Delayed reaction is one of my things too. While things have been bad recently, I have a job just going to get some shopping without feeling anxious and sick. I'm not even considering going out with people for the time being. For example, I was supposed to meet up with friends to do some holiday planning for August. I told them I trusted them to make the right decisions without me. I did this for two reasons: first, I'm not sure I could have sat in a room and held a sensible conversation with anyone - even friends. Second, even if I made it through the afternoon, I thought that I would be very tired and probably feeling sick afterwards, and therefore more likely to miss dinner and then have a bad night.

However, my pattern before everything went pear-shaped was to go out and try to enjoy myself. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't. Whatever my experience of the outing, I would feel crap afterwards. I don't know whether it's a safety/avoidance thing or even a dissociation thing. One thing I do know is that I can go stay with my family for 2 days every Christmas and be "normal", even this year during christmas dinner, when I had to sit next to the person who abused me (yes I know - it's my choice to visit the family and I can leave any time I want to - it's just not that easy). Anyway, getting back to the point - while I am fine while I'm there for the 2 days, for about a month before I get terrible nightmares, then it takes at least 2 weeks to get back to anything like normal functioning afterwards.

I guess what I'm trying to eventually say is that maybe we have developed a strategy of saving our anxieties until we feel safe to express them. I always tends to switch into "think mode" during a stressful occasion and switch off the feeling side of things. Perhaps when we are out of control we can't make use of this strategy. Maybe this is actually a good thing, otherwise we don't deal with the feelings at the time which is what got us into this mess in the first place!

Not sure whether this makes sense at all, or helps either! And there was me thinking that my reasoning was improving!!!