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Struggling with processing trauma, improvement comes and goes. Can anyone relate?

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Matts18

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Hello all,
I am new to this site and not sure if this question is in the correct forum but I’ll give it a shot.
I’m a teenager and have been going to therapy for the last few months. Since that time I have discovered some pretty heavy stuff about my childhood. I have pretty much lived in my head for most of my life and really have only intellectualized most of my traumas. However, I have been spending time alone and trying to sit with the reality of my childhood and it seems to help. I feel that when I go to therapy, I can’t be honest with my therapist and just talk over what I have done on my own over the last week. I struggle with trying to process this stuff in a manner where I’m trying to move forward In life and my mind starts being super analytical about the “correct” wat to process trauma (as if there’s a rule book with specific steps). Also, I seem to make some big improvements for a few days every few weeks but them sink back as if my new found chunk of freedom dissolves away. I would like to know who can relate and any advice as well. Thank you guys.
 
Totes normal. Therapists literally have a rule book with specific steps, and the first one is for you to Be Honest. Like completely raw and brutally honest. That's probably the hardest part. You'll progress and you'll "go backwards", fancy one step forward two steps back till you break through whatever you're trying to break through. It's like trying to lose or gain weight or muscle or a new skill - until you hit that magic spot, you gotta keep at it. It's like bouncing on a trampoline - eventually one day, the lining will break. Who knows when that is, how many years or jumps or bad winters, but eventually, it's gonna rip. Keep jumping man.... Jump as hard and intentionally as you can (without breaking yourself of course).
 
Hi, childhood sufferer and lifelong CPTSD for it, going on sixty (!) so I have been around the block with this stuff. Hate to scare you with, like you are doomed to being sixty and pecking away at a keyboard for a PTSD support group someday. Lots of ways to get on this bus, lots of stops to get off along the way too.

Biggest thing I get from your post is that you are getting help and that alone will get you to a better place AND maybe stop some of the bad stuff getting from happening anymore. If I had been helped sooner, I wouldn't have made some of the choices I made and suffered the traumas that they brought, whole episodes of my life would have been different for just knowing why I was experiencing life in such an off kilter (do people say that still?) spinning off center way. You got that and that aint nothing.

Correct way to process trauma makes me laugh. Ever hear of the stages of grief? Lots of people have written lots of papers and books about the unique stages that we all have to go through to process grief- but the number of stages, the order, the length of time spent, it all falls on such a wide spectrum that no one ever does it correctly by any book, ever. This PTSD is much like overwhelming grief. Especially in that we all process at least slightly different and as much as entirely differently from everyone else. It defies having a "Best" way to deal with it. IMHO. Someones gonna argue that.

What MnM said is so true. Honesty with a therapist is everything. You are paying someone as a guide, just like someone might hire a guide to catch a fish on a certain river. The guide knows the way, the guide knows what works, and the ten million things that don't work. But if you come off misrepresenting your skill with fishing gear or just want to get in the boat and tell stories when you should be listening and learning, thats on you. He is getting paid (she) and at the end of the day you either learned how to catch that fish on that river, or you are just waiting for the next boat ride.

Leave the ego at the door. Accept that this person is trying to help you but if you don't do the work nothing is going to happen. Be honest and willing to go through some painful shit, but be expectant of that counselor to show you what you need to know and when that happens, you can "process" some of it, hopefully.

This is a great place, welcome to the best I have ever found and I have been around that block too.
 
hello matts. welcome to the forum.

old habits die hard, especially the old habits that we pick up without knowing it. one quality i find in those setbacks is that i never snap ALL the way back to my old habits. i get more skilled with the tools that help me progress a little further in each go-round.

be gentle with yourself and patient with the process, matts. if change was easy, everybody would do it.
 
Hi Matts. Welcome here. Sorry about your luck all at the same time.
I come from similar background. Went through absolute living hell for 15 or so years. You don't want that. Nobody does.
If I were to give advice to a newby I would say - if possible don't focus so much on the traumas. Learn how to manage your life in a way that builds health, strength, and personal self care and empowerment. Really learn how to focus on the self care and if that is a challenge, that would be a good place to start building a non-traumatized part of yourself that you can walk forward with.
 
Hi Matts, and if you haven't, known that boundaries....being able to say No and stick with it, operating on your chosen healthy value system......and not compromising your value system for some quick fixing someone elses needs.......Saying "nicely" what you want want/need and stick to it with friends/family is huge.....I never said no....and always apologized.....and spent most of my teenage years in my room........I'm in my 60's too....boundaries are very empowering, healthy, and they give me a sense of confidence. Glad to have you....and see you around! Oh yeah....check out the name.....keeping honest is not a dysfunctional behavior......it is the direction of healing.
 
Think of your brain as a desktop pc. When its not busy doing a lot of things its quick. agile, it's not working hard.
Then reprocessing is added. Workload is varied because it's "fixing" memories so they will process properly.

So, just like your computer your brain is more loaded when its fixing memories as compared to when its looking for memories to fix, and the only way you know is by the way you can function. That's where I find I need to be kind to myself and not get worked up because my function is low. Stress is stress and there is little I can do but manage what I can when that stuff is happening. Adding more stress just hurts the cause. So just sit back and let it be.

Realize that the workload of reprocessing is a variable you can't control but hopefully you will be done with it someday and all the good stuff will come back.
 
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