A couple months ago, I spoke to a journalist about my experience with childhood schizophrenia and was asked if my early childhood hallucinations and delusions were only my imagination. I tried not to show it, but that really upset me. Those experiences were painful and damaging, and I wish they had never happened. Why would I want to imagine physical and sexual abuse bad enough to the point where it's given me CPTSD? But I don't know. Maybe I was faking it or imagining it. It certainly seemed like the journalist thought I was faking it.

I felt ashamed to talk about my experiences afterwards, and it's been hitting me lately just how much shame I have in coming forward to talk about these things. I'd like to seek help for sexual abuse, but I feel bad when in groups of survivors of "real" sexual abuse. Am I co-opting their trauma? Sticking my nose somewhere it doesn't belong? I want to get help for growing up in an environment where I was expected to kill or be killed, but I'm ashamed to put my own personal trauma on the same level of brutality as full-scale warfare. I don't know why this is. Have I not suffered enough for it, maybe? If I've lived through physical torture, maybe it wasn't as bad as "real" torture. After all, how would I know the difference? Maybe I've just been coddled by my brain all these years.

Do you experience anything similar? Do you struggle to validate your own experiences or think you've imagined or faked things? How have you managed to move past this idea, if you have?