Does Going To Therapy Every Week Make Me Believe I Need To Go To Therapy Every Week?!

[Sideways]

Maybe a good time to try some different grounding techniques, as well. It's incredible liberating when you know that you can stop yourself from dissociating - and there's stacks of different, simple ways to do it. It's about finding the right way for you.

 

[EveHarrington]

Is your therapist teaching you a lot of different ways to stay grounded? Is she teaching you ways to cope?

 

[barefoot]

@Ragdoll Circus Yes...I'm just realising how phenomenally bad I am at even realising that I'm starting to dissociate, so I don't then think to use any grounding techniques until I'm really in a muddle.
Perhaps I should speak to my therapist about this stuff when she gets back. If I can't recognise when I start to go, I can't see I'm going to get very far with anything!

 

[barefoot]

@EveHarrington I have strong mints, hand cream, perfume, potent essential oil in my bag to help ground me when I dissociate. I used to have these out a lot in therapy and used to use them quite a bit. Now they seem to have fallen off my radar. She mentioned them the other week but I was so far gone by then that I couldn't find them in my bag and tbh I was just so confused that I didn't really know what she was talking about. She will try to make me stamp my feet and feel my body...she has tried before to make me stand up and sort of dance around with her in the room but I think I often just refuse to get up because I'm just sort of sitting in a frozen, zoned out state so I think the idea of getting up and jigging around is just...incomprehensible in that moment...

 

[Sideways]

Your T sounds pretty switched on. If she ever starts asking you if you're "all there", that's the time to stop. Ask her what made her ask? What did she notice change? How were you feeling?

It can feel a bit like one of those wishy-washy concepts at first, but there's often patterns. Recognising your own body language, and how your body is feeling just takes a bit of practice. And it's worth the effort - being able to emotionally connect with what you're talking about, in a therapeutic rather than retraumatising way, kinda requires you to stay in the real world. Once you start dissociating, there's not much point in the talk stuff - you could narrate War And Peace but if you're dissociated at the time, it won't get you very far:)

 

[Sideways]

Stand up? Pull things out of my bag? Hell no! I'm like you - if I know I'm out of it, I freeze, no way am I moving. I don't even blink.

Try the description thing. The chair you're sitting in, or the room. You can so it in your head when you're out and about, but in therapy, I say it out loud so my T knows what I'm doing. So I'd start describing the room, everything in it & where things are, textures, colours, temperature, smell, etc. You can go on and on into the minutiae until you know you're back in the same reality as your T.

Grounding strategies that focus on something about the here and now, what is actually right here in front of me, allow you to ground yourself without having to move, which for me makes it feel a lot safer:)

 

[EveHarrington]

I'm concerned that at 2 years in your therapist hasn't given you tools on how to learn your early signs of dissociation.

 

[Friday]

Feeling Good vs Being Better.

It sounds like you've fallen into the trap somewhere along the line of thinking therapy is supposed to feel good (it's not). It's an Easy trap to fall into. ((Also one that you're starting to come out of, now)).

But as for what's been happening? Bringing her the stuff that feels good to bask in having someone else do for you, that you can actually do yourself, and then avoiding the hard stuff because -trap- it feels bad, so that's not right, therapy is supposed to feel good (no it's not). So now that she's left? Not a lot has changed. The stuff she's been doing is still getting done, because you're doing it, and the stuff you've been avoiding, you can still avoid. So it really does beg the question: why be in therapy at all?

As a suggestion, to break that cycle? All the stuff you can do for yourself? Do try doing it yourself, instead of bringing it to her. Meanwhile, bring to her the stuff you can't do yourself, and that really doesn't feel good. Flip the dynamic around. Instead of focusing in feeling good, focus on being better.

<grin> You've got a couple good lists going, here, already, although I'm sure there are a bunch of things you can or might want to add or shift about :) Just pulling from your posts above.

Stuff you can do your own self (but have been taking to her) :
- validation*
- reassurance
- soothing
- friendship
- manageable problems / momentary irritations
- etc,

Stuff you can't do yourself or struggle with:
- Intimacy
- Feeling Needy
- Disassociating as soon as you touch on trauma
- Flooding emotions
- Toggling back and forth between disassociating & flooding
- Speeding up the recovery time / minimizing how hard you're hit with the "lows" (Depression? Apathy? Rage? ... Whatever low means to you)
- Not being aware you're disassociating
- etc.

* QUESTIONS / Things I don't know where to put

On the one hand: I like her a lot, I look forward to going, I like feeling validated/accepted and feel that she understands, which makes me feel less isolated and more "normal" about some stuff.
.

- Are you *actually* less isolated and more normal, or do you just feel that way?

- Ditto... Feeling validated, accepted, & understood is different from actually being validated, accepted, & understood... Which is also different from being confidant enough not to need external approval / ie is really doesn't effing matter whether anyone else validates, accepts, or understands... Because YOU accept & understand & value that higher than anyone else's understanding -or lack thereof-, unacceptable, or outright challenge or disbelief.

^^^^
This is why I asterisked the validation piece in things you can do for yourself. Early posts it sounded like this was something you had a handle on, later posts not so much. If you still need someone else to tell you ABC? (Or if they don't understand/ validate/ & accept, or disagree, it crushes you or throws you into confusion?). That's definitely a piece to work on.

 

[barefoot]

Your T sounds pretty switched on. If she ever starts asking you if you're "all there", that's the time to stop

Yes, this is right...I don't know why, but when she asks if I'm ok or if I'm getting spacey, I think I feel too ashamed to say I am and so I kind of insist I'm ok and then dive in to "prove" it and then...well...I'm not! So I need to get better at expressing that I'm not ok...

 

[sun seeker]

I don't really feel anything about it....it feels like I'm telling someone else's story and sometimes it feels like I've just made it up.

Sounds familiar. You probably know this, but not feeling anything about it doesn't mean it isn't affecting you. It sounds like you are dissociating.

I don't think it's "bad enough" to warrant me having PTSD.

Ah, yup. That sounds familiar too. Until I started recovering more memories and realizing it was definitely bad enough. I don't know if that is relevant for you, but telling ourselves our experience wasn't bad enough for whatever reason, when the symptoms of PTSD are clearly there and had to come from somewhere, is a way of protecting ourselves from feeling the extent of the trauma. It's easier to blame ourselves than go through the intensity of believing, yes it happened, and yes it really was that bad.

There was a pivotal moment for me when I had to decide whether to believe the trauma really happened or not. It hasn't been as straightforward as that makes it sound, but I do remember that moment of choice and looking at what the results would be either way. I guess it was empowering to see that I really did have a choice about it. I had to get to the point where I had more to lose by not believing than by believing.

Perhaps I should just go in one week and say I want to talk about what happened and then that will make me talk about it.

I'm trying to think of solutions here. Do you and your therapist mainly just talk? Does she have other modalities in her repertoire? I am wondering whether there are body-focused therapies that would be a better fit, if it is this hard for you to talk about the trauma. You can still release the trauma energy from your body without talking about it (I think) or without even remembering all of it. There are some traumas that I am not sure I will ever remember completely, and my therapist assures me that's fine and we can work on them anyway.

Maybe someone else who knows more about how the brain works will have something to say about this, but I am pretty sure that just talking is not going to resolve anyone's trauma. That's because the talking part of your brain is not the part affected.

Something else that comes to mind, with some hesitancy, is to ask whether you are taking any medication, and whether it's possible that a small dose of some kind of benzoid would help you to connect emotionally with the trauma without dissociating.

Do you know of a straightforward, accessible resource that outlines attachment issue

It's not exactly straightforward, but the best I know is Laurence Heller's "Healing Developmental Trauma." He has an interview on youtube that takes about an hour and a half to listen to, as an introduction.

There are also a lot of threads on the board about attachment issues.

 

[barefoot]

@EveHarrington - we worked a lot on grounding skills, self-care and self-soothing early on. We reached a point where, for about 6 months, I wasn't dissociating. Or I'd maybe get a little spacey but then she would point it out or I would notice it myself and then I would be able to make myself be present again. I'm not sure exactly when or why that changed. But the toggling between dissociation and getting flooded thing...that's only really been over the last few months and that's what feels really out of control...it's like a rapid whirlwind of both things and I can't really process that either state is happening because it changes so quickly. I don't know if that makes sense? It's hard to describe...

Actually, I think I do know when I started dissociating again...I've just remembered while I've been typing this response...it was a few months ago and I accidentally (!) let it slip to her that I'd done something to hurt myself. And I hadn't done it in years and I'd never told anyone. And I'd suddenly done it for the first time in something like a decade. And I think I was really freaked out by the fact that I'd done it and then I sort of blurted it out, then immediately wished I hadn't. And then, of course, she was asking about it and I suddenly felt a wave of total, unbearable shame. And then I dissociated really badly. But it didn't feel the same as when I'd dissociated before. It felt much worse...a really horrible, frightening feeling and I did some odd things and was basically there for about three hours and it ended with me standing with my nose pressed to her wall while my whole body shook. It was a hideous experience. And since then, dissociation is back on the table. And I think the fear of that happening again is always at the back of my mind. I guess the previous grounding techniques have just fallen off my radar. And they shouldn't have.

I probably need to go back to square one with her and not even try to move forwards with the hard stuff until I've got this more under control again...

And I'm starting to think that at the moment I'm probably not very honest with her about how I'm feeling when I'm in session. I will often say I'm ok when I'm not. And then I end up in a mess.

Ah....crap!

 

[barefoot]

Thanks @sun seeker - there's a lot of food for thought in what you've written and it's sort of making me feel like the contents are falling out of my head when I read it, so I think I need to revisit it another time so that I can try to take it in a bit better!