Through my Lens of CPTSD

I do not experience anger as a personality flaw. I experience it as infrastructure. It was built slowly, layer by layer, in response to prolonged stress and repeated boundary violations. It had a job to do.

My visits to the Health Retreat did not magically erase that architecture. What it did was slow me down enough to notice how much of it I am still carrying.

In counselling over the past few years, I have come to understand that my anger developed as protection. When I was not safe, anger stepped in. When my reality was questioned or minimised, resentment preserved the truth. It was my internal record keeping system.

It said, “That happened. That mattered.”

For someone living with CPTSD, the nervous system does not casually forget injustice. It stores it. It sharpens it. It keeps it within reach in case it is needed again. Hyper vigilance is not dramatic. It is practical.

It is the body saying, “We will not be blindsided twice.”

At the retreat, when the noise of daily life dropped away, I could feel what vigilance actually costs.

The tension in my shoulders & lower back.

The shallow breathing.

The subtle scanning of rooms.

The guarded posture that I have worn for so long it feels like bone structure.

Resentment is not abstract. It lives in muscle. It lives in the jaw. It lives in the gut.

And here is the uncomfortable truth:

those responses once kept me alive in environments that were unsafe. They were adaptive. They were intelligent. They were not evidence that I am broken.

For years I tried to suppress the anger. That did not work. Suppression only turned it inward. What has worked, slowly, is viewing it through a trauma informed lens.

Letting go, for me, does not mean forgiving what was done. It does not mean minimising harm. It does not mean rewriting history to make other people more comfortable.

Letting go means loosening my grip on the constant fight response.

It means asking myself, gently but honestly:

• Is this anger protecting present day me, or younger me?

• Is this resentment keeping me safe right now, or exhausting me?

• What would it feel like to choose peace in this moment, even briefly?

The retreat gave me something that trauma rarely allows: space. In that space, I could see that I have more choice now than I did then.

My nervous system may still react quickly. It still flares. It still scans. But I can recognise when I am in survival mode rather than present reality.

That distinction matters.

I am not my CPTSD.

I am someone whose nervous system adapted to prolonged stress. A nervous system that learned to be vigilant because vigilance was necessary.

A nervous system that is now slowly learning that not every room is dangerous.

The retreat reinforced something important. My anger makes sense. It always has. It was never irrational. It was protective.

But I also saw that I do not have to live inside it forever.

Healing, for me, is not a dramatic breakthrough moment. It is incremental. It is noticing tension and choosing to soften. It is catching a catastrophic thought before it spirals. It is choosing not to rehearse old battles in new rooms.

Step by step.

There is something quietly powerful about realising that survival strategies can be honoured without being permanently inhabited. I can thank the anger for what it did for me. And I can slowly, carefully, learn to stand without it being my constant companion.

That feels less like weakness.

And more like freedom.