Just life

Hi @cdtofi and welcome to the forums.

Yes, this is a place where you can ask questions, but the people you are asking are not Mental Health professionals.

All the people on here have a lived experience of mental health issues.

Here is a link to a part of the forums where people talk about issues of trauma and PTSD including cPTSD

https://saneforums.org/t5/Talking-through-trauma-and-PTSD/bd-p/trauma-ptsdforum-board

You can post on the forums at any time, but currently the posts will not show up between midnight and 6am, as the forums are moderated and they will be reviewed and posted after they have been reviewed.

There are peer support workers here who have lived experience but also training in peer support work, but they are not rostered after 10pm, so the forums become a bit quiet after 10pm.

I hope you are able to find some answers to soem of your questions and chat to people with similar experience which may be helpful to you.

The forum members are a range of ages from at least age 18yo to retired people like yourself.

I am wondering whether you ahve a mental health professional that you see or have seen?

Hello @cdtofi and welcome to the forums

I'm glad that you've found this space as its the perfect place to ask these questions. There might not be any straightforward answers to them, as there's no real one size fits all experience of mental health struggles, but its great to get a conversation started about this.

I guess to try to answer some of your questions: you could be a combination of happy, sad, and lonely. I know that might seem contradictory but we can all hold so much in us, and because of that there's no one way that a person with cPTSD, anxiety, or mental health issues should be, but it's completely understandable to ask the question anyway.

I can't speak on any personal experience of cPTSD, though I experience anxiety and it can be a real spectrum: some days its just a quiet hum of unease in the background and a little feeling of butterflies in my stomach. Other times when it's more intense it can feel like a sense of impending doom and thoughts of all the things that could go wrong and, I can't seem to catch my breath, and there's a feeling that there's no way that I can face the day. On the quiet hum days I can get on with my day and push through, but often on the doom days I struggle to do more than sit in bed and cry. Everyone experiences anxiety to some degree, its a normal emotion, it's when it starts to impact your day-to-day life that it becomes something more.

I hope this is a bit helpful, and I hope that you have a great week too. Do you have much on during the week?

@cdtofi welcome amasing seems you have been told how to feel and yet you seem so gronded in expressing how you feel. What a fan*TAS*tic opportunity for you in this space to connect & chat. I thought I would share one of my Haiku with you.0h 'ya iF

hey @cdtofi @mind0vermatter i've got social anxiety too, and writing out my feelings has been a big help for me as well. hope you both are taking things slow and treating yourself with kindness 💙