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I think it's a lot like being left-handed. If you're left-handed and you live in a right-handed world, then a lot of things aren't going to work for you, even though they're perfectly easy for everybody else. And you're going to confuse people who expect you to do things with your right hand...

As someone who has misunderstood you in the past, I came very close to misunderstanding you again in this thread. I don't think that I misunderstood you this time around. Most intelligent people who understand what they are talking about who discuss something controversial tend to do so with a...

3.5 years does sound like a long time. I feel like I started to really have the conversations with my therapist that I wanted to have in the last 2 or 3 months. I've been seeing him since mid 2003. He did a lot of things to keep me alive during many of the last 14 years. It was only when I...

Ah :) Yeah, that's pretty much what that joke deserved :)

:) Who is Jasmine?

EMDR: It's finger-looking good.

There is nothing weirder than the EMDR experience. The whole finger-looking experience is so silly, and the effect it has is so confusing. It takes energy to experience emotions, and if you're not used to it (in other words, if you need EMDR) then it can be too much. That's OK, if it's too much...

Talk to your therapist about whether dissociating in one of your sessions is actually a bad thing. Tell them how you feel about dissociating during a session. If you're going to dissociate, then the best place to do it is in the presence of a therapist who can help you compose yourself.

I play computer games for comfort a lot. Sometimes, I've been very negative about that, seeing it as a symptom. And I've managed to harm myself by doing it excessively. But it's not the games themselves that are the problem. And the games themselves have been better for me than some of the...

My diagnosis is DID. You might have DID, based on your description, but maybe you don't. DID is a disorder where a protective mechanism malfunctions and causes problems. You've described a protective mechanism, but you haven't described any problems. (The forgetting might be a problem, but it...

It's definitely something you should mention to your therapist. My suspicion is that you've been pushing hard and become tired, and that your therapy should be adjusted to take that into account.

It's a mystery, which threads get traffic and which don't ! Great to see some good news.

This sounds really really positive. Very happy for you :)

Limits in therapy is tricky. If I had limited myself to what I thought was reasonable at the beginning, I'd have quit. More recently, I will say "That's really difficult" or otherwise check how important he thinks it is to explore a particular path. And yeah, therapy is hard. It's important to...

Could you please notify this thread when the results become available?

Does it soften over time? It does, once you've learned how to get it to soften. (For non-PTSD people, they seem to have this automatically.) The trick is to avoid 'chasing it away'. Rather than thinking of something else, or minimizing it, or being upset that you're having the memory, you...

That extra time with his daughter could be a very big deal, in terms of stress levels. It means increased communication with his ex, and it means fear that the extra time will be taken away again. It also means less private time for him, which means he needs to reorganize his coping strategies...

That's a really good point. Had a really good day with the upgrade yesterday, and today is starting well :)

So, you're starting to say to yourself, "This person that I can be during an emergency or at my peak, I need to be that person all the time, otherwise there will be a disaster," huh? Take a good look at your sufferer. Now that you know where that road leads, it's time to realise that you can't...

My first marriage lasted 9 years. Marriage 2 has had its first slump, which is pretty much over now, we're almost as good as we were during courtship, and stronger for it. I'm starting to remember the positives of that first marriage, which is extremely painful. I learned to dissociate from...

An option to consider: "Thanks for showing me that you care by coming up with ideas in how to fix these issues that I'm having. I'm working with a therapist to work out which things are going to be the safest and the most effective. I find that really tiring, because most things that we come up...

When I feel really stuck, and the message is really important, I tend to describe my ambitions for the message, and let that be the message. "I want to say something supportive, that shows that I care, but nothing I can think of sounds good enough." That can come across really well sometimes...

I've found skills training really effective there. Paul Ekman has written world-leading stuff on catching liars & his website is a great start. And... it's just plain difficult. If you approach it in the same way that you're approaching the problem with intimacy, I'm confident you'll cover every...

My wife and I both do the same thing - each of us prefers to put the other one first. What I eventually started doing was realising that I could lighten her burden by taking better care of myself. Self-care doesn't come easily to me, but I'm getting there. And she's able to relax more, and has...

Talking is something you need to do for yourself. There's a skill component to it; if it goes wrong at first, then you try again. Therapists are really useful at helping us work out how to talk. I think you'd find it useful to have one of your own.