(((Rose))),

I was out doing errands and thinking about this thread. And how hard you are tying, and me too, to learn how to control the responses to triggers and also tracing them back to why they are there to begin with.

I thought about how I used to be able to control how I reacted to things so much better. And then since I had so much loss, things changed and I started presenting this PTSD.

We grow up around people where we just think we have to work around them, even obey them. And it really never occurs to us how they might be "disfunctional" people.
And sometimes with the people we grow up around, no matter what, there is just no pleasing them, unless ofcourse for some reason we allow them to have all the control and feel they are the best and most important and deserving. And for everything I wanted to try there was always all the negetives of how it might not work or could be dangerous.

The bottom line is that when we struggle with PTSD the focus has to be on establishing our own sense of who we are and our "right" to the pursuite of happiness. We have to find our way to realize that as long as we interact with other people we will face others who will continue to send us messages of doubt and disrespect. But it doesn't mean we have to "own" those messages emotionally.

I have come to the conclusion that there are a lot of disturbed people out there in life. I have heard so many people talk about their disfuncitonal families now that I am realizing that the chance of me interacting with someone that comes from some kind of disfuction where they too have issues, well, I might as well learn to find ways to keep disabling my own emotional responses because someone else may remind me of some disfunctional person from my past.

Right now Rose, both you and I are in a place where we are tracing the triggers and learning to understand what they mean. And as we are triggered, yes, it can suddenly rattle us where we feel threatened in some way. And because we have PTSD, our reaction is going to be more than just a person who can get triggered and yet have much less reaction and just go along in their mind "with a bunch of grapes".
The grapes signifying, they don't give a dam.

Well, we do give a dam when something is not right. But we have to work harder right now at slowly learning to put more strength in our self worth and be able to get to a point that when we get triggered, we can make a choice to not accept the emotions that tell us we are in some kind of danger.

Yes, it is work and it will take time to accomplish this skill to a point where we can not feel so much like we are constantly working hard on this PTSD and any thing we add to that is a lot of work and at the end of the day, we are often very tired, more so than others can imagine or respect, unless they too have PTSD.

Open Eyes