I think that with trauma, developmental trauma especially, part of what I'm paying the therapist for is to be the adult in the room. To be capable of modeling reparative and disconfirmatory emotional experiences. To be the person who does NOT drop into disorganization. To be capable of...
ACES = 4
PCES = 0
I appreciate that they’re also looking at the absence of positive experiences as a valid factor. It’s difficult to communicate that what didn’t happen had a huge impact on you. it seems to confuse people and they seem to think it’s just normal envy and it shouldn’t be a big...
Doing the kinds of things you described sounds like a great way to make contact with one’s inner child, to me.
i was asked to look at old family photos to try to piece together my childhood. if I lived near any of those places they may have suggested that also.
Not having to work for a living is what all adults work for in the first place. Nearly everyone looks forward to retirement and receiving retirement benefits, and being able to escape the daily grind. Life is much easier when all that stops.
Which is a long way of saying that if you now have...
I feel like I have done nothing except push myself through life, just to survive this long, and to obtain the necessary things like food, clothing, shelter, etc. I am tired of pushing. It feels like living in a form of functional freeze, acting whole while not being whole, doing to do because...
I might be interested also. I am in therapy, once a month as it is all I can afford, but he prefers to work somatically and relationally, not problem-specific. I have some valid questions around friendship that I could explore with a bot. I’ve used internet resources for it and it would be...
I see my resistance to meds being partly based on prior experience and data, and partly on knowing that I don’t do enough of the other stuff.
The science shows that routines and hobbies and exercise and yoga and journaling and focusing on your own physical needs does shift things for a great...
I am entering the sparkling winter of my own life. I can only add that dealing with the natural progression of life in its physical and emotional forms is truly a universal situation that all will face.
i find consolation in the ideas of past generations, that with each stage of life comes new...
That was the hard, first step for me. Accepting that it wasn’t originally me. Accepting that even though to me it wouldn’t look like “abuse” to a random observer, from the POV of my infant/toddler self and my developing brain it was indeed abuse. And it’s okay to call it that, at least to...
Music in general is a new-ish trigger for me, especially unfamiliar music. It might be linked to an experience in surgery but I’ve never worked on it. It can initiate a meltdown almost immediately so I avoid it now.
i love classic rock and saw all the greats live back in the day, and just...
If it were as easy as making lists of “this is real ptsd” and “this is fake ptsd” then who’d need therapists? A diagnosis (as in most medical fields ) is an educated guess made by a qualified someone who has first-hand experience and knowledge of a person.
I understand that lawyers really want...
It was normal during my childhood and early adult life that I only spoke to some siblings via telephone twice a year - Christmas and birthday. I saw them a couple of times. It was normal that I only spoke to / saw any extended family (grandparents, aunts, cousins, etc) for an hour or so every...
It has all been said above — she was your family and it’s normal and natural to grieve.
i lost my sweet boy more than two years ago now, after a long and happy life, and I still greet his shadow every morning with open arms. It has gotten easier.
Don’t chastise yourself. Love in any form...
I use a noise machine set to “heavy rain” sounds and it seems to help drown out small noises that used to interrupt my sleep.
But I second trying out all the different free sleep aid / ambience / ASMR / relaxation videos on youtube first. I sometimes even run some of the visual ones during the...