Overwhelmed

[Disquieted]

I think I'm just done feeling like this.
4 months of therapy and all I can do is close my eyes without panic. (I wasn't able to close my eyes in the beginning, sometimes I still can't).
I'm flooded with intrusive thoughts. I feel like dissociative crap. I'm just so done.
I really don't care if I stuff this bad stuff back down. Maybe I can stuff it forever.
I'm not therapy material. I can't handle being in therapy. Thinking about going. Worrying about thinking about it. Feeling embarrassed and afraid. I'm tired of someone watching me panic for an hour and telling me that my eyes are darting, my breathing is shallow...I already know my heart is racing and I can't swallow.
I'm just done trying to get better.
I've been like this for over 30 f****** years. It is a waste of time.
My ptsd is a F***** life sentence.

 

[Seasounds]

Ah, sorry for your pain. Certainly, do what you need to do, re-establish safety! Give yourself credit, for an amazing step, in experimenting with relaxing in someone else's presence.

(You did better than me, I walked out during the first session! I re-experienced so much overwhelming shame, I thought, "Therapy is for the birds, it is making me worse!"

Therapy, especially in the first six months, can be terribly uncomfortable. I felt like a farro cat, trying to be tamed, caught in a house, where I just wanted to escape, and run in the wild. My anxiety got so intense, while beginning to approach my issues. I'd come home and curl up in bed, sometimes cry, somtimes shake. After time, it got better, a lot better.

A few thoughts, to be helpful:

• You might want to find a therapist who naturally highlights what you are 'doing right', rather than highlighting what you 'aren't' doing right'.
• One thing I learned to watch for, was to notice if I relaxed in the therapist presence. If I didn't, I looked for another, instead of thinking it was just. This is a very individual experience, relational, that only you can read.
• Know you can go to therapy less frequently.
• Make sure to be 'active' in therapy. Speak up, if you get signals from your body (shallow breathing, sweating, racing heart), that you need to either change, or stop, an activity. Regularly, if I get tense, I will inform my therapist, and I stand up and walk in the therapy room. This is a form of emotional regulation.
• You get to approach your issues at your speed.
• Therapy, by design, brings up issues. Unlike abusive relationships, you get to have a voice, every step of the way.
• Just have a plan with a patient, adaptive, therapist, to work slower, if you decide to go back.

I have found therapy very worthwhile, when I took it at my speed. ( I think it was 4 years between my first therapy visit, and my second one.)

Make good care. You did well!

 

[Hashi]

I think the most important thing when starting therapy is learning how to ground, how to contain the reactions and emotions, how to keep stable and psychologically safe. It sounds like you don't have strong skills in those areas - is your therapist helping you with that?

Telling you your eyes are darting or your breathing's shallow doesn't sound very helpful. I'm wondering what the context is. Is your therapist saying that to try to help you use techniques to calm yourself?

My experience is that we need a lot of skills, and we have to practise them a lot. It isn't helpful to do trauma work without those in place, it can be overwhelming or even retraumatising.

I'm not clear from what you wrote but the kind of horrible time you're describing sounds to me like a need to focus on basic stability and coping, before anything else. I'm wondering where are you with skills and techniques for that, what's your therapist's approach to it and what kind of therapy you're doing.

 

[Disquieted]

I'm just having a really difficult day.

My psych will just gently ask me if I'm aware that my eyes were looking all around as we practicing mind body awareness skills. Trying to make me aware that I'm feeling anxious. LoL as if I don't already know.

I do stink at any and most coping skills that involve relaxation, mind - body connection, or grounding. But yes we are working on these things. And I try to practice at home.

I'm the one who can't speak in therapy. I sit there and stare, maybe talk about good things while all the bad thoughts run around in my head. I want so badly to talk about it but the words don't come out.
So I don't know?!

My psych does hypnotherapy, emdr, mind-body/somatic therapies...but obviously I haven't been ready for any of that. I've sent maybe 3 randomn emails about my feelings. And I broke down, no tears, but just overwhelmed because she was breathing out loud which really triggered me. I don't even know what I said but it was very generaluzed. That may have been the day I was diagnosed. I don't even know anymore.

I wasn't diagnosed with ptsd when I first started therapy as I had never told anyone about the abuse until maybe July.
But thank you all so much.
I have lots to think about.

 

[Friday]

I could have written that. :D Absolutely, 100%. Err. 97.2%. There are a few details different. I've been at this longer than 4 months, and less than 30 years. Just about everything else, though, is plucked straight out of my head.

Which is good news for both of us.

Because I don't know if you've been better, but I have. I'm a mess right now. And I'm tired. And I'm done. Come to find, I'm usually rare, or medium well, and not actually done-done. And if I can take a break, or fight in a different direction, or even just white knuckle through this particular part of the cycle... I'll come out on the other side. I never have faith that I'm going to, no matter how many times this happens. But if I can gut it out? So far, everything really is temporary. Make it through today. Tomorrow may suck worse. Make it through tomorrow. And sooner or later, something clicks. Or at least it always has. Like I said, I never believe it in the moment. When things are hard, I'm locked here. This is how it's always going to be. Forever. In my mind, anyhow.

<grin> You've already seen some improvement, though! That's awesome. It may not seem like much, since you've already achieved it, but that's outstanding that you're already moving in the direction you want to be. That's huge.

 

[Hashi]

I do stink at any and most coping skills that involve relaxation, mind - body connection, or grounding. But yes we are working on these things. And I try to practice at home.
I'm the one who can't speak in therapy. I sit there and stare, maybe talk about good things while all the bad thoughts run around in my head. I want so badly to talk about it but the words don't come out.

I'm afraid I don't think you can say you "stink" at coping skills but you try to practice, and leave it at that. You say you want so badly to talk about the bad thoughts, but coping skills have to come first. If these aren't working, you do need to try them more and/or try different ones.

I have to say that relaxation was not a helpful coping skill for me when PTSD first hit and I started therapy. It was a big problem and best left to one side at that point. I did find it really helpful to do deep breathing for 20 minutes (timed) so if you mean deep breaths then I would go for that, but other kinds of relaxation were not going to happen. It made me more anxious.

I also found mind-body connection was something I needed coping skills for, not a coping skill in itself.

However more "active" coping skills like distracting myself, visualisation of being strong and protected, and techniques to contain the trauma and feelings (such as mentally locking them away in a box) were very helpful.

And grounding, for sure. Things to do in reaction to getting distressed, and things to do all the time to stay stable and grounded.

I wouldn't go out one day to run a marathon without having learnt about and practised warming up, good running technique, pacing myself, cooling down after and generally building up my stamina through training. I wouldn't try to run a marathon thinking/knowing that my warm up and my running technique stink. I think trauma work is similar. The basics are needed, otherwise we're likely to get badly injured along the way or never even start.