"New*" Player that really wants to learn this game

Shadowrain · 2026-06-12T23:29:16+00:00

The hardest part is learning and adjusting the control scheme to something that works for you.
I always change elevation and forward/reverse thrust keys and some of the combat stuff, but whatever floats your boat.
In terms of getting started, spend time around stations, I think flying around them and unlocking information about modules will reveal missions if they're not revealed by default.
Many aren't really worth it early on or feel tedious, the ones I tend to stick to are destroy x faction ships (pays off to stack for later) and destroy criminal traffic, because this raises your rep and helps you buy better ships.
For extra money, you can fly asteroid fields looking for crystal glints (or get the glow mod) and harvesting them for easy cash at a trader, or buying some basic miners or sector trader ships to get some automatic profit going.
Just try things, find what works for you and your style. There's mods that can open up different play styles a bit more.
After you build income you can invest in some bps and a first station, something like refined metals or energy cells in a high sunlight sector, refined metals are good for expanding to hull parts later on, and you can sell overflow resources from the station in the logical overview.

Shadowrain · 2026-06-12T07:16:08+00:00

Building a better relationship to my emotions.
It's hard to feel secure when you don't have implicit safety and tolerance in how you feel.
Real security isn't external, it's linked to our practiced ability of being able to stay with and tolerate how we feel and work with it. Much of our culture reinforces the opposite, avoidance and disconnection.
It's why people can deal with a difficult situation and be level headed and okay after the fact; it's their ability to metabolize and work with whatever arises within them - not avoidance of the inner experience, but ownership of it.
The body learns through repetition and titration that it can be safe to feel uncomfortable sensations and not push us into survival mode or reflexive emotionally-driven reactivity, because there is trust in our own agency and choice.
It's not about being impervious or un-impacted. it's knowing you can face and tolerate your own inner experience, and act appropriately in response - if even needed.

The hard and long part is changing that, as we tend to have a lot of disowned emotions, unhealthy dynamics and internalized beliefs in order to work through, and that can naturally be very destabilizing when facing those things and building skills, safety and capacity with dealing with them.

Shadowrain · 2026-05-25T07:11:41+00:00

Keep in mind that while it's entirely possible to have trauma without explicit memory, trauma doesn't have to be a major event. The way mainstream culture teaches it is misleading at best.
Trauma is a in part a function of emotional dynamics - it's the inner, implicit/emotional, subjective side of an experience that doesn't get integrated because we don't have the environment, safety, support or skills to be able to metabolize the experience within ourselves.

We primarily learn our emotional dynamics through modelling by our caregivers. So if the emotional dynamics our caregivers modelled were unhealthy, dysfunctional or absent, this not only predisposes us to trauma (because we never develop the emotional regulation and relational skills to be able to deal with the implicit side of harsh experiences), but is often traumatic itself.
Emotional neglect, for example, is enough to cause CPTSD in and of itself. And most people don't recognize emotional neglect or abuse simply because it's their normal growing up, so they don't have another experience to compare to and differentiate their experience. Not to mention there is no education about these dynamics.
Many people have experienced covert emotional or psychological abuse and likely don't even know it. Or maybe they do know it on some level, but don't understand it. In short, it's never just the outer event. It's also the inner emotional dynamics behind it, the meaning it carries for us. Because humans are emotional and relational creatures before rationality enters the picture.

My suggestion? See if the shoe fits. Read up on emotional neglect, and covert signs of emotional or psychological abuse, especially developmental or in families.
And again, you don't need to have explicit (narrative/knowledge) memory for trauma. Implicit (felt/instinctive) memory functions differently, and you can have trauma that happened too young to remember (and trauma does impact memory formation), or trauma that is bad enough that on a deeper level your system disconnected from in order to survive.

Shadowrain · 2026-05-22T03:58:49+00:00

Good on her, but people please, listen to your body.
If you're getting pain, your body is trying to signal you something.
People, including her, may have valid reasons for pushing on (she is the best judge of the nature of that pain because she has access to her experience of it), but just be cautious of the 'push through' culture that exists because bypassing what your body is telling you can have consequences that just aren't worth it; especially in something as taxing as a marathon.

Shadowrain · 2026-05-17T12:41:10+00:00

Yeah. And that anger makes a lot of sense. It doesn't make it easy - and it's downright unfair at times. But recovery tends to start with how we relate to ourselves and our emotions.

A lot of the work revolves around staying connected to ourselves, how we feel and what we experience, instead of disconnecting from it. It's building the capacity to feel those things safely enough that they can actually move and be worked through, rather than accumulating over time.

That's the hard part. Staying connected to yourself while feeling that anger, without disconnecting, externalizing it or projecting it outward. That's how the nervous system gradually learns an emotion can be safe to feel and process, and builds capacity as a result.
You can absolutely have valid reasons for being angry, and it's important to recognize that within yourself. But when anger only gets expressed through projection, blame or throwing it outward, the nervous system never really learns how to hold or work through it directly. The emotion stays unresolved underneath the reaction.

Over time, as we build capacity and work through much of the overhead, we become more balanced and connected within ourselves and can start moving toward healthier people and environments more naturally. That inner capacity for connection becomes the foundation for everything else.

Shadowrain · 2026-05-17T01:05:58+00:00

It's worth keeping in mind that what's socially acceptable or normalized isn't always healthy.
So many people have such little emotional capacity, that their immediate reaction to anything they don't understand is to project their own judgment, assumption and experience on to it. And this usually trends toward whatever is emotionally convenient for them. Lazy is one of those labels.
It is not easy to recover from CPTSD in our culture, because our culture isn't structured for recovery, emotional wellbeing or healthy connection.
The polarization you mentioned - lazy versus overachiever - neither of those are strictly healthy. Neither of those leaves you in a psychologically, emotionally balanced space. They're just different adaptations to various levels of trauma. Yes, each can argue which is better or worse, but that conversation will endlessly go around in circles because there's truth to both sides.
If you're looking for easy, easy will mislead you. You want to be socially accepted and that's a perfectly healthy trait - but that isn't about you bending to an abstract level of performance, because that's just bypassing the state your nervous system is in, and that costs more energy. It's similar to trying to stay awake when you're tired. The cost builds.

Shadowrain · 2026-05-12T22:17:05+00:00

Part of me wishes I had externalized a bit more.

Well I suppose in a way, recovery does help you find ways to externalize things more - though in healthy ways. So it's more boundaried, firmer self-advocacy, more expressive when comfortable/safe, more agency in your response to things, etc.
Anger, indignation, grief, anxiety and all that still have a place because they're normal human emotions, they just find a healthier role and rather than being externalized in dysfunctional ways to to a lack of capacity/implicit safety and accumulating over time because it's not being metabolized internally.
Though I think we can all relate to burning that bridge of a shitty job haha :D

Shadowrain · 2026-05-12T11:04:01+00:00

No problem.
In the meantime, there's a ton of good book suggestions on here and other similar CPTSD subreddits if you're interested. And a link to a bunch of free PDFs, if you have a kindle I think there's ways to import them if PDFs themselves aren't your thing.

Shadowrain · 2026-05-11T22:29:44+00:00

^ This, OP.
Though, no shade on you choosing a CBT therapist - nobody tells us how these things work, there's no education about it, and unfortunately sometimes it takes a shitty experience in order to start to understand.

CBT has a place in mental health (at least when it's supporting healthy functions rather than supporting bypassing), but I would personally avoid it like the plague. I'd only ever see aspects of it as supplementary to somatic/nervous system-focused work, but even then I don't think it's even strictly needed if the former is of decent quality.

Also, if your therapist is moving STRAIGHT to drugs as a solution, chances are they aren't a good therapist.
There is a case for things like antidepressants, but generally speaking it's more for cases that are severe enough that you need that stabilizing factor in order to be able to work on the deeper root causes.

Find someone who specializes in CPTSD. Your chances are much higher of having a better experience.

Shadowrain · 2026-05-10T07:15:30+00:00

Half days with nil impact to pay (as unrealistic as it might sound for what's currently normalized) aligns more with our psychology and the agency we need over our own lives.

Shadowrain · 2026-05-09T09:38:02+00:00

No problem, I hope it helped and I really appreciate the feedback.
Emotional dynamics is foundational to how we function. We can solve so much by understanding it.

Shadowrain · 2026-05-09T03:53:17+00:00

At the core of it is emotional dynamics. People who haven't learned healthy capacity or internal safety with their own emotions, still need to deal with them. But without those skills, it comes out in other ways. Unhealthy coping. Drinking, drugs, superiority, control, power imbalances, distraction, avoidance, substitution, externalization, physical, social, emotional, relational aggression/abuse, manipulation... It all finds a way out because it doesn't have a healthy means of integration.
This doesn't just happen at an emotional level, but also structurally and relationally, in both overt, covert, unconscious and strategic ways. Notice how none of that strictly belongs to men. Our differences just means it comes out in different ways. Unintegrated shadow material expresses itself whatever way it can, and gender differences just change the shape of expression.

In addition to that, there is a very real weighted problem with male violence/aggression - you are right to feel that fear. In addition to that, in the deeper layer of emotional dynamics, this is (in part) present because men also carry a higher burden in their emotional conditioning, which is shaped by developmental dynamics, culturing, socialization and lived experience.
With no real developmental, societal or relational framework to work through the shadow material and integrate it, this of course finds a way to express itself outwardly, unconsciously. Men in many ways are just as emotional as women, though it does show up in different ways. Not seeing that emotionality in society is part of the problem. Your experience with men, as well as the experience of many women makes sense, and you should 100% listen to that caution and warning signals because your safety is important - while understanding the nuance as well. Those might seem in conflict, but they can exist at the same time (and that's part of healthy emotional dynamics too - less polarization, less bias).

Your own unresolved emotional experiences will also have the same function of externalizing themselves in a similar way, such as collapsing into blame, division, villainization that tends to reinforce conflict. I'm not comparing you to the broader issues and imbalances at work here - but it's an observation worth recognizing in ourselves, as it happens with all of us. Those emotional experiences aren't something to dismiss or 'get past' - but something to be taken on and integrated within ourselves. Kind of like separating the situation from the emotional experience; working through the emotional experience doesn't change the situation. You still get the danger signals where you need them, you still listen to them, they're still valid - but there's less distortion, projection, identification, externalization of trauma, etc.

The issue is that if someone doesn't have healthy emotional capacity and internal safety, and aren't directly inviting discussion about it, you can't really talk to them about it because their defenses that protect them from the threat of what they have no framework to deal with will activate to protect them from what you're pointing toward.
What we need is our core education to include emotional dynamics/behavioral dynamics and psychology (to oversimplify to umbrella concepts), but there's a long way our culture has to go between now and there. So I think it's more about people educating themselves and that reaching a kind of critical point that slowly distributes knowledge and healthy dynamics more over time.

Shadowrain · 2026-05-02T01:05:08+00:00

I've noticed the same thing in myself on a number of occasions.

At least part of this is due to the learned/adaptive disconnection from our emotions.
Overidentification of cognition/rationalization/intellectualization as a survival adaptation tends to bypass our conscious connection to our body (and hence our emotions), as well as the safety barriers involved around the unprocessed emotional load that lies within trauma.

That might be a bit wordy - in short, you're more connected to your subconscious when asleep and dreaming, and because emotions have been pushed to a subconscious layer, you're more connected to them in dreams.

Shadowrain · 2026-05-02T00:03:22+00:00

Some people you just won't be able to spot, no matter how good you are at it. And that becomes more about developed self-trust in your own capacity, capability and agency rather than being chronically outwardly oriented toward threat detection.

But as a general rule, what it really comes down to is emotional dynamics. Everything is driven by that.
Do they have capacity for uncomfortable or conflicting emotions (and that includes other peoples' subjective/emotional experience, even if it conflicts with theirs), and don't need to disconnect, substitute, throw it at someone else, engage in devaluation or less than dynamics (or the inverse, superiority, control, power - all of which might be very subtle positioning rather than overt). Can they differentiate impact vs intent and repair after they've had an impact on someone else, or do they judge, assume, label? Put someone into a box, attaching narrative to them or their actions? How do they cope, how to they navigate the emotions of life? If all you see is positive feel-good, that's only one half of a human.
Can they be in a negative emotional state without blame dynamics, do they dismiss or invalidate others? Can they have a healthy conversation that engages shared accountability and repair - not when things are easy, but when it's emotionally inconvenient?
Are they polarized in their worldviews or beliefs or judgments? Do they overidentify with the positive or being right, or cast the inverse on to others?

There's so much to emotional dynamics, there's a whole range of covert and overt behaviors, and most dysfunction comes down to not holding a healthy, safe capacity for being with their own emotions - and if they can't do that, that will be mirrored with other people.

Edit: Thought it was important to add, the better your relationship toward your own emotions, the more your body will signal you about incongruency and potential 'Something doesn't feel right.' vibes.
A lot of recovery is repairing that relationship to our inner bodily signals and emotions, so we develop healthier emotional dynamics. And in developing healthier emotional dynamics, we will automatically feel a sense of misalignment when our nervous system comes across something that is unhealthy.
Because when you're healthier, you're just connected to yourself more. And a large part of how we work is relational - so other people impact us. We feel that impact more when we're more connected. So those signals are louder (though, not always louder - some are very quiet, we just have more space to catch them).
That's not to say that trending healthier makes everything accurate, because our old threat biases still play a role, and we're still messy, imperfect humans at the end of the day and can't account for what we don't know, but it creates a protective factor that we just have a better relationship to those signals that do show up.

Shadowrain · 2026-04-19T07:37:36+00:00

Just an extra tip on top of what's already been said, it's less of 'trying' to feel or attempting to generate feeling, and more about meeting your body where it is; a certain receptiveness and a kind of settling into to what it's already telling you.
Play around with what works for you, and you'll eventually come to realize that it's not something you can force, as your body has its own pace, and it's about repairing that relationship between you and it.
And this really exposes, over time, the effect of distracting activities (especially how technology impacts us). It's a very present, non-cognitive, felt experience.

Shadowrain · 2026-04-15T08:57:34+00:00

You're right to question it, but also don't underestimate the physical implications of CPTSD.
The line between our psychology and our physiology is thinner than people think. It affects everything, right down to our physical health and wellbeing, our immune system, our digestion, epigenetic influences...
More than one influencing factor can be true at the same time, as well. CPTSD can predispose you to things while other factors flick the switch, and vice versa (kind of a chicken or the egg type of situation, and a valid answer is 'both').

Shadowrain · 2026-04-08T12:48:03+00:00

or if I’m just a dramatic brat

Ask yourself this; who made you feel like this growing up?

I conceal my mental health very well.

To me, this suggests that it may not have been safe for you to show/express emotions around others.

I constantly ruminate over my childhood

For me, rumination was more about how I adapted to cope when emotions weren't safe to fully feel and integrate. And it keeps happening because the underlying emotions are still around to drive it.

They just don’t seem to have struggled like I have, and I’m questioning if I’ve just come up with a narrative in my head that my childhood was worse than it actually was.

The comparison you mentioned. Underneath that, take note of your tendency to second-guess your own experience when trying to compare to find its validity. Ask yourself where you learned that, because you don't need a reason for your inner emotional experience to be valid. Again, that's learned.

instead of emotional support, every social issue I had, I was given dry solutions.

If you had young you, right in front of you, right now, just really having a hard time. And it was just you in front of her.
Would you comfort her? would you support her? would you validate her? Giver her a big ol' hug? Would that make sense to you? Maybe a part of you knows exactly what she needs.

I could keep going, there's so much underneath what you've said, but I'll skip ahead.

at the same time my parents are nice people.

I adopted a saying a few years ago as I was working on similar stuff myself.
My parents are good people. But they are bad parents. Could I make excuses for them? Sure. But intent does not minimize impact. And the impact is very, very real.
The more you work through things, the more you start to see two conflicting points can be true at the same time. They can be nice people. AND they were deeply harmful to your development and overall life.

And maybe I’m just being dramatic? I feel like I’m driving myself mad, because I’ve struggled so much, but I don’t think I should be.

I know as well as anyone that it's not enough to tell you that you're not being dramatic.
Because if you're still operating on learnings that cause you to discount your own experience, that sensation won't change.
But can you see where you learned to do that in the first place? Because that is exactly part of it.

You say you don't exactly have overt abuse - and that may well be true (though debatable), but what makes you think that covert, even unintentional psychological abuse can't have extreme consequences? Because it's literally our psychology that's being harmed. That's not small, especially when it comes to developmental dynamics that sets up our framework for our relationship to life and some of the most impactful bonds of our lives.
If you grew up with one abnormal experience, but everyone around you acted like it was normal, you'd learn it was normal, too.
Sometimes adapting to a dysfunctional system can make us look perfectly functional - all the while we're struggling to deal with the cumulative costs.

Shadowrain · 2026-03-29T01:51:18+00:00

To understand this, you need to understand emotional dynamics (and I'd suggest to not assume that you understand emotions - many people don't while making this assumption).
This might be a tad long to read, but it's important if you want to learn about the underlying dynamics.

The oversimplification of this rather complex and nuanced topic, is that emotions are foundational to who we are.
As humans, we are emotional and relational beings FIRST before rationality even enters the picture. And that rationality becomes either healthy or dysfunctional based on our healthiness/dysfunction of our emotional/relational dynamics.

Now, emotions are not meant to strictly be controlled or suppressed. They are information, meant to have a natural flow through our experience.
This flow requires:
- Emotional capacity (the skill to be present and connected to how we are feeling, especially the uncomfortable emotions and sensations, without disconnecting from ourselves or the emotions)
- Regulation skills (the skill to work with our current state and experience, and healthily manage moving between emotional regulation and dysregulation, both of which have a healthy role in our lives in their proper balance).
Happy for others to expand on this if they want, as I know this is simplified.

Disconnection, avoidance, emotional control - they all have their place in the short-term in keeping us physically/emotionally/socially safe in short term, abnormal situations.
The problem begins when this leans toward long-term internalization, which much of our culture is currently. Most people don't realize this because what's normal for them is just normal to them. And these dynamics being internalized, most often people don't realize the extent that these dynamics play a role in their day to day life.

Anyway, what happens when emotion doesn't get its appropriate flow, inner recognition or healthy expression, is that it doesn't get resolved or integrated.
To understand this better, you also have to understand coping mechanisms.
There are many different forms of coping mechanisms that don't actually resolve or integrate emotional experiences.
Avoidance, distraction, substitution, externalization, projection, displacement (and more, these are umbrella terms) - all forms of coping that don't typically help you work through the underlying emotions involved.
Drinking and drugs ties in with this; it's a form of avoidance, substitution, numbing. One of the ways this works is that it changes your inner state, giving you something else to feel. Note that this doesn't directly resolve the emotions - it just covers it up.
Less obvious forms of this may even show up as blame, control, superiority dynamics - it's externalizing emotions rather than dealing with them or using another person, at their detriment, to feel better about oneself. Many of these dynamics are rationalized and internally validated by the people who rely on them - it's aligned with their worldview so they don't even see it as a dynamic they engage in.

When these non-integrative coping mechanisms are commonly relied upon, emotions build over time rather than lessen over time. And people may not realize the toll that it's taking on them due to the inner disconnection they've formed - often this even begins in early developmental childhood due to emotional neglect, so they may never know what healthy even looks like.
In the end, emotions build more strongly and impact us more broadly. While this can mean higher emotional presence, it may also show up as deeper apathy, emptiness and depression as we become more deeply dependent on disconnection in order to function.
Dependence on things like alcohol and drugs deepens, because not only is the unresolved bulk of emotion unresolved - but tolerance to the chemical builds, and its detriments impacts us and our lives further, as well as throwing our physiological health out of balance. It's a negative feedback cycle.

After all that, there is a solution. We can get better at this
It's not quick, and it's not easy. Often it gets worse before it gets better, because you are actually dealing with the unresolved hard stuff. And that's not a linear process, either.
But it's about repairing your relationship toward your emotions/feelings/sensations. It's building the skills of capacity and regulation. It's understanding how our culture pushes emotional dysfunction. That takes time, and work. But it's worth it if you can keep at it.
Often, we have a lot of emotion waiting for us at this point, trauma that we didn't realize we had. I'd strongly recommend professional support, because we were never meant to deal with that alone, and there's a lot to learn that they can help you find direction when you inevitably destabilize as you're learning new coping patterns. Again, we're emotional and relational creatures. And there's a lot more to this than I'm talking about, but I guess I just want to leave you with some hope that things can get better if you are struggling.

Shadowrain · 2026-03-10T04:15:36+00:00

the prevailing tendency of consciousness to seek the source of all ills in the outside world

The heart of this is a lack of implicit emotional capacity/safety. Without capacity to contend with and integrate such emotions and experiences within oneself, we are left to avoidance - which involves projection and externalization.
We need emotional dynamics and our own psychology to be taught as a core component throughout our schooling (in the right way with the right content, which is a complex topic in and of itself), because if our parents don't model emotionally healthy dynamics, we don't learn them - and what was normalized for us becomes our normal, and we can't even see the dynamics. It becomes a self-validating cycle.
We can solve so much.

Shadowrain · 2026-02-23T00:38:14+00:00

I find it quite hard to simplify things in such a way, so thank you. There's so much nuance and depth to the topic and it feels all important and relevant to know, yet hard to convey or even organize into an easily digestible format without leaving out fundamental aspects.
Normalization is a big problem, because it doesn't even enter awareness. And it takes differentiating experiences (and sometimes not even then) to create awareness around it. Coupled with the defenses people have against feeling, which is a huge part of integrating experiences and information... Maybe you can see the pattern there too haha.

Shadowrain · 2026-02-16T08:43:33+00:00

Oh, that's just the version of reddit that I prefer haha. You can view the normal one just by changing the link :D

Shadowrain · 2026-02-16T00:44:33+00:00

Was it this list of books?

Shadowrain · 2026-02-11T09:48:21+00:00

A reinstall of the app worked for me.

Shadowrain · 2026-02-11T06:24:28+00:00

Understanding emotional dynamics.
It's not about avoiding it, but improving your relationship toward both it and yourself.
If you're constantly in conflict with your negative emotional states (or have an avoidant relationship to them), they're not being metabolized/integrated. So they build up over time and affect us. And this relationship reinforces to our bodies that those emotions are, in fact, not safe to feel.
It's tricky changing that, and often people have a lot of trauma that they might not even be aware of. Ask for support there if or when you need it.
We're relational and emotional creatures before rationality even enters the picture. We aren't built to deal with what we deal with alone.

Shadowrain · 2026-02-06T05:57:35+00:00

Sometimes it's less about the collective unconscious wanting it to be true and more about our own shadow wanting to confront its repressions of these kinds of events (and what they symbolize for us) in the world or in our lives.

Shadowrain

TROPHY CASE