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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...

I don’t know what you’ll learn from an account of today’s session with my T. I think at the least, further evidence that the power of symbols and movement of the body really does transcend language. I was agitated, and arrived with a list, an agenda. I told her how I felt about the ice-queen I...

This may seem like a ‘diary entry’, but it’s directly related to trauma as seen from the viewpoint of sensorimotor psychotherapy, so bear with me and I’ll illustrate how. I have found the last week of illness very disturbing, as I have written. When you’re trying to gain control over your body...

I seem to have turned the corner today with the flu. The last five days have been pretty hallucinatory; frightening and disquieting. When you're trying to build new habits (even just plain old new years' resolutions, never mind SP 'triune brain' theory), it's upsetting to have them disrupted in...

I really appreciate your input, Scout86. :) I agree with what you say about continuing the work and letting the relationship develop. I do not have a great track record in the last year of making the right choice at the right time, and I fear to make another wrong choice now. I have room to...

Non-diary note: After a long period working on grounding with sensorimotor psychotherapy techniques and practices, it’s the habits which you have worked hardest on which you can expect to still be available in some capacity in a real internal crisis. I observe this based on the last five days...

This is the hardest time I have had since I began this diary; depressed, unmotivated and laid low with the flu. The frosty living situation in London was bearable while I could go out and work on SP, but these long hours in a mostly ingested flat with a person significantly less socialised than...

I have been cafe-hopping locally this morning, considering why I have felt so bad the past few days, and have come to the conclusion that one of the big skills necessary in sensorimotor psychotherapy, or any other form of treatment which addresses long-term behaviour, is to be able to...

Having a difficult time at the moment. Feel panicky and lost. Feels like a setback. Not helped by the fact that I am clearly having some flu-like symptoms. For the record, it manifests physically as tension around the sides of the abdomen, and a twitch in my eye, which itself is a very old...

Well, I went - and also didn’t go - to the Meetup I was traveling to in the last post. After a lot of difficulty in trying to understand where the meeting had been arranged, it turned out to be a sectioned-off area in a noisy pub in central London. Half an hour early, I saw a few other lone...

The hardest day since I came back. It was harder than ever to get out of bed and then out of the flat. And now that I am here in the ‘exterior world’, my whole body wants to run back ‘home’ as badly as my hands want to plunge themselves back into my pockets. Rising, nameless panic in a north...