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PTSD and my body: Does anyone else experience PTSD as more of a physical than a mental thing?

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I get a lot of both the physical and the mental.
The physical is big in regards to body memories/physical flashbacks.
Things like feeling like my ribs are broken again, or a bloody punched nose, or semen in my nose/throat/mouth, smelling hospital smell when there's no source of it, anal pain, or even the slaps and hits I'd get from my mother as a child. Those are often felt while doing EMDR on that stuff.

But, things like the broken ribs feeling happen quite a lot. There might be scar tissue or something making it have an actual physical component, but the feeling it gives is like when the injuries were fresh.

I also get a lot of joint pain - the knee he injured (kneecap out of place, still is) - or my fingers. The joint pain, all the pains, flare up when I'm dealing with a lot of stuff, mentally. If I've had a rough EMDR session, I'll usually feel those pains after.

I used to have very little connection with my body - I had hit a point where I was dissociating in some form (usually derealization/depersonalization) just about 24/7. But going on naltrexone made that stop, fortunately. Now I'm on a dose of 25mg, miracle drug. My pdoc says I'd have some sort of dissociative disorder diagnosis by now if not for the naltrexone.

It's like my body's natural response to all this stress, all the difficulty of all this, all the anxiety and panic, is to dissociate from it all. I did trauma sensitive yoga, and it was helpful - but the most helpful thing in regards to staying in my body has been naltrexone.

Now and then, things will get bad enough that I depersonalize/derealize, even with the naltrexone, and at those points I have to find a way to ground my way out of it. Sometimes going for a walk and noticing everything around me will do the trick.

In regards to exaggerated startle response - sometimes it can be massive, but it's always present. If I'm having a more hypervigilant/anxious day, the reaction will be huge, even in public. I'll go like "AaaaAAAaa!" and then like "holy f*ck" and just breathe for a sec.

There was this one day recently, where I went outside, and each place I went to, someone did something to startle the shit out of me (a very easy task honestly) - and I just eventually went home and was like "okay f*ck being outside today"

I've been startled by mannequins standing there :/ in the brief instant where my brain recognizes the object as a human and it as being too close to me or just, there.

I have things that I feel that happened to me. Like I can feel <<sigh>> him penetrating me (this is the first time I have ever uttered that phrase and it is really hard) down to his breath on the back of my neck to what he tastes like (another first). It is the MOST sickening, disgusting feeling ever.

I sympathize with this a lot. I know how you feel - I have a hard time uttering stuff like that too. It is sickening, disgusting, and it often makes me feel the things I felt at the time - pain; my body screaming at me to make it stop, the (I wish there was a different word for this) tickling sensation - the horrible, horrifying tickling sensation - the physical feeling of something entering me that I didn't want. It's very hard to describe. But it's horrible and I wish tickling wasn't the closest word I could find to describe it. It's so much worse than just a tickling sensation. I guess being forcibly held down and tickled against your will, faaarrrr past your ability to endure it, where your body just starts involuntarily trying to get out, get away, make it stop - but not being able to. Begging for it to stop. Being ignored. Having to endure it until he is done.

Sometimes when I feel the pain it makes me like, stand up, or back away from whatever I'm sitting on, I have to move like I'm moving away from it again. Like an involuntary reaction.
 
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