Therapy For Underlying Issues

[Abrasky]

I was wondering about dealing with the underlying issues. I did therapy for 10 years and usually I only got one memory back a month. It was issues but they didn't underly my PTSD. Then in the last 2 years, I seem to have hit a tornado of pain and misery and anger as my therapist says I have gotten to the underlying issues. What happens after you deal with that? Does it get better, or worse, or is there more underlying issues to deal with. If you deal with underlying issues and a lot of the pain is processed or your memories have stop being fragmented can you heal enough to not have PTSD?

 

[ronin47]

Maybe it's just me, but two years seems like an awfully long time to be dealing with "underlying issues." I dunno.

For me, though I've been in therapy for two years, I'm still dealing with things that are a result of my confronting my trauma. For instance, my mind completely catonics whenever I see an image or hear a scenario about helplessness. That didn't happen before I started working with my first effective therapist. But, as you probably realize, the fear of helplessness was still in there, eating away at me. So in that sense someone might say that I am worse off than before therapy, but I'm not. The difference is now my problems are on the surface in plain view so I can actually see them for what they are. I couldn't develop effective coping strategies until I fully realized what it was I was trying to cope with. The "symptoms" of my therapy are still there, but I'm learning how to cope with those to. I guess it's a question of do you want to deal with PTSD your whole life or do you want to deal with healing your PTSD your whole life. Personally I'd pick the latter over the former any day of the week.

I don't know if that helps at all. Just my personal take on the subject if it means anything.

 

[Abrasky]

My therapist said, my abuser did a lot of damage and in her words it takes as long as it takes. I've wondered whether 2 years is normal though, but it's not like I can stop the ball rolling. :pThe memories just keep coming back, I got back 2 more this week. And I haven't seen my therapist since November so it's not from new therapy, it's from old therapy that was ages ago.I had one appointment in November and one in January 2010 and that is all.
I feel like the first 10 years of therapy did nothing really to make this picture of what really happened in my trauma appear after actually seeing it in the last 6 months. And then I wonder how much of this trauma is accurate, but the pain that has come out doesn't make me doubt the memory of my story one bit.
I'm wondering if anyone has gotten out a huge lot of memories(100) over 1 half years from so small amount an appointment and what happened afterward. Did it heal them? Or did they go crazy or get multiple identities or get stuck. I'm just curious and a bit scared. I can't seem to get to the end of this one and the memories keep coming.

 

[Abrasky]

Oh that's why I was getting scared. I went from 0 -100 from calm to an angry blaze and went into the room and threw washing and swept a lamp off the table. Luckily hurricane Maze: ( (As my husband called me) only bent the lamp, it could be bent back and is standing up on the bedside table again. Washing can always be re-folded.
I think I got glimpse of what I am dealing with at my next appointment. Which is probably the 2nd time I got a PTSD reaction. A new flashback : ( I was 30 had a 3 month old baby, breastfeeding not then but during times I could move, diabetes insulin dependent, kidney infection and kidney's were not working which built up the insulin in my body, on my bed unable to move from a hypo (low blood sugar) that almost made me pass out as it wouldn't go up with my husband feeding me about a weeks worth of carbs in one hour, and a baby screaming in his cot without anyone to pick him up for 30 minutes while I couldn't move to help him, hypos 3 times a day and highs which didn't make sense and a hospital which wouldn't help me because they didn't know my kidney's weren't functioning (neither did I )and said I was making it up. My memories got fragmented about this night too, but I fought this one.

 

[Ted Moen]

PTSD has layers and layers and layers of defenses and interpetations of traumatic stuff and related things we have developed to protect ourselves from thoughts and feelings we couldn't deal with at the time of needed to rearrange. As we work on each layer in a safe, therapudic environment, there is discomfort as we relive what we had to bury and gaines as we increase our understanding of the specifics of our trauma and our symptoms. Overall, there is huge gain as we increase our ability to live better with our symptoms. At the moment it can be either a very liberating feeling or very incomfortable or both. Whatever feeling comes up at the moment is likely to be very intense.

17 years into therapy for combat stuff with some early childhood stuff I was working on anxiety and panic, doing an exercise in a safe environment, when the exercised asked about hearing a sudden "click" and the feeling of being locked in. My immediate response was I'd be molested again, followed by a huge swell of intense feelings. As a college freshman I had been hitching home for the weekend and got picked up by a predator who molested me and left me by the side of the expressway in the midddle of the night. I had that buried throught 17 years of therapy. Suddenly a whole set of symptoms that didn't seem to be explained by stuff I was working on became understandable, and another set that I had attributed to other stuff seemed better explained.

Do the layers end? Who knows. But working through each layer leads to a better understanding of your symptoms and an increased ability to manage how your symptoms impact on your current situation, and that's progress in learning to live better each day with ptsd.

Ted

 

[Abrasky]

That is helpful Ted Moen, I'm sorry you had to get back horrible memories. That's awful but good you were able to get to the bottom of it.

I also seem to be getting a set of symptoms that weren't previously explained by stuff. I avoid workplaces, now I know why, I work fast because there was one new memory in there where my mum nutured me after she chucked me out of home and brought me back home when I was 9. I learned if you do enough nuturing you can wipe out violence. Which is NOT true. But it got me into a succeeding patter, I got a degree out of it. Then when I all this violence happened this learning sort of morphed into I am not doing enough nuturing/work/ doing nuturing right enough, to wipe out the violence. I have to work more right, more right, do more work, more work. It just sort of imploded me. I went from working in 2 jobs and studying full time with a big social life to not working at all and avoiding my friends. I was also scared of looking people in the eye. I was scared of empathy. I thought if I looked people in the eye, I'd have to face the pain that was connected to empathy through a memory of when I was 19. I didn't understand that set of symptoms until this underlying issue came out.

I suppose it is like a piece of string really. How long is a piece of string?