Complex PTSD and Shame

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Complex PTSD and feelings of shame seem to go hand in hand for many people. Having a distorted view of yourself and a hyperfocus on your 'flaws' makes life hard enough, but the feeling of 'badness' that shame brings can trick you over and over again into believing that you are indeed 'bad'.

I always felt like I was bad, but what does ‘bad’ even really mean?

It seems so simple, yet the word is multi-layered, subjective and largely dependent on the messages you received growing up. It is also a feeling in your body, a subconscious construct and a whole bunch of memories linked together offering you damning evidence.

It's also a decision I made and a decision made for me.

What I do know for certain is that from the moment I was born I was supposed to have done something wrong.

I knew that my dad didn’t like me. I knew that my mum found parenting stressful and that she frequently abandoned me even though she was often right there in the room with me. It was like she was conforming to being a mum by being there physically, but she was passively resisting by mentally checking out.

When we went to away as a family she was more of an empty shell than a human being. She had a permanent look of disinterest which would turn to annoyance when she was forced to interact with me.

She didn’t like to be reminded of the choices that she had made and the choices she told herself didn’t exist.

My father used me for a while when I was very young, and then he discarded me. I didn’t know why, just that the attention stopped abruptly. Badness stuck to me all the time like oil on a seabird after a spill. Only I was born with the black sludge coating. Already imperfect, polluted and dirtied.

I knew I was bad.

I tried to find reasons for not being bad that I could collect and use to counter the feelings I had. The self-disgust, the inferiority and the hatred that bubbled up.

Pure OCD began as a way to reassure myself that I wasn't so terrible, but it only made me hypervigilant and any ‘wrong’ feeling I found was amplified by a million percent.

Instead of recognising that my dad was being abusive, I worried that I could be an abuser. I worried about being one of those awful people that hurt children. Obsessive fears started at primary school, and I could not shake them off.

The constant checking and being triggered and checking and reviewing over and over again filled my childhood with despair. It followed me into my college years, my university years, my adulthood, and it is still with me now, although I am much better at recognising when I am triggered.

My inner child is always asking, am I okay, is it safe for me to exist?

I feel like my agoraphobia is the way that I have managed to avoid answering this question.

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When I was an adult, and not long before he died, my dad told me that he never wanted children. He didn’t really need to say it, but it confirmed what I had always felt.

I was brought up to know that I was being looked after despite being so bad. They had been lumbered with a failure, a waste of space but they were begrudgingly keeping me alive anyway because they had to.

There was something safe in knowing this. That they would put up with me being there despite everything.

I was sure no one else would, and I was terrified of being found out by friends, partners, co-workers. People passing by in cars, strangers in crowds. Could they see what had happened to me? Did they know I was bad too?

When that paedophile at the seaside had accosted me and my brother. I remember thinking how dare he do that? I also thought, my dad makes me feel uncomfortable and scared too, but I know he won’t hurt me. But this person, was an unknown. Better the devil you know.

My frozen stuckness is the feeling of being bad.

My feeling of badness has kept me away from finding other people that might love and like me and I am feeling the isolation as I get older.

Is it possible to stop feeling like this? There is no before so I’m not trying to get back something that ever existed in the first place.

What am I trying to do then, wipe the slate clean? Can I rewrite my script that was written for me while I sloshed around in my mum’s womb? Or perhaps it was even written before they got married?

After years of therapy, gaining insight has meant they have lost alot of the power they had to make me feel negatively about myself. Yet they are undeniably a part of me still, in my head and my memories inside.

And I wonder sometimes, do I want to stop feeling bad?

Is there some safety in it that is keeping me there? The rigid thinking afterall gives me a structure, all be it built out of avoidance. But predictability is safe, even though it means identifying as ‘bad’.

Maybe it's time to explore what it could be like to be important and significant and loved and liked and happy and free. Maybe I am okay, in fact no, I know I am okay.

It's time to move on and accept that although I feel bad, it's not who I am. I don't have to accept life with a caveat from my parents, or the rules that I invented to give myself some structure, because that structure was a prison.

I can make a new structure, a more flexible, positive one to keep me safe, so I can grow.