I was initially sent to professionals within the Employee Assistance Program through my former workplace (was there 13 years) when seeking help after finally breaking down and not being able to continue to "fake it 'til I supposedly made it". The difficulties arose from me trying to hold a state agency accountable for unethical happenings. Opened a huge can of worms i didn't even realize had been closed for so long.
I shared all of my childhood sexual abuse, teen rape incidents, and early adulthood repeated domestic violence incidents where I was near death more than I'd like to remember. Even shared it all in writing so I wouldn't forget or leave any of it out. Up until that point, I had assumed I had handled it all well enough since I was still able to work, help raise two step-kids, and help care for others in my family.
However, NONE of them ever discussed PTSD, but rather diagnosed me with severe depression, severe anxiety, severe insomnia, severe adhd, severe stomach issues (IBS, "nervous stomach", etc.), severe this, severe that, and some kind of personality disorder that they just couldn't quite narrow down. I thought that meant I might get one named after me at that point. I was pretty much told I lived a severely impaired existence and they were going to try really hard to medicate me out of it.
Each of those diagnoses came with a prescription, often of many sorts, to try to supposedly balance things out. However, all they did was make things much worse. Whenever that happened, they'd suggest yet another prescription to mask the discomfort the previous one was causing. Never did they dive any deeper into my life to discuss or weed through actual events that occurred that may have caused many of the issues I was dealing with, no matter how many different specialists I was farmed out to. I learned really quickly that pills don't teach skills and I had to fight like hell to find help that actually felt helpful, as well as healthy.
I finally found what feels like genuine help through a local domestic/sexual violence shelter, an osteopathic doctor, and many holistic healers, who are luckily willing to barter, that I'd been taught to ignore throughout the rest of my life, as they aren't often covered by insurance nor do they offer endless piles of supposedly substantial peer-reviewed studies to convince folks of their therapeutic worth, as it seems quite difficult to receive funding supports if they aren't already existing within socially accepted arenas of "help".
I'd also like to add that my older sister was sexually abused by a distant family member and raped multiple times in her youth, as well, and was told she obviously must have done something to cause it, and was then immediately sent to a mental hospital and given shock therapy treatments and many varieties of meds to try to "fix" what our parents and the professionals perceived as a "chemical imbalance", totally messing up an otherwise healthy, albeit abused, individual. It's a jungle out there, from what I've experienced. Tread gently and wisely.
