When Your Brain Is Requesting Some Down Time
Many women who contact me are struggling with the symptoms of trauma and getting no qualified help to understand what’s happening. Their interactions with their compulsive-abusive sexual relational disordered man (CASRD man, rhymes with hazard man) only make things worse. He baits them into circular arguments, blameshifts, gaslights, insults, and accuses her of things she hasn’t done—all in order to keep her mind struggling to catch up and work these things through, while trauma symptoms also work against her.
She can’t win. It’s too much to expect of herself. And it’s not fair. Let’s talk about why it’s not fair with real information about the traumatized brain.
Let’s think about it all from the point of view of someone who actually knows what trauma care is, instead of thinking about it from her covert abuser’s point of view and his deficiently trained advocates’ point of view.
Her frame of reality has been blown to bits. She still has to put one foot in front of the other. No one else seems to think it’s a big deal. So she keeps trying to normalize a completely traumatizing event INSTEAD of normalizing her response to it. This is key. Read it again.
That’s the trap he wants her in. And it’s the trap the treatment industry keeps her in when they refuse to examine what he has actually done to her and how the impact harms her. A big part of my job is helping a woman to create safety within herself—safety from self-blame and self-critique as she struggles without any new frame for reality.
Here’s a useful blog from another trauma-informed and trained care practitioner who talks about some of the dynamics for women like us who are struggling to keep their heads above water in the deep end while her covert abuser and his treatment gang stand up in the shallow end and tell her she’s over-reacting.
Let me know what you think? Did this resonate?
with you,
Diane.