What Are You Avoiding Doing, That You Really Must Do In Order To Gain, Regain Or Maintain Wellness?

[femaleveteran]

goingonhope wrote:

What Are You Avoiding Doing, That You Really Must Do In Order To Gain, Regain or Maintain Wellness? That Which You're Avoiding And, Why? What's Your Fear? "Let's Be Honest, And List Them As They Come Up Daily".

....I'm a bit loopy today, but seriously this could make for a fruitful thread if we didn't avoid doing anything about what we learn from it. And, if we didn't list so many things that we couldn't keep up with actually getting it done thereafter and despite the fear and/or terror.

....Like I said, I'm a bit loopy today.

That's my idea for a title, Anybody, Anybody, Anybody At All want to start it? :oops:​

​

Sure I will go ahead and start it goingonhope.

I am avoiding going into deeper types of therapy. My group facilitator wants me to go to a residential treatment program for female veterans who have PTSD (some will be there who have it from Iraq or Afghanistan and others will be there who might not have had combat PTSD but have PTSD related to something else that occurred in their military service). She wants me to seriously think about going to this program in Cincinatti after I get all healed up from my leg surgery that is coming up April 4th. So I suspect she will want me to be going sometime in the fall since I will have quite a few months of physical rehabilitation to undergo after this last surgery.

I have told her each time she has brought it up to forget it. I tell her that I cannot stand the thought of being confined to a residential program and I told her it sounded like prison to me. Of course I was overreacting. It is not a locked facility and after the first week (I think or maybe it is after the second week) then you get to go home for a three day weekend every weekend....plus if you go and you decide you do not want to be there you can just leave. It is not an acute psychiatric ward is what I mean. However I am terrified of going because I know first of all that they are going to expect me to be completely off of my Clonapin which I take for my anxiety attacks. They want you to be completely off those meds so that you really feel the whole and real emotional aspects of the trauma/traumas....I can hardly stand the thought of doing that type of inner/mental type of intense work and not being able to take something that allows me to not feel like my heart is going to explode.

However I know rationally that in order for me to make any real progress that I should probably go to that program at some point. However I dont think it will happen anytime soon. But then I think if I do not do it soon I might never do it. And when I go to the combat PTSD groups I go to and I see veterans there who have been doing these same groups for ten-fifteen and some even twenty plus years, it is terrifying because i know those are the same guys who are sitting right where I am at this early stage in my PTSD diagnosis and they have had their diagnosis a lot longer and been going to groups a lot longer and they are still pretty much at square one just like I am. So again, I am terrrified that I am going to wake up one day at 65 years old and still be going to the same group every thursday at the VA.

She also wants me to start a type of therapy with another counselor called cognitive processing therapy. It consists of a group but it is also an intensive individual therapy effort for something like 15 weeks or maybe longer ...I cannot remember right off hand. She told me there was a lot of homework and journaling type stuff to do with it. I have been resistant to that as well but not so much as I have been the residential program idea. Mostly the cognitive processing stuff scares me because of the whole journaling and homework thing. I am afraid that I will let out too much and then the therapist will know everything about me and I always have had a fear that if anyone person knows too much about me or my life history then they will use it against me for the rest of my life. Somewhere out there in the world there will always be that person and they can use whatever I write while in that therapy to push my buttons, use me as a doormat, hell.....they could even blackmail me by threatening to publicize every detail I ever wrote about. So that is scary too.....

NOW.........

i know all my excuses are just BS excuses. I understand that quite rationally and whether I choose to do both these therapies, or just one of them, I am sure that only good can come out of them.....I mean rationally I know that these therapies certainly cannot cause me any more harm than it would to not do them right? I am just being honest about the ways in which I often will try to talk myself out of these types of helpful and healthy things and how I do truly recognize that my excuses are just that.....total crapola. However I have to overcome that need to control everything and that very same need for control is the very same thing that allows my brain to come up with these irrational fears that get used as the excuses to not take advantage of these healthy-living learning opportunities to get more healing under my belt.

Oh and I am also still avoiding a lot of people.....pretty much all people except for the ones I speak with on this forum or on the other combat PTSD forum. As far as people not associated with this forum or the other one though it is a different story.

I have made friends with quite a few other veterans since going to the VA group I go to and there are some times when they will call me up and I will meet up with some of them for dinner and whatnot....but then there are other weeks where, if the phone rings and it is one of their numbers that flashes on the caller ID, then I will not answer the phone. Then if they ask me in group to go somewhere with them I will say I will go and sometimes I will actually show up....but then other times I will call and cancel and make up some excuse that I am sick or something like that and cannot make it....Then many time and I am not at all proud of this way of handling these sitautions but there are many times when they invite me out to dpo something and I will deliberately not show up. Then, I will tell them when I see them in group the next time that I just completely forgot about it.

I should not do that to these guys because they are all good guys and they do not deserve to be dissed by soemone like me in such a way. Also i should not handle these invites the ways I do because I know I do need socialization with other human beings especially since I just moved back to this area just 15 months ago. So, after being gone from this area for so many years, I really do not know anyone at all who lives around me anymore.

Therefore, I should really not try to alienate these other veterans who have been so wonderful and kind to me since I started going to their group. Eventually, if I keep being so fickle about their attempts to include me in their social outings, they are liable to just stop asking me to join in with them socially for any reason at all....and then eventually they might just stop talking to me altogether.

But again, I am afraid of getting too close to any of them. Mostly, I am terrified that I am going to lose them. Many of them are a good twenty to twenty-five years older than me (mostly Vietnam Veterans) and I am afraid that i am going to have to watch them as they grow old and pass away. One of the guys with whom I am the closest (and I have also gotten to know his wife really well also) had a bout with throat cancer about three years ago. He is in remission and healthy as a horse now but I have that fear that as soon as I fully commit to the friendship then he will get sick again and then I will lose him too.

Plus a few of the other older veterans have chronic illnesses as well. So i get scared about losing them too. Again I know rationally that loss is a part of life and everyone experiences it and i amnot ever going to be the only one in the world who has had to deal with loss or will have to deal with it in the future. However I tell myself that crap to get out of getting close to people and to get out of making a committment to people and to avoid what I believe will ultimately be so painful an experience i might not make it through it....even though no loss of a person is ever going to actually physically be able to kill me....it will hurt and I know that but this irrational fear that "if I lose anyone else in this life I will just DIE!" is just simply ridiculous.....however it is how I have been thinking alot since i really think I started developing symptoms of PTSD which now, as I know more about those symptoms, I would say these types of thinking patterns started shortly after I deployed for my second tour in Iraq.

Again, let me say that i know I work my own mind up into these frenzied dramatic predictions for the future and yet at the same time I know that, in the past, I have dealt with and, even better, I have SURVIVED the same loss and shame and disappointment and fear and anger and all the stuff that all these things I should be doing may carrry with them. Yet I think to myself quite often that if I have to lose ONE more thing, or if ONE more person hurts me then "I'ma shirley gonna die!!!!!!!"

The simple fact of the matter is that I need to do these things that I avoid or I will wake up at sixty and I will be much worse off for not having done these things and not having taken these steps to heal.....I might lose some things in the end of it all....I might lose some people if I get close to them and, I might lose some self-respect and be ashamed of myself once I start individual therapy...especially once i start talking about some of the ways I believe that I failed as a soldier and as a leader in a time of war.

But perhaps with a little luck and inspite of how painful the processes might be, I might be able to get rid of some of the pain just by going through the processes of residential treatment, the cognitive processing therapy and allowing myself to get close with other human beings......who knows??

I guess I won't know until I commit to do one or all of these things ....and I will not make those committments until I am absolutely certain that I will not bolt and run away from them once I start. I look at committing to do these things PROPERLY as if it is sort of like deciding about marriage....or at least how I think people should make a decisions about marriage. I believe there is no use in getting married to someone unless you are absolutely certain that you are going to stick it out to the bitter end...that end in my book being death (I am after all a Catholic and I do believe marriage should be forever which is why I have yet to take that plunge because even though I was in loveI did not know if I could make such a promise to the person I was in love with....after all not everyone who is in love should run out and get married, right?.....Now, some things like a spouse cheating might be out of your control and that, in my opinion is a perfectly valid reason to end a marriage....but, what i am talking abou t are situations where if you even think that something like money or leaving the toilet seat up in the bathroom, or not pressing the toothpaste tube from the bottom up, or not cleaning your shaved beard hairs out of the bathroom sink or loading the dishwasher with the Big Bowls on top....if any of those typoes of situations tell you that they would ruin your marriage and the other person you are thinking of marrying had better never do any of them after the marriage because it will be OVA'...then you should nbot even be thinking of getting married in the first place.....Others might not agree but I think I am right in that certain family "vlaue" if anyone wants to call it that....I prefer just to call it what it is...a mature way of looking at marriage to another person....you can either live with such mundane things they might do ....or you can allow your irritation at such stupid things to force you into divorce court where you rip your life and the lives of your children (if there are any children) apart. Sooooooooooooooooooooooo...............

.... until I can be certain that I am willing to do these healthy-living-learning-therapy-type things all the way then I will not do them at all (until death do I part with my PTSD, righty-oh???....after all, I keep hearing there is no cure for PTSD so we are pretty much stuck together until death)

Hopefully though through continual reflection on the subjects I have written about, I will come to the appropriately healthy decision about what to do in each situation. Only time will tell.

I do not know if this is what you were looking for goingonhope but hey I started the thread you suggested....so YOUR TURN!!:tup:

 

[goingonhope]

The simple fact of the matter is that I need to do these things that I avoid or I will wake up at sixty and I will be much worse off for not having done these things and not having taken these steps to heal.

Hope

 

[Don]

goingonhope

Yessss, but I do hope you'll balance that thought with the concept that PTSD treatment is still pretty new. The state of the art seems to be still rapidly developing. And, that in medical circles the current treatment focus, the 'cutting edge' if you will, will typically always be thought of as 'so much better than before' (imo largely, because: it is new, and, has not yet been thoroughly disproven).

Much earlier (the fourties & especially the fifties?), I think a similar sort of expert medical thinking was prevalent when dealing with female hysteria: as performing a 'hysterectomy' was considered a classic and proven solution (if only because most of the patients didn't seem up to coming back seeking further 'treatment'). Then there were times, including currently but only a tiny bit thankfully, where "lobotomy" was considered the safe, easy, quick and even briefly, the preferred approach for tackling a stubborn mood disorder.]

I certainly agree that you do need at times to confront and deal with the things you avoid, when you're up for it and when you have a support network in place. But, I'm apprehensive about the portion of your approach describing 'one approach fits all' (of dropping current meds, so as to deal with the unfiltered rawness of your syndrome in a group treatment setting; granted, a fantastic training experience for the medical personnel, but, what of the patients?).

I see people who need to resort to mood meds as using an often invaluable crutch to keep reactions manageable and down to a dull roar, and figure once they're handling things much better with such a crutch, then they can work at weaning themselves off their crutch while retaining their progress. I guess I've come to think that therapy that re-traumatizes the patient, may be a very wrong approach. Rather, I like the concept of 'lightly challenging' the patient (going only somewhat beyond their comfort zone very regularly), and only infrequently along with plenty of recovery time, exposing the patient to serious 'trauma therapy'.

Don

 

[femaleveteran]

I agree with you about the med issue Don and that is exactly why i am having trouble with the residential treatment thing especially because they do expect you to be takn off those types of meds entirely or else they will not treat you. As well, I cannot do the exposure therapy group they have at the VA I currently go to (which also involves individual therapy as well as the group) because they want you off of meds for that treatment as well. The onlyindividual therapy option I have is the cognitive processing therapy which includes a group as well as individual sessions too.....I described it above.

Anyway I was not saying I agreed with the idea of coming off of Clonapin in order to go to the residential treatment program....I was sinmply saying that is what is required and they claim the program is really "awesome/spectacular/beneficial/etc....." and so I was only trying to convey that I am not willing to go to the program right now because the thought of dealing with that raw emotion, especially when it comes to dealing with some of the more intense traumas I have experienced, without anyway to come down from the intensity afterwards is just more than I can bare. I have gone for days without my clonapin and have tried to deal with the raw emotions of stuff during those tiems but it sends me into a tail spin where I then want to do some form of self-injury just to change the way I feel....feeling the physical pain becomes a sort of "time-out" and actually is seductively relaxing when one is in the middle of sheer panic. It is something I only just realized over the last year. I never did any sort of self injury before but one day I was having such a bad panic attack and I sliced a spot on my stomach that was pretty deep with a razor blade and it was INSTANTANEOUS RELIEF. I mean it was just as if I had taken some sort of rapidly acting Clonapin. That is when I realized that there is only so high I can go with my anxiety threshold. I am not proud of the fact that I am a weaker person nowadays. I am not proud at all.

I used to have to handle all sorts of high stress situations in the military and sometimes multiple high stress situations all at one time....but as I said, something changed in me after I first got to Iraq that second deployment and since then I have suffered a steady deterioration of my stress handling skills. Now when i get stressed out, instead of being capable of thinking calmly and rationally but, at the same time, rapidly and effectively - just like the army taught me to do from day one - I now have a hair trigger temper and I become irritable and if more stress is piled on then eventually I lose it and have a full blown anxiety attack. I have had them so bad while driving that I have had to pull off the side of the road and I throw up and feel like my heart will explode at times. I know logically it won't but it certainly is a scary feeling. If I take a Clonapin when that happens then within about 30-45 minutes I am settled back down and i am not tired or loopy......I just am clam and able to think straight again. There have been a couple of times where I have felt so lousy that I have doubled up on my clonapin dose and then I do get loopy and feeel pretty stupid and all that but I do not take the stuff every day and so when i do that it has a strong effect. My doctor says that if I am going to stay on it I should just take it twice a day which is the amount I am technically allowed to take it.....he said that way I will build it up in my system and not have as many panic attacks.

But I do not really know what the right answer is to any of that pharmacology stuff....Medications seem to work differently for different people. right now I am okay with just taking it when I am in the midst of a full blown attack. I just need to not do the double dosing thing anymore. it has only happened may 3-4 times but I learned my lesson when I went back one morning and saw a bunch of jibberish I had written after taking 2MG's one night and went on the combat PTSD forum. After that incident I made a promise to not do the 2MG's all at once ever again. I did not even remember half of what I had written on there.

but the meds do help when things are really really bad and as long as i take them appropriately I do not really see a problem with them being a tool to use in conjunction with therapy. thata is why I feel the residential treatment program is a bit too hardcore for me right now. I do not think I want to spend 15 weeks or however long the program is, having my emotional scabs seared off with a mental blowtorch and then waiting for hours if not days before I feel like I can breathe again. Like I said, if I cannot commit to the requirements of the program then there is no sense to just going and "trying it out". I am a firm believer in finishing things I start and I do not think I can do that kind of intense work without being able to have something to help me calm down when things get rough.....so there is no sense in even entertaining the thought of going until I am sure I can commit to following their rules while there and not running away when things get rough. I have never run from anything before and I do not want to start now.

Sorry but I am just being honest about my own limitations and weaknesses when it comes to dealing with trauma and the fact that right now I just cannot handle a lot of stress very skillfully on my own the way I used to be able to. Again I say - I am not proud to admit that fact but there it is. I do not see any way to handle the trauma work that is required in some of these therapy modalities any more effectively right now without the aid of medications....maybe one day I will be able to do such work when i get a little more healing under my belt but right now....nah....dont think it is gonna happen.

 

[Don]

I have gone for days without my clonapin and have tried to deal with the raw emotions of stuff

Well, abruptly stopping something like clonapin (Klonopin? see rxlist.com), could be very hairy if you've been on it steadily for weeks or months (you'd want to taper off). I believe it's a benzo-, and that med family is well known to have addictive qualities where "withdrawal" symptoms can become a major issue (the addiction aspect is also why benzo's are not a great choice for long term use imo).

Though from I've read, anxiety is a difficult syndrome to treat well with drugs over the long term anyway. I suspect it's because we too readily "adapt" to an anti-anxiety med both physically and emotionally. When there's a 'need' to take an anti-anxiety med, I'm a firm believer that it's also good practice to tackle the underlying causes and contributors, such as attitude, frame of mind, lifestyle, diet, etc. Also, that 'calming routines' can become great stopgaps as coping measures to help us ride out waves of anxiety.

Don

ps. I've used anti-anxiety meds on occasion (Xanax, serax/oxazepam, even the harsher benzo- cousin, valium/diazepam), and have consistently found that after several days or a few weeks, their usefulness rapidly tapers off.

I become more and more 'wired' while on the med and well, for me anyway, they're a recipe for disaster over the long haul. But, even so, I see them as a great 'bandaid' med for short term use. A way to keep me out of the E.R. with what seem like heart attack symptoms but which are really my High Anxiety having been triggered and out of control. (I've been to the E.R. two or three times with such symptoms much earlier.)

 

[Heather]

This is a GREAT thread. I just had this very discussion with my therapist this afternoon. He wants me to write 100x's on a piece of paper before the next time I see him (yea right):p

THAT I AM 100% RESPONSIBLE FOR MY ACTIONS, BEHAVIOR AND FEELINGS. I OWN ALL OF IT!

I'm no longer allowed to blame anybody else! That is seriously so not fair. And no fun! We talked about tossing out the victim behavior and seeing myself as something different. Wow, now there's a concept.

 

[nie]

Forgiving myself . . .

 

[femaleveteran]

I hjave only been on the Clonapin for about five months and like i said before I do not take it every day. However I have double dosed on certain days when things have seemed to be especially bad and i now know, again as i said previously, that I do not need to do that. However I have tried dealing with the raw emotions without anything at all....even before i had been put on any medications which was right after i was officially diagnosed with PTSD.... and some weeks in the beginning were so bad I could not even leave my house. I would not even go to the grocery store for basic stuff like milk and bread. I would order a pizza and make it last a week and a half because certain traumas that my counselor initially had me talking about in group along with the other stuff I was hearing from other combat vets abut their experiences was either really triggering me initially or I would feel guilty that I felt so bad because other guys, especially the older Vietnam Era Veterans seemed to have gone through so much more than I did and I felt I had no right even to sit in the room with them at times.

But it was the extreme fear that was causing the social isolation and the near daily (sometimes more than once a day) anxiety attacks that caused the doctor to put me on Clonapin. But on it I have been able to be more outgoing with people in group anyway, and I have been able to take the wstep of finally joining this forum after lurkinfg here for a while and just reading stuff....well not lurking....I was actually trying to learn something about PTSD and what I could do about it. Anyway I have been doing some better when I do take the Clonapin when I need it and I have not had any isolation episodes longer than maybe a three day stretch where I have felt incapable of leaving my house out of sheer terror. So I do not think dealing with the raw emotions without Clonapin was in any way related to any type of withdrawal symptoms. But hey you know better than me I am sure Don.....you seem to know alot more about these meds than I do. I can only tell you how I have used them and you can judge for yoruself if you think I suffer from withdrawal making my anxiety worse on the days I do not take it. For example I have not even had any Clonapin at all in about a week and I have been feeling okay. Of course I have been getting quite a bit of good news alot lately and that has probably eased my anxiety about alot of things as well. So I do not know.

Again let me say, maybe you are right Don. Most of you all here on this forum definitely know more about all this stuff than I do. I have only been at this whole healing process thing for going on about 6 months....a little bit less than that i think. But I have been dealing with the full blown symtoms (like every single one on the list for PTSD) for more than a year now. However I have been going back and seeing how with the multiple deployments I had, I started having some symptoms and then some more and then some more until I had every single one on the list like I said. Is that even how it usually works....or was I just stuffing the worst symptoms early on without knowing it .....I mean I really have not figured out all that yet.

All i know is what I said in the beginning of this thread and that is that I know there are things that people have told me I should do to be more healthy and all that .....however I have not made any committments to doing those things....however I am trying. I am doing the best I can right now with the skills I have learned in a short period of time to try to deal with my PTSD and I know I could be doing things better I suppose but it will just take some time and I am not going to do anything that is goiong to make me hurt worse inside than I already do on pretty much a daily basis.

But it is nothing that cannot be cured with a good joke and a big HAHAHAHHAHAAHAHAA to the rest of the world. Act "AS IF" is my only motto many days because I cannot feel great everyday but I sure can act like I feel great...I can act it so well that i probably should have gotten a few academy awards by now....so I act "as if" everything is groovy and some days I am able to believe it way more than I can on other days....but ya gotta keep trying right?....Some people say the toughest person of all to fool is yourself but I have gotten prettty good at even that over the years! Others are easier to fool as long as they do not know just how screwed up you really are. A little bit of a "devil may care" attitude can carry me a long way.

 

[femaleveteran]

Oh and I know all too wll about the ER....another reason they put me on the Clonapin was I was winding up inthe ER about once a week there for a month and a half where my blood pressure would shot from normal to like 180 over 140 in a matter of minutes and my heart beat would be like 140 beats a minute at "rest" and this would be after going for two or three days and sometimes longer without any sleep.....you would think a person so exhausted would be crashing but I would have something trigger anxiety -- it could be something as simple as seeing a trashbag on the side of the road and swerving to miss it even when there was no reason to to something big like seeing a really graphic show about Iraq (my ex loved to watch that crap and since men always control the remote I often got roped into sitting and watching it and then all of a sudden my heartbeat would be out of control and the blood pressure would go up and, next thing I would know, I would wake up in the ER after having passed out cold from all the anxiety and its physical effects on me.....or I would not pass out but still be so physically ill from the anxiety attack that I would think i was going to die. So that was another big reason for the clonapin....the Veterans Administration got sick of paying for 88 mile ambulance rides to the nearest VA ER...Of course the ambulance guys, they would take me to the nearest ER twelve miles away but once they found out I was a veteran, and they figured out it was not a heart attack, they would just stabilize me and put me back in the ambulance to go the rest of the way to the VA ER, where they would make sure I was stable once there and then just send me home for it all to happen again a few days later....it became quite embarassing actually and again it is one of those moments in life where I have never felt so useless and like such a big wimp...but hey it happened and now it is not happening so that is progress right?? Anyway, like I said, I guess the VA figured it was easier, and not to mention probably cheaper, to prescribe pills than to pay for all those ambulance bills.

 

[Grace11]

I am avoiding exercise. The back to work schedule's thrown me off. I need to exercise to be mentally and physically healthy. So, I don't have an excuse, I just haven't done it lately. I do have time after work, I just have neglected it. I need to get over the hurtle and remember that I feel great afterward, it just sucks getting motivated to go for a run after a full day of working again.

 

[Reclusive]

I have severe agoraphobia and social phobia and what I've been avoiding doing is going out when I don't absolutely have to. I can pay rent, go to the grocery, and come home consistently, but I avoid picking up the mail or walking around the block. I've only been in my backyard a handful of times, if that many. I don't know why I can run errands (I still arrive home like a trainwreck) but the idea of my own back yard is just insurmountable.

And I have my excuses - there aren't any chairs out there, it's hot, it's windy, there's nothing to do, what if my cats need me inside....

It's a small thing, but I've been avoiding it.

Also, I challenged myself to call a specific friend of mine once a week to help get over the phone thing and that happened all of once a few months ago.

 

[goingonhope]

I do not know if this is what you were looking for goingonhope but hey I started the thread you suggested....so YOUR TURN!!:tup:

Female Vet, Yes this is exactly what I was hoping for, and IMO even better. :tup: Thank you!

That which I'm avoiding: Presently I am avoiding taking one small (0.5 mg. Lorazepam) prescribed today and am extremely hesistant to ever take a (50 mg Tramadol) for severe pain when and if that need returns.

Why: I am avoiding taking these, even though I justifiably and temporarily require them, because I am most negatively brainwashed; I've been force fed more ignorance and negativity surrounding my rights and who and what I become if I take them, then ever necessary.

Fear: I am afraid of bad/complicated reactions to these meds. Warranted or unwarranted fears, I simply do not know and am afraid of finding out.