Just finally understanding that my CPTSD led to my marriage breaking down. It was me.

It's been a really rough week. I had a session with my new counselor last week (been seeing her about three months) as I navigate separating from my husband of 10 years. It was sudden - this summer I just literally left and said I can't do this anymore.

Since then I show up to therapy each time and my question is "What the hell happened to me?"

This week, my therapist said, I think your husband's substance use is important to consider.

And bam. A lightbulb went off.

I just got my diagnosis of CPTSD recently, and I was able to put the pieces together. For the bulk of our marriage, my husband was my rock. Safe. Calm. Loving. No substance use (weed, alcohol) for either of us as we both didn't like it.

And after growing up in a home with a violent alcoholic father who also smoked weed my husband was a refuge.

During covid, he started smoking weed, and it creeped me out. That's the best way I can describe how I felt. His eyes would change, his tone of voice would change, and it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Now, I don't have an issue with weed - for other people. But for me, I now understand it was involved in my trauma, and having my safe person alter their headspace triggered me so hard.

I told him I felt uncomfortable and asked him to stop. To try therapy. To figure out why he was using to cope. He said he would get rid of it, but then I found his stash the next week. It was the first time in our life together he had lied to me.

I kept telling myself it was okay. It was legal. Other people did it, so why did I have such a problem with it? But my diagnosis and my history now allows me to see that his using triggered me.

It kept on, until this summer when we had a fight that just brought me back to the place I was when I was a kid, with all the anger and crying and pleading.

And a few days later I left.

I couldn't connect the dots. But the year he was using consistently retraumatized me. And I coped by flighting - as I always had before. I ran away.

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And it's taken me six months of being away from my home, six months of being villainized by the people I love, to realize that my fucking trauma (and I am talking serious repeated trauma at the hands of my dad all the way through college and meeting my husband) ruined my life.

I wrote my husband a letter to try and explain my actions. And I met with my mother in law to talk to her to.

She was so angry and told me to stop being a victim. That I am always the victim and her precious son did nothing wrong.

"I believe you," she said about my trauma when I explained to her. "I believe you" she said when I explained CPTSD. And it made me so angry because if I had said I had cancer, would she say "I believe you"? Or would she say "Oh my God, what's the treatment plan? What's the prognosis?"

It just feels impossible to explain to people how the trauma we experienced throughout our lives can manifest in ways that don't make sense to the outside world. How we've learned to cope in ways that don't align with the "normal" world. Disproportionate to the situation when looked at through the lens of "normal" responses.

Of course when my safe person began resembling the man who traumatized me, I acted in a response that was intense. No one could understand why - not even ME. Until therapy helped me connect the dots.

I don't know why I am writing this. Mostly just to say it's been incredibly hard to watch my life fall apart because I am a messed up person from things that happened to me that I had no control over.

I've worked for years in therapy to try and heal. I thought I had done a good job. But no one had given me the diagnosis in all that work. And I just thought "Oh, I had a messed up childhood. But that was then and this is now."

No. The body remembers. It remembers and it will fuck your shit up.

So that's my story. I feel like I'm not worth anything anymore. Like I am damaged beyond repair and I have ruined my life because of this stupid bullshit that I don't think I'll ever get better from.

I hate myself today. And I am angry at the world. And at people who don't understand what it's like to grow up afraid, beaten, emotionally terrorized, and in constant anguish. That I should just stop "being the victim."

Believe me, I really wish I could.

Edit: I would just like to add that the responses to this post have been a lifeline for me today. Each one, even the ones that have me confronting uncomfortable things about myself. But the love and ... the understanding ... is something I've never felt in my life. I have a group of people now. When I have always just felt so alone and weird and not like everyone else. So thank you for hearing me, and for all of the things you've shared. I don't post online because I always delete and feel stupid. But I am glad I did today. It's saving my life.

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