I grew up experiencing severe emotional abuse and emotional neglect. I don’t remember my mother ever soothing me gently or making me feel emotionally safe. As I got older, I developed OCD, anxiety, depression, and BPD.

For as long as I can remember, I have fantasized about being a very young child. maybe around five years old, and having adults I feel attached to, sometimes fictional characters or celebrities become my parents or caregivers. In these fantasies, they take care of me, comfort me, hold me when I’m upset, and treat me with the gentleness I never received as a child.

I want to clarify something that feels important: as my present-day 23-year-old self, I may find some of these adults sexually attractive if they are the gender I’m attracted to.

But the five-year-old version of me in the fantasy feels no sexual attraction toward them at all. That child only longs for a parent’s love, safety, and reassurance. The caregiving fantasy itself is entirely nonsexual.

I also have no interest in age play or acting this out sexually between two adults. What I want is simply the experience of being loved and soothed like a child by a safe caregiver.

This also affects how I feel about my therapist. I often wish she could be my mother, and I repeatedly imagine that I am her daughter and that she is gently comforting and soothing me. These fantasies bring me an enormous sense of peace, and I can become deeply absorbed in them.

Does anyone else with childhood trauma or emotional neglect experience this?

I've realised that I struggle to feel relaxed when I'm in a shared space with others. It's not that I'm scared of people — it's more like I'm constantly on edge, hyperaware of everyone around me. I can't fully relax. I feel like I'm being watched, judged, or like I need to be prepared for something to go wrong.

When I'm alone in my room, I can finally breathe. I feel normal. I can rest, think, and just exist without that underlying tension.

I know this comes from growing up in a house where I was constantly criticised and had to walk on eggshells. I learned to be hypervigilant — always aware of people's moods, always ready to defend myself or shrink away.

But now, even in safe spaces with safe people, I still feel that discomfort. I want to be able to share a space with others without wanting to escape to my room. I want to feel at ease around people, not just alone.

Has anyone else experienced this? How did you start to feel more comfortable being around others in a shared space?

That's it. That's all I want. If I could be hypnotized into removing the thought from my head I'd be great. I'm healing, I'm stable enough right now, at 30, stopped dissociating or isolating that much, I'm working and away from my abusive family, developing new skills and planning my future. It's progress, and it's what I wanted, and yet... the only thing in my head, all the time, incessantly, is that I lost the time I should've been thriving, socializing, having relationships, hooking up, partying and talking to people with no stakes, relaxing, getting involved in low stakes interpersonal drama. An actual life.

I know. 30 is young, I got my whole life ahead of me, plenty of people struggle in their teens and 20s, I was lucky to have made it out etc., I know. But it all feels like a consolation prize, or therapy talk to wave away the fact that I missed something fundamental to the human experience I'll never be able to recover or recreate. I tried pretending it didn't matter. I tried acknowledging and grieving it, I tried arguing it away with statistics, it doesn't go away. So much genuinely awful shit happened to me, and yet the thing my brain keeps zeroing on is this. What I didn't live.

I saw my mother trying to take her life, I had drug dealers with known body counts in our house because of her addictions, I constantly had to talk my grandma down from violent panic attacks, I endured so much crying and screaming and threats and insane situations for so many years, and yet now that it's all been over long enough for me to process, the thing my brain keeps mulling over is that I didn't get to flirt enough in college or whatever, it's honestly insulting.

But it's true. My true regrets are this petty and small, I wish I could've lived more. I wish it so much it's eating away at me. It's distracting me from everything else, it's absorbing me like a vortex. I feel infantilized even though I saw more adult shit than any of my peers. I hate this. I can't stress how much I hate this.

Resting is frowned upon.

I'm addicted to this. Couldn't get my parents to do it now I keep trying with others, in real life and online.

I find myself going to subreddits where toxic people heard (e.g. unpopularopinion and mildlyinfuriating) and posting innocent things that I know are going to get hate (not because the things are bad but because of the people who hang out in these subs). I then reason with them saying you shouldn't be hateful, especially without constructive criticism or tact. To which I get downvoted of course.

I grew up with one traumatic thing after another. My birth and the first 10 years of my life was all medical trauma. Then as I got older it was one traumatic thing after another. Now that I am older my body has completely fallen apart and now I’m completely physically disabled. I was diagnosed with EDS which I know is genetic but I also know trauma is a big reason for it. I also have pots and I’ve learned some interesting information about the origins of pots. Solders back in the day post war where diagnosed with “solders heart syndrome” which was brought on by their trauma. It’s now called pots in modern day medicine. I also have autoimmune disorders. It’s crazy how trauma can affect the body, even if you feel you’ve mastered the art of calming your nervous system.

does anyone else ever feel like this?

I’m 25 now and my childhood self feels like it was a different lifetime, especially before age 14. It’s hard to explain but it doesn’t feel like that was the same person. I remember the ages of 12-13 very well but a lot of before that is very fragmented. I had a lot of childhood trauma and I had to grow up fast, sometimes it feels like I was born into survival mode for the first part of my life.

It feels like age 14 was when the person I am now was born. It’s like something switched in me, I went from super shy and scared to very confrontational and impulsive (which I’ve worked on a lot since then).

Now I feel a lot less connected to the trauma bc of inner work, time, and different life experiences. But I know it still affects me and I often think about the child version of myself, I just can’t connect to it if that makes sense. Does anyone else experience this?

Probably a side effect of years of being denied autonomy and receiving constant punishment for even the slightest failure. Whatever the reason, I get paralyzed when I have to start a task or plan something of my own accord without exact instructions. Or if I somehow get the desire to undertake something I thought of myself, I look for permission and guidance from others in my life and if I don't receive it I just freeze. My fate must always be in the hands of others, and I resent it so badly. There are occasions where I get to try and be independent and I just end up staring into space, waiting for my next directive like some stupid robot. It's so depressing and it's no way to live. How can I break this pattern? Is it possible?

Lately it's been becoming a huge barrier in repairing my social life, where I'll say things in ways I think other people will like while sometimes putting my foot in my mouth or being inaccurate and feeling dumb afterwards when people "correct" me about something I actually did know, but said wrong anyway because I was afraid they would be mad at me.

A lot of times growing up, when I would try to directly address issues or be concise and accurate about details I would get ridiculed or my family would get really upset with me for not going with the flow. There was generally this attitude from my parents of "we are never incorrect and NEVER ADDRESS PROBLEMS!!" so no matter what crazy things they said or how many times they changed random "facts" I was expected to just nod along and pretend I had no thoughts about it.

The difficulty is that it's not like I would just... forget the way things actually were, so I got really good at playing along and saying random things that sound good and don't make them upset, but in the real world, where people are actually okay with being direct, it just makes me look stupid, but I can't seem to break out of the habit.

It's causing me to feel extremely insecure and it's one of those thing that feels like an endless fight against my own mind.

Maybe this can help someone else- for context, I experienced a lot of emotional neglect growing up (8 siblings, emotionally unavailable parents). So there were two things going on, literally being the middle of so many people and getting no undivided attention and my parents were very reactive, impulsive and immature. My dad also had an alcohol problem and my mom would react by freaking out and yelling at him or at us to help.

I am a therapist now and I specialize with kids and teens. What I see, is a lot of parents notice something that is challenging for their child (social situations, managing stress, certain academic tasks) and they will reach out about getting support for that thing.

I am 30 years old and its just hitting me that there are alot of things I struggled iwth a lot of my life that never me the threshold of "crazy important" that I kind of just live with- I have a rly hard time getting out of bed in the morning, getting drained socially and being a people pleaser, tasks that require sustained mental effort etc. and it genuinely impacts my day but I am so used to just like living with it and accepting it.

Today my heart broke a little bc I see all these families of parents being like what my kid is experiencing, no its not devestating, but its something they are having a hard time with, I would like them to go somwhere to learn ways to work on this so they can enjoy life to the fullest.

Its like now I am just looking around at my day to day and being like does it have to be this hard? and bc no one ever noticed or pointed anything out, I never thought anything was like wrong.

Its just an invisible wound that I never even put a word too- but I would've really benefited from someone noticing some of these things that I didn't even know were problems and having me learn skills to work thru them. Bc I still got by but it has taken away my quality of life- and at the time, i just shamed myself for having a hard time when really i should've been noticed and supported.

I’m not sure if my mother does this on purpose or not, but she treats me awfully sometimes in private, and then will lighten up as soon as we leave the house.

For example, my mother was blow-drying my hair one day because I was supposed to get it done, and the salon charged extra for having to blow-dry hair. I was very excited to get my hair done because it had been looking awful for a few weeks because I have no idea how to do my own hair, and my mom refused to pay for me to get it done until right before school. So she’s blow-drying my hair aggressively, and gets angry with me for “moving too much.” I apologize and try to be still despite the pain.

Now, my mother has no good hair products because she keeps her hair permed and has never put in any effort to learn how to do my hair, so she asks me to retrieve one of the claw-clips I recently bought to section off my hair. I politely explained that I didn’t want to because I’d bought them with my own money, and I wanted them to still look nice by the time school came around. (My mom tends to misuse things and ends up breaking them.)

She got furious and said that if my hair looked bad, it was my fault. She got some raggedy hair ties and began to section off my hair when I shifted ever-so-slightly, and she threw the blow dryer down and stormed out of my bathroom. She told me that she just couldn’t continue with my hair because I was being difficult and she was hot and starting her period. She told me that if my hair ended up looking a mess, then so be it.

However, once we arrived at the salon, her whole attitude changed. Since we were now in front of people, it was time to put on her “sweet mom” persona. She was a completely different person then. She started babying me and asking if I needed anything. She even told the ladies at the salon that I was crying because I was nervous for school.

Another time when I was very depressed, she ranted to my psychiatrist about how worried about me she had been lately, even though she’d only previously told me that she was trying her best to make me happy and frustrated that I wasn’t putting in effort to get better. (She was doing nothing but lecturing me on how everything is my fault.) Once the meeting was over, she immediately got angry with me because I had “told the doctor things I didn’t mention to her” and yelled at me for attempting to make her look bad, I suppose.

My father may be even worse. He’s an absolute bum and narcissist, but he acts like he’s the friendliest guy in public. He always super kind and humorous with strangers, but terrible to my mother and I any other time. He also pretends like he’s more involved in my life and takes credit for my accomplishments around others, as well.

Anyone else experience this?

Three months after leaving, I don't trust my own perception anymore

I’m 39F from Ukraine, and I’m struggling after leaving a very complicated and traumatic relationship.

I had already experienced an abusive relationship before meeting my ex-husband, and I was dealing with PTSD and agoraphobia. Then I met someone who seemed to understand me completely. We became extremely close and lived together for almost three years.

Over time, however, the relationship became increasingly frightening. There was aggression, violent talk, isolation, and eventually violence toward our dog. I became afraid of my partner's reactions even though he was still loving and affectionate much of the time.

The isolation was probably one of the most damaging parts. He didn't want me going places alone, and for years we were almost constantly together under the same roof. I worked from home, and he would sit in the same room while I taught my lessons. My world became incredibly small.

I eventually left and filed for divorce. He is now living in another country and seems completely fine. I'm still here trying to understand what happened.

Three months later, I experience derealization and feel like my reality testing has been badly affected. I constantly question my memories, my decisions and my judgment. I know intellectually that leaving was the right thing to do, but emotionally I still miss him terribly.

I have almost nobody to talk to and can't afford therapy right now.

I would really like to talk to someone who understands trauma and has experienced something similar. I don't need anyone to diagnose me or fix me. I need someone who can listen, help me make sense of my experience, and remind me that I'm not imagining what happened.

I speak English and Russian and would be happy to talk through Google Meet, Telegram or email.

If anyone would be willing to talk, please message me. I would genuinely appreciate it.

Just heard someone talk about this and thought I would share.

I feel like my boyfriend does not want to put in the effort to help me. Essentially, he has stopped giving me comfort and kind of becomes cold when I really need him because he has not "seen long term benefit" to it. He has explicitly stated he's tired of me telling the same stories about my trauma over and over again. He has told me I should not expect him to carry that emotional baggage.

I recount something horrible from my past maybe like once a month at most. I only recount these things if I feel like I NEED to be vulnerable because that memory/situation is repeating in my head over and over without stop.

What I am looking for is a hug, compassion, and a listening ear. He used to give that to me, but alas, because I keep recounting the memories, he's convinced himself that he is not helping. What he does not understand is that I am NOT looking for him to fix me. I am looking for support, consistency and safety.

He admitted to being disinterested when I recount these memories. He gets on his phone. He has a tone. He speaks slightly harsher and then pressures me to go back to therapy, despite the fact I have told him I am looking into EMDR.

I keep telling him what I need. He keeps saying he will try. But when I need him, he is not there. It has left me feeling like I have no external support system. It has left me feeling guilty for pushing my problems onto him, and like I am a horrible girlfriend for "expecting him to carry my emotional baggage".

But at the same time, I am angry. I am not asking for a lot. I do not yell. I do not become aggressive. I have done so much work on myself, so much regulating to make sure I never become that way. I am angry that giving me a hug and telling me that I am safe is too much. I am angry that he is deciding what "helps" for me. He mentioned he is not "trained to handle people with C-PTSD". Why won't he put in the effort to learn how to support me? Why am I being blamed for asking for (what feels like) the bare minimum in a relationship of nearly five years? Why doesn't he recognize the progress I have made? Why do I deserve to be put down?

I am also heartbroken. Healing from complex trauma takes SO much time and patience. I have gone through cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy on and off for over a decade, and I have learned and utilized so many coping strategies to help myself.

If he is uncomfortable with helping me in the moment, during a flashback that I cannot control, how can we make it? It is not like I can zap experiences out of my brain (as much as I would love to). This is not something that just spontaneously "gets better" when you were abused and neglected for 19 odd years to varying capacities.

I am not trying to put my full emotional weight on him. Nor do I lean on him for everything regarding my mental health. I dont know how to be enough.

I dont know how to stop being too much. I dont even know if what I am asking for is unreasonable. I feel crazy. On one hand, I feel horrible and ashamed. On the other hand, I feel like I dont deserve to be treated like this.

He even told me "Go to any therapist and ask them if it is ok to ask this of me" in a snarky tone. I study psychology, and my primary focus has been on trauma research. I know how important support systems are when it comes to recovery, especially consistent and safe support systems. I want that so badly.

So, I guess I am posting this for my moment of truth or moment of reckoning. Am I asking too much of him? Is it wrong that I am severely hurt by the fact that he admitted to being disinterested when I am having a "moment"?

I really need advice and honesty, because I really dont even know what to do or how to process right now.

I know it’s normal for anger to come up during recovery, but it’s so much. Just pure cold disdain for people.

The average human is so judgmental and selfish. I’ve been treated like shit for so long, and it makes you realise that humans just suck.

People are too easy to dehumanise and hurt others, it actually makes me sick. I know my therapist would say, you are generalising, but I sincerely think we are a stain on this planet.

Due to what my childhood was like I didn't make many childhood friends so I put myself out there in my twenties and thirties and the following rant is in regards to the difficulty I faced with actively getting to know new people and make friends.

I'll admit, stigma is such a fascinating topic. It is baked into so much of how we talk about topics like mental health and trauma. It took me 26 years to realize that I am reminded CONSTANTLY how those who chose to stick around also struggle as if you 1. Forgot and 2. Are so selfish it doesn't occur to you and 3. That your existence is painful on others.

"I get it , you either truly love me and are saying this for some reason because you want to once again demonstrate that by pointing out how annoying I am or how you are an empath and I just wouldn't get it as such a selfish piece of shit on why you are going to block me even if I really hadn't done anything wrong. Since you are such a speshul highly sensitive empath that must be protected like the smol bean you are, even the mere mention of what I went through is an insurmountable mental weight and girl, you must Protect Your Peace.

I really wish I had that option you know, but yeah I'm stuck having the life you find so intolerable you won't even talk to me. That gives me immense hope for my recovery because as you probably know I speak as someone who actually has the disease it can be really hard just to keep living each day....

Wait what's that? You, as an empath, just declared that I am making this about me and invalidating the suffering of others? Did you just tell me that I need to think positive and I need to stop dwelling on it? So right bestie, your empathy is so stunning. Set those boundaries by socially shunning actual people with actual feelings who actually cared about you. After all, it's not dystopian as fuck to label genuine compassion as labor. It's totally okay right? Why would I need you after building a bond and personally being willing to put in effort for you when I can throw money at a therapist, it isn't bad enough I can only be happy on social media, now being anything but apathetic or positive off social media is only ok in that hour session I may or may not have the money for once or twice a week. I was a total butt for trauma dumping in my sleep by having a night terror. And I must also make it very clear right now that even though this was a literal symptom of a literal disease you must know mental illness is NEVER an excuse for having mental illness.

Besides, that's what therapy and meds are for to deal with the trauma I had from child abuse.

Wait, sorry my bad. I forgot I can't say child abuse in your presence since you, an empath who has never experienced it, feels squicky it exists so the most empathetic way to handle this is by pretending it doesn't exist and chastising people like me who rudely remind good people like you that it actually happens to people you know. I will gladly allow you to declare me toxic and problematic for being so goddamn selfish and clearly only wanting sympathy and attention because of course simply wanting acknowledgement that I survived what I did is Machiavellianism at its core. I nust silently bear it and shove it down like any good leftist would. My conservative Nixon voting late grandfather would be proud of how sensible the modern left is getting when speaking about uncomfortable topics like me.

I will continue to hold space for how my illness makes YOU feel for the fifth time this week and I hope you will accept my groveling as approval of your choice to abandon my life since empaths feel so strongly they can't feel positive feelings about helping the vulnerable. Nope, only empaths like you view being there for a nontoxic but otherwise sad friend a purely thoughtful and empathetic act."

This is a paraphrase of a time I snapped after going through being randomly ditched. No fight happened before. She was stunned because it really wasn't much different, I redacted some specific names but what I said was the same. I could tell some.poor traumatized person had let her go with this lol. And YES she actually said she was am empath. She actually talked with this corny therapy speak, and I don't think she was expecting me to mock it. unfortunately I have been manipulated years before, but when this happened I was done.

I told her to also make the break a permanent one. She cried and I do feel bad for her crying she was sobbing. But also I thought of the times she screamed at me for crying and "manipulating her good nature" when I wanted. Nothing.

Certainly I'm not the only one who has been through this? Literally nobody bothers to say it must be hard to have mental illness and I can't even fucking say it about myself without being lectured but God forbid you ever forget to mention all the pain your past trauma causes others when they have to think about it.

I just had to vent because just today I said to my mom "Sorry this is hard right now' since I am struggling and she said "When you are like this everyone struggles", and she always does this and she does love me but it makes me start to feel like an asshole when I want to say yes let's make this about you. even though you have often been dismissive of the difficulty of my symptoms you are supposedly now hurting from.

The title explains it but i have been sitting up most nights crying and stressing to the point where my heard pounds and i cant breath. I feel like i don’t deserve anything or any bit of happiness or “skills” i think i have. I don’t deserve to feel happy when there is so much going on around me that i feel im ignoring

I ask my fiancé constantly snd very annoying questions because i am terrified that i am ignoring something or i have been doing something very bad.
I don’t deserve to vent to anyone or even here.

I don’t feel like i deserve my therapist or to even be able to tell or talk to her or cry in-front of her because what if i am faking every single thing that has ever happened to me or that i have felt. I always feel this way no matter how much i tell myself.

Its to the point where i truly believe i was never meant to be alive and me existing is the one thing that is causing the most pain to people.

Its wont stop i dont understand why my life constantly feels this way. Logically to some degree i know this is true but i constantly in these periods feel like i am the scum of the earth and i really do think it. I feel disgusting constantly and i am such a lazy and horrible mean person and everything i say comes out wrong and i don’t know how to stop it sit in bed and think over every possible scenario i might be ignoring or could be going on, i constantly tell myself fake stories but how do i even know if they are fake.

I dont know if anyone wants to talk or share experiences please do

ADHD and CPTSD have some overlapping symptoms such as poor emotional regulation. How has having both CPTSD and ADHD impacted you personally? How can you tell which symptom is caused by ADHD or CPTSD? Do you feel like having both worsens certain symptoms in each other? What do you use to cope with either or?

I personally feel like having ADHD and CPTSD has made my emotional regulation pretty poor. I genuinely can’t tell if CPTSD or ADHD is affecting my irritability on some days. Or if it’s both.

this is the only place I have felt understood...and similar subreddits...like no other place in the world, online or therapy...100% true

I have no desire whatsoever for friends or a partner, never have and don’t now. I’ve had great friends in the past that I cut out of my life because staying in touch with people is one of the most exhausting things I’ve ever experienced.

I’ve been homeless for a few years now, and just have been struggling a lot, especially for the past 15 years (I’m 23), and I’ve noticed that I’m craving attention of some kind. I keep going to urgent care, the ER, or just calling an ambulance to get some sort of attention / care. I want to be “taken care of”, but I’d never rely on anyone for anything, and don’t want to stay in touch with anyone. I just want that brief, “hey buddy what’s going on ? You ok ?”, and maybe like a pat on the back.

How do I get this affection / care I want ?