I had a DS PTSD member ask me about how to go from trauma like ours to compassion.  Hey, good question, since it's a stretch for those of us whose entire familiarity is with abuse.  We tend to stick to what we know.  Compassion, then's, always a work in progress for me.  

The good thing is that in therapy I learned that there are tricks for turning my CPTSD symptoms to use for it.  I'm a Christian, not a Buddhist, but it was useful to me to find that in Buddhism they call it tonglen, "In the practice, one visualizes taking in the suffering of oneself and of others on the in-breath, and on the out-breath giving recognition, compassion, and succor to all sentient beings.^[3][4] As such it is a training in altruism." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonglen

I have CPTSD from the time I was a little kid, I don't have a before/after trauma timeline in which I can be nostalgic and return to better days for my recovery.  I can only work with my PTSD symptoms.  They're wired into my brain and how my all of my feelings work from constant trauma survival right through all of my years of brain growth in child development.  They're all I've got.

Take my hypervigilance symptom, for instance.  When I became an Emergency Room hospital chaplain at Loyola U Med Center on Chicago's south side, gunshot victim central, my hypervigilance was on full strength all the time.  

I brought to it my own 6 years of childhood gun battle experience in the Tupamaro War.  When I came up next to a gunshot wound patient on a gurney I was all lit up with that, but to the patient my ultra awareness was sensitivity to them.  All I had to do was to overcome my hypervigilance's paranoia to let it be so.  

I didn't explain it.  The patient didn't need to know why I had a heightened sense of presence that stood out beyond everyone else they were meeting in the ER.  That sense of presence just worked in my favor in counseling them as their chaplain right then. 

Still does.  Having seen so much death as a kid, when I teach death and dying classes now to nursing students, they see a sensitivity in me to the topic they don't see in other instructors.  Fact is, I'm haunted by childhood ghosts, particularly of a young guy I saw get shot in the groin and bleed out in a riot just a few feet away from me when I was 11 years old.  But I let them be holy ghosts in the classroom by not explaining why I'm so sensitive to the class's subject.  I just let it be power to them.

Still a work in progress, I started something corny a DS  PTSD member suggested to me a year ago.  It's a gratitude journal.  Again, my CPTSD hypervigilance is eyes in the back of my head that can tell you when anything's wrong in my surroundings.  I can read a room negatively with great accuracy--negatively.  I assess for threats in seconds.  Problem is, I miss everything good about every room I walk into that way.

So the corny idea of a gratitude journal in which I write down one thing I'm thankful from one person per day is an exercise in hypervigilance going the other way.  It goes against the grain of every childhood combat instinct I cultivated to survive, not to mention the domestic violence ones I cultivated to gauge the home front every day, and my natural mistrust of kindness because of being a two-time pedophile survivor.  Being a triple trauma survivor, then, layers of cynicism package those survival instincts, too, to protect them from regular people whose optimism I envy.

I've kept that corny gratitude journal every day now for a year and a half, and the gears of it grind slowly for me but they are making a little difference, I'm finding.  At my age, any difference at all is quite a find, and this one's free, not involving a psychiatrist or a medication copay.  To do it daily makes me be on the hypervigilant hunt, so to speak, for something or somebody positive every day. It's part of my choice to work on going from survivor to thriver.  

Today I'll write in my gratitude journal about you all, and the chance to tell you this story.  Never said a gratitude journal couldn't be selfish.  That's what Thich Nhat Hanh said the whole point of compassion was in the end anyway.  It's self-care for ourselves as much as it's caring for the world, after all.  

After psychiatrist Viktor Frankl survived Hitler's death camps and wrote Man's Search for Meaning, he said the real test for the survivor of major trauma was the bitterness after.  For him that test was when he came out of the camps to found out his wife and family had been wiped out.  Processing trauma to him had 3 parts:

 "Frankl identifies three psychological reactions experienced by all inmates to one degree or another: 

(1) shock during the initial admission phase to the camp,

(2) apathy after becoming accustomed to camp existence, in which the inmate values only that which helps himself and his friends survive, and 

(3) reactions of depersonalization, moral deformity, bitterness, and disillusionment if he survives and is liberated."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning

That third bitterness part's a bear, because we're so entitled to our bitterness by our personal trauma histories and their facts.

Muji