* Not a Disorder
Complex PTSD isn’t just the scars of what happened, it’s the weight of carrying those scars through decades of being told they weren’t there. The panic attacks you gaslit yourself into calling “overreacting.” The relationships you sabotaged because closeness felt like a trap. The exhaustion of performing “fine” while your nervous system screamed, “We’re not safe!” Living in survival mode isn’t resilience, it’s a second trauma.
They don’t tell you how the aftermath calcifies. How hypervigilance becomes a life sentence of scanning rooms for exits that aren’t needed. How shame clings like a shadow, whispering, “You should be over this by now,” as if healing erases the years spent dissociating through birthdays, self-destructing in silence, or flinching at triggers only your body remembers. The real injury isn’t the past, it’s the present you’ve had to navigate without a map, armed only with coping mechanisms that now feel like cages.
Surviving this long is proof of your fierceness. Every night you white-knuckled through flashbacks, every morning you chose therapy over denial, every boundary that says, “No more,” to the cycles that birthed you, that’s the work of rewriting destiny. It’s not “dwelling.” It’s dismantling.
Healing isn’t a return to who you were “before.” It’s building a life where your body finally believes the war is over. Where “safety” isn’t a theory, but a practice, one slow breath, one trusted hug, one unedited truth at a time. The daughter they left in the trenches? She’s still here. And she’s teaching you how to finally come home.
#DaughtersOfNarcissisticMothers #CPTSDAwareness #LivingWithTrauma #BreakingTheCycle #NervousSystemHealing
GreatCosmicMothersUnite 