It gets better

It really does. I know you probably don’t believe me. I didn’t believe it a few years ago either. I vividly remember having a session with my therapist where I told him I was still feeling suicidal (he was very good about letting me express my SI without jumping to ship me off), and I felt hopeless, and I was so depersonalized and he told me that if I couldn’t trust that things would get better, to just try to trust him. And that was a lot easier for me, because I did trust him. It took over a year but I did trust him, so I trusted him, and I’m so thankful I did. It did not immediately get better. Not even by a long shot. It didn’t even get better for at least another year after that.

Things just kept getting worse, and it was this self serving cycle, of being disabled by this horrible condition. I was too symptomatic to work or even pass an interview, but I needed to work to have money to keep my basic necessities. It was so bad I don’t think I can even properly articulate it.

But I kept trusting him, and there got to be a time when I was about to become homeless, and I was going to lose everything. All of my stuff that I worked the last 10 years to save up. My cats. Everything. I had been researching painless su1c1de on pubmed for months. I had 3 separate plans, plan a, b, and c, and it got to the point where it was taking more effort not to just do it finally. I saw no reason not to. Life was about to get so significantly harder for me than I ever imagined or could cope with. I was already at my end. I didn’t have anything left in me to keep in the fight I was already in, let alone raise that fight to extraordinary levels. But I anchored to the only things that mattered to me anymore. My cats and my therapist. I knew my cats didn’t deserve to have me gone forever, and my therapist had worked with me for so long, I couldn’t imagine how much it would hurt him for me to kill myself despite his best efforts.

So I told myself I would make one last effort. And that made it doable for me, because if it didn’t work out, then that was okay, because I was gonna k1ll myself anyway. It was almost over. I might as well just give it one last hooray to really say I did everything I could. The thought of the end was so peaceful to me. I daydreamed about my su1c1de like people daydream about lovers.

So I gave it that one last hooray and… it was the thing that worked. My last hooray was getting sober. I had been abusing alcohol to cope with all of my pain. The trauma had always come before the alcohol, but I underestimated just how much alcohol was standing in my way.. this is just my story, and everyone’s story will be different. But I hung on until I found the thing that finally worked, and I somehow found the strength to survive homelessness. Almost 2 years of it. I’m still technically homeless, but will be moving in to my first apartment since 2022 at the end of the month. I survived, and this time it was different from surviving my childhood, because the survival didn’t involve active abuse. It did involve active hardship, but I now had the agency to forbid anyone who would abuse me from being allowed to hinder my healing.

I found my voice and I learned how to use it and eventually get comfortable with using it. I used to have debilitating anxiety when I would self advocate, and now I can not only self advocate but advocate for others as well, it’s ease and inner security.

I’ll leave it with this, a comment I just made that sums it all up pretty well:

I completely agree. I am very far into my CPTSD recovery now and went from having flashbacks every day, sometimes multiple times a day, being unable to hold a job, unable to function in basic ways like feeding myself or showering or brushing my teeth, abusing alcohol, all the while doing everything they “told” me to do meaning I was taking my meds and seeing my therapist at least once a week but usually twice. Now I wake up genuinely happy most days, and even when I’m not I just feel indifferent to the day and my life. I enjoy things again, I can take care of myself easily again, I’ve held a job for over a year and haven’t missed a single day, even went back to school and am finally getting my degree.

This is all to say that about 7 years ago I discovered the CPTSD subreddit, and I used it religiously for several years. My symptoms were so bad back then. So so debilitating and I was convinced I would never get better and that all hope was gone for me. Even just up until about 1.5yr ago, I was convinced it was all in vain. All the work I was doing was moot and futile. But it wasn’t. It was the dark before the dawn. It took several years of practicing my vulnerability with a group of my peers (this subreddit) in anonymity to eventually be able to share tiny bits and pieces with a trained trauma therapist. After about another year, I was able to start getting really vulnerable for the first time in my life, and began the rollercoaster of relational healing. It almost killed me so many times, and it was so intense and painful and devastating. But when I came out on the other end of it, not only could I be vulnerable with other people but also with myself, with an ease I never thought was possible for someone like me. I feel confident and emotionally secure inside now. Really, genuinely, people can insult me and say the most vile shit to me and it just doesn’t incite any emotion in me because I know what the truth is and I know how to navigate types of misery and hardship now. I have an inner security that can’t be touched by anyone outside of me. I specify outside of me, because that guy inside of me can still touch it, if he wishes to. But no, I do not wish to harm myself anymore. I love feeling strong and at peace inside.

I used to envy people who got to walk through life the way I do now. The thing about healing is that it’s not a passive process, it’s an active process. Sometimes that “activity” means doing trauma work, other times it means just hanging on until the next hour. It’s a long road, but god damn is it worth it.

I viscerally remember a time when I did almost exactly the same thing OP did. I got finished with yet another therapy session that didn’t seem to do jack shit, just made me feel even more dysregulated and hopeless inside. I just felt so trapped in my own mind, and it didn’t matter where I went or what happened to me, because the hell wasn’t outside of me. It was in my own mind. I remember walking on a trail next to a river and watching the river and thinking about how I could jump in and it would all be over. The only thing that kept me from doing it was thinking about my cats, and how they wouldn’t have anyone to take care of them. I feel so extremely lucky to have made my way out of that hell. I advocate so much for spending time in this subreddit, and finding refuge here while the rest of the world is such a dangerous, miserable, terrifying place to exist as a wounded, traumatized person.

TLDR: If you think the fight is over, and you have nothing left, and there is nothing left for you… trust me. You don’t have to trust that it gets better but trust me. I want you to experience this safety. I want you to know what it’s like to wake up with an inner peace that’s untouchable by people around you. Please, save this post, I won’t delete it. I want you to know it’s possible, and it’s possible for you too.