Greetings - PTSD From Violent Crime

[poundsixzeros]

Hi Tina,
Not at all - the though didn't cross my mind! I really appreciate your comments - please forgive my tardy response. I loved what you said in your earlier post! Comments like yours make me feel like I am not the only one, and that there is hope. I'm glad you found a strong counselor. I haven't had good luck in that realm and have pretty much decided to go it alone. I actually had an EMDR counselor who refused to do EMDR with me because I needed to get my life in order. How jacked up is that? If my life were in order, I wouldn't be there in the first place. Another one was trying to treat me for ADHD, which I do not have. Another one asked if I had suicidal thoughts. WHen I said 'sometimes' he threatened to put me in a hospital. It was that innocuous. Not a prevalent thought in my head, just a passing thing. There is no quicker way to get me to stop talking than by threatening to take the one thing I have left, my physical freedom, especially when I was baited in the first place.

Consequently my boyfriend is the lucky recipient of my sometimes mis-directed, and usually over the top, anger. But that's another story.

Please don't take offense to my tardy reply - you have a beautiful way with words and I do appreciate them!

 

[just tina]

You're on time when you get there. Glad to see ya.

The strong counselor I referred to was a lay-counselor in Re-evaluative Counseling, and we weren't dealing directly with PTSD, but one session was amazing. I've taken the best from a lot of different counselors and left the rest. In the old days, talk therapy was it, and I benefited from a lot of free counseling with interns at college. They were pretty wrapped up with their schools, so I'd always come to a point that there wasn't much else for me because I didn't want to join the cult and constantly wrangle with their dogmatic theories about who I was.

I had a great counselor at the VA for six years, but we were only allotted twenty minute visits. After he left, there hasn't been a steady one. I asked a prescribing nurse I had seen three times for twenty minute med checks, to write me a disability letter for school (I'm going back again). She started to write that I was paranoid and psychotic. I said, "What are you talking about?! You have six years of my records from a psychiatrist, and there is nothing there about me being paranoid or psychotic."

She turned and looked at me like she was forced to level with me for my own good, and said, "You have extreme fear, therefore you're paranoid, therefore you're psychotic. If you don't believe me, look it up in the DSM." Then she pointedly looked over at the DSM---the only book on her bookshelf.

I told her to just pull up the letter the last counselor wrote, print it, sign it. She did.

I'm going to look for a private counselor who will take VA money soon and I dread the whole process.

Alone is better than paying a poorly educated quack to diagnose you with things you don't have. Sheesh.

Stay in touch when you're feeling alone and don't like it.

Be kind to yourself. (Take it out on your boyfriend. (kidding.))

 

[poundsixzeros]

I hate to say it, but you are 'lucky'. I don't have any VA benefits. I don't even know what 'Re-evaluative Counseling' is. I was just attacked as I was moving through the world like everyone else but now I can't. And there are no extracurricular benefits for that. My crime victim 'benefits' ran out years ago, before the ptsd even kicked in full force. I cannot keep a 'regular' job (I develop websites at home for less than a burger flipper at McDonalds. Seriously. I used to make 80,000 a year. Ouch.) so I cannot afford counseling, even if I found one I liked. I pay an arm and a leg for my own health insurance which would get cancelled asap if they even knew I went to counseling. Such is life. No. I have nothing to be angry about [smirk].

ps. don't get me started on the boyfriend ;-)

 

[just tina]

I didn't know I had VA benefits until 1999. Luckily, my college had low tuition. I tried all different kinds of sources and services. I usually paid on a sliding scale.

I feel lucky to have the VA....though I have some very mixed feelings about it. I never made much money. I honestly didn't think we humans would be around this long.

I've met other previously highly paid-professionals with Phds driving cabs, and people who were raised upper-middle class scraping by on assistance and SS. Was a caregiver for the last 8 years. I see a lot of disorientation, in the people I've known who have suffered such a financial fall. I suspect we'll all be seeing a lot more of that in the future. I'm thinking the costs of counseling might come down a bit, at least.

You have plenty to be angry about. Are you doing the workbook? Or taking any kind of organized approach to dealing with your current malaise? Not saying you should. I've been completely without resources and suffering at times, myself. So I had to wing it. That was before the internet and the Great Flood ;), but there were a lot of books out about PTSD and I journaled a lot.