I feel like my issues are too complex to recover from

[Deleted member 39476]

I've been in therapy for a couple years now after having a really bad experience with the end of a relationship. I initially got diagnosed with CPTSD, and after a few sessions of learning some tolerance skills that don't work for me, went into EMDR.

The first year looked like this: Try to reprocess traumatic memory, fail completely because I dissociate, try a different one, fail again, never feel any real emotion when going into things, try again and again and again with different approaches until some actual emotion comes up, become totally overwhelmed by the emotion and shut down again. We took a bunch of different approaches, including inner family, grounding, emdr, and some other exercises, none of which had any success at all.

After about a year I eventually got to the real root of my issues, as deep as it gets, some extremely fundamental internal conflict between two traumatized parts of self. It's been straight downhill ever since I got to that point, after trying to confront and deal with that internal conflict, my dissociation became 24/7 chronic instead of reactive, my anxiety level went up to a 9/10 and never went back down again, I developed severe issues with executive control to the point where extremely basic tasks are nearly impossible now, and in general have declined in every possible area.

I can't process anything because I dissociate. I can't ground because the feelings are way too overwhelming so grounding makes me dissociate harder, I can't do anything CBT or DBT because I lost almost all of my executive control, I can't use tolerance or relaxation exercises due to no executive control and an extremely severe level of stress all the time, I can't negotiate with my internal parts anymore because they don't trust anybody, the list goes on but it seems like I am stuck in a very unpleasant catch 22 that prevents any progess in any way.

At this point it seems like the issues are so complex that they all prevent any of eachother from being resolved. Has anyone here managed to dig themselves out of this kind of ultra catch 22?

 

[Deleted member 12723]

Has anyone here managed to dig themselves out of this kind of ultra catch 22?

First what is executive control? I do not know what that is and I have never heard of it before? Do you have other traumas in your background?

 

[Ronin]

Dig out, no, but I'm not entirely done working on it.

Is what I figure matters more, maybe. Not being done looking for a way, in the absence of a way.

You said you declined in every possible area... yet you made a super comprehensible post about it, with quite precise phrasing. Leads me to believe you're overlooking your skills and things you DO and do do rather well, or things you'd just like to be better at / as standards were different once, but that you're having covered more than you think? Depression and anxiety and perfectionism are a bad combo, but you really don't have to do it all, and do it all NOW.

So what - *one* area, or a small bit of a thing - do you need to work on the most, now? And what sort of help do you need to get started?

 

[Ronin]

First what is executive control?

Mental control of behaviors related to goal setting and accomplishing goals, basically.

Or, a set of skills to think of & perform a task.

 

[scout86]

Has anyone here managed to dig themselves out of this kind of ultra catch 22?

I'd bet there's probably someone here who has.

Your post reminded me of some things my T has said about the dangers of trying to do too much too fast.

after a few sessions of learning some tolerance skills that don't work for me, went into EMDR.

That's the first thing that made me wonder. I don't know a lot about EMDR, but it seems to me you need some coping skills in place before you start. What tolerance skills were you supposed to have learned and what kept them from working?

 

[Freida]

You said you declined in every possible area... yet you made a super comprehensible post about it, with quite precise phrasing.

I was thinking the same thing! Sometimes when you are in the midst you can't see what you can do -- this is a perfect example

My first year into this mess was very similar and, no matter how much I denied it, the truth was that I was trying to go too fast. I always do things successfully and on time - so doing this counseling crap and getting stuck made me even crazier. And then I heard over and over "you are pushing yourself to hard." Blah - what did they know!?

yep. they were right. We had to go back and start with "window of tolerance" which meant going to benign things in my past and building emotional skills to deal with them, then adding some more stressful ones, and so on. I'm now three years in and just now getting to a place where I can stay un - disassociated. It has been a huge pain in the ass - and it makes me cranky that it is taking so long. But I finally accepted -- it will take however long it takes. Can't change that.

I'm a little concerned that your T is not slowing you down? Or are you not being honest with her because you want to keep the ball rolling (not that I've done that or anything:))

People told me over and over -- its a marathon not a sprint. Once I accepted that (sort of) it was easier to get more control

 

[Friday]

At this point it seems like the issues are so complex that they all prevent any of eachother from being resolved. Has anyone here managed to dig themselves out of this kind of ultra catch 22?

Yep.

You’re not going to like the answer, though. Or, at least, I don’t like the answer.

Get stable, first.

 

[Deleted member 39476]

I'd bet there's probably someone here who has.

I was taught breathing exercises, progressive relaxation, mindfulness meditating, containment, and grounding exercises before starting. I rarely can even attempt to use any of them because my executive control is so bad under severe stress that I legitimately cannot force myself to even try. When I do try the breathing exercises make me significantly more nervous and dissociated, grounding causes me to dissociate further, meditating causes me to dissociate further, containment just outright doesn't do anything, and the progressive relaxation also just does not do anything.

Basically I'm at the point where I cannot do anything in therapy because I'm not stable at all, but I can't seem to get to the point of stability without doing things in therapy.

 

[Deleted member 39476]

I was thinking the same thing! Sometimes when you are in the midst you can't see what you can do -- this is a perfect example

I can only do things well when I get obsessed with them. In this case I have been meaning to post this for months and could never actually get myself to do it, but as soon as I actually feel like doing it I have no problem writing a lot really quickly. I'm completely controlled by these obsessions though, if they make me feel like eating compulsively I will eat compulsively, if they make me feel like staying in bed for 24 hours, that's what I do.

 

[EveHarrington]

It sounds like you seriously need meds to calm your system down so that therapy can work.

 

[Deleted member 39476]

It sounds like you seriously need meds to calm your system down so that therapy can work.

Tried 3 different SSRIs for that purpose, all them didn't do much besides making me feel a little bit worse. I was offered klonopin if I wanted it but I know better than to go down that road right now. I'm just praying some fluke takes place that allows me to calm down so I can break the cycle of nothing working.

 

[Sandstone]

I was taught breathing exercises, progressive relaxation, mindfulness meditating, containment, and grounding exercises before starting. I rarely can even attempt to use any of them because my executive control is so bad under severe stress that I legitimately cannot force myself to even try.

I could have written that list of "fails" almost word for word. Breathing exercises tipped me into hyperventilation, my T said I wasn't even to try progressive relaxation because focussing on my body would trigger me, mindfulness is a disaster and so on.

There are more skills out there, and you need to put your clearly good intelligence into action looking for them, and identifying the reasons why things don't work, so that you can modify them until they do. For instance, breathing led to hyperventilation. When I realised that I already know I have unusually high lung capacity, then I could recognise that deep breathing was likely to present me with too much oxygen, so I could modify breathing exercises to less in-breath, much more pause and much longer out-breath. I know I am quite visual, so I found an image that represented how that breathing looked, and put practice sessions into an online reminder that opens the image and a timer for me. I had to find a timer that didn't have a ring at the end, as that would have startled me and destroyed the benefit of the breathing. There are good physiological reasons why deep breathing works, for everyone (who doesn't have a trauma directly linked to it), so I knew I could eventually make it work for me. It took months, literally months, to find out how to make it work for me. When I went back to T and said I'd finally got it sussed, she was amazed - she had no idea it had been such a problem.

There are lots of other examples, but this post is getting long. I recommend you have a look at the Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook (McKay, Wood, Brantley), which I found as a free download. The first couple of chapters include lists of skills, and I found enough there to apply and modify so they worked for me.

In the end, I wanted to be alive, so I needed to find ways to make that possible.