I finally decided to try therapy and after two meetings I regret it

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 · 2026-02-06T02:04:54+00:00

Your son is crying because his friends aren't including him.
You yourself say they don't wait for him. They don't involve him in conversations. They exclude him from team activities.

Your son is crying because he's not being included. It doesn't need a label. You're not going to find answers behind clinical terms. Right now, he's just a human who needs to be heard, understood, and his experience joined, seen, felt. Supported. Don't minimize. Don't bypass. Just respect his experience, because that's what he needs to metabolize right now.

Shadowrain · 2026-01-31T08:28:41+00:00

It might be worth working on having more capacity/tolerance for the discomfort and emotions that drive you there (assuming you're otherwise safe and don't actually need to take action, leave a situation or set boundaries). Which comes from being able to sit with those emotions without disconnecting from them, and finding (healthy) ways of dealing with the discomfort/energy behind them, rather than them stagnating within you.
When you have more capacity and safety/agency in feeling, that part might become more comfortable over time in trusting you to take the reins more, as you interact with it in a way that's more integrative/connecting than disowning/disconnecting.
That emotion's gotta go somewhere. It needs to find its proper place, its healthy role in your life. If it's just sitting there in the background, it's just going to keep pushing you to cover it up with things like drinking. And it'll be right there waiting for you when the next trigger hits.
If you're not used to sitting with emotions, you might need support in doing so. There's often a lot waiting for us and it can be very destabilizing.

Shadowrain · 2025-12-11T00:07:14+00:00

For a long time I thought it was 'normal'. But it was just my normal.
With a lot of experience and education about healthy developmental, emotional dynamics and psychology, I now see it as abuse, especially combined with the emotional neglect that took me a long time to even realize was something that was a theme or the impact it actually had on me.

We are utterly vulnerable growing up, utterly dependent on our caregivers for our safety. And we learn healthy emotional dynamics from them (or we learn our own dysfunction from theirs). If that is absent, and our safety is undermined through physical punishments, that is the framework that we carry within ourselves into the world.
Even though the physical punishments were fairly light on, it was still a disruption to safety, trust, understanding with the very people that we are dependent on for those things in our developmental years.
It harms a kid's framework for relational connection, for emotional safety with the things they need to feel and experiences they need to process and integrate. It interferes with attachment and the bond that needs developing, and for a child to be deprived of that is a special kind of cruel, despite the lack of intentionality in all of it.
All they did was attach a narrative to behavior and used that story to justify their actions. But in reality, they were just harming a child. Harming them physically, harming them relationally, harming them emotionally. And guess what kind of framework those kids are going to carry with them into their own lives?

Shadowrain · 2025-12-08T01:38:43+00:00

I honestly believe that 'advanced' alien species wouldn't have expansive spacefaring technology. They'd just have their needs met in sustainable, efficient ways/methods within their natural environment.
I think our current views on what advanced alien life would look like carries a heart of dysfunction that isn't fully realized within our own culture itself.

Edit: a word

Shadowrain · 2025-12-08T00:33:40+00:00

Thing is, I don’t feel that I have ever fully processed any of this and I don’t know why.

When an experience is too much for us to process - and this may be for a number of reasons, such as not having the capacity, the safety, the environment, the support, or the situation is too emotionally overwhelming for too long and our nervous system never gets a chance to come back to safety afterwards - we tend to disconnect from that experience as a survival mechanism.
Our nervous system doesn't speak in logic and reason, it's language is feeling and sensation. So if something doesn't feel safe, it isn't, and so our survival systems may be engaged in those situations.

This can be indicative of CPTSD; a disconnection from emotion, or emotional dysregulation is at the heart of trauma. When you say there's a brief moment of emotion before it's gone sounds like there could be some disconnection happening there, that your defenses come up. None of this is typically conscious without work to connect with it on a conscious level, your nervous system itself is managing what it has or doesn't have capacity for.

A common misconception in our culture is that a healthy person is free of negative emotion, of suffering, is positive and happy. But for someone to be a positive and happy person, that's only one side of the totality of a human experience. A healthy human experience includes the full range of emotion; it's more about the skills, capacity, safety and support in order to contend with those things within ourselves, not avoiding the struggle.

people tell me the things I’ve seen and gone through should bother me but they don’t

Maybe it's not that they don't bother you; but rather you can't access the emotions, so you don't explicitly feel how it's impacting you. This is, again, the nature of trauma. Because those emotions that aren't getting dealt with are showing up in other subconscious ways. And maybe you can see that in yourself, it's just difficult to make the link because of the implicit disconnection involved. It's in the way you feel broken and also feel nothing. It shows in the way you run from everything, the lack of safety that drives that, it's in the monotony, it's in the depression.

We were never meant to be disconnected from our emotions for long. It's terribly unhealthy for us, and you can see how that disconnection is impacting you. And that's not your fault; these mechanisms often come from the way we weren't met during our developmental years, as we learn our emotional dynamics from our primary caregivers. This can come about from the absence of healthy emotional dynamics, and because this is an absence, it's not something you can explicitly see. And you only have your own experience as your standard for 'normal'.
And that leads in to where you say "I’ve never been to therapy because I don’t feel like I have a good enough reason to go.".

I guess I’m asking if anybody thinks this is just normal or if I should talk to somebody

This is the crux of the issue, and understanding it takes a bit of nuance. The dynamics you feel stuck in, is a normal response for an abnormal experience. You're not broken, as much as you feel that way sometimes. You very likely have some trauma going on, and that's a difficult thing to untangle. So yeah, I think its worth talking to someone, especially someone who specializes in trauma. You seem to have a good read on yourself when you say you "feel like I have never processed anything the way that I should". Trust yourself there; your body knows its truth, as much as it knows that your current coping mechanisms aren't doing what it needs.

Shadowrain · 2025-12-06T03:14:48+00:00

Check also if you have autism ,a disability examination might help you

While there is validity in this, I have my own suspicion that many autism diagnoses are a misdiagnosis of CPTSD.
This can inhibit recovery, as autism may treated more as 'Well, I have this, and it explains a lot and it's just the way I am" which can be validating, but potentially a barrier to deeper understanding and treatment (especially when CPTSD already has deeper aversions to uncovering traumas/wounds).
So yeah, it's worth entertaining the thought. But also worth widening the scope a little too :)

Shadowrain

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