How Long Were You Dissociating Before Your Therapist Realised It?

[just me here]

I look back on twenty years of trying to get help with my depression and remember telling all of the different thaerapists I have seen about felings of dissociation, and not one of them ever even mentioned Post traumatic syndrome until very recently.

I think that since my major trauma was really just a prerequisit for the following traumas being able to cause so much damage without being even remotely the same type of trauma, it confused the issue.

I was set up for PTSD by the really bad handling of my mothers death and the total lack of any kind of acceptance for my greiving. That made me fertile soil for the trauma of being in a very bad car accident myself and then losing friends to drunk drivers and seeing some very bad accidents both as a passerby and then as an EMT.

So to my Therapists I just seemed to be a depressed individual, but in reality I was probably in a state of disociation caused by my undiagnosed PTSD and the trigger of having driven to the session and dealing with some idiotic behaviour from another driver on the way.

Now I know that a close call in traffic can cause me to go into depression, self hatred, physical pain, and dissociation in spades.
Why didn't my therapists see the signs?

Probably because the traumas I talked about were dealing with my parents and the death of my mother, but the traumas I was suffering from were the ones I avoided by dissociation and didn't talk about.

Anyone else blame their "depression" on something besides the actual cause of their disorder?

anyone else describe their dissociation to their therapist without them realising it wasn't just a symptom of depression?

 

[BloomInWinter]

Right there with you. The first trauma just seemed to make me so numbed out and set me up as an easy victim for the subsequent ones, both because I didn't (couldn't) deal with them and because I kept recreating dysfunctional relationships because what others call 'crazy' or 'intense' I call 'actually feeling something.'

Being a paramedic sure didn't get me any healthier. Now I finally admitted to my T. that I have a 'few' traumas from that and haven't been able to stop worrying that he might ask me about them!

I hope the next generation has better resources and healthcare than ours, which is surely better then the previous one.

 

[QuietNow]

Until recently when the media started making such a circus out of PTSD due to the number of combat vets, PTSD was under-diagnosed more often than not.

I've found that to really treat it, it takes the combination of a very good psychiatrist who has a good grasp of brain chemistry and a very good trauma therapist which are Not a dime a dozen. Real trauma therapists are rare. I've seen therapists list a shopping list of 'specialties' with PTSD often thrown in the mix. But an excellent trauma therapist usually specializes in trauma, PTSD, and dissociative disorders. I'm having real trouble right now finding a therapist that can handle the dissociative disorder and that I can connect with emotionally. The other card in this is that because you have to dig into extremely frightening memories, you need someone that you could really trust to allow yourself to open up. (without developing boundary issues, of course)

When I'm good I'm sane and stable...except when I'm not. And it takes a very good therapist to clue in on the real underlying cause.