Why My Coping Mechanisms Look Like a 14-Year-Old Boy’s Bedroom
Let’s be honest: when you live with a brain that treats daily life like a high-stakes, threat-level-midnight hostage negotiation, you need hobbies. And by hobbies, I don’t mean gentle yoga or mindful breathing—because if someone tells a dysregulated nervous system to “just breathe,” what they’re actually doing is risking a swift elbow to the throat.
No, when you have C-PTSD, ADHD, and a body made of chronic fibromyalgia pain that hates you, you need absolute, hardcore dissociation disguised as acceptable adult behavior. You need survival anchors.
Long before I knew what “somatic regulation” or “polyvagal theory” meant, I was just a kid trying to survive a chaotic environment using whatever tools were lying around. Turns out, my childhood survival mechanisms weren’t just quirky pastimes—they were the brilliant, improvised scaffolding that kept my soul intact while my internal world was on fire.
The Early Days: Dolls, Diabolical Plots, and Control
Some kids played house normally. I used my dolls and toys like a tactical war room.
When your real life feels entirely out of your control—where adults are chaotic, homes are unsafe, and the ground beneath you shifts daily—you build your own universe where you are the god of the realm. My toys didn’t just sit there looking pretty; they acted out complex, dramatic cinematic masterpieces and elaborate rescue missions.
Looking back? It was my very first taste of somatic and emotional control. I couldn’t stop the unpredictable storms in my actual house, but I could dictate the exact narrative of my dollhouse down to the last millimeter. It taught my nervous system that safety could be constructed, even if it had to be built out of plastic limbs and sheer willpower.
Books: The Ultimate Legal Escape Pod
As I got older, I graduated from dolls to books. Oh, sweet, beautiful, glorious books.
Reading was never just a leisure activity for me; it was an emergency evacuation pod. When my internal environment got too loud, or the hypervigilance started screaming at me through the floorboards, I dove headfirst into fantasy and fiction.
People call it escapism like it’s a dirty word. “Oh, you’re just avoiding reality!” Damn right I am, Susan. Reality is currently re-enacting a disaster movie in my chest cavity. Give me a thick fantasy epic where I can temporarily abandon my own failing, pain-riddled meat-suit and live inside someone else’s brain for three hundred pages.
Reading gave my hyperactive ADHD brain a focal point while letting my terrified C-PTSD nervous system finally, mercifully, unclench its shoulders. It was the original weighted blanket for my mind.
Digital Gaming: Hitting Pause on the Panic
Then came video games, which is basically interactive reading for people with broken attention spans and a deep-seated need to smash things without going to prison.
People who don’t get it assume gaming is just “wasting time.” But for a neurodivergent, traumatized brain? It’s pure, unadulterated medicine.
When I’m immersed in a game, my brain is too busy calculating quest lines, dodging digital enemies, and managing inventory to worry about whether I said the wrong thing in a social interaction five years ago or whether my fibro flare-up is going to sideline me tomorrow. It engages the ADHD squirrel-brain while giving the C-PTSD hypervigilance a very specific, contained box to play in. The world outside can burn to the ground, but right now? I have a digital objective to complete, and my nervous system is finally resting.
Finding the Anchors in the Chaos Today
These days, the tools look a little more sophisticated, but the mission remains the same. Whether it’s losing myself in a good book, getting lost in a game, or sitting down with a sewing project—where I can physically stitch things together when my life feels like it’s unraveling at the seams—these aren’t just pastimes. They are my anchors.
They remind my nervous system that the war is over, the immediate danger has passed, and I am allowed to experience joy, focus, and quiet.
If you’re out here surviving complex trauma, chronic pain, and a neurodivergent brain that loves to throw itself a daily pity party: find your weird little anchors. Read the trashy romance, build the Lego set, play the game, stitch the quilt. Whatever keeps you tethered to this earth and brings a spark of light back into the room is valid.
We aren’t just surviving anymore. We’re building our own fires, and rising right back out of the ashes.
Jump To My Other Pages
Rising and Repeating Cycles of this Phoenix– Home Page/About Me
Rising from the Rubble – What the Phoenix Cycle Taught Me About Living with C-PTSD
The Spicy Remake No one Asked For – PTSD Vs Complex PTSD (cPTSD)
The Day I Will Never Forget – First Hit I Remember
Rising and Repeating – Cycles of this Phoenix 
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