This is the blog version of the miniseries introductory podcast, available on the free platform wherever you stream (just search CPTSD or Traumatized Motherfuckers).

It’s an overview of trauma, this project, and the point of the recent reboots that TMFRs has been undergoing. (You know, can’t say executive functioning is always at a “plan for the next few years” level of activity – sometimes, we just gotta make corrections as we go along.)

Check out the trauma-basics miniseries wherever you listen. Cheers y’all.

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So, how’s life been lately? But how has it really been?

Having some variety of experiences that goes beyond your normal baseline standard depression, anxiety, self-hatred and disinterest in being alive?

Maybe your anxiety isn’t just social or incremental, it’s broadly spread across every waking moment and penetrative into every situation. Maybe you’re having trouble sleeping, leaving the house, maintaining relationships. Maybe things have gotten a bit rocky with your health – maybe your health has always been a nightmare and doctors won’t even look you in the eye. You’re having obsessive thoughts – often, about that disrupted mental and physical health, not to mention all the ways you’re failing yourself.

There might be a lot of nights lying awake to accomplish those self-berating goals. Mornings that you can’t get out of bed – you dread waking up, not to be too emo about it. All the times in between your busted sleep schedule are numbed out with various chemicals and distractions that you logically realize are making the whole thing worse, but in practice you can’t seem to curb the behaviors – if you did, I mean, what would you even have left to bandage the day.

You might feel disconnected from your body – you know, more than the usual emotional numbing that has defined the past (checks watch) 3-25 years of your life.

You might feel like your brain is being squeezed or pumped full of air every day. Your thoughts might be slow, like you live in a fog and move in slow motion. Or way too fucking fast, like your head is a hurricane, your cognitions went through a wood chipper, and now spin all around you. And all the while, you’re trying to keep up with these human performance metrics that the rest of the world seems to “just do.”

You know, at the expense of doing anything else. Like, for your Self.

Just having a job or a family maybe seems to be a life-consuming, brain-altering drug that makes you equally distracted and nervous, whether you’re actively engaged with it or not. A new way to be hypervigilant and terrorized about every possible event that could take place, if life were to continue proceeding in the dank direction it’s been headed in. And reasons to worry about your inherent worth or ability to perform in critical human ways.

Hell, maybe there are some fleeting moments when you don’t feel any of this. You feel absolutely fine. Then you gaslight the fuck out of yourself. You wonder why your brain and body were doing all that funny business in the first place – or, I mean, were they? Because right now you’re not sure what was so upsetting.

And then your phone rings. Your email pings. Your residential partner walks back through the door. Or you just spontaneously remember something from 15 years ago that got your goat and never gave it back.

And suddenly you’re swimming in it again.

The continual stress, the insomnia, the self-damning thoughts, and slow-burning sensation that you’re not allowed to… be. To exist. That you’re fatally flawed, always in the way, always alone, always incapable of doing what you need to do, and unworthy of this space rock roller coaster ride unless you manage to perform in X Y and Z ways to earn the acceptance of people who don’t really know you.

A lot of days you flip into teenager mode and have a silent moment of “but I never even asked to be here,” as you contemplate… you know… opting out.

And who could blame you? The endless death march of living like this sure isn’t worth it. I’m not going out and trying to live, I’m just sitting around and waiting to die. Sometimes it seems a lot better to just speed this all up.

All the while, with folks in the background chanting “It’s not so bad. Look on the bright side. I don’t know why you’re so sensitive. Why can’t you just be happy. You should be so grateful its not worse.”

I guess, in an effort to fully rot away any remaining positive regard you could have had for yourself while boiling human experiences down to “bad enough” or “not bad enough” to matter.

Good shit, good shit.

Well. Ya know. First of all. Sorry to hear that we have so much in common. I just described about 15 years of my life, high on mental illness.

And, secondly, welcome to something that you might want to learn more about – the neurological, emotional, and behavioral effects of growing up in a society of feelings-averse shitgoblins when you’ve got a trauma brain to conduct your daily dealings. And, if you’re here for the “C” part of this CPTSD, many of these dignity-denying gobnobblers may have been in or around your family during some pretty key years in the evolution of your brain.

So that’s what we’re here to talk about.

Trauma AND what happens if your trauma is pervasively dished out by your family unit. In one quick, concise, breakdown of everything you probably need to know about recovering from a life that’s become defined by mental illness. From the brain mechanisms that constitute trauma, to the common downstream mental disorders, to the social influences that are still triggering your neurological programs, to the best ways that I can recommend climbing out of this dank, stank pit you’re living in, per what I’ve learned from a few thousand Fuckers and myself so far.

Here’s the deal. I’m not a professional therapist or psychologist. I know these things because I’ve already done this – as in, the complete life destruction, then the necessary brain recovery to knock it off, AND also… this whole research “slash” help-a-fucker-out project.

For the past 18 months I’ve somehow been the one-man team behind a trauma support community and recovery research podcast – and apparently it works, despite having zero qualifications besides “ex scientist, current masters student, and fluctuating -mentally fucked human being.”

I put my science past to good use and break down academic articles. We put the community to good use and connect the dots that we’re all experiencing, but probably never mentioned to anyone before. And, my self-obsessive need to understand all my mental ticks rounds out the show with the insight/application/relatable description of living in hell – portion.

Somehow, people from around the world have latched onto it, and report that it helps as much as therapy, if not more. And/or it actually helps them to DO therapy, because they have a way to talk about the baffling experiences that have been sinking them.

So that’s the point here. It almost impales me sometimes. But with the momentum it’s built, this thing can’t stop.

Problem being. We all sortof embarked on this journey together in the middle of last year, 2020. We first talked about the experience of having PTSD and covered some trauma basics, we learned continually from each other in the community, and we wound up getting into super advanced PTSD education along the way. We really niched down, into tiny details and relationship terrors that surround complex trauma. We even started speaking in our own CPTSD and narcissist vernacular along the way.

Meaning, there was a problem if you weren’t in the Fucked Up Friends Club pretty early on. Because anyone jumping into modern day episodes… would have no idea what we were talking about in our advanced thesis-like episodes anymore. This podcast progressed into something that would not be useful for people who just need to get a grip on the nightmare that is daily life, before they worry about fine tuning things or picking out their individual brain bugs.

And that’s why I decided it was probably best for me to burn this thing to the ground, put out a series of “here’s the basics of what’s going on” episodes, and get everyone on the same page before we jump into the next chapter.

Here’s what we’ve learned so far, all strung together, so you don’t have to listen to a backlog of 120 episodes to get to this level of self-understanding and mental torture relief.

So that’s my goal. To give a callout to all the folks who feel individually fucked, to let them know they’re not alone, and to give the background information that you need to stop hating everything so much (starting with your self).

From there, you might want to get the more in-depth conversation on everything we’re discussing here, plus a lot more. Those previously released, more advanced and much more deeply detailed episodes? Not to mention the revealing recordings sent in by people like you, from around the world? They’re available. Sometimes each one is like a book chapter, depending on how hard I was trying to biology-my way out of reality. Sometimes they’re more like journal entries or confessional booths. And folks say they really help get a lifelong comprehension of “what the fuck happened, continues to happen, and why” from going through the full gamut.

But, first, just start here. Because you have to opt-in to get the backlog. You have to commit to caring enough about your recovery to even go online and do a thing to get that far. To find five dollars to spare in your budget for the Patreon – because, honestly, if your brain isn’t worth that much to you, sorry, but, this isn’t for you.

So, decide what you think and maybe I’ll see you in the Traumatized Motherfuckers Patreon community someday.

The point here, on this open airwaves public platform right now, is just to get the word out and introduce this acquired knowledge.

Academic research, community research, and my own experiential research, spun around into conceptualizations that might make sense of your… life. It seems to be what some people need to hear in order to finally heal. Or get the help they need to heal. Or, even to feel self-accepting enough to being open to trying to heal.

So let’s get started. This is Traumatized Motherfuckers, a personal project, educational effort, and support community for people who never felt like they had… people.

There’s a never ending amount to say about the impact of PTSD on a continuous, lifelong scale. But let’s get started with the basics. Maybe by the end of this mini series, you’ll also consider yourself – not a victim, or a martyr, or a monster – but a real Traumatized Motherfucker.

Let’s show those feeling-averse shitgoblins what we’ve got.

Cheers y’all.

Jess