Walk with me, into the depth of my mind. It is bigger on the inside than the outside. Do not be fooled by what you see. I am going to take you on a tour of the inside, an insight into the mind of someone who is a survivor of ritual abuse and has Complex PTSD because of the trauma I suffered. This is me. The compartments of my mind do not always stay in the same place. They will lead you in a maze of uncertainty, fragmented. The shards of broken pieces will all be vying to cut through into the spaces of my mind. The mind listens when you speak, the mind watches, the mind looks different to different people, the mind my mind is like a stranger in an alley. A degree of patience is needed, the language of the mind is difficult tangled, but it is possible to hunt down those fragments of Information, and begin to process, trawl through the history for the signs. Etched inside are the words that haunt YOU ARE A NOTHING. Keep going and you will come across more spaces, with more etched words. At times it is possible to visit my mind and be content, and then there are times when it is not this way. It will be a jumble of words, of actions, of opposites, of contentious rambling, of those words that were said, that would make me scour and withdraw. The voices in those voided spaces, ring through so clearly, sharp tongued. Sometimes I grow so tired of the fear, of the sadness of my mind, of the shards triggering, retraumatising. They come in the night without light and scrape their words against the inner walls of my mind. I speak to them faceless in the dark and they leave jumbled letters for me to piece together and find ways to make words that are of comfort and so then I am settled. I start another day.............
On the surface, it may seem like PTSD and Complex PTSD are none too dissimilar -- they both come as the result of something deeply traumatic, they cause flashbacks, nightmares and insomnia, and they can make people live in fear even when they are safe. But at the very heart of C-PTSD - what causes it, how it manifests internally, the lifelong effects (including medically), and its ability to reshape a person's entire outlook on life - is what makes it considerably different.
Below is just a few things that can are associated to C-PTSD
