complex PTSD
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The true double bind is not merely a clash of obligations. It is a collision between incompatible moral worlds, each claiming total legitimacy. What makes it intolerable is not that you cannot satisfy all parties, but that whichever path you take will retroactively redefine you as immoral in someone else’s story. You are not allowed
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There is a phenomenon as old as myth itself: the fury of the wronged woman. The Greeks knew it well; the Erinyes, or Furies, primordial goddesses of vengeance, born not of love or justice, but of violated oaths and bloodlines betrayed. They pursued with unrelenting purpose those who had disturbed the sacred order – particularly
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~ A mother’s perspective. “He was never very good with ordinary women. Too intense, too dazzling. Women like that – girls, really, don’t know what to do with men who shine too brightly. They want safety, not blaze. Stability, not confrontation. And he…he was never built for mediocrity. I saw it in him early. The
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Survivor’s guilt is not some abstract post-traumatic affliction best quarantined in DSM footnotes. It is a structural response to a fundamental human experience: the proximity of death, coupled with the unbearable weight of continuing to exist. Non quia interfeci, sed quia superfui.Et hoc crimen nemo audivit, nisi ego. When you’re a child, and the one
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Some boys disappear into obedience. He didn’t. He just burned. They said sit down. He stood. They said blend in. He wore fire. Applause was safer than affection. A spotlight doesn’t flinch when you get too close. He learned to read a room like a script. Smile like a threat. Charm like a blade in
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I thought your birth might fix me. You arrived with the smell of lemons still in my mouth, and something broken already in my chest. I told people you saved my life (and you did) but I never told them I was terrified I might ruin yours. Dennis was gone most weeks, and the walls
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Betrayal in families rarely announces itself with drama. More often, it arrives quietly – through omission, reframed memories, strategic silences. It grows in the spaces between what was said and what was never allowed to be spoken. For the betrayed, it begins as confusion. Something doesn’t add up, a strange withdrawal, a coolness that lingers.
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There are adults who do not walk through life as whole persons, but as a gallery of selves—each one trying to make sense of the others, or deny them altogether. What the DSM once called Multiple Personality Disorder—now formally termed Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)—is not the theatrical split so often misunderstood in popular culture. It
Reade Saunders 