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i hold that my alternate universes can be dissociation done well. my propensity in this regard came in downright handy during the psychotherapy of creating a "safe place" to retreat to while suffering panic attacks/hypervigilance. my most developed "safe place" is a cave lit by phosphorescent...

i started my recovery from child sex trafficking in the early 70's, without benefit of the internet. the results of my exhausting search are now as out-of-date as my dumb phone. my recovery didn't progress far until i dropped the label hunt and started dealing with the symptoms, one at a time...

yes, getting better often introduces new and deeper pain. i like the broken bone analogy of the need to re-break and reset a bone which has been left to heal badly. yes, it hurts extra, but the gain is worth the pain. what will being better look like? the doris day classic pops into my head...

hello untitledperson. welcome to the forum. sorry for what brings you here, but glad you are here. your post is putting me in mind of my need to be gentle with myself and patient with the process. my heart's desire was for a magic wand to let me wake up a perfect person in the morning. well. ...

similar issues rose, again and again, in my personal therapy. i was consistently surprised at just how ideal that less than idyllic start was. in my own case, therapy sessions turned out to be an ideal place to begin working the issues out. emphasis on, "begin." the underlying issues turned out...

a brief physical work out helps me channel the anxiety before i lay myself down to sleep.

hello elfin. welcome to the forum. sorry for what brings you here, but glad you are here. my only clues on medical career development come from television, so? ? ? i've been boycotting the medical system since 1995 when age-related testing became the high pressure theme of every physical. color...

my hub-a-lub would have been a draft-dodger if he had been old enough --i am the veteran of the family-- but, girl howdy, that man can carry on and on and on and on. . . would it be sexist of me to call ^it^ the good ol' boy syndrome? maybe we could get our hubbies together and take bets on the...

excellent call, dark feathers. it is a dandy topic for group discussion. if i were to publish the story of my life, i would fictionalize it for the sake of privacy for all the characters. i didn't care to publish it, but there was profound medicine in the writing. equally, i have found healing...

i'm a hardcore minimalist. less is better in my estimation. however, i live with 3 kids and a packrat. my minimals are their storage opportunities. my favorite thing about moving is it forces closet cleanouts. the closets in the new place fill all too quickly, but enjoying the small moments...

hello mimi. welcome to the forum. sorry for what brings you here, but glad you are here. total empathy on the difficulty of kicking the dissociation habit. mine has proven so therapy resistant that i fell back on a personal theory of, "don't cure it. train it." i find dissociation downright...

goofy toys. dart guns you can shoot at each other. bath toys which you can use in harmless pranks. weird stuff you still haven't figured out why you kept in the first place.

i didn't mean to imply that. in my case, the pro and peer therapy went hand-in-hand. the pros were the heavy hitters while the peers held me steady and helped me translate the psychobabble to pragmatic usage.

hello patricia. welcome to the forum. sorry for what brings you here, but glad you are here. in my own long and tedious recovery, peer support -both live and online- has proven to be my most effective tool for dealing with the yuckeries of the buckeries. pro services have been valuable, but...

hello user. welcome to the forum. sorry for what brings you here, but glad you are here. during my own insomnia years, any drugs strong enough to counter my insomnia were strong enough to give me major hangovers. i felt like those hangovers were worse than the insomnia. peer support --such as...

i carried my ptsd into the army with me and started my active therapy in base clinics during my european tour. that therapy segwayed into the va clinics. whaddup?

hello bammelina. welcome to the forum. "practicing self-expression" is an essential body of recovery tools in my own recovery. the slice of that body i practice inside my therapy support network -both live and virtual- is trust and sharing. expressing myself in the privacy of my notebooks and...

congratulations? that sounds like a first manifestation to me. emphasis on "first" because the first always carries unexpected surprises, kinda like the surprises that accompany our first attempt to walk. 'tis nay a surprise when baby falls down on those first steps. ****coffee cup clink****...

at 71, after more than a half a century of therapy work, i still run into this phenom from time to time in quite a few different settings. at present i am foster parenting 3 children, ages 12, 10 and 7. i see abuse scenarios everywhere. teachers. friends. parents of friends. etc., etc., all the...

congratulations! ! ! may the trend continue. empathy on mistrusting the good days. in my own case, i believe that particular mistrust has sabotaged more of my life than pure evil ever could. just believing. . .

I didn't know "depersonalization" was a stand-alone disorder. i thought it was a psych symptom with roots in cultural practices. on the cultural level, most of academia/politics are based on depersonalization. we are depersonalizing every time we try to see another point of view. in psychology...

empathy, quo. i grew up keeping a criminal family one step ahead of the law. we moved an average of every 6 months during my childhood. i turned whistle blower during adolescence and still refuse to keep secrets 50 years later. i respect privacy, but not secrets. the levels of guilt and...

hello ka. welcome to the forum. looking forward to getting to know you. for what it's worth my reaction to current events has long been a measure of my current mental health. be it the nixon show, the trump show or the latest case of road rage, obsessing about current events typically means i...

my blood sugars go wonky and cause severe mood swings when i forget to eat. it is normal for me to need time to stabilize after an episode. "difficult" is an understatement, but healing happens when i am gentle with myself and patient with the process.

what are you doing about it?