Hey @GalaxyOwl
This is an incredibly heavy thing to carry, and I want to start off by saying that you are not alone, and you are not a bad person.
As someone who also has CPTSD, I want you to know that I hear you, and how overwhelming shame can be (I call it battling the "shame storm"). When going through a shame storm, logic feels useless because a physiological and emotional hijack is happening in the brain. It makes so much sense that you feel frustrated when books and podcasts don't help, because they often address the mind, while from my own understanding, shame lives within our nervous system.
When you feel that surge of shame, your brain isn't just processing a social mistake for example, it's processing a threat to your survival. For someone with trauma, hurting another person's feelings can feel like a precursor to abandonment or physical danger. I want you to know that shutting down or getting defensive is not a character flaw, it's your nervous system keeping you "safe" (whether there is an actual threat or not). You are not choosing to be difficult, your brain has simply hit the emergency eject button on your social skills to prioritise safety.
You mentioned that you "logically understand" everything but "immediately do it again". This is perhaps one of the more frustrating parts of the trauma recovery journey. Logic lives within the prefrontal cortex of the brain, but shame and trauma live within the amygdala and in the brainstem. When the shame starts to spiral, the "logical" part of your brain goes offline. You can't think your way out of a storm happening in your body.
It is also quite common for people with CPTSD to feel like they are being "manipulative" when they receive comfort after a mistake. True manipulation is a conscious, calculated choice to control someone for personal gain. What you are experiencing is emotional dysregulation. You want comfort because you are in genuine pain. The fact you feel guilty for receiving it, and that you care so much about the other person's feelings, is the ultimate proof that you are not a bad or malicious person. A bad person wouldn't be agonising over this the way you are.
Another point I'd like to bring up is that having high emotional empathy but lower cognitive empathy (struggling to read the "why" or "how" of a social situation) is an exhausting combination(but I can relate to it to an extent in my own experience of being AuDHD and having CPTSD). You can feel the "burn" of their hurt, but don't have the map to navigate out of it. This creates a feedback loop of: you feel their pain, you panic because you don't know how to fix it, the panic triggers shame, and then that shame triggers you to shutdown etc.
Since you only see the psychologist 10 times in a year, it's important to recognise that the goal isn't to "fix" the root trauma overnight, it's about reducing the secondary shame you experience (the shame you feel for having a shame storm/spiral). Here's two little things that might be useful to you to practice:
- when you have calmed down after, try to tell yourself "my nervous system thought I was in danger. I wasn't being bad, I was triggered, and I am learning".
- try externalise the shame, so instead of calling it "my shame", you could call it "the voice" or "the storm" - it is something happening to you, it is not something that is you
Many people with CPTSD, including myself, have been or currently are exactly where you are. We have felt that same "unfixable" wound and the same self-loathing. And many of us have found a way to a life where the spirals/storms a shorter, shallower and less frequent.
You are not failing at recovery, you're in one of the hardest parts of it where you have the awareness but not yet the tools and skills to change the bodily response. That awareness is a massive, painful, but necessary step in the recovery journey.
Try to be kind to yourself, and also do something nice for yourself this evening.
