ptsd – Meg's Mumbles

breachbangbloom:

condemnedtorocknroll:

unfriendlytaiwanesehottie:

all the highly empathetic people i know in my life have had abusive home lives and that’s because we were trained to read a situation at any given moment in our homes and learn how to react within seconds because if we didn’t and said or did the wrong thing, we’d get fucked up and beat and hurt

but like subconsciously always reading the mood of any atmosphere or space you’re in, always being able to gauge how people feel, it’s not a fucking gift, it’s exhausting. you can’t turn it off, even if you want to. you read the situation and if it’s negative, you freak out because if someone’s angry at you, it’s the end of the world

like we’ve internalized the scars from our childhood when an adult being mad at you was the worst thing ever and it’s carried with us into adulthood. it’s hard to unlearn all that.

so like a lot of us have mental health or anxiety issues because we also start internalizing all the energy from people, be it positive or negative, and so anxiety-inducing and frustrating to the point of tears

#hello this is called hypervigilance #And is a symptom of ptsd #And the fear of fucking up or someone being angry at us if we don’t respond to the emotion correctly #is known as a ‘maladaptive schema’#Which means that when our brains were developing #the constant traumatic or abusive environment wrote some base code into our brains #that influence the way we can filter and assess any infortmation #So all information we receive goes through the panic centre first and then gets viewed through this trauma induced coding #Which is why even when we know theoretically that we are ok and safe #we still go into panic and act instinctively

…..I had no idea this counted as hypervigilance. no idea what so ever.

“A long time ago, when you were a wee thing,
you learned something, some way to cope, something that, if you did it,
would help you survive. It wasn’t the healthiest thing, it wasn’t gonna
get you free, but it was gonna keep you alive. You learned it, at five
or six, & it worked, it *did* help you survive. You carried it with
you all your life, used it whenever you needed it. It got you out – out
of your assbackwards town, away from an abuser, out of range of your
mother’s un-love. Or whatever. It worked for you. You’re still here now
partly because of this thing that you learned. The thing is, though, at
some point you stopped needing it. At some point, you got far enough
away, surrounded yourself with people who love you. You survived. &
because you survived, you now had a shot at more than just staying
alive. You had a shot now at getting free. But that thing that you
learned when you were five was not then & is not now designed to
help you be free. It is designed only to help you survive. &, in
fact, it keeps you from being free. You need to figure out what this
thing is & work your ass off to un-learn it. Because the things we
learn to do to survive at all costs are not the things that will help us
get FREE. Getting free is a whole different journey altogether.” -Mia
McKenzie