Quick note: I’ve been feeling heavy with grief this past week and wanting to address some deeper topics. Sometimes my way of coping with uncomfortable/painful feelings is to bring a touch of humor and levity, so hoping this strikes the balance in a way that honors my own feelings, the collective sentiment, and offers a silver lining to anyone struggling with prolonged trauma.
Hey everyone,
Since this is a lifestyle newsletter, I thought it fitting to discuss my C-PTSD life/style. I’d call it a journey, but at some point, it becomes a lifestyle—because there’s no end to trauma, except death (which sounds way too bleak). But hey, why just be traumatized when you can be sexy and traumatized? Live, laugh, love, and manage those trauma responses!
Living with C-PTSD has shaped every aspect of my life—how I work, how I love, and even how I practice self-care. In fact, it’s the reason why I’m so great at what I do: I’m an expert at running from my problems. In 2018/2019, I had a pretty damning self-care addiction where I blew all my money on spa Groupons and 20-step skincare routines because there’s nothing quite like sitting in a hot tub for a couple of hours while pretending your responsibilities don’t exist. But here’s the thing: you can’t run away from your problems forever and it’s unsustainable to walk around carrying so much heavy emotional baggage (And why not with modern orthopedic support and CBD topicals? I say go ergonomic).
Over the past few months, I’ve been processing a bunch of tired shit that I thought I had made peace with. Once again, I had unintentionally shoved my traumas (yes, there are more than one—just like a beautiful mille feuille!) back in the box with a gigantic bow and put it way back in my subconscious only for it to pop out at the most inconvenient moment and spill everywhere. Ugh. Even when you actively manage your responses, it doesn’t change the fact that these things are part of the imperfect, never-ending process of healing and not everyone is super understanding or forgiving about it (also part of the process). At the same time, it also resonated with me that quietly dealing with things as I always do is a bit of a disservice to anyone else that might be processing trauma.
Between the lingering societal impacts of the Trump administration, pandemic, and never-ending cycle of violence, I’ve been forced to confront trauma again in ways I wasn’t prepared for. And I think a lot of people are feeling the same, even if they haven’t recognized it yet. I’m hopeful because people are starting to talk about it more openly and that by sharing my own story, maybe others feel less alone in their messy, ongoing healing. So, that’s what I’m going to talk about today, and my Leonard Cohen bathtub breakdowns.
What is C-PTSD?
C-PTSD, or complex post-traumatic stress disorder, stems from chronic trauma—like prolonged abuse, domestic violence, war, or community violence—creating lasting effects on emotional regulation, anxiety, and attachment issues. Unlike PTSD, which is tied to a short-term or singular event, C-PTSD comes from ongoing or repeated long-term trauma. It’s not like a quick storm that passes; it’s a weather system that just kind of sticks around, sometimes showing up as a flash flood, other times as a slow, miserable drizzle.
Healing isn’t linear either. Yes, you can work through issues to cope, function, and thrive, but there’s no magical moment where you suddenly feel "normal." Instead, it’s more like, “Well, guess I’ll be unpacking this in therapy for the rest of my life. Fun.” Sometimes, you don’t even get the satisfaction of a clear diagnosis. It could just be an "undiagnosed mood disorder" for 10 years, while you try out every combination of meds until one day you finally stumble onto WebMD thinking, “Wait, this sounds like me!” and confirm with your therapist, who seems delighted that you finally figured it out because it was so obvious to everyone else the whole time.
The trickiest part? Trauma likes to surprise you in the most random ways—like when your brain throws up a trauma trigger just to keep you on your toes. And trust me, there’s no easy fix for it. It’s not like you can just stick a swab into a machine and it’s like, Surprise! You have C-PTSD!
The Messiness of Symptoms and Stigma
Once you recognize that you’re traumatized, the stigma surrounding mental illness makes things even messier—especially if you’re messy (and let’s face it, who isn’t?). I mean, the symptoms are not pretty: flashbacks, hypervigilance, emotional detachment, and difficulty forming relationships. Trust me, it sucks. And when society tells you to “get over it,” the internalized shame can make it all so much harder. At almost 40, I’m still learning to set boundaries and unlearn the internalized ableism that’s kept me hiding my struggles.
Ew! Who wants that voluntarily?! Not me! It sucks! Literal definition of a Debbie Downer. And there’s more than one trauma to deal with, too?! Ugh, why?! You might even start flirting with the idea of pursuing a career in comedy, only to have your comedian friends break it to you that you might just need a therapist. “But my life is a joke, and you complain about your trauma on stage all the time, too!”
Trauma doesn’t just live in your head. It rewires your brain—the amygdala (emotions), hippocampus (memory), and prefrontal cortex (decision-making). There’s medication for it, sure, but healing is mostly about confronting what you’ve been avoiding. This reality first hit me hard in college, when living alone for the first time triggered depressive episodes that cracked open the unresolved chaos of my childhood and left me stuck in a bathtub catatonic with Leonard Cohen playing on repeat. (A little cliche, I know, but hey—trauma survivors be traumatized.)
Born To Be Traumatized
College didn’t just represent a milestone; it was an escape plan from my chaotic home life. Growing up, my mom’s paranoia evolved from thinking neighbors were stealing from us to full-blown conspiracy theories involving the CIA and a mafia crime ring.
Most nights, she would usually wake up around 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. to start knocking on the walls, walking around the apartment and into the hallways of the building to yell at no one, or with her piercing screams that sounded like a horror movie when she thought that the apartment was being gassed or she was being electrocuted in her bed, then shove me in a car to drive around all night. She yelled, frequently, at me or anyone else, underscored by temperamental mood swings, extreme co-dependency, and zero boundaries that left me walking on eggshells.
In the morning, I tried to blend in at school, but always felt alienated—my shoes weren’t cool enough, my family wasn’t "normal." We were evicted repeatedly, lived in charity housing and motels, and I had to call my friends’ parents to bail her out of jail. All the while, I stayed silent because, let’s face it, no one wants to be that person. It was embarrassing, and a massive burden that I certainly didn’t want to deal with it, so why would I expect anyone else to?
I feared becoming like my mom, so I became a perfectionist and overachiever, working multiple jobs while keeping up my grades, all in the hope of getting the financial aid I needed to get the hell out. My senior year, I was crashing on friends' couches, writing college admissions essays that turned my trauma into a scholarship-winning narrative and making me physically sick in the process. It worked, but it felt like I was selling pieces of myself to buy a future.
Once I got to college, I overworked to escape my past, juggling three part-time jobs, freelance writing, and a full course load. Surviving felt like an achievement, but it came at the cost of suppressing my trauma. Cue the Leonard Cohen bathtub breakdowns—my emotional release between bouts of high-functioning dissociation. I knew I had been through a lot; I just didn’t know what I was supposed to do with any of it, let alone what kind of help I needed. I was functioning well enough on the outside—smiling, making people laugh—but the trauma was always lurking beneath the surface, ready to explode when I least expected it.
The Blessing and Curse of Being A High-Functioning Healer
Like a lot of people with C-PTSD, I became high-functioning. Dissociation helped me bury the pain and focus on achievement, but living in survival mode is exhausting. Dissociation fuels perfectionism and people-pleasing, but it also burns you out. Even now, I still struggle with emotional dysregulation, which is frustrating. Fortunately, I’ve read that many women in their 40s stop giving a fuck—so almost there.
Setting boundaries is hard when you’ve never had anyone show you what healthy boundaries look like. Self-empathy? That’s even harder when you’ve been taught that weakness means losing control. It’s safer to be seen as a bitch than a doormat, but it’s scary to realize the strong foundation you thought you built might be propped up by unreliable friendships and hollow relationships. And then there’s the yearning, because maybe you’re actually fine with being alone but can’t escape the creep of loneliness, so you can’t help feeling awkward and inexperienced about true intimacy after years of just accepting anyone willing to love you.
With C-PTSD, healing isn’t something you can rush. No one’s coming to save you, and trauma becomes part of your fabric. Even if you’re hyper self-aware, sometimes you can’t see how deeply you’ve lied to yourself about being okay. C-PTSD strains relationships and makes new connections tricky. If you think regular dating is hard, try adding a little trauma to the mix! Opening up repels people, which reinforces the trust issues you already had. But the mess is part of the process, and I’m still working through it, including breaking the habit of constantly apologizing for my existence.
There’s no 12-step program for C-PTSD, though there should be. I found my own version of recovery through Pilates—it’s become my mind-body practice and a way to manage my trauma. While I’m grateful to the connections I’ve made through Pilates that include so many genuine and empathetic people, it’s also not quite the same as having a sponsor to talk you off the cliff when you’re about to emotionally spiral or whatever. This is where your emotional regulation and friendships are put to the test.
Stigmas around mental illness persist. Not only for outsiders to understand what’s going on, but for individuals trying to piece together their own internal struggles and impulse control problems (hence, the frequently overlapping similarities between recovering addicts and trauma survivors). There are no “perfect victims,” and dealing with judgmental people can lead to more avoidance. You start dodging places and people that trigger memories of trauma, just accepting that you’ll carry these scars for life.
More recently, I’ve thought a lot about trauma in the wake of current events. I think everyone is carrying a little bit of it, even if they don’t recognize it yet. But I’m hopeful because more people are talking about it now, and many are trying to help. Sharing my own story is my way of connecting with others who may be silently struggling.
My So-Called Leonard Cohen Coping Mechanisms
During those dark moments in college, the slow, melodic tempo and liturgical undertones of Leonard Cohen’s horny-sad music became a gentle soundtrack for a quarterly ritual: hysterically sobbing in the bathtub until I had no more tears. As a writer, I loved how eloquently and effortlessly he expressed complex emotions, but also: have you even heard “Famous Blue Raincoat?” The next day, it was back to business as usual, walking around with a big stupid grin on my face as if I had just taken a gigantic emotional shit and suddenly not traumatized anymore. Of course, that’s not how trauma works.
Over time, the Cohen baths became less frequent, but the grief never fully went away. Even as a high-functioning adult, showing up for work and life, the unresolved trauma was still lurking just beneath the surface. It wasn’t sustainable, and unsurprisingly, I ended up in the hospital for two weeks after cracking under the pressure.
I’m not alone in this. The world feels heavy with grief, and sometimes it feels like we're all silently navigating trauma together, even if we don’t talk about it. Just as personal trauma doesn’t exist in a vacuum, neither does collective trauma. The world has been a relentless source of triggers, from political violence to global pandemics, forcing us all to face new layers of grief.
My own experiences with trauma have been heightened by the state of the world—whether it’s political upheaval or global crises, it’s impossible to separate personal healing from the collective pain we’re all enduring. I believe everyone is dealing with some level of trauma, whether they acknowledge it or not. For example, yelling and silence can both trigger me, which is why the combination of violent rhetoric and social ostracization has been particularly hard to deal with. Frequently, I find myself regressing into a lot of emotional dysregulations that I felt compelled to acknowledge—because it doesn’t feel good putting that energy out into the world.
Even before October 7 and the events that followed, navigating my trauma was leading me to reconnect with my Judaism—so the intensity of the past year has been weighing heavily on me for a number of reasons. And the executions of the six hostages just a few days ago—Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Eden Yerushalmi, Carmel Gat, Alexander Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Almog Sarusi—have hit me like a ton of bricks. Maybe it’s because it seemed almost certain they were coming home and all of this would finally end, because the grief I feel isn’t just for the hostages, but for everyone surviving through this nightmare.
The other night, I felt the sudden need to play “Who By Fire” as I drew myself a midnight mikveh on the new moon. It was timely reference, not only for the present circumstance but as we approach Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement next month that follows the anniversary of October 7. The song, tied to the Yom Kippur War, resonates deeply with the themes of death and rebirth of choosing life after trauma. This year has been relentless, and I’ve felt sucker-punched by the silence from non-Jews about the violence we’ve faced. Even before Israel retaliated, I knew that a generation was about to be fucked in this never-ending cycle of ancestral trauma and hate, and my heart wept for everyone. Living with it feels like enough punishment without the added thirst for retribution I see from others.
Rituals and Healing
Empathy shouldn’t be a numbers game. If you can’t extend compassion to people beyond borders or require an equal exchange of suffering to feel sympathy, something is unresolved within you. Grief transcends sides, and no mother should ever experience the pain of losing a child in this endless cycle of violence. It’s fair to say everyone has blood on their hands when it comes to a war and even in a best-case scenario, it doesn’t erase the fact this is an entire generation that will now have to cope with that trauma for the rest of their lives. Some people will never forgive, some people will never apologize, and some people will let their anger and grief eat them alive.
Just like before, when faced with silence, I stopped asking for help. And there was Leonard Cohen and the bathtub again. I lit candles while also making a moon tincture and writing my intentions, blending my personal recipe of rituals and coping mechanisms because that’s what I need to make sense in a world where I often feel like I have no control. Weirdly, I felt more Jewish than ever, even if it was not prescriptive, dogmatic, or makes sense to anyone else but myself.
Reconnecting with rituals like my midnight mikveh and Leonard Cohen helped me find a sense of peace and purpose amid trauma. In a world that often feels out of control, these personal, spiritual practices provide an anchor, reminding me that healing is not about fixing—it’s about finding ways to live with the scars.
Healing is messy, non-linear, and lifelong. But in sharing our stories, we find light in the darkness. And if nothing else, there’s comfort in knowing we’re not alone—whether in a Leonard Cohen bathtub breakdown or just navigating this chaotic world.
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