This is the private blog (transcript) version of the public podcast episode here.

---

Hey, fuckers. How’s it been going?

Hope that March has been all right for you. I gotta say, it’s been a challenging one for me and quite a few of us.

So hang in there if you’ve been a little up and down, maybe exhausted and somehow overexcited at the same time. Maybe having some explosions in your personal life that you haven’t really been able to avoid no matter what you try to do.

But today I figured, you know, let’s fill one of our weeks here with an episode diving into the mailbag. I get quite a lot of cool emails from listeners around the world and admittedly, I’m not always sure what to do with them.

I read them, I appreciate every word. But if I can be frank with you, I feel like I’m not very good at communicating digitally about trauma matters.

Like I have some manager parts that take over and start trying to solve things for people or just generally don’t really express the emotionality and the ability to hold emotional space for other people very well in textual communications. So oftentimes when I do respond to these messages with page long emails, nothing comes of it.

I don’t air back and then I wonder if I’ve said the wrong things and maybe upset somebody because I just don’t think I’m doing the most effective job. So instead, what if we opened up the mailbag and anonymously read some emails here on this platform and maybe this will start being a much bigger part of the private blanket fort podcast stream as well.

And open up these discussions for more people to be able to benefit from hearing these shared stories and insights from motherfuckers all over the damn place. And it could possibly give me a chance to respond a bit better audibly as well.

So let’s do it. Let’s hit up some emails today and see what y’all have got to report from the real world of living with complex PTSD and just starting to figure that shit out.

Here we go. So first up, this message that I received through the contact forms on the t-mfrs.

com site says, “Hello, I’m I have CPTSD. Hey Jess, my lovely fella told me about your podcast and I’ve been listening for about a month.

From Wales, yo. I listened to the free stuff and now I’m back listening to your earlier podcasts.

I was wondering if I might get your opinion before I go traumatize myself some more with the shitty doctors here who just look at me like I’m weird. I’ve been suffering pretty badly with anxiety depression since my 20s.

I’m not sure about my younger years. If I had anxiety I was definitely sad and depressed and felt utterly alone in my feelings since like as long as I can remember.

So I lost my mom due to a drug overdose when I was five. I’m so sorry.

Before we were taken from her for good, authorities, we lived with her. She would go out at night a lot, have druggies around us, leave us alone, me and baby bro, without food.

I was found playing amongst dog poo and drug stuff when social came around and she had lots of warnings. My mom was young and 24 when she passed.

I’m so sorry to hear that. She had fallen out of her own family and life was very difficult for her.

She had a breakdown at a young age after her auntie died. I think she was very close with her.

I remember scary things happening. I remember police coming to get my mom and me, aged four, trying to get them to go away, flipping the bird, saying no they can’t come in, etc.

She was taken away and I remember asking when I could see her again. From then foster families and some abuse within one of them didn’t like that I didn’t want to call him daddy.

Think I’d see a few daddies by then. Anyway, got locked in a room by myself on Easter day, no eggs for me, or the next day.

They wouldn’t let anyone from our bio family adopt us. Only grandma came forward but we were displaying disturbing behavior so they refused.

Adopted by age seven with my bro age four, dad physically abusive, mom emotionally distant, wasn’t allowed to talk about mom or past. When mom died and foster informed me, I cried and they basically mocked me for crying.

So I’ve never felt like I can talk about her. I felt so lost and lonely and I have failed at all relationships.

My behavior is wild sometimes. I lose my shit and freak out.

I’m agoraphobic. I have IBS and other body pains in my joints, nerves, headaches, migraines, and sleep paralysis on and off for years.

I’m now 41 and I haven’t worked for a year and I’m losing hope. I’ve tried a few antidepressants and they don’t seem to work for me.

They don’t stop anxiety to meltdowns or pull me out of a dark hole. I’m feeling pretty upset as I write this.

Pretty hopeless about the future. I have to say I don’t even see one.

Not that I’m going to hurt myself even though I often think about it and fantasize about suicide. I cannot do this to the people that care about me.

I’m in a right old mess. I think I’ve spent half my life crying and feeling overwhelmed and afraid.

What do you reckon? I have missed out an awful lot.

This is just a little bit. Thank you so much.

Thank you for looking at this. Well, Anonymous Writer, thank you so much for sharing your story with me and us now.

To answer your question, yes, I would absolutely suspect, I cannot diagnose, but I would strongly, strongly suspect that you have CPTSD and working with a very well experienced trauma therapist would be helpful for you. This is different from a trauma-informed therapist because people can take a weekend conference and get those credentials, which theoretically might equip them to understand some of the brain mechanisms, but in practice, I think it’s a whole different ballgame as most of us come to find out.

I suspect you have found out before based on your comment about shitty doctors around you. Here’s what I’m seeing that sounds like CPTSD.

For me, every single thing that you described, honestly, if it had started and stopped with my mom was a drug addict and these were the things that I was exposed to in her care, being left alone with my brother, her having druggies around us, her having kind of uncontrollable behavior and disappearing for periods of time while being intoxicated herself around you, presumably, all of that is already enough for CPTSD. It suggests neglect, abuse, early parentification, having to emotionally regulate your parent for them, and a whole lot of unpredictability and stress that would pattern the brain towards trauma.

Additionally, the other major thing that you mentioned that tells us this is most certainly probably the case is that your mother had her own difficult past history which led to all of these events, being on her own early and having her own very negative experiences with her family, which caused her to separate from them, and then falling into coping strategies with drug use. That means there’s general trauma at play, generational trauma, excuse me.

So we talk often about having to split ourselves from our families. It sounds like that’s what your mother did.

I’m assuming her own upbringing was semi-horrific, aka traumatic, and then she fell into her distractor parts, taking over with that drug addiction. So right there tells us a whole lot about what has been getting passed down through the bloodline, through the environment, and through your genes.

I would say it most certainly points to CPTSD. Then you continue to your story saying there was early loss in life and being juggled around between households where you didn’t feel especially wanted and they were sometimes abusive, people trying to force you into uncomfortable roles and not respecting your boundaries, such as not wanting to call somebody “Daddy.

” This all continues to point to pervasive continuing trauma. Just the continual instability moving around, unpredictable people around you who you are forced to rely on, who have their own issues and their own motives for having you.

Most certainly CPTSD fuel for the fodder. I’m, again, I’m so sorry.

So then you could discuss your symptoms being ongoing anxiety, depression, bouts of wanting to give up, agoraphobia, behavioral outbursts. Yeah, this is all absolutely typical for complex trauma.

And so are the relationship challenges that you detailed. You are far, far from being alone, my fucker, for whatever that’s worth.

I think all of us, everyone I’ve ever spoken to through this project goes through these same experiences, feeling completely alone and personally busted, unable to get help that they need or find people who just understand, accept, even appreciate them for what they’ve been through. And that is the CPTSD life until we find out what’s going on and start doing that work, connecting with other people, getting better information, and taking a real hard look at what is living in our subconscious, what is below the surface that we’re still living with and responding to, which is creating those unwanted quote wild behaviors.

So my friend, yes, I think a complex trauma informed and experienced therapist would be a great idea for you. And, you know, if you want to keep learning and gathering support networks as you go along, we are here for you.

So do not feel uniquely fucked. This is not about you.

This is about what you went through in your early years, and they sound like they would leave quite a lasting impression. So we’re here for you.

And just validating, yeah, fucker, you gots the CPTSDs. Thank you for writing in.

And if you have more to share, you know how to do it. Hit me up and we can keep chit chatting here for you, here for it, and we’re with you.

So y’all hear why it might be a little difficult to respond to these things in email form. Just how do you handle that amount of information and trying to provide validation and reassurance through text form?

It’s a little challenging. But our next message comes from another friend who just kindly said, “Dear Jess, I am currently in a relationship with a person that has CPTSD.

I value so much what you have to say because I can understand behaviors and can adapt accordingly to help my partner. Healing can come from many different areas.

Even though I have not personally experienced CPTSD, there is now a clear explanation and understanding to many things. Thank you.

” Well, my friend, thank you for tuning in and wanting to better understand your partner’s brain. I have to say, it’s not especially the norm, unfortunately.

It’s much easier in relationships to just say the other person has problems and needs to deal with them, and it is not your responsibility to really try to understand what’s driving the behaviors or going on underneath. So I just appreciate so much that you’re wanting to learn about CPTSD, which is a bit of a deep dive and requires a lot of empathetic compassion and listening and space providing in order to do it.

So no easy measure. It takes a lot of energy.

And thank you for being a good partner to your partner. I’m sure that they appreciate it as well.

It just means the world to me that any of this information going out helps shine some light on what’s going on inside of all of us. And I would really like to provide more information on that.

So it’s a bit challenging for me to put myself in the shoes of someone who is seeing these behaviors and doesn’t understand them at this point. But consider this an open call.

If y’all have any questions about what might be going on or things you’re still not quite understanding from the outside, viewing another person with CPTSD, let me know. Send in your questions.

I can answer them in some mailbag-esque episodes. And try to get clearer on how to more efficiently, effectively, compassionately work with your partner who’s suffering from a case of the goddamn trauma brains.

It’s not easy. It requires a lot of delaying your own reactions and returning to yourself in order to hear them out rather than throwing up your own protective parts and shutting them down.

And I’m more than happy to discuss a lot more of it. Also, upcoming in the next few months on the private podcast and then whatever trickles down through here, we will be talking about vulnerability, intimacy, and trust after CPTSD.

How we struggle with it as the traumatized motherfuckers. How we need to build it within ourselves before we can bring it to others.

And then how to start working with our own parts through relationships in order to build that vulnerability, intimacy, and trust. Because we have a lot of parts of us that shut it down.

And then bringing it to talking about partners who both have their own potentially trauma brains, but at least human brains. And how it really works in couples counseling when we’re talking about CPTSD folk and all of their unknown subconscious identities, memories, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and assorted programs.

So send in your cues and tune in for the next couple of months as we’re diving deeper into this issue. I’d really love to take a much deeper dive with y’all.

Thanks for your message. Thanks for tuning into your partner and compassionately trying to understand complex trauma.

It’s not easy for us, even with the trauma brains. So the effort means a lot.

Next up, this is an email that I received at traumatized motherfuckers, fuckers with an X instead of a U at gmail. com, where you can also reach me if the website contact form ain’t quite your jam.

So this message says, “Hi Jess, I want to thank you for your podcast. ” Well, thank you for tuning in.

“It’s helped me understand myself a little more. My name is Carla.

I’m a 48 year old single mom in Western Australia. I ended my relationship with my ex when my son was two weeks old because he was violent and I wanted a different life for my son.

He is not in my son’s life. My son is now 15.

I just feel so lost and so defeated. I’m scared.

A couple of years ago, I was diagnosed with childhood PTSD and ADHD non-attentive. I’ve struggled all of my life with relationships.

I can make friends and keep them for quite a time, but if something deeply hurts, feelings of rejection are my biggest one. I just can’t cope.

I can sometimes manage to communicate, but if I don’t feel heard or if I can’t catch myself, I go straight into fight or flight and can lash out with my words and people just leave. Regardless of how long we have been friends or how much I’ve given in the friendship, it hurts and it’s confusing.

The last few years have completely broken me to the point that I don’t even have a sense of who I am anymore. At the very start of COVID, before mandates, I had a foot injury which ended with me off work and unable to go to the gym.

My son was having issues also. He reached out to his dad as he was craving a relationship with him and was ignored.

He ended up refusing school and I was trying to just keep him working at home and I was very overwhelmed and in a bad place. I isolated myself quite a bit.

Then the mandates came in. I didn’t want to get the COVID jabby as I have a high reaction to medications.

I had reacted to many things with my foot injury, then surgery, and had nothing left. All the things that kept my head above water are gone.

The only thing I still do is volunteer work twice a week at a conservation center dedicated to our endangered, amazing black cockatoos. I was never an anti-anything or conspiracy theorist, but I was openly pro-choice and so was accused of being those things anyway.

I lost a lot of friends and family and copped so much judgment. I don’t understand how people suddenly lost value.

My best friend had started being a bit different and I had noticed she had lied to me a few times. When I called her out on it, she told me she was done.

Via text, and I still don’t understand why, I begged to know what I did wrong, said I was sorry for whatever it was, begged for conversation. This went on for months.

She would read what I said but not reply. I eventually got angry and she blocked me.

We were a big friend group, we all met at playgroup, and would do group catch-ups and go camping every year, and that’s now just gone. This was two weeks before Christmas 2021.

She had always told me I was family, if they won the lotto they would build me a house with their property as they couldn’t be without their weirdo. That it didn’t matter if I was a little bit broken because they could see my heart.

The friend group has just all fallen apart. My mom had me at 15 and my dad was 19.

He was an alcoholic, he was violent, and would fight with mom, and then tell me I was unlovable and only he would ever love me. I was fat, stupid, ugly, I would only ever grow up to be a slut like my mom.

They broke up when I was 6. When he would get us, I have a brother 3 years younger, for fortnightly visits, he would sometimes be drunk and tell mom he was going to kill us and she would never see us again.

She would be running around the car trying to get us out and he’d drive away. So much more has happened in my life, but with my dad.

I craved his love and acceptance all my life but never felt like I wanted. I finally ended contact with him when I was 38.

I had a complete breakdown and my friend scooped me up and got me through it. Then suddenly the heart she saw was nothing.

I was nothing, not even worth a conversation. I have been stuck since then.

I am in survival mode constantly. My immune system is fried so I’m always catching colds.

I’m too scared to go back to the gym or to try to make new connections. I have friends but I don’t feel close to them.

I don’t really even feel connected. There’s no one in my life that understands how I feel so I just close down.

I feel like I’m barely surviving. I’ve lost all joy in life.

I think I’d prefer to not be here anymore and I cry every day. I feel so much guilt for feeling this way because I love my son more than anything in this world and want to be enjoying my life and him seeing me enjoying life.

I just feel so lonely and so alone. I have reacted to any antidepressant I have tried.

I’m still on leave from work. I see a therapist who I’ve been seeing for years but she only does CBT which doesn’t help.

I don’t have the funds at this point in time to pay for a therapist who does EMDR. I’ll start to feel stronger and then life will happen and I’m knocked straight back on my butt because I just have no resilience and no support system.

I’m just so desperate to feel loved and accepted and supported. When I listen to you it’s the only space I feel understood.

So thank you Jess. Well fucker, first of all your message made me tear up quite a bit.

Thank you for sharing your story and for saying that listening to the podcast makes you feel seen and heard and a little bit better. But a lot to dig through here.

So first of all I congratulate you for separating yourself from your father. That sounds like a pervasively damaging relationship and I would really explore that if I was you.

You mentioned your therapist only doing CBT which is not going to quite get the job done here if I had to guess. And EMDR may help.

What I would recommend of course is somebody who has experience in parts work if it’s possible to find an IFS practitioner or somebody who is familiar with the concepts and as always is an experienced trauma therapist as you are eventually able to have the funds. I completely understand the hang up around being able to find the care that you need for insurance and financial reasons and I’m so sorry that you’re stuck in that horrible crevasse.

It also sounds like COVID was just life changing for you in many, many ways. An incredibly stressful time that has broken down your normal life structure and then unfortunately left you alone with your own brain while it’s tried to support you and your son and both of your lives and at the same time it has been kind of thrown off the edge of a cliff by having this friendship dissolution take place.

All of this is going to bring up a lot of those older parts that I would suspect were formed from parental relationships. Those narratives of not being good enough in every way in one way or another however the wind shifted that day and the extremely fucked up narrative your dad used which is you’re not good enough and no one can love you except for me.

Typical, typical, extremely unoriginal abuser tactic right there. Get the person dependent on you by making them feel so bad about themselves and being so kind as to offer quote “acceptance” to them when in reality the person is offering zero acceptance, only more criticism and insertion of fucked up core beliefs.

So I would imagine there’s a lot going on in your brain that’s historically based at the same time as you are dealing with plenty of current problems ongoing. As far as your friend is concerned, holy shit, it sounds like a pretty common communication unevent essentially if I had to guess.

You said you had noticed your friend lying before in the past and then only confronted them you know kind of towards the end of things which suggests that there was not very authentic communication taking place on their part. Perhaps they were only presenting half truths for some duration of the relationship when they were struggling with some kind of counter truths on their own part if that makes sense.

Such as saying that they would always provide for you but maybe behind the scenes subconsciously something that they weren’t proud of or even necessarily aware of or could understand themselves. Maybe they were having mixed feelings about that supportive role in the relationship or there were other semi-triggering things happening within their own brain programming that they didn’t know how to talk about.

Again maybe they didn’t really get it themselves. So bringing up the lies then is a confrontation to them and if they already were having these mixed feelings it could force them into a position of relying on those protective manager parts within themselves which then are just shutting you out to try to protect themselves and probably sustain some sort of narrative that they formed around the situation whatever that might be.

So that would be the stonewalling behavior that you’re seeing and then the you know blocking that you’ve experienced all happening in the blink of an eye like a flip has been switched. So it’s an extremely destabilizing event to go through.

I have been through it myself for what that is worth. Difference being I’m not much of a relationship pursuer.

So if somebody desires a break with me, okay I will just go the other direction then. And unfortunately by reaching out which you were genuinely trying to do just trying to understand what had happened that may have been pushing her further and further away from you by feeling like you were stepping on unspoken boundaries that she had decided and laid without you know really discussing what was going on with you.

So I would say give that some time. Assume that a lot of this is things going on within your friend that things going on within you were possibly triggering especially when you were in an extremely stress overloaded time and place.

It may have just been a lot for her system to deal with and this is kind of a protective strategy. But fucker there’s so much to say here.

I just want to really validate your experience. I think a lot of us have been going through these massive shifts in the last three years now.

I can tell you nothing in my life looks at all similar to the way that it did pre-2020. Like nothing at all.

It’s been so destabilizing and such an insecure time and then there have been a lot of relationship issues. I think everyone has been in a state of trying to survive with global events knocking us around and it’s created a lot of interpersonal challenges while we’ve all been dealing with our own trauma brains reacting to the stressful events separately.

So I do feel like I truly understand especially when you say you’re not even sure who you are anymore. Well it’s because your identity has been forced to shift so rapidly due to external events that you haven’t had enough time for your brain to really integrate all of it and come to some sort of decision in a way of who you are.

You haven’t had enough practice with all of these shifts knocking you back and forth. So your brain is probably running through a lot of programs each day trying to understand who you are, what you are, how you feel, what you think, and how it all makes sense in your entire life history up to the present moment which is head spinning.

It is overwhelming and it would leave you in a place of feeling like you just don’t want to do it anymore because there’s so much inner tumult. So this is all to say it will stabilize over time if you are conscientious of these things and working with them.

It would be amazing if you could switch therapists somehow. I’m not certain in Australia if there are programs to assist with finding providers with less resources in hand but I would really really consider checking that out even if it needs to be a remote experience just to give you a way to stabilize and process with somebody else at this point and then to start moving into the integration phase.

So we are here with you my fucker. It sounds like a very CPTSD riled and common experience that you’ve been having.

You are not losing your goddamn mind but it is going through a lot of adjustments right now and it just sounds like some rugs have been ripped out from under you so you don’t even have the structures to kind of escape from your brain in the ways that you used to. I’m so so sorry and we are here with you and for you if there’s anything that you need.

Jump into the community, write me some more emails and we can discuss them through the episodes but I really do recommend that you seek support as you can. I don’t want to push my little support network but it does seem to help people quite a great deal when they’re in similar circumstances and truly just need to be acknowledged and seen genuinely without all the judgment especially without the self-judgment.

So we’re here with you. Keep us updated and thank you for sharing your story.

It means a lot to us and hope that you’ll be doing all right as time unfolds and you’re able to get in there and work with your wiring a bit. Cheers to you and don’t be a stranger.

And all right my fuckers, I think that that is enough mailbag for the week. If y’all like this, we’ll come back and keep doing it.

It is contingent on receiving more contact forms and emails from y’all so if you’re interested go to t-mfrs. com and use the contact submit form or you can reach me at traumatized motherfuckers fuckers with an x instead of a u at gmail.

com. Share your story, ask some questions, whatever you want to do and let’s keep deepening this discussion within the group and really put these heartfelt, insightful, and authentically revealing messages to better use than sitting in my email inbox together.

I hope that you have enjoyed this little rundown of hearing from motherfuckers all over the goddamn place and just a reminder that you can do even more of that in the Traumatized Motherfuckers private community and podcast stream where we share stories monthly from motherfuckers like you reflecting on all different aspects of these cptsd typical life. So I’ll talk to you soon in one way or another my fucker and until then take care of yourself all right?

Hail you, hail yourself with a capital s, hail Archie, and cheers y’all till we speak again next time. Bye.

---

My inbox collects a lot of stories and questions… and I think they’d be put to better use anonymously shared with the whole crew. Let’s dip into some listener feedback and questions today, asking “Do I have CPTSD?” “How do I understand my partner better?” and “How do I cope in this relationally destabilizing time?”

Wanna get your own recorded feedback? Submit your message at t-mfrs.com or traumatizedmotherfxckers@gmail.com

---

Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/complextrauma/message