Here's my rough draft, thinking out loud:
I have needs, everybody else has needs.
When those needs are not the same, sometimes I prioritize mine and sometimes I prioritize other peoples'.
If I think that I prioritize mine too much, then I think I'm selfish.
If other people think that I...
Hey, well done. You talked about it. I don't blame you. You had no choices - you were 8, a kid in an awful situation.
That doesn't make you disgusting. Glad you're here now.
These are two moments that stand out / bring up questions, for me. A therapist's job is to help us explore our feelings and reactions. If you are expressing a sense of growing confidence / competence around the skills in the worksheets, it would make sense for her to encourage you and help you...
A forum glitch wasn't letting me post earlier. I'm posting my response without catching up on what others wrote.
Failure depends on your goal, right?
- If my goal is to make a lot of money, I have failed.
- If my goal is to have a stable* place to live, I've succeeded.
- If my goal is to be...
We need each other. People need other people when the road is hard. And you've come to a place where other people get how hard it is. Healing is a lot of work, and it sounds like you've come really far to be able to work on TheThing, whatever it may be. So we can all celebrate how far you've...
I'm glad you reached out here. That's a great first step. You are doing your best, even when things feel really dark.
You said that fantasizing about death provides relief. What kind? Is it the relief of escape from pain? From your current circumstances, or from particular thoughts?
Welcome. Not EMS, but other long-term trauma, and what you wrote fits right in here.
This is a big one for me. Survival = continuing at any cost and putting the best face on it that we can. Until now, at least. Healing seems to involve taking that face off (for brief periods and in safe...
Current goals:
- low/no SI
- ways of managing shame and dissociation when they come up, so that they don't hijack my ability to make social connections, do my work, function.
- balanced boundaries/relationship with biological family, so they don't send me spinning.
I imagine I will go biweekly...
Thanks all for asking good questions. I was definitely in one of those "can't find my way out of a paper bag" places. It made a real difference to read what you wrote.
Definitely true.
I know that in reality, they make mistakes and have hard days and probably things have gone wrong in their...
Righto. I'm doing a thing. I'm (1) putting someone on a pedestal, idealizing them, and then (2) envying their supposedly perfect life that I actually know little to nothing about. I'm (3) reflexively comparing myself to them, and then (4) experiencing intense shame and desperation.
I...
Echoing others, most people don't know.
In order of distance: A few close friends know that things were complicated until a certain age, and I'm not a fan of my biofamily. Two friends know I have PTSD. My partner know some of my triggers and could probably guess some basic facts about my...
My coworker went beserk in the middle of a meeting. I tried to continue, but couldn't hear the client over the ruckus.
Might have to lock the coworker out of the meeting room, if this continues. Even if the coworker cries about it.
YEP. This. All the time. My recently-discovered strategy is that I write down what I'm trying to do, on paper. And then I just keep checking: what was I doing?
Any time I think of something else that I should do, I write it down on a running disorganized mess of a to-do list. So that if I've...
I think feeling present is a spectrum. It helps me to know that non-ptsd folk also move along this spectrum day to day and moment to moment.
I dissociate a lot, all the time. Every once in a while, especially when I'm at my healthiest... my vision goes less flat? I can see textures more...
It's possible (and likely) you did nothing wrong by sending that email. Your therapist can probably see how much this matters to you, and knows that meeting with you to talk about it may feel much warmer and more meaningful in the end, even if it is scary at first to talk about it together.
If...
Good point - definitely want both! And clarity on what's mine and what isn't. I was a mess when I wrote the post, so I was defaulting to either/or.
I'm not sure what you were asking here:
Can you clarify?
This person definitely needs support outside of just me, and they aren't getting that support. They had a terrible experience with a therapist for several years as a child, so they have been completely against the idea in the past. Over the past six months, I have been open about my own...
Yes, so something like consent is part of it. And consent can be withdrawn.
The person needs to not fly off the handle so much that it is hard to bring themselves back, or so much that they stop being able to "see" the other person? Cause if the person flies off the handle and is ranting and...
There are lots of contexts in which venting is a perfectly healthy, normal thing to do. On the other hand, someone just spoke to me in ways I found triggering, which is making it hard for me to see the conversation clearly. Afterwards, the person described their own talking as "venting," and...