Improvement Strategies for Crippling CPTSD

[shimmerz]

To those of you who have endured crippling CPTSD.

Have any of you experienced meaningful improvement in your life with symptoms related to nervous system activation from CPTSD
(e.g. less constant hypervigilance, fewer emotional overwhelm/shutdown cycles, reduced dissociation, improved ability to feel calm, safer relationships, or more day-to-day stability)?

If yes, what information, people, therapies, or tools helped you the most?
If you’re willing, details that might help others would be appreciated.

I’d like to keep this as a running thread where people can share what has helped them and why.

 

[Teasel]

The NHS gave me some psychoeducation and a variety of classes/ courses on symptom management techniques including -

Grounding techniques
They sound pretty useless when you hear them, but practised every morning, they became more and more helpful

Sleep hygeine - no caffeine or sugar later in the day, get some exercise, expose yourself to light or a daylight lamp early in the day, get your body cooler at bed time, no screens before bed

Progressive muscle relaxation
I used to hold enormous amounts of tension, I mean the knots in my body were rock hard. Learning PMR and learning to sit with less tension, with a better posture were amazing for me.

A tree of life course
Maybe helped me think of things I'd like to focus on other than ptsd all the time.

Acceptance and commitment therapy tools like dropping anchor, unhooking your attention from whatever has hijacked your mind, figuring out what your values are, and how you can choose to act on your values instead of eg fears and triggers. The books by Russ Harris were suggested to me as being easy to understand introductions to ACT

Books that were amazing for me were

Judith L Hermann Trauma and Recovery

Bessel van der Kolk The body keeps the score

Pete Walker Complex ptsd, from surviving to thriving

A practise that I found helpful was keeping a mood diary - not really even a diary, I just used the app Pixels, and gave each day a colour from orange through yellow, beige grey, and black. And noted anything which I thought had affected how I felt that day. Maybe helped me begin to see some patterns and to figure out things that helped me.

Studying what helps me and what makes things worse for me has been great. Recently bolstered by work with an occupational therapist on sensory diets for autistic folk and trying out some simple bullet journaling. So now I assess how I feel fairly often, and am permanently jotting down what helps or hinders me when I'm doing great or OK or terribly.

 

[shimmerz]

@Teasel thank you so much for your detailed posting. I am certain many will appreciate it.

 

[Ecdysis]

I'm in a crazy PTSD flare at the moment and have just started beta blockers (isoprolol) and am considering starting alpha blockers too. They block the stress hormones in the body. It seems in this PTDS flare, my body is producing crazy amounts of stress hormones and I can't seem to regulate out of it any other way...

 

[shimmerz]

Best of luck to you on this strategy @Ecdysis. Thanks for sharing with everyone. Do you happen to know the type of test you did to measure your stress hormones?

 

[lana Smiley]

I'm in a crazy PTSD flare at the moment and have just started beta blockers (isoprolol) and am considering starting alpha blockers too. They block the stress hormones in the body. It seems in this PTDS flare, my body is producing crazy amounts of stress hormones and I can't seem to regulate out of it any other way...yyy

Yeah- that cortisol is bad stuff!

 

[Ecdysis]

I didn't have a stress hormone test, but my Dr trialled me on the beta blockers and my body responded immediately... My resting heart rate went from 100 to 75 within half an hour...

I had massive health issues last year and almost died due to treatment errors and it seems to have sent my body into a hyper-stress loop that I couldn't get out of anymore... There were lots of weird physical symptoms that correspond to extreme stress levels over months and they've started resolving with the beta blockers, so it's obvious that it's a central nervous system thing in my case and presumably dysregulated HPA axis... But anyway, that's just the theory... What matters is whether they work in practice or not, and in my case they do.

I've been prescribed beta blockers before, years ago by my psychiatrist too, to help with the PTSD symptoms but I was taking it as an as-needed med for situations in which I'd start panicking. And alpha blockers are mainly prescribed as a psych med.

The hope is that the beta blockers will help my system to settle down and re-set at my "normal" level of PTSD stress

They're certainly not a cure all! And not everyone can take them as they're not compatible with some medical issues or other meds... But they can be a helpful component if the nervous system is completely dysregulated and won't settle down, I think.

 

[Ecdysis]

This link is a great explanation re chronic stress, stress hormones, HPA axis and importantly what easy things to do to help fix it...

I need to do them, as I've not been doing anyyy

 

[Freddyt]

Yeah- that cortisol is bad stuff!

It is until your body quits making its own........then its a chronic illness called Addison's Disease....

 

[Applecore]

To those of you who have endured crippling CPTSD.

Have any of you experienced meaningful improvement in your life with symptoms related to nervous system activation from CPTSD
(e.g. less constant hypervigilance, fewer emotional overwhelm/shutdown cycles, reduced dissociation, improved ability to feel calm, safer relationships, or more day-to-day stability)?

If yes, what information, people, therapies, or tools helped you the most?
If you’re willing, details that might help others would be appreciated.

I’d like to keep this as a running thread where people can share what has helped them and why.

Yes. I have immensely recovered from crippling CPTSD. But. I am sure you know this caveat already, and for the sake of public discussion, here's the "but":

Crippling CPTSD is not one thing. It is different things to different people. And it is often entwined with other things that are not always part of CPTSD - like depression, anxiety, OCD, ADHD, BPD, Bipolar Disorder, trait narcissism, eating disorders, etc. So our methods for recovery are different. Our starting points for improvement are different.

That said. There are upliftingly simple things that work for most people as a start, and certainly worked for me:

1) Tell your life story. Either 6 hours of therapy or 6 hours talking into a voice recorder or 10-30 pages of writing should do it. You can do it here if you like.

2) Find and read the most suited personal psychology and self-help books out there.

3) Massively increase regular exercise. Start with walking, or whatever you can handle.

4) Quit or immensely reduce narcotics, alcohol and added sugar. Don't purchase it to keep it in the house as a temptation, only go out and buy it when you really, really need to self-medicate in the short term. Spend money on nutritious-delicious home cooking especially vegetables, fruit, nuts and oily fish.

5) Quit or immensely reduce social media and treat "AI therapy" with scepticism. Replace it with hobbies or/and real-world social meetup groups.

6) Find a job that doesn't make you unhappy.

7) Find friends and family that don't make you unhappy. Actively reduce time with those who do.

8) Find accommodation and location that doesn't make you unhappy.

9) Recognize that over-thinking about past trauma feeds our dysfunctional addiction to it. Redirect your mind with plans for achievable, rewarding goals and carry them out.

10) Get much more sunshine. Fly to winter sunshine if you can. Take Vitamin D if you can't.

11) Get much more time in nature. Look there for joy and awe.

12) Without forgetting the content of point (1), now stop complaining and blaming. Practice gratitude and kindness. Work hard, tell jokes, laugh and be silly. Hug someone and make them feel good.

 

[Grasping Hope]

It's an individual thing because as others have said, the range of symptoms is so broad. The cross-section of symptoms and life circumstances is even broader.
I have to say that the biggest factor in how symptomatic I am or am not, still lies in circumstances outside of my control. That is, good things happen in my life and suddenly I'm managing a lot better. When circumstances are not so favourable, I do a lot of avoiding. Like, a LOT of avoiding. Only in writing this am I realizing that this is an attempt to approximate the experience of external positive circumstances, by keeping my stress cup from overflowing.
I do feel like I've become a bit less reactive over the past few months since I started doing heart-centred meditation. Basically it's the same technique as any mindfulness meditation practice, but with your attention focused on your heart. If you do this every day, after a while the habit of bringing your attention back into your heart centre spills over into the rest of your life and can give you those much-needed few seconds between trigger and reaction, to calm down and find the capacity for a more adaptive response.
Another thing that helps me is the time (lots of time!) I've spent learning about causes of my particular version, which combines CPTSD with mind control programming. There are so many, many traits I've been blamed for and blamed myself for, that I now realize were deliberately programmed into me by means of torture and double binds. The more I understand this, the less I blame myself, and the less I blame myself, the more space I can give myself to be creative in my search for solutions. That's a long-winded way of saying "build self-esteem based on your individual history." And, as much as possible, hang out with people who can understand that and avoid those who can't.

 

[Freddyt]

I have to say that the biggest factor in how symptomatic I am or am not, still lies in circumstances outside of my control. That is, good things happen in my life and suddenly I'm managing a lot better. When circumstances are not so favourable, I do a lot of avoiding. Like, a LOT of avoiding.

Learning to live with PTSD, is learning how to deal with the moments when things are not favourable. To have strategies to help even things out and allow you to cope better with the not so good.