Writing Is Cheaper Than Therapy: Portraying CPTSD in Fiction With Care and Compassion

Since the publication of No Higher Ground, I’ve received several congratulatory messages about my realistic portrayal of CPTSD. They wanted to know how I had managed it so accurately. Unfortunately, the reason I was able to is because I also have it, something these readers already suspected. Like knows like has never rang truer.

(7 Things Writers Should Know About Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.)

Now, I did do research into the causes and long-term effects that make up a CPTSD diagnosis, but honestly, I just had to sit back and really evaluate myself and the way I move through the world after having the childhood I had.

I thought everyone walked through life so hypervigilant that they cannot be snuck up on no matter how quiet the other person thought they were being. I thought everyone bent over backwards to make sure the people they loved were happy, always at the expense of their own happiness. I thought everyone ruminated about something dumb they said and if they had hurt another’s feelings. I thought everyone worried for weeks if someone was mad at them over the slightest thing. I thought everyone couldn’t stand to fight with another person, that confrontation made them run in the other direction. I thought most people didn’t remember their childhoods very well or barely had anything good worth remembering. I thought everyone went through life cringing, even when things were good, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I thought everyone had trust issues. I thought everyone had trouble connecting to others or always felt at odds with the world. I thought everyone was so terrified of being abandoned by someone they loved that at the first sign of trouble they broke things off first. I thought everyone just knew love was conditional. I thought everyone, in their darkest moments, thought about leaving this earth forever.

Yes, most people have some of these personality traits, but combined, they are the lasting effects of prolonged, repeated trauma. And not just physical abuse either, but abandonment and neglect combined with emotional and mental abuse, compounded over many years in a situation that you are unable to stop or escape.

A lot of things went wrong in my childhood and I basically gave them all to Raven, the protagonist of No Higher Ground. My mother left me at five years old, I became the protector of my mentally disabled brother, and then my father remarried my abusive stepmother and basically handed over the parenting reigns to her.

Obviously my stepmother wasn’t the only source of trauma in my childhood—my mom leaving and my dad checking out were huge as well—but neither of them were abusive. That lies only with my stepmother (and her sister). All these years later and even four years after her death, I still find it hard to talk about because I worry that people will think I’m being dramatic. Heck, I worry that I am being dramatic. Or that it didn’t really happen the way I remember or that kids were just raised differently back then—it was the '80s after all. That bruises on our butts from the belt were the norm or having your room destroyed in a parents fit of rage was an everyday occurrence or that being thrown around by your hair was just a weird way to be shown love or that being tossed down a small flight of stairs was to teach you a lesson or being told I was the reason my mother left was an act of kindness.

All of this happened behind closed doors. Same as with Raven, I did not go around with black eyes and broken arms. Oppositely, in public, my stepmother was cloyingly sweet. I was told how lucky I was that she stepped into the role that my mother left open. Since the abuse I suffered was not visible to the outside world, it made it easier to hide. This is what made it simpler to minimize to myself as well by telling myself I didn’t love her so whatever she did to me didn’t affect me. But of course it did. How can anyone grow up in a house with someone who absolutely loathed their existence and not be affected? And I never told a soul. Enduring such a life in isolation only doubles down on the unbelievability of it all.

In trying to prove I was tough enough to survive, by minimizing it to myself, and then to others when I was an adult, I missed the opportunity to heal.

I made it to adulthood, moved out, met my husband, started a family, lived a life I loved, all the while, repressing everything and trying to cope daily with my weird, obsessive traits. But it slowly started to unravel. I developed depression (not for the first time in my life) and severe anxiety.

And then my wicked stepmother died.  

I was finally free to talk about it without worrying about ruining somebody else’s life. Weird and backwards, but that’s how it goes. Of course I was asked repeatedly why I didn’t tell anyone and I just flippantly said I don’t know. I always suspected that it wouldn’t have helped if I told anyone and if anything I thought it would make it worse. Maybe this is just what scared, helpless children believe, but it was the only way I knew how to survive.

Now, I suspect the real reason I never told anyone was I believed that if anyone loved me they would have seen it without me having to say a word and the fact that no one saw it said more about me than it did about them.

To understand this now, as a mother myself, it makes me incredibly sad for the child I was. Having been abandoned by my mother in the first place is what I believe set up this kind of unhelpful thinking.

I can obviously never know what would have happened if I had told just one person, or better yet, if one person saw it. Of course I wanted that one person to be my dad. Maybe someone would have taken me away, gave me a different life, but that is not what I believed then or even now, because I still to this day have a hard time believing anyone will ever look out for me better than I can.

And this, this exactly, is CPTSD. You feel like you are the only person you can trust in the world; even now, when I have a great support system, there is always that five-year-old me knowing that no one is coming to save me so I must do it for myself.

So maybe the best stories emerge when we as writers dig into the deepest part of ourselves to tell something we are scared to tell, but also something we have (at least a little) personal knowledge of. That is how we make a narrative authentic, that is how we show the reader to trust us, that is how we let people know they are not alone in those deep, dark thoughts and secrets. This is how we handle a delicate topic with care and compassion; become the character.

Personally, I think it would have been very hard to portray a character that suffered from CPTSD with the honesty and tenderness I did if I didn’t have it myself. Write what you know has never rang truer. I don’t believe that I am the type of writer that can tell just any story. It has to be something that matters to me and something that I am capable of doing authentically. And if that means excavating a part of myself I would prefer stay hidden, isn’t that better than therapy in its own way?

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)