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New to This, Confused, Overwhelmed

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Aprilmomof3

New Here
I am very new to even trying to understand the impact that ritual abuse and what people tell me was severe, long-term sexual, physical, and emotional trauma. All of it scares me and overwhelms me and makes me want to run and hide and go back to pretending everything is perfect, fine, blissful, happy, blessed, and the like. You get it. While I still live very much in that perfect, fine, great, blissful facade of a world, I need to in order to function, the fact that I dissociate in a variety of ways when things get to be too much is becoming more and more apparent to me. I do dissociate. I have experienced dissociative fugue. I do experience dissociative amnesia. I do experience depersonalization and derealization at times. I have significant memory gaps. I see pictures, where I am in them, and have literally NO MEMORY of me being there or what was even going on in the picture. A few days ago I came across a FB memory of me with a broken leg, in a cast, preparing to have surgery. No memory of any of it...the injury, the surgery, the recovery, even the CAUSE of the injury. This terrifies me...and happens to me more often than I can handle. I don’t know what to do. I am very, very scared. I just want it all to go away.
 
You’ll find out soon enough and slow enough for it to begin to make sense. Long term ra does not come back all at once because it will simply overwhelm us. Build a team of supports , not all of them should be survivor supports, but good decent people who can take you as you are and even give you a break. I have a good coffee buddy, a weekly support group a few good friends. Get a good therapist with a background in ra or complex ptsd, trauma. If they don’t have a good background in that stuff you wind up spending years doing not too much.I have a great psychologist who is learning and very committed. I do not think he has the ra back ground but for sure the trauma, complex ptsd portion and I was able to give him a book by Alice Miller I believe, called healing the unmanageable. He used it for a bit. I’ve been with him now for 5 or 6 years. We are in to the worst parts of the abuse. It is like layers and we’ve been unpacking it as he calls it, for a long time now. Complex abuse is difficult work, but it can be done with the right people. My guy introduced me to meditation and tapping, and I explored it myself to see what worked for me and what I was opposed to I didn’t use. He never pushes it on me though and totally respects any fear response I have towards those additional supports. As to memory work, the best things that have helped me especially with the don’t know don’t understand scenarios, I’ve learned what he has taught me, acknowledge it as being in the past and focus as much as possible in the here and now. It is very difficult to do, but if I’m doing a lot of dissociation then I do need to say to myself what day it is, what I typically do on that day, what time is , even where I live. anything to get me more current than where my head is at. I’ve learned a lot about relaxation techniques and they are super helpful for getting back into the current.
 
Thanks very much for your response and for telling me about what has worked for you. I do have a therapist, I moved to VA from FL about 9 months ago and started with my therapist here about 7 months ago. As it turns out, and it was not my plan, she specializes in trauma and has extensive training and experience in RA and C-PTSD. She has helped me become aware of the fact that I dissociate and we are working on it, slowly. I ordered a book on RA and it will arrive tomorrow. My therapy has become intensive over the past several months and I see her currently 3 times a week. Sometimes just thinking about if I am feeling safe helps me. I feel so incompetent and, quite frankly, hopeless at times. I do not want to have this...I don’t want to acknowledge this...I just want it to all go away.
 
Hi! Thank you for sharing! I am sorry you are experiencing so much! It's very wonderful that you already have a therapist. I believe that it will help you a lot to continue treatment and I am glad you are helping yourself by having sought help.
 
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