as small as a world and as large as alone

5:25pm November 22, 2013

clatterbane:

I didn’t want to go off on a tangent with that last reblog about tagging and triggers.  But,  I actually thought that what I experienced couldn’t even be flashbacks for years and years because they very rarely have any visual elements whatsoever.  (Similar with migraine auras, actually.)

So I couldn’t even have “Real” PTSD. When actually I have some pretty debilitating sometimes CPTSD. Which also often looks different from the single-incident kind. And talk about numbers of potential triggers built up…

A lot of people do have a very limited idea of what can even constitute a flashback. Including professionals, unfortunately, not just random self-righteous sounding people online. Assuming that other people are not having them because they’re not just like yours is a really bad idea. To say the least. Everybody is different.

I assumed that about a lot of my flashbacks too.

Sometimes I even said I had flashbacks and then felt guilty about it because they weren’t visual, or weren’t visual enough.  

Sometimes I even claimed there were visual elements that weren’t there because I was afraid it wouldn’t be real enough.

(And don’t get me started on the whole cycle of:  "I’m not real enough" -> “I’ll claim something that ‘seems more real’ even though it’s not what I’m experiencing” -> “The fact that I’m claiming something that isn’t how I experience it, means I’m not only REALLY not real, but a horrible person, to boot.”  That’s basically the cycle that any accusations of being a fraud set off, because I used to do that a lot about various things.  But then I realized I saw people all around me doing the exact same shit, and then getting self-righteous when they saw other people doing the shit they themselves were doing too.  That’s an even more interesting tangle. But it made me realize there’s nothing unusual about doing that, it’s just nobody talks about it because talking about it, or even acknowledging it, undermines the whole purpose of the thing.  So consider this me breaking the silence so maybe other people can break the silence themselves, or at least come to realize they’re not alone.  Seriously that’s a very common thing that people in general do about many many aspects of life when they feel like they’re not good enough.  It’s not unique to any sort of person, and it’s not the same thing as being a horrible person.  Although it is pretty unpleasant of some people to rag on other people about it when they themselves are doing it.  And it’s truly horrible to do things that create an environment that cause people to do things like this.  Any environment where people are under hyper-scrutiny about their authenticity creates this kind of inauthentic behavior, it doesn’t actually make people behave more authentically.)

But anyway, yeah.  Definitely been under the illusion that flashback had to be visual, or even had to be sensory in general. It doesn’t.  It can even just be a thing where you have what I’d call a cognitive hallucination, where some element of the previous situation seems to be going on but isn’t, but you’re not actually seeing the environment with any of your  outward senses.  And it can also be something you see with your inward senses.  And it can be lots of other things that bring you back to the old situation in many different ways, in many different levels of severity.

And yeah, I also would be considered to have CPTSD, mostly from psychiatry but also from other stuff.

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