To those who've been here over five years

[shimmerz]

I’ve been on this site a fair bit longer than five years. I think it’s actually coming up to 10 now. I can honestly say that I worked and worked and worked and really wasn’t getting much better until just recently .

I think there were a lot of moving parts to that situation for me. One thing I wanted to stress is that although I used my tools and they didn’t really help back then, once I was actually able to dig in and positive things started happening, my tools that I had been practising all those years have been like gold to me.

One of the things that I noticed in one of your posts, I’m sorry I didn’t quote it but I’m on my cell phone right now and don’t find that easy to do on cell, is that you mentioned that you have been told along the way literally not to go out on your own. I too was subjected to this. I feel like it’s important to mention that neural pathways have been defined that need to be undone along the way to change this behaviour. When you are ready.

In all seriousness I was on able to go out unaccompanied for approximately seven years. I am still working on on doing this behaviour modification that was necessary for my own safety but is no longer serving me.

I had some very very large triggers that were happening ( homelessness ) that played a large part in keeping me symptomatic. That was part of my root trauma that just had me spinning around in circles. It took a great therapist, an aligning of the stars the moon and the sun, also known as luck, a larger support system which my therapist helped with, and a community of peer supporters to get me out of the hole I was in. Just for the record, I still haven’t been able to get to the very root of this homeless thing. I still get triggered up by it even though I am properly housed at this point. I’m not entirely certain that that trigger will ever get totally kiboshed.

If your brain has been trained to not be able to go outside on your own, then I’m gonna say that’s part of your trauma at this point. That’s a really difficult thing to work through I know.

So honestly, maybe you’re setting your sights too high With what you are aspiring to accomplish. I literally had to congratulate myself for brushing my freaking teeth in the morning. I double congratulated myself when I hopped out of bed and popped into the shower sometime during the course of the day. I really had to lower the bar and trained my brain regardless of how ridiculous it sounded to be ecstatic about The fact that I was doing these Simple Simon things.

Talk about humbling. I also had to learn to be grateful that I was actually able to brush my teeth in the morning. Gratitude, or thankfulness, were two really big pieces of the puzzle. Those two things alone allowed me to re-pattern my brain in such a way that I could actually see that I had been making positive changes along the way.

Shocking how this may all sound these things allowed me to really grip in and iacknowledge the fact that I was moving in a positive direction and once I caught grip of those concepts things just got better really fast. So fast that I could barely keep up. Still struggling with that whole thing.

I say it would be of great help to you if you just really lower the bar for yourself and get excited over little things. If you aren’t attaining the goals that you’re setting for yourself then those goals are too high. Also my goals were set from hour to hour. I wanted the next hour to be better than the last one. So I would set myself up for one small task every hour of the day. And no matter how ridiculous it seemed, it was of the utmost importance that I gave myself credit for even the most tiny accomplishment.

PS I have just finished editing this post that had a ton of errors in it. Please forgive. I need a better voice dictation system or I need to take the marbles out of my mouth while I speak. Thanks for your patience if you read this before I edited. Be well sandstone.

 

[Justmehere]

Reasons I’m not better than I am:
1.) I forgot that I’m not a project to be fixed. Instead of self-compassion, I tried to find control by trying to fix me like a DIY project on a broken down house. Didn’t work.
2.) Made poor choices to trade out one bad coping skill for another and trying to stop that habit has slowed down my progress.
3.) The mental health care system where I live is in a perpetual crisis because it’s lacking in providers, let alone qualified providers... and I haven’t moved to another area yet. Why? Lack of courage? Not sure.
4.) No money.
5.) New trauma happened.
6.) Had to deal with old abusers instead. of... whatever else I was supposed to do... which probably should have involved greater acceptance of the situation and getting space from them sooner.
7.) Co-morbid mental health conditions.
8.) Medical illness.


Most of all:
9.) I don’t know. <—- this is the hardest reason to face.

 

[Ronin]

Because my idea of better is, on the best days, dead. No worries, no problems, no one to fail (yet again). Ton of loving people to join.

So, f*ck better. Trying and hanging in there is more.

 

[Innordinate]

Why aren't you better?

I was better. Have been better. I definitely have up and down cycles. Mostly co-morbid disorders get set off by whatever life event, which sets off symptoms of other disorders.

I think I will be back to functioning better again sometime in the future, who knows when, but will always have these crappy cycles and times when i can't manage ptsd symptoms or other disorder symptoms. Hopefully I get better at recognizing the backwards slide before it becomes a spiral and get better at managing symptoms faster when that happens but pretty much, this is going to be my how my life goes. You get better with practice right?

And even though my proverbial shit has hit the fan this past year, I'm still in a way better spot than I was 8 years ago.
So I would say I actually am better, maybe just not well at the moment.

Also, I don't believe anymore (or i try not to) in laziness. I don't know a single person with ptsd that wants to live their life with out of control symptoms - so if they're not getting better, somethings not working right for them. Treatment plan, meds, whatever... there's some kind of brick wall in the way of their healing, because again, nobody would consciously choose to not do the work over getting better. Sometimes we just have to get over our own denial, but that's not being lazy.

 

[EveHarrington]

I’m not “better” because I had an unknown comorbid disorder that I thought was ptsd. I believed I was battling ptsd but it was soooo much more. Of course, living it from the inside, you don’t really realize that it’s not *just* ptsd. They just piggy back off one another. I’ve spent so much time crying because I’m scared, crying because I’m happy I’ve figured out this part of the puzzle, crying because I have to be brave enough to tell everyone in my life what I’m dealing with, crying because I don’t want to hurt my mom when I tell her the truth.

The good news is that my ptsd healing is further along than I realized. The bad news is that I have another new realm of healing to work on.

Oh sorry I haven’t been here 5 years. But I have been working on healing for a decade now.

I have worn make up three times in the last seven years. I don't even clean my nails, except they get cleaned when I wash my hair. I aspire to clean knickers and socks daily, but the rest of my clothes are just what I wore yesterday. I don't look in the mirror, so It doesn't matter. But yes, doing that much can be overwhelming, quite apart from the trigger of removing nightwear.

You sound depressed.

Are you on an antidepressant?

They can work wonders, give you your life back.

 

[ms spock]

Why aren't you better?

What do you define as better?

Serious question - plenty of people apply all the tools and get better.

Yeah if they had a good enough childhood and don't have dozens of ACEs Take The ACE Quiz — And Learn What It Does And Doesn't Mean

If you have a loving family, and got PTSD from an extreme bashing, vicious mugging, rape, terrorist attack, war, domestic violence, death of a family member in custody, losing a limb in a car accident, if you didn't get sexually abused under the age of ten etc you potentially have a time to return to, a sense of self, family connections, social connections, you don't have multiple abusive people in your life or no friends at all. If they majority of the males in your family are child rapists, then your capacity for social connectedness and the experience of family is somewhat limited. You are probably not living in a Dept of House in poverty because you had to run away when you were 15 because it was the only way to stop your Father from carrying out his thread of killing us all then himself.

If you have a half decent family then you have a place to go and have a cup of tea and a piece of toast, if you don't then your teen years are very hungry. If you are hungry you get sick more often, and it effects your health. If you are homeless you can't get a job because they want to have an address that you live in when you apply, and if you have not got a job then eating is more important than paying for a P.O Box.

I diligently have been applying the tools every day for years. For some of us it takes longer than others. I will have been here ten years this year. This last year was about learning about how not to comfort/binge eat. The year before was learning another skill. The year before another skill. It took two years to learn how to do a small amount of self compassion without becoming suicidal. The years before that each year I would pick a skill and work on it. I had excruciating sexual, physical, emotional, spiritual abuse from a very small child, I remember screaming at my Mother not to leave my along because X's car would come and get me (we lived with them when I was twoish) then I was sexually exploited by some professionals, a rape crisis worker ironically when I was 15, a psychologist who moved into my home, and I had to move out for three months, couch surfing whilst I tried to rid of her. I was abused and exploited by a number of professionals, and that retraumatised me. Everyone is different. I have worked very hard and diligently on my recovery/symptom management.

I lived for 20 years in a Dept of Housing where a woman got raped in the stair well, cars were set on fire if they thought you dobbed them in, we had two drug dealers in our buildings. The guys next door would talk about women they had raped whilst sitting on their veranda in loud voices. The guy above me abused his daughter and bashed his wife.

If you never get to get a safe space you don't get to heal. One of the outcomes of trauma is poverty. You need money to get treatment for trauma, but you need to be not so traumatised that you can't work. So you stuck in a Catch 22.

Most of the people that have had comparable childhoods like mine who were in youth refuges, semi homeless and the like are long dead. Even a favourite school friend, now long dead as well.

Your question, whilst interesting, is too simplistic. Because most people with PTSD have comorbid disorders. I have serious reactive attachment disorder, and that has taken over a decade to heal.

I have only stopped emotionally flashbacking, in the last few days, I would always go back to seeing my parents in certain situations when conflict arose, and I would disappear myself. Literally yesterday two days ago was the first time something unpleasant happened and I didn't flashback, emotionally, visually on go over it in my head. I have worked my guts out for 35 years to get here. But particularly the last ten years.

 

[ms spock]

I suspect that most of the honest answers will fall into one of the two categories you have identified - those who didn't do the work, or those who have and stay for social connections. I'm in the first group.

That's binary and just way too simplistic, there will be honest answers that don't fit in to either of those two categories, if it really was that simple then no one would be on this forum. You are beating yourself up too much about your own progress, or lack perceived therefore of. the same way you are beating yourself up and putting yourself down, well that came across in your question clearly. Have you read David Burns's book "Feeling Good"? If not, get it and read it ASAP. There's some distorted thinking in your posts.

It did come across as being rude - your question is pretty blunt. I chose to not engage with that because I don't have time to waste, but in my opinion @DharmaGirl was not being too sensitive. You are being too insensitive. There's ways of asking this question without implicit blame underlying it all.

Pick one skill and do it every single day.

And I feel for you because I have a very good idea about what you are going through, (if my assumption is correct)

 

[Sandstone]

It did come across as being rude - your question is pretty blunt. I chose to not engage with that because I don't have time to waste,

I want to first say -- anyone who reads this as a personal attack -- you have an issue right there you need to work on. That is you, not the OP with the question. You choose how you interpret and respond to everything in life.

 

[Sandstone]

Looking at the range of answers, they seem to fall into

• procrastination - delay in starting the work, for various reasons
• being better, but staying for ongoing support/social connections
• being better but still having more to heal
• taking time to find the right treatment/tools/techniques
• ongoing traumas/adverse circumstances
• co-morbidities, both physical and mental
• dissociation / denial / detachment
• complex trauma and range/ depth/ age at onset of trauma
• working too hard being counter-productive
• wrong diagnosis
• wrong/ poor/no treatment
• lack of consistent application

no-one has said it, but I'd add

• malingering/faking/exaggeration

I shall go away and consider which of these apply to me, whether they are acceptable reasons for me and what I can do about them.
Thanks to everyone who has replied in so much detail.

 

[DharmaGirl]

Did you mean to sound so rude?

I wasn't being rude

I asked if you meant to sound rude. I did not say you were rude, nor did I take it as an attack. I simply felt that it sounded a bit rude, and maybe you would want to change the way it was worded. I answered your question, and questioned you back. It was not meant to start an off topic discussion of my taking it as rudeness or of Sandstone being rude. I didn't take it personally, I didn't say she was rude, I merely attempted to get her to see that it could be construed that way. Thank you @Living in the 70s for your support in this.

This is an interesting and beneficial conversation, I won't sidetrack it further.

 

[somerandomguy]

malingering/faking/exaggeration

I don't believe this happens.

But that doesn't mean half of us don't believe it about ourselves anyway.

 

[shimmerz]

But that doesn't mean half of us don't believe it about ourselves anyway.

Agreed. I think this is distorted thinking.