complexposttraumaticstressdiso

I have come to realize that dealing with salesmen is highly triggering for me. This is because of the real or imagined pressure that I feel to make a quick decision and to spend money. To add to this, some salesmen (as part of their job) will not accept my NO the first time, and try to manipulate it into a YES.

I first realized this last year when I went to purchase a single tanning session. After saying I just wanted a single and not a monthly purchase, I had to explain myself MULTIPLE TIMES. I ended up breaking down and briefly crying. For a trauma survivor saying no ONCE is hard enough, but to say it multiple times is excruciating and sometimes feels impossible because then my fawning patterns kick in and sometimes my no is changed to a yes. And then I berate myself after I leave, unhappy with myself and the purchase, as well as the fact that I was manipulated into buying something I didn't want or was unsure of.

Aside from this, I am someone who takes a while to make decisions. I need time to think, weigh pros & cons, and use process of elimination from my top picks. This is not easy to do when someone is standing there watching and waiting for you. I am extremely uncomfortable being watched during my decision making process. Sometimes, I can sense their annoyance with me and I end up apologizing unnecessarily.

I am trying to "toughen up" to these salesmen, because I know the real root of the issue is my past abusers who consistently rushed me, picked apart every single decision I made, blamed me for said "wrong" decision, and refused to accept the answer no from me. Also, salesmen do sometimes use coercive, dismissive, dominating, & minimizing tactics, so they often are very manipulative like my abusers. In fact, one of my ex-abusers was an insurance salesman.

Who else gets triggered by salesmen?

#CPTSD #PTSD #triggers #SocialAnxiety #decisionmaking #agorophobia #manipulativebehavior #nomeansno #complexposttraumaticstressdiso rder #Anxiety

#Emptiness #Emptiness

When my depression gets extremely severe I feel this deep sense of hollowness inside and complete desolation takes a hold of my life. For a very long time I had no idea what to do other than let it overtake me as long as it did. I had mental illnesses before my physical ones but I was unaware since I was so young. I got Inflammatory Bowel Disease when I was 20 and diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis. Now my GI doctor at the Mayo Clinic says I have Crohn's disease. Anyway, this disease brought out the depression and anxiety a great deal so I believed it was the cause. However just recently, I was told I had Complex PTSD and so many things made sense, and the fact that I thought about suicide when I was in 4th grade and tried it horribly but luckily badly my Junior year in High School definitely demonstrates that I had mental illnesses back when I was school age. To me, it was just a logical way to deal with wanting to leave my house because I couldn't deal with my mother's abuse any longer. And wrongly, I thought if something happened to me she would care more. I tried to go back to school but kept ending up in the hospital so I was always filled depression and just having the disease gave me great anxiety. I was so bad they often had to almost sedate me with high doses of IV Ativan. My dad had died six months before I got sick and he was the only person I knew loved me, and my getting sick proved my mother and both my older brothers could not care less, since they abandoned me and left my care to my boyfriend of 2 years, and never came to visit except once. I never was able to graduate, not for a long time.And that was a sense of shame and feeling of unworthiness that filled my life as well.There's a lot more to the story, but I don't want this to be that long. But the loss of my father was an incredibly huge impact on my life in a negative way since I never and still really don't know how to deal with death and grief, and it brought back 2 years ago when I lost an extremely close Uncle of mine to AIDS, both were way too young to die; and their deaths left me with an emptiness that beat all other types of hollowness that have occurred throughout my life. I pretty much think of them every day and just wish they were still alive and with me. I believe the grief I carry from them and now a few others often is one of the main root causes of my depression, and makes me feel the complete desolation around me and complete emptiness inside. Thankfully I have a couple of very supportive people who do their best to help me through it, which means a lot, but sometimes the deep depression just has to run it's course throughout me.

#Emptiness #Depression #Anxiety #Shame #complexposttraumaticstressdiso rder, #CPTSD  #Grief #IBD #inflammatorybowel disease #CrohnsDisease #UlcerativeColitis #ChronicPain #sexualassualt #Anemia #RheumatoidArthritis  #Osteoporosis #Insomnia #ChronicIllness #Disability #MentalHealth #MightyTogether