From what I have been learning elevatedsoul, when someone experiences trauma, and I think in your case you were not only traumatized and neglected, but became very lost, the amygdala which is the area of the brain that stores our emotions can get very sensitive.

When we are children we don't really understand emotions, we feel them but we don't understand "why" really. Children really depend on the adults/parents to help them understand the world and how to feel safe, how to understand emotions, what they mean and what to do when we feel them. This is called "nurturing" and we all need it because human beings take a long time to grow and mature out of all mammals, even other primates.

If you dissociate and feel like different people, well, we are all a combination of ourselves at different ages of development. And all of our experiences are stored in our amygdala because we are "all" emotional beings and accumulate over time our life experiences where we "felt" emotions, especially strong emotions. We all have "feelings".

Also human beings are all born with a desire to "navigate". This is a must because we have to be born to navigate in order to survive.

If we have life experiences that result in us having painful feelings, even if we don't understand these "feelings" we do our best to navigate around them, even find ways to "avoid" upsetting/scary/ strong feelings.

These episodes that you describe experiencing where you don't understand "why" you are experiencing them? I think a lot of the members in this forum can relate to that, I know I can. Part of that is because of how our emotional experiences get stored and that it can be a challenge to slowly figure these emotional flashbacks out because of how the conscious mind doesn't have the access to that area of the brain the way we think it does. If we happen to get pictures or fragments of memories, we can sit and think about it, remember it better, but when it's an emotional flashback that can be more difficult. Actually, even being in a state of being numb can be something we did to navigate in a chaotic environment we had no way of understanding or controlling.

Most people who struggle with PTSD/ complex PTSD practice avoiding, and isolating and withdrawing to a certain extent. There is a strong desire to avoid "feeling", at least in front of others. I have come to learn that is because when a person experiences trauma, the amygdala becomes very sensitive. Because the amygdala is connected to the lymphatic system the entire body can react to reminders of trauma too. Most can relate to your description of being "tired". An episode can be just as exhausting as physically running a marathon.

A person if traumatized at a very young age can develop different identities, and that's another way that person navigated in order to survive whatever it was that was too hard for them to comprehend. I remember a therapist telling me how one patient he had was a CEO of a big company and he had to stop before he went into work and remind himself "not" to be the child identity. He will most likely always have that happen, but, he learned to manage it.

Most of us learn to take life one day at a time and keep doing whatever we can to make progress and learn how to manage the challenges the present with ptsd. In the realm of things, life in general, we all have to learn to live our lives at different stages of life anyway. Part of gaining though is allowing self to read, watch movies and documentaries, listen to talks and others, and observe instead of spending too much time looking inward. Not all the answers are within, often the answers and ways to build new navigational skills are outside of ourselves.