π "Feeling My Morning Anxiety" Gave me CPTSD Flashbacks
Last Updated: 3Β months, 2Β weeks ago
I tried waking up and "feeling my feelings", including my morning anxiety and that awareness just descended into CPTSD emotional deregulation/flashbacks the whole day
--- Update from 1 June 2024 ---
Not sure I agree with my update either. I think the real problem was not being aware enough of how to self-regulate, possibly, plus trauma processing is a risky business in any case. Of course, not processing it is also just as risky in similar and different ways.
--- Update from 6 June 2023 ---
I later realised that probably the reason I was so wrecked emotionally was probably due to sleep deprivation due to the below-mentioned sleep cycle transitioning itself back to what may be my more normal cycle which it's starting to seem may be partly if not fully nocturnal.
Just wanted to clarify with this update here that "feeling my emotions" was probably not the problem in and of itself. That said, unrepressing trauma IS something that needs to be done carefully, and if you can afford a therapist that is better. I can't.
--- Original Post ---
Maybe a lot of the standard "feel your feelings" advice doesn't always work so well on someone with CPTSD. Sometimes things are repressed for a reason, to protect us from the emotional flashbacks they bring.
So today I woke up with morning anxiety, I actually listened to it instead of looking at my phone and going about my day almost immediately, as Dr K advises here.
Granted, he didn't advise it as a treatment for CPTSD, but...
It didn't go well.
For starters, I woke up late, the second day in a row. I still have some anxiety about waking up late.
Even though there are theories that it's more normal for ADHD brains to have a later sleep cycle with our circadian rhythms being different.
And maybe we do but right now I'm not sure as I haven't done the research yet as that takes EF, and I keep hearing conflicting things from different people who are supposed to be experts, and the process of sorta resetting my sleep cycle was gruelling and torturous involving no sleep for 3 days and I don't want to risk having to go through that again, if I can actually bring myself to go through it at all.
I also have a rule about not making coffee after 12:00 noon otherwise I only fall asleep around 3-4AM, which it seems I pushed today to 2PMish which meant finishing the last cup before 3PM. Missing out on enough coffee if I didn't wake up early enough is also stressful as it's a stimulant and that really helps my unmedicated ADHD brain. Feelings of lowness like depression might even have become a trigger for me now, as might anxiety.
I also tend to get anxious before Laundry day - in case it doesn't get done on time if I oversleep and there's not enough time to wash, hang and let clothing dry properly on the one sunny day in winter, cause that's a whole thing.
Another stressor was my routine didn't force me out of the house and I somehow feel like I can't leave the house without a good reason (generally to go shopping). Which got me wondering - are my weird obsessions with sticking to rules for my routine and struggling to break out of those routines some kind of OCD? As I recently learned, that can actually come from trauma.
The threshold of getting outside when there isn't a "good reason" as my brain determines it (walks apparently aren't a good reason because they don't lead anywhere except back home) seem as massive a mental hurdle to get over as a virgin having sex for the first time.
Getting back to the "don't feel anxious"/"don't feel depressed"/"go outside" things, maybe I still subconsciously view wellness as an external performance, not an internal shift, as my performative upbringing from my parents and cult conditioned me to see all positive or negative behaviours as simply a manifestation of choice and if necessary willpower and defined purely by the external visible action not systemic causes and this, entirely my responsibility and within my power, never something I could blame on anyone else for pressuring me to do something that affected my mental health or constraining the actions I could have taken which could have improved my mental health growing up.
But I'm realising that that's actually not true and was a leftover unprocessed learned behaviour from my performative parents and the evangelical cult. A lot of fundamentalist Christianity teaches even things like anxiety as being a sin.
It was in this video I learned about Religious Trauma Syndrome. I intend to make a separate post on this sometime.
It's a similar thing to what Dr K said as I paraphrased in my how to commit to writing everyday post change it's actually a cognitive shift, not willpower.
I guess that's something more I need to process. In addition to now knowing I need to research Religious Trauma Syndrome.
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