With CPTSD, the familiar can be wrong, and the scary experiences can be right. Distinguishing the difference requires patience and building trust within yourself.

I recently discovered that my familiarity is contempt, and happiness feels wrong.

personal insights

I spent the last five months at one of my favourite locations: a rural cabin on the mountainside of a lake town. Recently, I returned home. It feels familiar, and I settle into normalcy, which my nervous system thinks is safety. My nerves were more turbulent at the cabin, but I felt happier at my core. It took me a year of going back and forth to understand what was happening.

I had to adjust to a new location and the feeling of enjoying myself. It is so foreign to me, who has spent most of her life living in abuse. I was used to feeling contempt, where normal feels like something you have to endure and muddle through until you die. I felt happier at the cabin; my history told me it was unsafe. Well, any time I smiled or laughed at something, I would get punished for it. So, of course, my subconscious was threatened by the idea of peace, joy, and settlement.

The nervous system needs time and experience to shift.

My body and mind took a year of pendulation to get it. I am so glad I kept going even when it felt wrong. I had doubted myself and met my deep terror of change. Change in my childhood and adult relationships meant harm was coming. Now, change means I get to live the life I want. It means listening to my intuition and rewiring my trauma. I am undoing the layers of pain and rediscovering who I am supposed to be and what I like to do.

Pendulation is the practice of shifting between states of regulation and dysregulation. The nervous system moves from calm and settled to feeling trauma. Our body rewires itself by bridging the gap between the harmful past and the safe present. Being present with the shifts instead of stopping them allows them to complete the healing process.

As they say…. Location, Location, Location

I am now preparing to move permanently to my cabin.

With CPTSD, the familiar can be wrong

How to tell the difference

When we get messages that something is wrong, it can be precisely what we need to hear to take action against it, or it can be a subconscious imprint from past trauma. How do we tell the difference?

There is no general set rule, but I have come to learn that internal instincts of wrongness feel very grounded and embodied. It sits in the belly and bones. The messages you get running through your mind are pretty straightforward and concise. It repeats with a need to act.

A subconscious imprint feels more like a freeze response: don’t do anything or say anything. It will stop you and beg you to return to where it feels familiar. It is less embodied and more rumination. The fear feels like a straight jacket rather than an instinct to move it through and out of you.

It will take practice, trial and error to trust the process. I recommend starting with small decisions with less impact and graduating to larger ones that will change your life significantly.

When I was at my worst, I started with simple desires, such as what position I wanted to lie down in or what food I wanted to eat for lunch. That was all I could handle at the time. Gradually, it built to what I wanted my day to look like, how I wanted to spend my time, what passions I wanted to pursue, and, recently, where I wanted to live.

Enjoy the journey, even the turbulence, because on the other side is you that you want to be.

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