Hi! CPTSD here thanks to untreated BPD dad. My partner also has CPTSD from an even shittier childhood. Between the two of us, we’ve done everything you’ve mentioned here and worked most of it out. I can write a novel - and I will, right here! Here’s what came to mind reading your post. Feel free to ask anything, I’m an open book.

I'm going to second EMDR, but only if you think this is rooted in trauma or any past experiences. If your life has otherwise been idyllic, skip this.

It took me years to try it, then I made more progress with six months of weekly EMDR than I did during the years I waited. It dredged up formative experiences that had impacted the basic assumptions I had about myself and the world, and it’s those assumptions, like a “Me Operating System”, that made other issues so difficult to handle. Since I could see them I could challenge them, and that changed my fundamental view of everything. It was super difficult and I was a pissy little bastard pretty much the entire time. It was still worth it and I’d do it again.

It takes years to make the first big changes when you have a personality and/or trauma-related disorder, because you’re using your wonky brain to fix your wonky brain. It fucking sucks. And it’s never going away, just getting better managed. I’m over two decades in on treatment and I still sometimes do the same shit I did when I started. The difference is it’s very infrequent now, I can typically stop it immediately, and it’s comparably mild if I don’t.

You’ll make the slowest progress at the beginning, so it’s hard to see. I remember beating myself up because nothing seemed to get better, which was making it even harder to improve. I eventually moved my goalposts way back and learned to become my own cheerleader. I have victory conditions, really small achievements where I take a moment to recognize that I did something right and check in to see how I’m feeling. If I was upset, I’d find a mirror, make eye contact with myself, and talk myself down, comforting myself like I might want an ideal friend to do. Sometimes I’d just hug myself and say I was sorry I was upset and cry a bit (or a lot) until I felt better. The point was being my own best friend, even if I didn’t feel like it. Especially when I didn’t feel like it.

And herein I explain, at great length, training myself like a dog.

You’re already hitting my first victory condition: recognizing the behavior. This is huge. Soooo many people don’t, literally ever. Every damn time you do something you want to change, you congratulate yourself for noticing. If you don’t feel like it, tough shit: you still go through the motions.

The second condition is changing something in the moment. Anything. I’m also rejection sensitive and my main reactions are to fight or freeze. If I found myself spinning up, even if all I did was hijack my own angry rant and say “aaaand I’m all pissed off and shouldn’t be doing this”, then gave in and still picked a fight… great job, I did better than doing nothing at all! I’d later congratulate myself for condition one, recognizing the behavior, and condition two, actually changing something, even if just a little and even if it was ultimately a flop.

The third is stopping in the moment. Sure, you may have started, but you derailed yourself. Three levels of congratulations!

Fourth is doing something else entirely. Anything else, even if it’s silly. Yesterday, I was at the gym. It was undergoing renovations so it had that construction plastic film up everywhere. Thinking I was alone, I was being a good little weirdo and batting at it like a cat. Then I noticed a woman had stepped into the area and was watching me. I was startled, so I felt the cold shock of adrenaline, followed by embarrassment welling up, all of which used to lead to anger or freezing. Instead, I just looked her in the eye and said, deadpan, “meow”. I laughed, she laughed, crisis averted.

It’s all about recognizing incremental progress and heaping on the praise. I call the praise part “training my own dog”. Calm me is rational and can think through shit. Emotionally flooded me isn’t very bright and needs to be trained, so I give that “me” positive reinforcement when they do a good job. Just like a dog. I sometimes give myself treats when I do a very good job.

There’s much more, like learning to be better at emotional regulation so I don’t have to rely on dysregulated me being a good dog, but this is what got me over the hump of “everything sucks, I suck, and I’m never getting better”.

Edit: oh oh! Look up amygdala hijacking in reference to getting really upset and going on rants where you later look back and are like “…WTF?” My partner does this HARD if they’ve been pushing themselves too hard for too long. I at first thought they were delusional and, well… they were. Temporarily. Because their brain had mostly shut down.

The more you can learn about psychology and neuroscience, especially affective neuroscience, the more you’ll be able to recognize what drives certain aspects of your behavior, which will help you figure out what to do about it. Knowledge is power and all that.