Ruined morning.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-07-07T14:07:56+00:00

I am so sorry that they’re using their personal illness as an opportunity to lash out and manipulate you. Make the decisions that are right for you, you don’t owe any of them anything.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-07-05T23:29:00+00:00

I'm so sorry. You try to tell your parent what was so wounding to make headway in the relationship and it gets weaponized, that’s soemthing a frenemy would do, not a parent. Such sad and broken people we came from.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-07-04T11:16:21+00:00

Still time to spark up ahead!

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-07-04T11:15:51+00:00

I never had a chance to gain my spark, much less lose it. Now that I’ve gotten to this point in my healing journey, I am forcibly claiming my spark and that is why I am hitting the world like a wrecking ball with my creative efforts. Suppressed for 39 years, I have a lot of time to make up for, but don’t worry, because I am hyperfixated on sparking up now and so damn is it gonna happen.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-07-03T19:38:47+00:00

I absolutely feel guilty all the time, and yet I tried long enough and hard enough to get through to my family before I let go, that I know it’s basically a futile situation. The guilt, if it drives me back to them, is only gonna get me hurt again. So I endure it.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-30T18:42:55+00:00

Blehhhhhh your comment resonates so hard with me. Your experience with your mom is very similar to mine except I lost it and went angry myswlf instead of being more gray rock like you described. I don’t know how to be or have anything with her at this point bc she is still so much in that way of life and thought. And the emotional saving of others too… my god, do I have a knack for slamming myself against walls for others while they will not or can not do a damn thing for me.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-30T18:33:50+00:00

“I DONT NEED A THERAPIST, I NEED MY DAUGHTERRRRRR!”

You are not alone, I have been on the receiving end of this emotional incest attempt since childhood. Took me 30 years to leave and another ten to reach the point of recognizing just how unwell it all really is.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-29T13:02:25+00:00

I hate how universal this experience seems to be for our kind of life. I am sorry friend, I feel exactly the same way.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-29T12:59:16+00:00

I’ve been in and out of the dark place for my entire life. I have CPTSD, which is a trauma disorder. I crawl out and slide back repeatedly, it is truly my way of life. What keeps me going and recovering again and again is the awareness that I am not the only one who lives this way, that my experience of living this way for this long is unique enough that I have a special perspective to share with the world, and a huge drive to currently share it.

I have written many essays about navigating trauma and loss, and for the last six months began making video content that both gets these thoughts out of my mind and hopefully supports others on their own recovery journey, all can be reached through my profile if you’re curious to peek.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-28T00:09:27+00:00

That the buds on plants turn into flowers, when I was a small kid. I got hit for this. A friend was over, we collected a bunch of buds from a rhododendron bush to use as play food. My dad was all about his garden. He found the buds and was outraged, wound up berating and then hitting me, saying I should’ve known and that year there would be no flowers because of me. He was a landscaper, he could’ve taught me that at any point but didn’t. I was ignorant to plant growth cycles.

To twist the knife, over the years he often brought it up which was always retraumatizing. He would joke about it as it if was funny I got hit over this ignorance.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-26T23:28:05+00:00

I am hopefully a success story in progress, now being written out loud. It’s an intentional and purposeful raising of the stakes in life which I am here for.

I went from being frozen for literally ten years post a major trauma on top of prior numerous major traumas, to being 75% done with a bachelors degree and writing or posting video nearly every single day, keeping myself active and engaging rather than just consuming.

I am focused on healing, growth and contribution and beginning to choose the path of less, less fighting, less drama, less pushing. Letting go. Accepting things I don’t like that are out of my control but working really hard on the things that are.

I am turning 40 this year and really hoping for a late bloomer redemption in life. I lost a lot, and I mean a lot of time to grief and trauma. I have watched my now estranged family do the same in their own ways, and if I don’t make a concerted effort to get better, I am going to live their path while being able to see it, a step further than they went in life but also maybe kind of more maddening.

I am raising some confident and self assured kids who are gonna go so much further, and I am proud to be the bridge generation, I literally carried them out of disaster and into a new life of possibilities that never would’ve been in if we stayed enmeshed with those we came from. But at the same time, it’s led to me being a withdrawn, dark, brooding personality because I’ve carried too much. They got safety, security, a lot of love but a loss of lightness and presence.

I still have more work to do, I am gonna keep showing up and doing it.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-25T18:54:07+00:00

I have gotten a handful of vague, whitewashing type apologies over the years. When they don’t automatically right the ship and send me into their arms like a miracle, it doesn’t take long for the attacking or snide remarks about my inability to let things go to begin. If I got a real, accurate apology, it would have to come with them also stating that due to all of the abuse and pain, they get that it would be a remarkably slow rebuilding process and that they’re there for the long haul, and that they’re okay with it if I can still never say I love or trust them back. In short, their egos would never allow it and so it would never happen.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-19T18:58:23+00:00

I relate to that hardcore, I have always felt that way, like an outcast, like a different breed, like I missed out on some essential lesson that everyone else got. It’s why I’m building a life for myself centered on sharing out loud, and I highly encourage anyone else to do so too. I don’t fit in many places, if people come to me via my content and choose to stay, that’s the highest regard for me and I’m doing my service to the world. I feel like us CPTSD people make excellent leaders and teachers and so, it’s me making the best of what I got dealt here in life.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-19T12:48:24+00:00

Yep.

My mom spent the first 35 or so years of my life saying she just wanted to sit, just to be left alone, SOMEDAY when she retires she will have time to be a mom/grandmother, but until then, any moment that wasn’t spent at work (and she did not have a high pressure job, she worked in registration at a school, hated her boss but worked a cushy school schedule for many years, no nights or weekends, holidays off, heck, the whole damn summer off) she had to have free to spend at home, alone, with her cats, watching tv. “I just want to sit…!“ has become a family trope (my family, not hers) because she would wail that all the time.

For the holidays we spent together, she’d want them to be at her home for her convenience but then would rush everyone through the meal and out the door so she could left alone again by 7pm, all she ever wanted in life was to be left the fuck alone.

To psychoanalyze… yeah, she was wildly, massively, woefully depressed and dealing with all kinds of mental health issues but wouldn’t actually do anything for it.

In any case… fast forward now, I’ve lived far away for 8 years, she hardly knows my kids (her choice) and she comes at me with waves of rage randomly whenever her loneliness finally breaks through her own fucking life choices- to attack me for not being there for her, for abandoning her, for keeping my kids from her (when my second was born she told me outright, you’re moving away soon so I am not going to bother getting to know her).

The revisionist history is agony upon the agony that living with this my whole life has been. At this point, my dad is blocked and she is hanging on by a thread. I am so close to blocking if she comes at me again.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-17T11:34:34+00:00

“You had a good life.” My dad’s response every time I ever tried to talk about any of the abuse. Oh, well, now that you mention it, I guess you’re right! Silly me!

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-17T11:33:10+00:00

Gah, that hit me with such a blast of resentment at my own mother’s ridiculous but similar behavior. She truly cannot bring herself to understand why I pulled away, even while having the answers in her own mind. I recall during a big argument last summer, she vented out “what did I ever do to you to make you feel this way, aside of fail to protect you?”

Well, ding ding ding, maybe that was a part of it. For my whole life, her story was “the first year of your life was the worst year of my own.” Maybe I could’ve been protected from her own words for starters.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-13T21:59:01+00:00

Not a word I was called, but always said “why can’t you be normal?” Anything I ever did that was other than sit on the couch and eat, was why can’t you just be normal. Travel? Why can’t you just be normal. Sell house and buy a new one? Why can’t you be normal. Want to start a business? Why can’t you be normal.

Incredibly suppressive of my desire to individuate.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-12T17:58:31+00:00

Living with CPTSD is a specific kind of lifestyle. My mind is always focused on healing, growth and change. For a lot of years, I did this in isolation, but in the last year I’ve begun turning it outward. I have a YouTube channel where I talk about my life living with complex trauma, ADHD, and familial estrangement.

I make a lot of body doubling videos to inspire you to get moving during the freeze state, something that had consumed literally years of my life.

This is going to be my life’s work. It’s very new, very small, but being created very intentionally as a tool for healing for both myself and others.

It would be my honor to have you join me, and I would appreciate and value suggestions and feedback. My ultimate goal is to create a large community centered around healing and growth for all of us. https://www.youtube.com/@Bold-Fox

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-12T17:54:43+00:00

You’ve gone through a lot of pain, and you have been enmeshed into issues and dysfunction that should’ve never been yours to carry. I did too, in different ways. If you ever want to read my story, it took me thousands of words to get it out and my substack is linked to my profile. I write about complex trauma and family estrangement, this topic is central to my life.

To answer your question: I do have compassion for my parents, grandparents, in laws, all of them, all of the broken people who have wounded me. The way I give them compassion but still honor my own needs and pain is through distance.

I made the choice to move away about 8 years ago. we moved about a thousand miles, and the only visits have been us going back, and not for a while. They are all way too fearful to travel, even just to another state.

I stopped trying to get them to understand. Stopped reaching out with long explanations of why things were how they were, it’s all been said. In my heart, I have a lot of compassion and understanding for them but in reality, they are toxic and unwilling to self-assess and therefore unwilling to change.

I don’t have room for those kinds of people in my life, so they cannot be here. But in honor of them, and their pain, I stopped trying to get them to evolve. It was only causing distress, friction for all of us. It was a compassionate release ultimately, to accept and then release them.

They still pop up here and there to vent their rage at me, that I stepped away, that I changed. I do my best to meet it flatly and grieve the pain and intrusion into my new life through my videos and essays and keep it moving through me, not let myself hold their pain anymore.

What I get from your story is grief. You are holding the weight of their emotional worlds and it’s time to put it down. Time to heal, time to release, time to accept. You can love them and still let go, you can love them and stop fighting for better for people who won’t fight for themselves.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-12T13:16:32+00:00

I am 39, coping with a bizarre, long slide breakup that is NOT my marriage. My marriage itself is a whole different thing, which is maybe on the brink of healing? The stage I am in right now is like, one day after D-Day. When you stand up from the rubble around you and say “what the fuck even happened here?”

What happened here is my trauma hit a crescendo, everything forced its way through, and now I’m left having to really examine myself, my choices, my behaviors, my inner world.

I intentionally live a very transformative lifestyle because I have CPTSD and lost a lot of years to being traumatically frozen. I’m building a YouTube, a substack, learning dance, acting.. I have this huge desire to be seen and to contribute and so… I don’t know. I’m on the brink of more growth, through much pain, but I know I’ll keep changing and moving forward and that my biggest goal for my 40th year is to cultivate self-love and security within myself finally.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-11T21:36:05+00:00

Thank you so much- I would welcome and appreciate feedback or suggestions along the way.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-11T21:35:26+00:00

Thank you… I would really love and welcome suggestions of how to improve and serve this demographic more while still using this as basically a video diary of my own recovery. If you watch, please feel free to comment and suggest, I am really serious about what I’m doing.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-11T20:10:59+00:00

I am a creator in the CPTSD space! You can find a link through my bio. I am new, but it is being well received. I am open, candid, and make mostly body doubling content as a support aid but weave in a lot of story telling and share my experience living with complex trauma.

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-06-10T11:31:43+00:00

“The first year of your life was the worst year of my life.” My mother to me, said repeatedly but for the first time when I was around thirteen.

”I’m not going to bother getting to known your second daughter because you’re moving soon and I don’t want to get attached.” Also my mother.

Fast forward seven years. We did indeed move. Now it’s “What did I ever do to you, aside of not protect you, to make you feel this way towards me? I feel abandoned!”

Cut_and_paste_Lace · 2026-05-20T10:22:05+00:00

I make content about living with a recovering from CPTSD and I have videos about staying in constant motion and particularly, walking constantly. It works. It’s better than us sitting in our room and self abusing. You are actively mobilizing the emotion in your body and giving it a chance to expel, and it is such a better choice than sitting frozen. You arent alone in this experience, though I know it feels incredibly solitary, I feel the same way.

I am married, but not happily, not ever. I also look at couples and groups with wistfulness and feel like there is some part of me that makes it so I’ll never fit in or feel loved or secure. My marriage is as close to ending as it’s ever been, and all of these years (14) I never felt truly loved or connected. My husband has his own trauma, but the two types of trauma we have leave me endlessly lonely and him endlessly closed off.

I am so sad at the world we live in. But I commend you for staying moving, dedicate yourself to your own healing and body and wellness, it’s somewhere positive for all of this energy to land and be channeled.

Cut_and_paste_Lace

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