There's so much in this post I want to respond to.. Despite the length of this response, I'm actually keeping it to a minimum here.

It's this way for me too, and unfortunately when my husband died I made the bad decision to move back to my hometown, from which I'd been estranged living in another state for 15 years. I don't make the best decisions when I am in crisis.

But just being around my mom is triggering. Her platitudes now, about other things, are the same ones she made then, about my awful childhood. And although she knows about almost everything that happened, she is married to the idea that her teaching me about things like which fork to use should have been enough of a foundation for me to counteract all the abuse I endured. She's still annoyed with me, that I'm not able to idealize my childhood in the way that she does. But the sad truth is that her presence has been one of the big factors in reactivating my PTSD.

She did save my life once, when my father was literally within an inch of ending it, which I suppose is what keeps me in touch with her. He might have only seriously maimed me, had she not pulled him away, which would have changed my life forever, so I'm thankful. But moving back here was a tragically bad idea.. I'd quite forgotten, after all this time, how crippling her words can be for me.

I agree it is an injury.. and in reading an excellent 2006 paper "The Influence of Organized Violence and Terror on Brain and Mind – a Co-Constructive Perspective" have been learning about how there are actually differences in the hippocampus in those with PTSD, shrinkage essentially.. and learning about Hebbian neuroscientific theory which is about metabolic changes occurring to cause "Cells that fire together, wire together". How we get rewired. As one friend of mine is apt to say on occasion, Sh%t is real, yo.

Here's an excerpt that I found especially compelling:

PTSD symptomatology can be understood as a consequence of plastic changes in memory through stressful, traumatic experiences. Life experiences are stored in autobiographical memory. The autobiographical context memory has been called “cold memory” (Metcalve & Jacobs, 1996). It contains knowledge about life-time periods and specific events. The sensory-perceptual representations of a traumatic event have been called “hot” or non-declarative (implicit) memory. It comprises emotional and sensory memories of all modalities. Cold memories (e.g., on March 24 at 3:30 I was living on my farm in Djakovica, we had three cows) are usually connected with hot sensory memories (e.g., black-masked, dark night, shooting, burning smell) as well as with cognitive (e.g., I can’t do anything), emotional (e.g., fear, sadness), and physiological elements (e.g., heart racing, fast breathing, sweating).

In individuals who are not affected by trauma or fear, hot memories are linked with autobiographic, declarative memories. However, in traumatized persons, sensory and emotional memories are activated by environmental stimuli without being related to autobiographic, declarative items (i.e., dates and places of autobiographical occurrences) – those autonomous hot memories form a fear network. An example of such a network is outlined in Figure 1. The activation of a single memory item (e.g., seeing a man in a uniform or feeling ones heartbeat) will cause the whole network to be activated. According to Hebbian learning, this will not only strengthen the interconnections between existing network units, but will also lead to an inclusion of additional network element, namely of those that are synchronously activated.



Figure 1: Example of a traumatic memory structure: the hot (non-declarative) memory builds a fear network. With each additional traumatic experience this fear network gets more and more extended, while the connections to the specific cold autobiographic events come more and more loose or even get lost.

I'm struggling with the negative self-talk work. I have, like, fear about fear about fear; wheels within wheels.. and it's so overwhelming at times, preventing me from even trying to do anything positive for myself. It's so hard to get my head wrapped around how it could develop so intensely into what it is now, but this Hebbian theory, how "Cells that fire together, wire together", does make sense of it. It's describing what I'm experiencing. The grooves of CPTSD. The way that it gets worse with every instance. This is from Wikipedia:

Hebbian theory concerns how neurons might connect themselves to become engrams. Hebb's theories on the form and function of cell assemblies can be understood from the following:

"The general idea is an old one, that any two cells or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become 'associated', so that activity in one facilitates activity in the other." (Hebb 1949, p. 70)

"When one cell repeatedly assists in firing another, the axon of the first cell develops synaptic knobs (or enlarges them if they already exist) in contact with the soma of the second cell." (Hebb 1949, p. 63)

Anyway, I so appreciate your input on this forum, OE. I'm encouraged by your approach, and by "where you're at".. and as you are clearly and intimately aware, encouragement is hard to come by with this affliction.