Sufferer Trying this thing of not closing myself off

[Asatantrosa]

Hello everyone.
I’m a 43 year old woman from Sweden who has been dealing with PTSD for over half my life. I was diagnosed 9 years ago and have had a hard time getting treatment until recently when i started trauma exposure therapy which has been hard and horrible but also a good thing.

One thing i’ve realized in therapy is how alone i’ve felt about the things i went through (SA) and how badly people around me reacted at the time. I reported it to the police but felt questioned and shamed by the police, i was injured during SA which lead to several operations during the following year which sort of prolonged the trauma and i fell in to a deep depression.

Today i have periods of severe anxiety and ”breakdowns” and i’m really just sick of feeling so unstable. The only way i felt i could move on at that time after all that happened was closing the door to these experiences and viewing them simply as ”something bad that happened”.
But as i think you know, these things don’t go away.

My therapy is ending and I realized i have no one i feel i can talk to about these things or ask advice about healing from trauma which led me to finding this forum, i don’t know exactly what i’m hoping to find except maybe feeling less alone and learning something about this healing journey we all seem to be on.

Thank you for reading <3

 

[Sideways]

Welcome to the forum!

The isolation all by itself can be devastating. It’s why we have the Social Forum, and also why it’s about the busiest forum we have. Being connected with others, in almost any form, can be so pivotal to healing

 

[parrotthepolly]

Welcome to the forum!

 

[Friday]

One thing i’ve realized in therapy is how alone i’ve felt about the things i went through (SA) and how badly people around me reacted at the time.

Soooooo much of life seems to come down on luck.

Welcome.

 

[Asatantrosa]

Soooooo much of life seems to come down on luck.

Welcome.

I’ve spent so much time trying not to feal things. Life is so unfair, horrible things are done to you and you are left with overwelming pain and fear and anger. Those feelings just seemed so useless, they don’t change what happened, no one listened or helped. To me the problem seemed to become not what happened but my emotions that felt crippeling so i learned to hold them really tight. But it’s just an illusion of control and those feelings are still there. My body hurts from holding myself together.

I’m learning to let myself feel the feelings, to recognize when i push things down and shut off. There’s alot of anger about how unfair the world is but also empathy. Things happen that are out of our control that shape us, it can be so hard to accept. To have to accept the resulting pain from something you didnt choose.

 

[WinnieThePoohChris]

Similar age and experiences. How are you getting on with therapy ending?

 

[Asatantrosa]

Similar age and experiences. How are you getting on with therapy ending?

I'm having a hard time right now. We left things off with the intention of me allowing myself to "feel my feelings" more so there's less of a build up of emotions and tension. But to be honest this leads to me being dysregulated a lot of the time, and conflict with some of the people in my life. I have a hard time feeling safe around most people and sometimes I get angry and paranoid when I feel they don't listen or respect my perspective (it's probably a trigger because of my past trauma and the aftermath). This makes me want to isolate because relationships are just so hard and makes me ruminate and overanalyze. I'm aware of doing this and also that a lot of the time my feelings aren't logical or matching the situation. But it just makes social interaction or being in a social work place so hard and all I do is feel my fear, all day. I have to be around people to work on this and have positive interactions to override the negative ones in my "experience bank" in the brain but most people only makes it worse since they have no idea of how confusing their actions or social responses are to me. I need people to be very clear and direct and honest in their communication and most people really sucks at this. I'm trying to deal with this and is not avoiding so I guess that's good.
How are you doing? Are you in therapy, have been?

 

[WinnieThePoohChris]

I think I could have written what you just wrote. I am struggling to get people to deal with some real world problems but as I have ptsd they are put down to that.

Does not help with trust and social interactions. I have had many of the issues recently that you described and trying to explain or ask questions leads to more problems.

I have had therapy, finished some a couple of months ago, bit weird afterwards but did settle down.

it's not all bad, have still had some nice interactions, some people do make the effort which helps. A stranger stopped and checked i was OK yesterday as I stared a nothing for a while in town.