Thoughts on Depression and C-PTSD from emotional Abuse

Depression can make you feel like staying in bed and not interacting with other people. You know that if you go out of the house, you will feel different and out of place.

Other people will not understand your inner world. You feel like you will be forced to put on a mask to fit in. It is difficult to function.

You get more and more internalized. So you self isolate, and limit your social interactions. This is understandable because certain kinds of interactions can be emotionally traumatizing.

You feel like the one person that is out of place in the world.  You sit alone and hear the thoughts that come up from your subconscious. Thoughts that there is something wrong with you.

Some of the feelings you get are from emotional flashbacks. There are things that happened and ways you were rejected during childhood that cause your subconscious to store these kinds of feelings.

If you can identify the false beliefs behind your thoughts, then the feelings can be sat with and calmed. You were not born feeling like you did not belong in the world. These thoughts were taught to you….even brainwashed into you.

When you have a feeling that is painful, like hopelessness…try to discover what core belief that thought is driven by. The belief might be that you are not as good as other people. .. Or that the world is unsafe.

If you are carrying the core belief that you are less adequate than other people…that is a bad programming. These things are programmed into children who do not have emotionally supportive childhoods.

Think back to your childhood and if you were made to feel insignificant, unworthy, unneccesary, or anything else negative. If your thoughts and feelings were dismissed, criticized, or made fun of then you are probably carrying CPTSD…complex post traumatic stress disorder.

People with C-PTSD often get depressed or feel extreme anxiety. You may have trouble keeping up with other people or feeling normal.

Those false core beliefs that were fed to you can be re-programmed. You need to question each one of those negative beliefs about yourself. Be like a scientist attempting to disprove a theory.

If you feel that something is wrong with you compared to other people, then ask what things are Right about you. Write them down. Engage in activities that prove you are as good or better at those activities, than other people are.

Look at the qualities of your parents and whomever fed those negative, false beliefs to you, about yourself. What kind of people are they?

Would you consider those people reliable critics? Did tbey have any agenda in which lowering your power would have helped them?

If those people told you something bad about the character of a person you love right now….would you believe their opinion without question? Or is their opinion not reliable?

You can begin to go out and interact with people in small increments. Go over your present state of mind, before you go out…and before you leave your car. You can just sit in your car for a few minutes and listen to music that calms or peps up your nervous system.

How you feel when you interact with others is based on the current state of your nervous system, how much sleep you have had, your mental state, and your blood sugar.

You can think of those categories and assess each of them, before you go into a store or any other place. Then you will feel more in touch with yourself and have some ways to help yourself.

If you are interested in learning. NLP State Management techniques, you can send me a message via my web site

Gentlekindnesscoaching.com

For information about C-PTSD and how emotional abuse causes depression and anxiety disorders, join us at the gentlekindness facebook page.

You are special. Your gifts and personality are an important part of the puzzle of humanity. You are connected with all living things in an important way.

You matter. You have a unique voice that other people need to hear. You have special characteristics that someone really needs right now.

You have innate value.

Namaste,

Annie. Gentlekindnesscoaching.com

Gentlekindness facebook page

Annie Mimi Hall youtube channel

Knowing the Person Inside of Your Own Head

Whose depression is worse?  Which mental illness is greater? 

Who suffers the most?

When does a depression become a mental disorder? At what point does regular anxiety become an anxiety disorder?

How long do you have to feel depressed, before you should be evaluated for depression?

At what point do depression and anxiety cross over from mental issues, and  become a mental illnesses?

Do you have to have a diagnosis to have a “real” mental illness? What did you have the day before you received the diagnosis?

Is one person’s mental disorder more important than someone else’s?

Is one person’s emotional suffering “worse” because they tell you it is worse than yours?

Does the “squeaky wheel” tendency also exist in mental health?

Is the squeakiest wheel the person with the worse mental disorder?

Is having to be the loudest squeaky wheel a disorder in itself?

Should you feel bad talking about your mental illness if you are not on medication?

Is someone who tries holistic methods like yoga and NLP hypnosis, less proactive about their mental health, than someone who takes antidepressants or anxiety medication?

Is the reverse true?

Can you tell from looking at someone, just how depressed they are? If they are suicidal? If they have PTSD?

Is the person who shows, or talks openly about their mental disorder, more mentally ill than someone who keeps it to themselves?

These are all valid questions to discuss. I wonder which of these situations you have had to deal with? Which side have you been on?

Have you ever had your mental pain minimized, denied, or rejected? Have you been told you don’t “look sick” ….you don’t “look depressed”….you don’t “seem anxious”…

Have you ever had to hear…

…”well everyone else can do it”…..”mental illness isn’t real”…..”anxiety is something everyone else deals with”….”just get over it”……

Have you ever heard….

“I suffer worse depression than you do”………”I  know someone with a real mental illness”…

Narcissism runs throughout the mental health field, as far as therapists and psychiatrists go. Just something to keep in mind when you are seeking a therapist, or in a therapy session. 

Psychopaths and narcissists gravitate towards fields of work that they can feel powerful, and have influence over the minds of others. …just something to keep in mind…..probably 5 or 6 percent of mental health professionals are either narcissists or socialized psychopaths.

Everyone cannot afford mental health treatment. Some people have no way to get to appointments, for any number of reasons.

People that are currently living in abusive environments have many reasons why going for mental health diagnosis or treatment could make their situation (hence their mental health) much worse.

Some people are much more extroverted than others. Introverted people are more likely to keep their mental illness to themselves, rather than telling the people they associate daily with, or people they see on a regular basis.

People with a history of abuse and severe boundary violations, is less likely to feel they can trust people to talk about their mental suffering with. Introverted people, with a past history of abuse, or who are currently living in abuse, are even less likely to feel safe talking about it.

Talking about mental illness has to feel safe. Just because someone does not feel safe being treated or diagnosed with mental illness, does not mean they do not have a mental disorder that interferes with their lives.

Some mental disorders make it difficult, or impossible to leave the house, get to morning therapy appointments, or to go to any kind of doctor appointments.

Some anxiety disorders make it difficult or impossible for the sufferer even to make the phone call to schedule the appointment.

The mental health system is better in some parts of the world and worse in others. Socioeconomic state makes a difference in how the client is treated by intake workers.

People doing intakes can be so rude that they can drive people away, who never try again to get mental health treatment. The system can be disheartening, violating, and depressing.

Everyone is not in the same circumstance.

Everyone does not have the same background or experience with the mental health system.

Everyone has different triggers, different fears, different sleep situations, sleep disorders, and different living situations.

You cannot tell from looking at someone, if they have a mental disorder or not.

You cannot tell from talking to them for a few minutes, from working at the same job as them, or from being in the same family as them.

No one can tell you that you are not really suffering. Well….they can say it….but just because they say it, does not make it true.

Someone saying they have worse depression than you do, does not make it true.

Someone saying you don’t really have any “legitimate” mental disorder, does not make it true.

Someone that tells you what you “should” and “should not” be able to do….even if triggers your emotional flashbacks or triggers your fight or flight” response….is not really a person who is on your side, or someone that supports you.

You need to be surrounded by people who support you.

You need to detach emotionally from people who trigger you or put you in situations you have asked them not to put you in.

You have the right to know how you feel, and to be the one to determine how bad it is.

You have a right to decide if your depression or anxiety is to the point of being a “disorder.” A disorder is something that has gotten bad enough to make your life “disorderly” …and ” unmanageable.”

You know whether or not your mental pain is interfering with your daily activities, your work, your social interactions and your life.

You know if it has gotten worse , better, or is staying the same.

No one can know these things more than you, because you are the one living inside of your own head.

 

 

You are Enough – You Have Enough Within You

Depression

Complicated Grief after a Death of a Loved One or Severe Relationship Abuse

Complicated grief can occur after the death of a loved one, after the suicide of a loved one, and also after a narcissist discards you. 

Complicated grief is like being in an ongoing, heightened state of mourning that keeps you from healing.  Mayo Clinic

The Mayo Clinic Lists the signs and symptoms of complicated grief as follows

• Intense sorrow and pain at the thought of your loved one
• Focus on little else but your loved one’s death
• Extreme focus on reminders of the loved one or excessive avoidance of reminders
• Intense and persistent longing or pining for the deceased
• Problems accepting the death
• Numbness or detachment
• Bitterness about your loss
• Feeling that life holds no meaning or purpose
• Irritability or agitation
• Lack of trust in others
• Inability to enjoy life or think back on positive experiences with your loved one

The problems of complicated grief are severe.

People lose touch with their friends and tend to isolate themselves. It is a mammalian response to want to go crawl into your cave and hide. You want to get away from any triggers and have no desire to be around other people.

It can result in losing one’s job and friends. If it continues, complicated grief can lead to very severe depression and suicidal thoughts.

There are factors which can cause a person to be unable to accept the death of a loved one. The death may have been senseless or violent. The death may have been of a young child or teenager. 

This can be a result of miscarriage or still birth. Any death of one’s child can cause mental trauma.

Some people can experience Complicated Grief after the death of a spouse, especially if they are now left to care for a child with no other parent.

The child’s grief only serves to compound the grief of the parent. They have to carry their own grief and the grief of their child for the lost parent. The more the surviving parent claims, internalizes and feels responsible for the suffering of their child, the more likely it will result in Complicated Grief that they cannot seem to recover from.

The child is a constant reminder of the lost partner. The child is grieving the lost parent. This can easily overcome the strongest of people, who are struggling to keep their child and themselves together, in the midst of their own grief.

There is seldom time for them to deal with their own feelings, because they are dealing with their child’s trauma over the death. This repression of feelings, in order to keep going, can cause the grief to not be resolved. The parent needs to get help with their own feelings.

Sometimes people do not understand why their loved one is still in the same state of grief that they were in months ago.

When they comment that the person should be better by now, it makes the person draw into themselves more, which is the opposite of what needs to happen.

There are any number of circumstances in combination with the person’s mental state at the time of the death, that can lead to ongoing grief that does not heal normally.

This is a very serious mental health disorder. It may need to be treated by a mental health professional. Telling a person to “get over it” or making them feel bad for continuing to feel grief, will only cause the person to further isolate themselves.

Complicated grief can also occur after the victim of narcissistic abuse is cruelly discarded. Their reality has been corrupted intentionally by a psychopath or a narcissist. When the abuser discards you, the world that you know completely falls apart.

There is a chemical addiction that the victims of narcissistic abuse suffer from and there are actual physical and mental withdrawal symptoms. There is also a sudden, rude awakening of the reality as they knew it, being shattered.

The realization that you were with someone in an intimate way, that was very dangerous, can be frightening and cause you to question humanity itself.

So, victims of narcissistic abandonment can go through a similar but different experience of Complicated Grief. As I said, it is a severe mental condition and can cause the victim to contemplate suicide.

Not all people that suffer from complicated grief will become suicidal but it does not make their condition less important to get help with. There is a lack of being able to accept the reality of what happened. Every day the person wakes up and re-experiences the death all over again.

Every day is the same trauma replaying itself.

People cannot go one with this level of severe grief and still live and function normally. It can cause destruction to their mental health and to their functionality in life.

If you are or have experienced the symptoms on the list above, you should reach out for proper help. Do not let people tell you that you “should” just get over it. You cannot get over this condition all alone.

It is not a choice that someone makes to stay have Complicated Grief or PTSD.

It is a state that your brain goes into. Your brain is always trying to protect you, but sometimes it does the wrong thing in the process.

The brain is causing the amygdala to work overtime. You become in a state of post traumatic stress. The brain decides to put the fear centers and the pain centers of the brain, into alarm mode. It is trying to defend you against more trauma.

The problem is that you cannot live and function if your brain is keeping the alarms on all the time. We were not designed to tolerate stress and anxiety in an ongoing, continuous manner. 

The fight or flight mode is a chemical reaction in the brain, that wakes up the amygdala and the frontal cortex. It is supposed to get your body ready to fight or to run. It is like that super adrenaline rush you get when someone does something on the road that is about to cause you to crash. 

It is like if someone were to hold a gun up to your head. It is like any kind of severe life threatening situation occurs. One example might be if you saw your baby in severe danger. Your entire body would feel that. Your blood pressure would rise, your heart rate would increase  etc.

PTSD and Complicated grief are similar in that the alarms are in a permanent ON position.

Someone traumatized from narcissistic abuse may have both of these condition –  PTSD and complicated grief. The grief causing the severe sadness and lack of acceptance. The alarms are on that have to do with not wanting to accept the trauma that you have to experience about the death.

People who have lost a loved one and were not prepared for it, can end up with complicated grief. If the death was violent, or there were circumstances that the person’s brain just cannot accept, then they may also have PTSD.

The conditions of  PTSD and Complicated Grief can exists as comorbid conditions in the same person’s brain. 

What the exact thing that is going on the brain is not as important as the fact that the person is in a severe mental disturbance. It is not sustainable for them and they cannot live normally with this ongoing critical mental disfunction.

God bless and protect those that suffer,

Please reach out for yourself and catch the hand of others who are sinking,

Much Love,

Annie

Time

There is no worse feeling of utter aloneness

than when someone that loves you

sees and knows you are hurting

walks away

and leaves you alone with your mind

when you desperately needed their time

Suicide, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicidal Ideations are on the Rise This Week as Search Terms / If You Ended up Here Please Read This

I looked at my searched terms and I noticed a dramatic increase in the search of suicide and suicidal thoughts. I must assume that this is a direct correlation with the impending holiday season.

To many people, the approach holiday season is like impending doom. There are so many potential triggers that are likely to send someone into a severe depression.

It is hard to find people that are compassionate and will actually listen without judgement. Most people find death and suicide so disturbing that they are not willing to let the existence of such things into their reality.

So what ends up happening is when someone mentions having thoughts of killing themselves, the responses are as follows:

1. Oh, Don’t talk like that!

2. You don’t really mean that.

3.  Everyone gets depressed. 

4. You aren’t the only one with a hard life. Why does everything have to revolve around you?

5. My personal favorite …Everything isn’t ABOUT YOU!

6. You have a great life. 

7.  There is nothing really wrong with you. 

8. Did you take your meds today?

9.  You are just trying to get attention.

10. You would not actually do that.

So, these are all actual things I have heard people say in my field of healthcare work. I have had patients that were suicidal and other healthcare workers actually said these things to them. Needless to say, I promptly sent them out of the room.

The thought of suicide is disturbing to someone listening, but it is much more disturbing to the person.

People that have suicidal ideations, have tried everything else to feel better. They have already racked their brains and tried to reach out for help over and over again.

It is rarely something that suddenly occurs to a person and they do it on a whim. I would venture to say that by the time someone searches the term suicide on the internet, they have already spent months trying to get real help …if not years. 

Some people are helped by a good therapist to deal with depression and anxiety. Others are not helped. It may be a bad patient/therapist match or they may be a person that therapy is just not the thing that will help them.

Meds work for some people. Medications for mental health are precarious at best. It takes a while to find the right medication and sometimes pills do not help enough.

“Have you taken your meds today?” is really not helpful. In fact the answer could be extremely complicated and not a yes or no answer. People have several meds in their arsenal. They are adjusting the dosages on a daily basis, trying to get some relief.

The extreme lack of validation is devastating to a person. If you are feeling suicidal and someone tells you “Everyone gets depressed. Just suck it up like the rest of us. Everything does not revolve around you” how does that make you feel?

You are in a severe state of mental torture. Then someone says they have depression sometimes too, so you should get over it….This can add to the feeling of isolation. 

People who have not suffered from severe depression do not know what it is like. But even people who have been suicidal in the past do not always believe a loved one when they  try to talk about this.

If you are feeling suicidal then it hurts to be invalidated and brushed aside. It makes you feel more worthless and hopeless. 

Something in your brain has become so traumatized that it is telling you that it cannot tolerate any more pain. Your very own brain is against you and telling you to end it’s torment.

Having your own brain work against you like an enemy is a very very frightening thing. You do not want to do what it is telling you to do or you would not keep reaching out for help, from those around you, from meds, from therapists and then finally from a stranger on the internet.

They think you have a choice to just “stop it” or “turn it off”. It is not that easy. You can’t just flip a switch and turn off thoughts of suicide. You have been consistently traumatized by things for a long time and the brain has become exhausted. 

The first thing is to validate you and your feelings. I know you feel terrible fear and pain. It has been building for a long time, probably from years of traumatic events and people constantly invalidating you.

By this point in time, you have been invalidated so much by so many people that you feel alienated and like you are different from everyone else.

Someone who has suicidal thoughts may be very compassionate to others. They can be the person that other people tend to count on and expect to be strong, no matter what. 

Some people end up self isolating because they feel they are invisible to other people or that they do not belong. They may feel very taxed by the company of others, especially when they cannot talk about whatbis going on inside of their own brains.

People can get to a point where their  brain is telling them that it cannot tolerate the mental torture any longer. This is not intended to be selfish.

I dislike hearing people call suicide selfish. The person who commits suicide is not trying to abandon anyone. Their intention is not to hurt anyone.

It is a state of emergency that people get into and they cannot figure a way out of it. 

If you have had suicidal thoughts before then you know the extreme feeling of lonliness and hopelessness.

The holidays are coming and there are elements to certain holidays that can betriggerring. Sometimes feelings of loss, isolation, and grief can become amplified.
Having to hide your feelings and thoughts about depression or suicide can make it worse. It can seem like you are the one person that no one wants to listen to.

The holidays require an extreme effort of acting just to get through. The acting feel tedious and exhausting.

One thing that can help to endure the holidays is the Spoon Theory.

If you have not heard of it then you can easily find it on google by typing in Spoon Theory. You can make it more specific by typing Spoon Theory mental illness.

You do not have to fullfill everone’s expectations during the holidays. Just because other adults expect certain things does not make you obligated to do all of them.

Self care and self love are very important during the holidays, particularly if you tend to become more depressed at that time of year.