Recent content by AnotherUser

My therapist was helpful in getting me to redirect how my brain works during a panic attack. Lucky, because I had one today for the first time in a long time! It's a lot of work to get that re-wiring working, but if you get enough panic attacks, you get plenty of opportunity to practice, and it...

This morning I had a panic attack, for the first time in quite a long time. To put it into context: for the last two or more months I have been trying to work from home, and in the last week the pressure of being in the same flat with my girlfriend (an architect who also works from home...

It has been a long time since I have posted on here, but as the evenings draw in and I can feel that I'm entering a new phase of struggle in my life, I thought I would say hello again. I've been away because, as my last posts indicated last winter, I found a girlfriend. In May we moved in...

I haven't written in this journal for a while because I have found events so overwhelming recently, along with the flood of feelings that they have brought with them. But I don't want to abandon writing down what I have been through, and will go through yet, in trauma therapy, so thought at...

The last two days I have woken up without the crushing feeling of dread in my abdomen. As far as I can tell, the conflict is over - the conflict between the UK and Romania, between Julia and what I set out here to achieve; between the relative ease of walking into a job here (however little a...

Halfway through this strange sojourn in the UK. It is hard to believe I have only been here a month. It all began as one thing and became something completely different. I came here to be alone, and found instead the connection that I was looking for, the very reason I first went to therapy -...

Hard to get up again this morning. The wish that sleep would last longer, followed as usual by the inevitable tightening of the upper abdomen as I realise it is time for another freezing day. Had another lovely chat with Julia yesterday evening after we watched a great movie together that she...

A very rough few days. Wednesday morning I had a phone interview for an unlikely-to-get job. I could tell from the way that the interviewer was baiting me that he had already found who he wanted, and was going through the motions. But for some reason that chat triggered the worst feelings of...

I've been doing sensorimotor psychotherapy since April. It relegates 'talk therapy' into an adjunct to the general philosophy of the treatment, which is more about how the body keeps re-treading and re-traumatising; and SP therapists work on this aspect with patients. The core book about it is...

The Christmas build-up, which seems to start in September, is so toxic for me. But this year I am trying exposure therapy as part of the work I am doing with my T, so I have probably listened to more Christmas songs on a loop as I've walked through my Xmas-obsessed home city than someone working...

Thank you for your advice, Scout86. It is good advice. When you are in the middle of a perfect psychological storm, everything becomes black and white, as you say; it’s pretty much one of the central premises of sensorimotor psychotherapy - to get the higher functioning of the brain able to...

I’m not in a good way at the moment. Pretty depressed today, feeling that upper abdomen tightness that indicates something is very wrong with how I am feeling about things. Eating and drinking too much, putting weight on, have hardly done any of that good long walking in ten days... The...

Since (I recently worked out) the average time for me between relationships is about four years, I tend to forget every time what it is actually like when you get back into it. ...how your life goes from I Am Legend-style radio silence to Apollo 13-style radio chatter overload. And also how...

So...Julia is coming to London at the end of the month, for five days into the new year. Our main ‘thing in common’ is movies, and so we get together on FaceTime and watch a movie, and then talk until my voice gives out (a couple of hours, I am still recovering from the flu). So I bought up...

Yesterday took it out of me. This morning I rebelled against the habitual tightening of my abdomen as sleep faded and the sense of conflict returned. I just wanted a lie-in and a day off from all the elements in my life that I cannot reconcile. Not really possible, but nonetheless I have...