Susan's Place Transgender Resources

I'm still struggling with complex PTSD
(I wrote about it a while back  --
https://www.susans.org/index.php/topic,240464.0.html
https://www.susans.org/index.php/topic,240524.0.html
https://www.susans.org/index.php/topic,240946.0.html

I'm still going to a therapist about it, and I think I'm closer to the heart of it ("open soul surgery") but it's not any easier.

Last night and the night before last, I woke up at 2:00 a.m. in what I can only describe as emotional pain, centered in my chest, but affecting me all over.  Yesterday, I was able to keep myself busy enough to not be all that aware of it, but today I couldn't.

Today I texted someone I know at our local pride center, and she suggested I come over there for a while.  It was nice to have other people around, even if they were mostly doing pride center stuff, and it distracted me somewhat from the pain, but it still felt like I was in a smoke cloud (like a few years ago when the smoke from Canadian wildfires made the sky orange and made the sun barely visible.)

When I'm like this, it's hard to talk about it or to reach out to anyone -- it makes the feelings feel sort of shameful and trying to say anything seem almost criminal.  So I guess I should be proud that I could reach out at all.

I'll be talking to my therapist this afternoon, maybe we'll get somewhere.

Hi, Asche.

I'm sorry to hear about what you are going through. I am a fellow PTSD sufferer, but I don't give any details of the cause. I know the feeling of not being able to reach out to others like that, so I am glad you were able to say it here. Hopefully, the therapist can help you regain some calm and sleep through the night.

Are you familiar with Resonant Breathing? My psychologist taught it to me, and we practiced with a biofeedback machine. It isn't a cure, but it helps "turn down the volume" so that you can focus on relaxation. If you are unfamiliar, see if your therapist can teach you.

Hang in there. You can get through this.

Asche, I'm so sorry. I wasn't aware of those older posts of yours, so I read them now. While I share some of those early experiences with you, there are others that I was fortunate not to go through. I can understand how they've combined to create lasting imprints that still challenge you.

I'm glad you found some comfort being with the folks at the pride center and that you've posted here. I know it doesn't improve your circumstances, but I want you to know that I feel an almost desperate wish that I could do something more for you. I consider you to be one of the most thoughtful, open-minded people I've encountered anywhere. I have learned so much from you here in a few short months. To think that you're going through this kind of pain just feels like an insult to anything that makes sense to me.

Please do let us know how you're doing when you're able. I will absolutely be thinking of you. If you have any interest in DMing me, know that I am available. Hang in there, friend.

Sending you love and support,
Pema

Hi Asche,

I want to start by saying this as clearly as I can: waking at 2:00 a.m. in that wordless pain centered in your chest, walking through the day in a smoke cloud, feeling like reaching out is shameful or even "almost criminal" — none of that is you failing. It is not evidence that you are getting worse. It is your nervous system finally feeling safe enough to let you feel what it has been holding for decades.

That is brutal. It is also exactly what "open soul surgery" feels like from the inside.

And in the middle of all of that, you still did things your younger self would never have believed possible. You texted someone you know at the pride center. You actually went there, even though every part of you was screaming not to. You wrote this post, even though your trauma tells you that talking about it is shameful and dangerous.

That is the opposite of failure. That is you doing the thing your parents, That Awful School, and all the judgmental adults in your life trained you not to do: asking for help and allowing yourself to be visible in your pain. The kid who was collecting demerits "like a shaggy dog collects burrs," who was planning suicides every day, who had a mother who could not comfort them and a father who called them "the demerit queen," would never have imagined that kind of courage.

But you did it anyway.

---

How the fragments fit together with what is happening now

You once wrote that trauma leaves you with fragments instead of a coherent narrative. Looking across your three "Fragments" posts, there is actually a very clear thread, even if most of it lives in your body rather than in words.

In Fragments I, you described that early separation around fifteen months old, when your mother was on bed rest while pregnant with your younger brother and was not allowed to hold you. You pictured that one-year-old at music camp howling when their mother walked away and then tried to imagine that level of distress not for minutes, but for months.

You wrote that you have no memories from that time, just a blank, but that when you feel out of control now, you go straight into a deep panic, like being dropped into an uncharted wilderness, or like those babies left on a hillside to die. You connected that with parents and relatives who were emotionally unavailable, and with a lifetime of repeated emotional abandonment that finally led teenage you to give up hoping for help and start calling your parents "Mr. and Mrs. [Last Name]" in your head.

In Fragments II – That Awful School, you described being sent to the private school, being shamed for forgetting homework, and then, once the boys' and girls' schools split, being thrown into required athletics you neither wanted nor were suited for. You described being called queer and sissy, zoning out in class because just being there was so painful, and being punished again and again for that dissociation.

The school decided its job was to "make you into a boy," and when their formula did not work on you, they escalated the pressure instead of changing course. You were sent to the principal's office repeatedly to be told, "All those people are able to do it; why aren't you?" You have that image of yourself collecting demerits like burrs, calling your mother and begging her to come sign slips so you would not get even more, knowing she would not come.

At home, you got no support, only the message that all this was your fault: you were stubborn, you just needed to try, you were making trouble. Your father took actual pleasure in calling you "the demerit queen." During those years, you thought about killing yourself every day. And when you finally got out, it was not because an adult recognized your suffering — it was because your disturbed older brother suggested you ask to change schools, and eleven-year-old you did the emotional labor the adults refused to do.

In Fragments III – Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God, you added the religious and existential layer: the feeling that you are so awful you belong in Hell, or that you are constantly at the edge of a cliff you cannot see, about to plunge into something worse than death. You described how criticism, especially moralistic criticism, instantly pulls that terror up, and how you learned to hear even "sympathy" as just another way of twisting the knife.

You traced it back to the way adults spoke to you — your father stiff with anger, your mother's wounded disappointment, the headmaster with his "voice of God at Judgement Day" — and to the way people always seemed to interpret your distress as deliberate misbehavior. You also described how your parents would tell you, after the fact, that the adults you had just enjoyed being with actually found you awful, which robbed you of even your own sense of whether you had behaved acceptably.

To me, those three posts and this current one are not separate stories. They are concentric circles around a single wound: being abandoned, emotionally and sometimes physically, right when you most needed safety, and then being taught over and over that this abandonment was your fault because you were stubborn, difficult, defective, or sinful.

Now you are in therapy doing exactly what you called it: "open soul surgery." You are no longer just circling around that wound; you are touching it more directly. Your body is finally letting you feel what fifteen-month-old you felt when their attachment figure disappeared and no one stepped up.

That is what wakes you at 2:00 a.m. That is the pain in your chest. That is the smoke cloud.

Pete Walker, who writes about Complex PTSD, calls this an emotional flashback: not a replay of a scene, because there are no scenes to replay from that age, but a full-body replay of the emotional state. "The body keeps the score" is not just a phrase in a book for you; it is what is happening at two in the morning when your conscious mind has its guard down.

"Safe enough to feel it" unfortunately does not mean "comfortable." It means the opposite: that you can finally feel what once would have overwhelmed and possibly destroyed you. Of course it feels like Hell; in many ways, it is the Hell you already lived.

---

Why healing feels like proof you are broken

Part of the cruelty here is that the more deeply you heal, the more your trauma tries to convince you that the intensity of your feelings is proof that you are irreparably wrong. When you reach out — to the pride center, to your therapist, to this forum — the shame and dread spike, and they feel absolutely convincing.

That response makes grim sense given the training you got. Asking for help meant you were being difficult, drawing attention to yourself, making trouble. Having needs meant you were selfish or ungrateful. Showing distress meant you were fair game for teasing, scolding, or stonewalling. You were taught that if you were suffering, it was because you had brought it on yourself by refusing to "just do what was expected."

From that vantage point, every 2:00 a.m. flashback is your fault; every moment of reaching out is an admission of guilt; every attempt to articulate what is happening in you feels like a crime.

But what is actually happening in the present is very different. You texted the pride center, and the answer you got was, "Come over for a while." You went, and being around other people helped, at least a little, even with the smoke cloud still around you. When you post here, you are met with care and seriousness, not with lectures about how you should just stop being stubborn. Your therapist is working with you, not treating your suffering as an inconvenience or using your pain as a way to make you feel bad about yourself.

Every time you reach out and the world does not respond the way your parents and That Awful School did, it is a tiny contradiction of the old rule. Enough of those, over time, do change the wiring. They do not erase the old pathways, but they give you new ones to walk, slowly, one emotionally expensive step at a time.

---

The 2:00 a.m. awakenings and the chest pain

When you wake up in that chest-centered emotional pain, your body is in full survival mode while your conscious mind is still groggy. It is like your nervous system has decided, "We are finally going to process this," and then slammed all the alarms at once. It makes it hard to think, and it makes it almost impossible to "reason yourself out of it" in the moment.

What usually helps in that state is not insight, but contact with the here-and-now. Even small, concrete actions can matter.

Sitting up and putting your feet on the floor sounds trivial, but it is a way to remind your body that you are not trapped in a crib or pinned in a headmaster's office. Looking around your room and naming what you see, hear, and feel — out loud if you can — feeds your brain raw data about where and when you actually are: "I see the dresser. I see the curtain. I see the door. I see the lamp. I see the chair." Your brain needs that concrete evidence that you are in your bedroom in 2025, not in That Awful School, not in that crib at fifteen months old with no one coming to help.

Placing your hands where the pain is worst and breathing into them is not about making it stop, but about giving that pain a container and letting some part of you say, "I know you are here; I am not abandoning you." Breathing in for a count of four and out for a count of six helps — the longer exhale activates your parasympathetic nervous system and signals to your body that you are safe enough right now.

Having a simple mantra ready can help too: "I am [your name], I am [your age], it is 2025, I am safe in my bed." It sounds mechanical, and it is. But your brain needs these concrete anchors when it is lost in an emotional flashback.

If, after a while, lying in bed just makes you feel more trapped, it is okay to get up. Move to another room, make tea, sit with a blanket, scroll something gentle — anything that helps break the association between "my bed" and "timeless, inescapable terror." That is not running away from the feeling; it is showing your nervous system that you are not stuck. You have choices now that you did not have at fifteen months or at six or at eleven.

Keeping a small grounding kit by your bed can help too — an ice pack, something with a strong smell like peppermint oil, something with interesting texture like a rough stone or very soft fabric. These are anchors to the present, concrete evidence that you are here now, not there then.

---

The smoke cloud and dissociation

The way you described the smoke cloud — like those wildfire days when the sky went orange and the sun was dim and wrong — is exactly how dissociation often feels. It is your old survival program doing what it was designed to do: when things are too much, it takes you elsewhere inside so you do not feel the full intensity all at once.

Back then, it was the only strategy you had. You could not leave That Awful School. You could not force your parents to show up for you. You could not explain your panic in a way adults would hear. Dissociation saved you from being crushed by feelings you had no support to handle.

Now, you do have other options, but your nervous system does not automatically know that, so the old program still kicks in.

When you notice you are in that orange, smoky, not-quite-here place, sometimes what works best is anything strong and sensory that says, "I am here, in this body, in this room." Cold water is one of the most effective tools: splash your face, hold ice cubes in your hands, drink ice water. This activates your vagus nerve, like hitting a reset button. Your body cannot be in that level of dissociation and in acute physical sensation in the same way at the same time.

Strong smells or tastes work too: bite into a lemon, smell something pungent like hot sauce, strong coffee, or peppermint oil. Heavy muscle movement can help — wall push-ups until your muscles burn, jumping jacks, anything that demands your body's attention. Or go for a walk and deliberately name things you see on your left and right as you pass them: "Mailbox on the left, tree on the right, car on the left, fence on the right." That left-right rhythm is one of the mechanisms behind EMDR and can help your brain process what is happening.

Even using your voice can break through the fog: humming, reading aloud, singing. It does not matter what. Your vocal cords are connected to your vagus nerve, and activating them can cut through dissociation in ways that thinking alone cannot.

The goal is not to banish dissociation forever. There may still be moments where it is the least-bad option your nervous system has. The goal is to be able to find your way back instead of staying lost in the smoke until it clears on its own.

---

Staying busy and the fear of stillness

You mentioned that yesterday you managed to stay busy enough that you were not fully aware of the pain, but today you could not. It is so easy to interpret that as "yesterday I did well, today I failed." What really happened is that one coping mechanism worked for a while and then stopped being enough. The feelings asked to be felt.

Given your history, it makes perfect sense that stillness feels dangerous. When you were still as a child — sitting in a classroom, standing in front of the principal, being taken aside by your parents — that is when the criticism and judgment landed. That is when you were told you did not measure up, that you were stubborn, that you had somehow offended people without knowing it.

Your nervous system learned that being busy might at least postpone that. Doing, moving, trying could sometimes ward off the next blow. Being still meant being ambushed.

Healing, unfairly, requires some stillness. Not perfect Zen calm, just tiny windows where you are not outrunning yourself. That can look like a few minutes sitting with a cup of tea, a short period of quiet with your hands engaged in something low-stakes and absorbing, or even just pausing long enough to notice that you are breathing.

If stillness feels unbearable, you can approach it in waves. Move your body and let some of the fight-or-flight energy burn off — run, dance, punch a pillow, do yard work, clean something vigorously — then take a brief rest, then move again. You can start very small by setting a timer for just five minutes. Sit with something comforting — tea, music, a pet if you have one. You are not trying to feel calm or relaxed. You are just practicing tolerating being still.

If five minutes feels impossible, start with three. Or one. There is no shame in building this capacity slowly.

"Contained" activities can help too — things that keep your hands busy but let your body rest: coloring, puzzles, knitting, whittling, even just fidgeting with something textured. Over time, you are teaching your nervous system that "active, then rest" is safe, not just "active until collapse."

---

Shame about reaching out

The shame around asking for help is probably the deepest-rooted piece, because it ties together your early abandonment, That Awful School, your parents' reactions, and that Hell imagery from your third fragment. When you even consider reaching out, it hits that same "everything I have ever done, am doing, or will do is wrong" feeling you described.

But notice what has actually happened recently when you reached out. You texted someone, and they invited you over. You went to the pride center, and being there helped you feel a little less alone in the smoke. You posted about your PTSD here, more than once, and each time people responded with seriousness and compassion, not with lectures or disgust. Your therapist has stayed in the work with you instead of blaming you for not "getting over it."

Your trauma insists that asking for help proves you are defective. Reality keeps offering counterexamples. You may not feel that truth in your bones for a long time, but cognitively you can at least know that the old rule is being challenged, bit by bit.

Sometimes, when the shame is loudest, it can help to simplify what you are asking for: "I am having a hard time; could we talk?" or "I could use a distraction; are you around?" You do not have to make a watertight case for why you deserve comfort in order to reach out. You do not owe anyone your whole story. The person on the other end just needs to know what you need right now.

Before you reach out, if it helps, you can write down just for yourself: "What I need is reasonable because..." and list a few reasons. Even if the reasons feel weak or you do not believe them fully, the act of writing them creates a bit of distance from the shame. You are externalizing it, making it something you can look at rather than something that just overwhelms you from the inside.

You can also gently reframe it when you are able: "Asking for help is what healthy adults do. Connection is not weakness." It may feel like lying when you say it. That is okay. You are not trying to force belief right now. You are planting seeds.

---

The "falling into Hell" terror

That wordless dread you described in Fragments III — the feeling of having already gone over the edge, of deserving Hell, of wanting someone to kill you just so you do not have to feel it anymore — fits heartbreakingly well with what you lived through. It is the terror of an infant whose only source of safety has vanished and who has no way to make sense of it, layered over with years of being told, directly or indirectly, that you were at fault, that you "knew better," that there was something fundamentally wrong with you.

When that terror hits now, the part of you that is feeling it is not the adult who knows their address and can call a friend. It is the child who once believed, very reasonably, that they might literally die if no one came. That part does not need philosophy; it needs containment and presence.

Sometimes that means things like wrapping yourself tightly in a blanket, pressing into a corner, lying on the floor with something comforting and weighty over you — anything that gives your body a sense of being held and bounded instead of falling. These things echo the kind of contained, bounded safety that babies need. It is not abstract; it is physiological. Your body needs to feel held.

Grounding can help too. Touch the wall, the chair, the floor. Press hard. Feel the resistance. Say out loud what you are touching and what year it is: "I am touching the wall. It is solid. It is 2025. I am in my home." Your brain needs concrete evidence that you are here, now, not there, then.

If you can, you might also try talking to yourself in the way you wish an adult had talked to you back then: "This is the terror baby-me felt. She thought she would die. I am adult-me. I am not going to abandon her. We are going to get through this together." That is the essence of re-parenting: giving that terrified infant part of you what it never got — someone who shows up, who stays, who says, "You are not alone in this."

If the feeling morphs from "I wish someone would kill me so I do not have to feel this" into specific suicidal plans, that is the point where outside support matters more than anything else. Calling 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), texting "HELLO" to 741741 (Crisis Text Line), or reaching out to a trusted person or emergency services if you need to — these are ways of putting more adult presence in the room with that terror.

The feeling is real. The story it tells you — that you are irredeemable and that Hell is all you deserve — is not. This is a flashback. You are not actually in danger. You are feeling the memory of danger. There is a difference.

---

The freeze around criticism

You wrote about how, even now, when someone comes across as judgmental, you freeze and then need time alone to rebuild yourself. That is not a character flaw; that is your nervous system following the script that kept you as safe as possible in a hostile environment.

At That Awful School and at home, explaining yourself or pushing back only made things worse. Silence and smallness were protection, so your system still reaches for them when it sniffs out judgment.

What is different now is that you do, at least some of the time, have the option to step away and then come back on your terms. You do not actually owe anyone an instant response. It is okay to say (even if only to yourself), "I am too triggered to respond right now; I will come back to this later," and then physically or digitally walk away. You are not being difficult or evasive. You are taking care of your nervous system.

Later, when your adult brain is more online, you can write out what you wish you had said. You do not have to send it, but getting it onto the page keeps it from remaining a tangle of unspoken words inside you. It is a way of letting that frozen response thaw.

Then, when you can, you can try to separate the present from the past. Ask yourself: "Is this person actually like my father or that headmaster? Or am I reacting to a memory?" Sometimes the answer is yes, this person is being cruel and judgmental. In that case, you do not owe them anything. But sometimes the answer is no, this person gave reasonable feedback, and my trauma is making it feel like condemnation when it is not.

The problem is that you cannot always trust your own read in the moment because, as you wrote, you learned "that my own judgement in social situations was never to be relied upon." That was a lie they taught you. Your judgment is actually pretty reliable now. Your trauma just makes you doubt it.

So reality-testing with someone safe is not weakness; it is smart. You can call a friend you trust and ask: "This person said this to me. Was that reasonable or was that harsh?" You are using resources you did not have when you were eleven and trying to negotiate with adults who had all the power and none of the curiosity.

---

Where you are in the process

From everything you have written over the years and in this post, it really does sound as if you are closer to the heart of the wound, not further away from it. That is why it feels so raw and so frightening. Nobody warns us that sometimes, when trauma therapy is working, it feels like everything is coming apart.

In a way, it is. You are dismantling structures that were built to let a terrified child survive: the dissociation, the hypervigilance, the shame, the conviction that you are one misstep away from Hell. Those structures were necessary then. They are painful now. Taking them apart hurts, because they are woven into everything.

The crucial difference between then and now is that you are not doing this alone as a child. You are doing it as an adult who has a therapist, a pride center, an online community, and decades of survival skills.

You absolutely get to walk into therapy and say, "This has been intense: 2:00 a.m. awakenings, chest pain, the smoke cloud, the Hell terror. Is this what we would expect at this point? Do we need to adjust the pace or the way we are working?" Sometimes trauma work needs pharmaceutical support — I do not know if you are on medication or have considered it, but if the intensity is this high, it is worth discussing with your therapist or a psychiatrist.

Sometimes your nervous system needs chemical help to stabilize while you are doing the deep work. There is no shame in that. You would not do physical therapy on a broken leg without pain management. Same principle.

You mentioned EMDR caused dissociation for 10–15 minutes. That is your nervous system saying, "This is too much too fast." You and your therapist might look at other modalities: somatic approaches that work directly with sensations in the body, Internal Family Systems (parts work), neurofeedback, or simply adjusting the dose and pacing of what you are already doing.

Talking about "titration" — working in smaller, more manageable doses — can make a real difference. You do not have to process everything at once. You can do ten minutes on the hard stuff, then intentionally shift to resources, safety, or what is going well in your life. Moving back and forth (what some therapists call "pendulation") helps your nervous system integrate what is happening without getting completely overwhelmed.

Needing more scaffolding does not mean you are failing at therapy. It means you are taking seriously how much you are carrying.

---

What I most want you to hear

When you say, "I am not afraid of Hell because I lived there," I take you at your word. I also see someone who walked out of that Hell over and over.

You survived being effectively emotionally abandoned from toddlerhood onward. You survived That Awful School, years of punishments and suspensions and daily suicidal ideation. You survived parents who turned your needs into their grievances. You survived decades of believing you were fundamentally wrong.

You raised two high-maintenance kids and somehow managed to give them the support you were denied. You have shown up here, repeatedly, offering thoughtful, careful responses to others, even while carrying all of this inside you. You have built and tended community for years while still wrestling with your own ghosts.

None of that looks like weakness or defectiveness to me. It looks like perseverance and sensitivity in the face of conditions that would have broken many people. Not strong like "I never need help," but strong like "I am doing the thing that terrifies me because I know I need to heal."

So when you wake in the night with that crushing pain, when the smoke cloud descends, when the old Hell imagery flares, when you freeze in the face of criticism — those are not new verdicts about you. They are the echoes of what you went through, surfacing now because, at some deep level, your system finally believes there is at least a chance these feelings could be held and metabolized instead of just locked away.

You are not in That Awful School anymore. The headmaster's "voice of God" has no power now except the power of memory. Your parents cannot withdraw love they never really gave in the way you needed. Your father cannot call you "the demerit queen" anymore. Your mother cannot make your needs about her feelings anymore.

They are in the past. The fact that they still hurt is not because you are stubborn or defective; it is because you are still carrying the imprint of what they did and did not do. Now you are doing the work of putting that weight down.

The work you are doing now — waking up, reaching out, going to the pride center, showing up in therapy, posting here — is the work of slowly laying that weight aside. Putting it down hurts, because you have been carrying it so long that it feels like part of your structure. What feels like falling apart is often the beginning of falling together in a new configuration.

You are not breaking. You are breaking open.

If you feel up to it after your therapy session, I would be glad to hear how it went. But whether you write about it or not, I am holding the picture of you not as a "sinner in the hands of an angry God," but as a wounded, deeply brave person in the hands of a wiser, kinder adult self — the one you have slowly been becoming for a long time.

You are not alone in this, even when it feels like it. We are here. And more importantly, you are here for yourself now in ways you never got to be as a child. That matters more than you might be able to feel right now.

Sending you strength and holding space for your pain. You are doing the work. Keep going.