Sweetleaf
Diamond Member
The end of my trauma included a whole lot of forced sleep deprivation, and it made me start having a psychotic episode. uuugh. I freed myself from my abuser in the midst of that psychotic episode - a couple days were pretty bad and during them, I realized that I was going crazy, I realized "holy f*ck I am psychotic" - but things were rough enough in the real world, that I stayed pretty well connected to reality, relatively speaking, for those days where I ended the abuse.
The day that I ended it, I was having some pretty extreme reactions to everything that had happened that day and the previous day. I was feeling so, so insanely intense. The people around me could see I was having a very hard time and freaking out, they could see I was f*cking terrified. Me being terrified intensified, when I found out that my abuser was going to be released from the ER instead of being sent to the psych ward, like I was hoping (because he had just attempted suicide).
f*ck I shouldn't be talking about this. I will finish it up quickly.
I was offered help through a therapist that my mom knew, and at first I declined it, thinking I could just handle things on my own, but that night while sobbing, freaking out, feeling horrible, I said "okay I'll do it, I'll see her" - and I started therapy the next day. But, my psychosis got worse, I wound up in the hospital, the hospital visit got rid of the psychosis, I went home, slowly started getting better and feeling like my brain was coming back online. I had these symptoms going on though - I came back to reality, and my brain stopped being slow, irrational, and fuzzy - but I didn't return to "normal"
Basically me having that psychotic episode scared me into continuing to see my therapist, and after that psychosis ended, is when I started seeing my first pdoc, who is the person who diagnosed me with PTSD, and also later set me up with my current t/pdoc person, who is much better at helping me than my old t.
Eventually I was diagnosed with PTSD, and I kind of felt relieved, in that I didn't have schizophrenia or some other psychotic disorder - I was relieved because I had something to explain what was going on, and it was something that was curable (I like to still believe it's curable). I was kind of doubting whether it was really PTSD, and thinking that if it was, hey maybe it'd go away on its own. Lol. I kind of felt numb to a lot of my trauma, I was kind of in denial that it was bothering me, what all my psycho ex did to me. Then therapy stirred things up, brought them to the surface, and I've basically been continuing therapy because I just want all of this shit to f*cking go away, or stop bothering me. I want my life back. I want to be able to work again. I want all of this to quit tormenting me all the time.
I don't really know what you should do about it, to help him seek help, but it's possible he's afraid of seeking help, because it is hard to do that - I had it offered to me, and the psychosis would have forced it to happen anyway - but without those things, I don't know if I would have sought it out all on my own, or how long it would have taken me to do that.
He could be trying to ignore it all and pretend everything is okay - I want to ignore it all and pretend everything is okay, I often try to ignore everything trauma related, but shit still comes up, and I still get triggered. I'd probably still get triggered living in the middle of nowhere, in a shack in the woods. Lol.
I was also in denial that my trauma was -that- bad or affecting me -that- much until therapy stirred it all up and made it hard to ignore that it all affects me a lot, and that I need help with it.
