Complex

Instead of those words, someone wrote these - - - 


Such complex stressors are often extreme due to their nature and timing:...most threaten the individual's emotional mental health and physical well-being due to the degree of personal invalidation, disregard, deprivation, active antipathy, and coercion involved. Many of these experiences are chronic rather than one-time or time-limited and they can progress in severity over time as perpetrators become increasingly compulsive or emboldened/entitled in their demands, as trauma bonds develop between perpetrator and victim/captive, and/or as their original effects become cumulative and compounded and the victims increasingly debilitated, despondent, or in a state of adaptation, accommodation, and dissociation. Because such adversities occur in the context of relationships and are perpetrated by other human beings, they involve interpersonal betrayal and create difficulties with personal identity and relationships with others.      (Complex Trauma) 


Yes: all of this.  

All of this is true. Adaptation, accommodation and dissociation: loss of agency, loss of choice, loss of self. It's how you survive, by breaking small pieces of your self to fit the shape of the ever-shrinking space you find yourself trapped in. And the longer you are there, the more pieces you need to break, just to exist.  

And then afterwards, when you're no longer confined to the place where you had no choice, you find out you're still shaped like that space. You are still broken. You are crippled into a tiny, misshapen remnant of yourself. 

And even when you have learned to look at the things that nearly destroyed you without freezing in terror - when you have pushed yourself through the agony of re-breaking those pieces so they can heal straight - when you have carefully, gently, lovingly mended every part of yourself that you can - that shape remains. It lingers, ever-present, an invisible imprint that is always ready to crush you again with the shame of being worthless, the brutal reminder that you are nothing - you don't matter - you never did. 

It never goes away. Decades later, a sudden jolt of deep shock and pain from that trauma will still cause you to flee from an ordinary family event, shaking and nauseous. But eventually you learn to see when the shape is gathering force, and you learn to resist it. You resist it by creating new shapes in your life: large, flowing shapes that are made of compassion, connection, self-respect. You build those shapes with your thoughts, your words, your actions. It takes time, and it takes energy, and it is work that never, ever ends.