• 💖 [Donate To Keep MyPTSD Online] 💖 Every contribution, no matter how small, fuels our mission and helps us continue to provide peer-to-peer services. Your generosity keeps us independent and available freely to the world. MyPTSD closes if we can't reach our annual goal.

Self Doubt About Diagnosis And Recovery

Status
Not open for further replies.

tontoe

Learning
Prompted by a [very good] thread I was reading earlier in another forum, about the reliability of memories, I realise how much I am plagued by self doubt, for example:

  • Did anything really happen? My memories are primarily sensations, rather than "movies" in my head, with fragments emerging in bad dreams that pitch me into altered states. I have the evidence of a "classic" set of PTSD symptoms, which are often overwhelming, but my doubting brain - on which I have over-relied for years - dismisses this.

  • Is my "diagnosis" correct? I spent years trying different therapists, and medications for depression from my GP, all of which made me feel so dissociated, I lasted max four weeks on any. None of the family doctors I went to seemed to understand trauma, let alone be able to offer any help or referral to somebody who could
Convinced by my symptoms that I had some form of PTSD, I finally found a therapist who specialises in trauma, and things began to happen. The family childhood I had hardly any memories of [and which I had thought of as normal] emerged as pretty dysfunctional [to say the least] and fragments of memory began to emerge.

I had, it seemed, CPTSD [even though, despite the huge amounts of research and evidence from survivors, it doesn't yet exist as an "official" diagnosis]

Intellectually, I know now what happened, just not the details. Emotionally, I often seem to be stuck - still the abused child with all emotions frozen.

And then there's another part of me. A tyrant that simply dismisses me and my whole experience as crazy, over-sensitive, needy and self-obsessed. This part of me tells me I should "snap out of it", "man up" [irony upon irony] etc etc.

I'm really struggling with the tyrant at the moment.

The further I get into therapy, the louder and longer the tyrant shouts that there is nothing really wrong with me, and that as the NHS doesn't seem to recognise the diagnosis, or do anything beyond prescribing some SSRIs or SNRIs for depression [which is a symptom of the underlying CPTSD] that just make me feel so much worse, I must either be crazy, or some kind of attention-seeking fraud. He also whispers in my ear that I am so broken I cannot be fixed.

Horrible. Irrational. But very, very powerful.

Even if the diagnosis was recognised [both by the NHS and The Tyrant], there's not much help available from the medical establishment.

Having read about it's success for helping with PTSD symptoms including depression, I'm considering TMS treatment in conjunction with my therapy, but it's not available on the NHS, so I have to make a judgement about whether I can raise the £8000 or so needed for a course at a private clinic.

And also whether the claims on the websites of Harley Street clinics are a variation of snake-oil salesmanship... and of course whether The Tyrant would allow it to work ;)
 
  • Like
Reactions: Zef
Totally get everything you wrote, half the time I think I made it all up, T tells me it would take some imagination to make it all up. I know what you mean about the tyrant voice, love the name for it by the way! That is exactly what it was like, really hope you find something that helps, hopefully the tyrant will appreciate the effort!
 
It took 17 years in therapy before I started to accept what happened to me, to believe the memories, and not give up on the journey.

And then I remembered something worse than all of those memories and believed I was just wanting attention, again. Until I got actual physical symptoms and had to see a cardiologist for those symptoms. After the flooding of memories stopped, the physical symptoms subsided and I was left with the overwhelming reality of new truth which I had not known as a child. For me it took my mother dying for me to remember the worst of it, the part that finally took me out of my disbelief completely.
 
It really takes a specialist to unlock that trauma and then to address it correctly. No person, before my healing started, had ever cared enough about me to even inquire about my childhood, including the monster I lived with for over 20 years. No one cared enough about me before to truly understand me , to truly aid me. It can be joyus and overwhelming at the same time when such areas are noticed. All I know is that I surely would not have survived and every day the significance increases because every day I understand a little bit more that what is being given to me is very special. Heling when there is someone that totally understands you is an amazing experience. Healing and finally getting my brain back surely helps me to understand that the situation Iam in started with hopelessness, but was recognized and then treated with so much patience and understanding, truly amazing, still getting used to that knowledge because now that my brain works better I understand the significance of this much better.
 
I have got to a point now (for the most part) where i can accept the memories are real. What I can't yet accept is that they aren't trivial or that I'm not overreacting. Or that they are real CPTSD. I don't have a formal diagnosis of CPTSD- my label is Borderline PD. But a therapist who was treating me for it is insistent that BPD is a type of CPTSD. I have read up on CPTSD and nearly all the symptoms I have fit. But part of my brain tells me what I went through can't have been traumatic enough. After all, I was a dramatic kid. My parents told me I was. And sometimes i did dramatise. Don't remember consciously dramatising the abuse though. Just silly things eg normal experiences like thinking I was dying if I ahd a cold or something. But a part of my brain keeps saying to me "you're a faker.you may have X, Y, Z symptoms of CPTSD and abuse but you don't have all of them. You're a fraud." Even though i know that you don't have to have every symptom to have the disorder. You just need enough of them and I seem to have CPTSD symptoms in spades.

But however much I rationalise it the self doubt still remains. And I hate it. It means that when my dad minimises something about what happened I fall for it hook line and sinker. And I start to agree with him. I hate it. i hate it so much.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top