it ruined literally all of the momentum I had built up my entire 2.5 years in LA (while grieving my mom to boot). Every drop of blood, sweat, and tears I did under impossible circumstances was suddenly in vain because the pandemic wiped out everything for me. Just before the world temporarily ended in March of 2020 I had meetings set up, auditions scheduled, was in talks at two theaters for having my puppet project having either a taped show or a reoccurring show, was submitting to festivals… and then the world stopped for long enough to have it all go away and there was no way for it all to be retrieved in a post-vaccinated world because too much had changed (people left the industry, got fired, new people running theaters-which even then weren’t even largely opened back up until well into 2022, and so forth). The path I chose had been decimated and any new paths that wouldn’t be 80+% starting over weren't clear, especially since my nervous system was shutting me down.

To be clear, I don’t think my pandemic story is worse than many people’s pandemic story. Not even close. However, this came after a lifetime of upsets, tragedies, rugs being pulled out from under me, and promises of things getting better that never came to fruition. Dead mom + hard work + a pandemic decimating everything + lifetime of everything I listed above (and more I do not feel comfortable listing) = my brain finally breaking and my nervous system quitting. While I understand I’ve had CPTSD for a long time prior to my diagnosis, this was the moment the symptoms became impossible to ignore because I could no longer mask, rally, or cope. Everything just went fuzzy and I basically disassociated so things got even weirder and it became impossible to ignore that something was really wrong with me.

Summer of 2019. I was taking a serious photo with a puppet on purpose after a show, but ironically this was more or less the exact time I knew my life was probably getting unsustainable at the pace I was going.

I knew I wasn’t okay by the end of 2020 and into 2021. I had a bad winter where it felt like the lights went out in my head, but upon getting vaccinated I erred on hope and decided to focus on getting back to life. Except… I wasn’t handling life coming back particularly well, despite having become impatient for this time to arrive mere months before. As mentioned earlier, a lot of social anxiety flooded me. I felt unsafe going anywhere without my dog, not unlike a child needing their blanket everywhere or an adult (hopefully) using cigarettes to manage social anxiety. I felt anger and hopelessness on a level that was new to me because I couldn’t mask my way out of it.  I put myself in therapy because I understood this was above my pay grade. All coping methods had lost their potency and it was like the lights were still dimmed in my head well into the summer of 2021. I could feel myself imploding internally but I couldn’t figure out why and was baffled as to why I seemed utterly incapable of being okay, not spiraling out, and very rarely finding any joy.

Found this in the dictionary explaining “co-dependence”.  Both photos are from the fall of 2023.

By the first week of 2022, my appetite was gone, but it started as what felt like a fluke. We all have weeks where sometimes we forget to eat or for whatever the reason don't feel as hungry. Initially that’s what it felt like. And after a week or so, my appetite came back. I’m not entirely sure what happened next, because you never think to clock stuff that's becoming a pattern before you realize it is a pattern, but by early summer of 2022 I was getting slowly alarmed. It felt like this was happening every few weeks, but each time I would lose my appetite for longer and longer and it was a bigger and bigger struggle to get my body used to eating again. Thankfully nothing gross happened, but digestion felt uncomfortable and tiring after a long appetite absence and a lot of the times it was just hard to even get halfway through a meal without shutting down with being suddenly full. It’s a hard feeling to describe. I wasn’t nauseated by food, but I was kind of repulsed and best case I couldn’t be less interested in food.

I was trying really hard to right the ship, but life kept throwing curveballs that threw more wrenches in the works. By October 2022 I was sitting in my closet crying because I had a live puppeteer gig that night and all of my black pants were literally falling off my body because they were too big and I was struggling to find a suitable and professional outfit for the night (and felt stupid for not even considering the fact that maybe I shrunk out of my clothes and should have tried them on earlier in the week. And all of these negative self talks were happening while being rudely awakened from my denial that maybe I was in serious trouble and I wasn’t being a drama queen and exaggerating my issues around eating- as many of my friends told me I looked fine and insisted that I wasn’t losing weight :sigh::).

Crying in my closet earlier in the day wasn’t pictured, but this smiling (masking) photo was! (And yes, OF COURSE I brought my dog to the show.)

I lost around thirty pounds from start to the lowest of the low. Thirty. Here’s the thing: I was already a size 0/2. I was not in a position to be able to afford to lose that much fucking weight. To this day I can only seem to go two months of a nearly normal appetite, but then some stressor, weather change, or illness comes in and I’m back at square one. This past summer proved to be a lot of steps backwards because I had a huge nervous system crash and lost 10 of the 13 lbs I had gained back. This summer was humbling in a way I didn’t need humbling. Why I crashed out is hard to explain for this already long post, but what I want to share is that while I’ve known for years that CPTSD is a nervous system disorder this summer I became resentful of how much of an invisible illness this is. I know how insane I sound when I say trauma crashed my nervous system to lay people who are smart but haven’t discovered this fact yet. I love to read neuroscience books for fun (nerd alert!) and have for years and I even had no idea, so while there’s no judgement that people don’t know this it’s still frustrating for me to have experience all of this stuff in a world that truly doesn’t get it. I experiene what I call a “nervous system flu” but really it’s a a dorsal vagal shutdown (which is when you nervous system grounds you and you don’t have energy because it’s trying to conserve energy or protect you, but is likely misfiring because your nervous system is too overstimulated to begin with). I have just as much trouble functioning and focusing as I would a normal flu when I’m in a dorsal vagal shutdown (which I was nearly all summer). It’s a physical response to emotions, but because it has to do with emotions it sounds more woo-woo than it is and people are more likely to dismiss me, belittle my experience by thinking I’m weak, or think I’m making it up. But it’s physical, it’s real, and it’s involuntary just like shaking or being unable to jump off a diving board is. And in my case (not everyone with CPTSD though), my appetite goes absolutely haywire to nonexistent when I’m in this state. I’ve been in and out of this state for years, hence the 30 lb weight loss and why I lost weight again this summer upon going back into a dorsal vagal shutdown.

Bonus fun fact: I also developed a two (plus) week long cold in late July, another charming physical side effect of both not having your nervous system work correctly (your immune system takes a hit when your nervous system isn’t working) and I’m still undernourished from the past few years, which also takes a hit on your immune system. Then I developed an infection in August that was relentless even with medication. I was also sick 4x last winter for the same reasons. When I’m healthy, I get sick every 1-2 years so this has been a real drag. I’m petrified that it’s now cold and flu season because it takes a long time for me to recover and it’s impossible to live life normally as is, let alone when I’m constantly fighting a virus or infection in my state. (Congratulate me though, as I was exposed to a cold two weeks ago and didn’t get sick! I’m crediting the 8 lbs I’ve gained back since August for this victory!)

March 2023. I don’t really remember taking this picture, but this one haunts me. I don’t like my color or general lifelessness. This was right around, maybe even right after(?) the roughest and lowest points for me- emotionally and weight wise.

All of this is to say though is that I’m very confused as to why the hell I can’t call my CPTSD a “real illness” in the sense of how we qualify physical illnesses. CPTSD destroyed my health. I was not just “too skinny” a year ago, I was grey. My hair was lifeless. I thought after a lifetime of looking younger than I was that I was suddenly starting to not only age but age rapidly- until I started eating (and with the help of a therapeutic nutritionist- who’s also my bff who intervened in the spring of 2023 right after the above photo was taken) a more nutrient dense meal to help things like ya know, my nervous system and whatnot and got a little life back in my eyes and by default some collagen was restored from not being so gaunt. My nervous system became a runaway train thanks to CPTSD. No wonder plucky attitudes about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps isn’t a one sized fits all solution; you can’t fight gravity if an apple falls from a tree and you can’t gaslight a nervous system into working correctly until it’s root cause is addressed.

Final Chapter: These Days…

How am I now? Great question, but the answer is confusing to even me despite that I’m living it so I’ll try to be succinct. On good days, I feel like a human! Like, I feel like a human in a way that I had no idea was how humans should feel. It’s awesome! On other not so hot days, it’s just as bad as it was in 2022 for me (or this summer), but luckily that lasts only a few days currently. However, the real honest answer is this: I’m in nervous system jail and I’m over it. I’m on a pretty specific diet and if I don’t hit 90 grams of protein a day (protein regulates your blood sugar, which regulates cortisol levels, which is vital for anyone with an anxiety based disorder) I wake up in the middle of the night and if that happens I cannot function. I cannot function because a) I’m no longer 20 and capable of surviving on little sleep and b) my nervous system shuts me down at any bump in the road. Like a parent who tries to protect a child from all heights, even good and healthy exploratory missions on a jungle gym, after one fall (or near fall) my helicopter nervous system gives me a “nervous system flu.” Again, it’s like when a memory foam shoe or mattress automatically goes into the position shaped to your body and stays that way long after you’ve left.

Everything I do is in service my nervous system these days. I can’t have a lot of sugar or caffeine. I drink so much water now. I leave social gatherings well before 10pm so I can unwind and try to be at least pretending to sleep by midnight (I still have insomnia tendencies, though that has largely improved for me). I’m on supplements I can barely pronounce. I often say no to big group gatherings because I physically cannot handle that much social energy most days. I’m a nightmare at making friends here in Atlanta (luckily I’m not staying here…), because every new person is a possible energy risk so I often avoid socializing, but occasionally I’ll pull a groundhog and see if I see my shadow or not. (Again, on good days I’m good but good days are still a bit scattered.) If I don’t do these things, I either have no energy for days on end (aka “the nervous system flu”) or I wake up in the middle of the night, wake up with anxiety in the morning (which typically ruins the rest of my day), or can’t process new information without sometimes literally crawling under my blankets with my dog.

This is just the stuff I want to share- trust me, there’s tons of ways I’m not doing life right now. There isn’t one corner that is safe or stable and this feels like a David and Goliath battle most days. That said, I’ve made up my mind to become a somewhat elusive CPTSD success story and usually when I make up my mind to do something I typically do it. That said, hold the victory champagne -and not just because I’m a boring non-drinker- because while lately I’ve had some good days I’m far from out of the woods and I’m being realistic over practicing toxic positivity on myself about where I’m really at.

If y’all think I haven’t been taking pictures of myself eating that aren’t gonna end up in an Instagram carousel soon, y’all don’t know me well!

All of this is to say that my whole life currently revolves around taking care of my nervous system. I’d like to think about it less, but when I do that I drop the ball and forget to do the things I need to do to feel healthy and functional. CPTSD is a monster that I genuinely do not wish on anyone. Lately I’ve learned that some friends of mine also have CPTSD and instead of comparing symptoms or asking for stories it’s just, “omg, I’m so sorry you’re going through this too” or “yup, CPTSD is no joke! Damn you have it too?”. It’s a wide eyed inside baseball acknowledgement that honestly doesn’t require much else. But to the rest of the world, I’m incredibly misunderstood and most people don’t have the framework to understand what I’m even talking about. Most people haven’t even heard that your emotions live in your nervous system, and many people are uncomfortable with their own emotions so it’s hard not the feel the energy from some people seeing you as the poster child of a failure because I cannot currently compete at the Will Power Olympics. If I tried to mask my way through life currently, I would be robbing myself from healing. It didn’t get me anywhere in the past besides denying my own experiences and making the trauma grow roots in my nervous system. So I have to be benched while not putting on a brave face and just let healing happen as I learn to honor what’s going on with me physically and mentally. They are not joking when they say healing isn’t linear or that healing doesn’t have a time frame. I’m frustrated by these facts, but at this point I’ve long accepted that this is just where I’m at and I’m only going to get ahead by doing what I need to do (or not doing what I don’t need to be doing). But on record, I’m exhausted.

Having CPTSD is like looking at your life through a funhouse mirrors, but trying to explain what it’s like to have CPTSD is like being a vampire whose reflection doesn’t even show in said funhouse mirror. I mention dorsal vagal shutdowns, where things feel in my body, or what it’s like to be disassociated without being in a fugue and because those realities for me can’t be reflected in most mirrors for most people, I disappear too because those are the things my entire reality has been wrapped around for years. It sucks. Add in people not taking mental health seriously and not understanding how it dances with and is connected to your physical health, and I even disappear further. On record, I resent this a lot and am trying to be the (small) change I wish to see in this world by writing this post. I think most people with CPTSD feel invisible for many reasons, so any visibility I can bring to the experience I’m going to do just that (remember, I lack impulse control with these things!). That said, CPTSD is a huge spectrum of both how people became traumatized and what their symptoms are. Not everyone loses their appetite or weight. Some do, but some also gain weight. Others don’t see a big change in either direction. Some people have entirely different symptoms than I do. Half of any subreddit or Facebook CPTSD support group I’m in is littered with posts that I 50% relate to and 50% do not relate to. So if you know someone with CPTSD and are reading this to better understand your loved one, thank you, but remember that I am not the monolith. But everyone, and I do mean everyone, with CPTSD feels at least a little bit lonely, isolated, and misunderstood in life and in their disorder. I really hope my experiences that I’ve shared help on some level.

Finally, this post is for everyone because of course it is. Your emotions live in your nervous system. You likely won’t get a whole ass disorder if you ignore your feelings, but you could be increasing your chances of other major illness. Science keeps saying stress and disease are linked and as I’ve already stated, I’m finally a believer in this. And even if you never get sick in a major way, life is too short to not be working optimally if possible. Go to therapy. Own your emotions. Use your words to communicate how you feel and what you experience. Work on being a better and more present listener to your loved ones. Prioritize all of your needs and not just the obvious ones. You’re a human and humans have emotions. Emotions help inform us how we are responding to stimuli and our environment, and yet we live in a society where we’re supposed to drown them out to fit in or not cause waves. Fuck that. You’re a human who should experience a full arrange of emotions- you’ll have forever to not have emotions when you’re dead.

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March 2023- a week or so after my lowest. Despite my weight loss sequel this summer, I STILL second guess how serious it got because this whole journey is insane. And then I look at this picture and remember how real the struggle, pain, and seriousness to my physical health it all was. Never forget….