A post to my page..
~~~ Emotional Self Harm ~~~
Do you find that you know what you ‘should’ do to help with self care and wellbeing…but just feel unable to do it?
I find that I plan and expect too much for my current capacity.
I think part of this, is because I never learned self care and healthy behaviours, plus I used to be highly functioning – so I feel a failure now and also due to feeling continually exhausted.
But….I also know it because I have always had emotional self harm issues, with setting myself up with unrealistic expectations, which subconsciously I know I will fail, and then I hate myself.
This is common with complex trauma survivors, especially those who have been harmed in prolonged abuse by narcissists/psychopaths and those scapegoated by parents.
Emotional self harm, is not obvious like physical self harm e.g. cutting.
But, emotional self harm, can cause just as much harm, is harder to understand and therefore, more difficult to accept we are doing to ourselves. And I believe emotional self harm, is probably as much, if not more prevalent in complex trauma survivors, than physical self harm…..but is rarely talked about – due to not being visible and not understood by many.
I also realise my reasons for doing what is considered healthy – like exercise, were previously not for healthy reasons, it was also a form of self punishment/perfectionism issues (I was a gym junkie) and also because I needed to ‘look’ as perfect as I could, and yet never looked ‘good enough’.It was never about my health and wellbeing.Now I don’t have my unhealthy reasons to eat well, exercise etc, I have no driving force to do it regularly. Because I clearly don’t care about myself enough to do it regularly for my healthy wellbeing.
Healing From Complex Trauma & PTSD/CPTSD 
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