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I never wanted to be here. I was forced into this situation because I was forced out of the other situation. I was forced to deal with personablies outside of my control and frankly out of control in general. The reason I became so insistent on expressing myself was because you didn't let me decide not to say things. You wouldn't accept it if I changed my mind about expressing something. So that built me an anxiety and how was I supposed to deal with that.

Thanks for the replies yall. I wanted to respond more detailed-ly but I didn't get around to it. I'm just going to write a small update to help myself get used to this.

I've had a few big fights with my partner. It's realized me that I still have some serious dread and triggers attached to our relationship. It's complicated because I was forced into this living situation due to my circumstances. I knew it was a risk, and it was very, very stressful at the beginning. I often felt I wasn't being heard. And we have an issue where I feel no matter what I say, it's not heard because they get defensive, which makes me very angry, and if I let that anger out at all obviously that only reinforces that. So we've had a vicious cycle.

I talked to an online friend for severable hours last night. It was so validating that I ended up staying up all night and probably fell asleep around 3:40a. I was concerned because people really don't want to engage socially anymore since the pandemic. It's so hard to try to talk to new people when you know most people aren't into intentional engagement with the issues in their lives (like loneliness)

In short, asdfahsdkghaksjfhaksdhfjalsdkflhajskvjarlgjalekrgjalkjdglk

[PLEASE:]

Before I start, I've written a disclaimer at the end about what kind of responses are triggering to me. Please read it if you decide to respond. OK thanks, the post follows:

I've been having such a horrible time with sleep. Chronic sleep problems are a part of my 2nd illness trauma and I've been struggling with that for 9-10 years. I've been unable to hold down jobs because of the energy and panic issues I have, so I'm now on disability and I spend many days almost completely unable to physically engage with the world. It's a completely different life than many of can imagine.

Some background before I get into the recent developments: My subconscious is extremely sensitive to stimuli while I'm asleep and I've had to use earplugs and blackout curtains since this started. Also, if the temperature changes noticeably while I'm asleep, I'll wake up.

Usually when I wake up, my heart is pounding and sometimes I'm breathing heavily. It's incredibly difficult to get back to sleep most of the time. In the beginning, this would happen kind of randomly but I'd be severely freaked out about it. It was due to drinking 2-4 cups of tea or coffee a day, but even after I realized it and stopped, the problem didn't go away. I was doomed to suffer the consequences even though I was desperately trying to figure it out. If I'd known more about my OCD and CPTSD back then, maybe I wouldn't be in this kind of position today. I'm absolutely positive it's got to do with trauma response and my autonomic nervous system.

I've tried going to sleep doctors and tried a number of things including CPAP and dental devices. Nothing helped. I won't get into the details just now because this post is already huge.



Back to my experience with sleep. Usually I go to bed around 11-12. When my sleep is bad, I'll wake up in the 4-6a range, then try to go back to sleep. Most of the time I can't do it unless I'm severely sleep-deprived (for me, this is a level that most people can't imagine, because I'm always significantly deprived) or using some kind of sleep aid like melatonin.

I mentioned I'm very sensitive to temperature changes. So every fall and winter, the temp of the house becomes less stable and my sleep gets much worse. Also, the humidity gets worse which also makes me cough sometimes, though I have humidifiers and whatnot. I've been living in a new place this year and have been really struggling to get my sleep consistent.

Recently I went through a period where I was sleeping through the night sometimes but just feeling absolutely drained throughout the day regardless. I was unable to do a lot of the things I had planned on doing like giving my grandmom her Xmas present (although that was also due to her rescheduling) and getting my oil changed. Then, I stopped sleeping through the night, instead waking up after 4-5h of sleep every night.

The way I've been feeling when I wake up is so painful. When I wake up and my brain feels like it's not functioning, and my nervous system is in a state of panic, I sometimes feel like I'm doomed. I've been thinking about death so often (doesn't help that my partner's kid has leukemia). It's not suicidal but it's very bleak. I've felt so bad that I decided to start taking some Lexapro again, even though it always makes me extremely sleepy during the day.

After talking with my partner, we're thinking my dental health may be contributing to my sleep issues. My wisdom teeth came in partially and really jumbled up all my other teeth. I'm thinking of getting them removed and seeing if I need to realign my teeth with something like Invisalign. I've got pain near my wisdom teeth and in my jaw so maybe this was a huge part of the problem the whole time.

Anyway, this is the end of the post because writing this took a lot out of me. I feel like I probably didn't need to go into as much detail, but I wanted to protect myself from getting in the same patterns where people think they know what I'm going through but they don't realize just how much I've been through. IDK, I'm tired and not making sense. I hope I can get a little relief soon.



PLEASE: if you decide that you want to give suggestions, advice, or anything like that, keep in mind I've tried so many different ways to address these problems. Please keep in mind that I probably have tried many of the things that people will think of. I have so many interconnecting health issues that they get in the way of being able to do a lot of the interventions that doctors try

So feel free to ask if I've tried things, but write in a curious way rather than believing you know what will fix me. Because so many people have told me to do things that were supposed to help and were just not helpful that I have a danger response for people telling me what to do or giving advice.

[post]

Seems like the pill has long lasting strange effects. I don't think I'll take it again TBH. At any rate, thanks for asking about suggestions. I really would prefer you didn't give any at this time because it's a trigger for me. Thanks for posting 🙂

Well, it happened again. I woke up after maybe 4.5 hrs of sleep. Yeaeaghhh...

It's not hitting me hard like it was just a week ago. I've been training myself to accept the present, accept all the uncomfortable stimuli. It has helped me stay out of the future anxiety to a degree. "Living in the moment" is so tricky, when you've been trained your whole life that the moment can be filled with danger. Trained to look out for that danger or suffer the consequences. But I do think I'm making good progress with that pursuit.

Thought about posting here first, but I decided to try an herbal pill (alleged painkiller) that I hadn't tried yet and call up a crisis hotline. It has been a while since I decided to call one, as it usually isn't helpful in the ways I'd like.

I had an idea to preface the conversation with my ground rules - no suggestions, tips, advice, none of that stuff from the script to make me come up with solutions like "what do you normally do to help yourself feel better." I'm sure a lot of you can relate to the issue being nothing reliably helps and I feel this way so often. I just think everything in society, including therapists, psychiatrists, doctors, and hotlines, are infected to some degree with the biases and unhealthy beliefs that uphold abuse. And My God It Sucks.

But yeah, it was a good convo, even if I didn't fall asleep during or after. I decided to get some breakfast, which usually helps me get back to sleep. But I honestly am not feeling super tired, which is weird. I think my nervous system upregulates and downregulates the stress response and such while I'm processing different things relating to my traumas.

Could also be the pill I took. But I felt different than I usually do when I woke up, and a lot of herbal pills don't do much of anything, so who knows for now. I think more answers will come in time.


Been thinking about my mother (who neglected/abused me) and how she's stuck in her early childhood identity. I'd like to find a way to coexist since my other family lives with her. She tries to be a good person but she's so goddamn bad at it, and she won't listen when you tell her she's hurting you. Obviously that's caused me a lot of pain. She must have been through some rough * when she was super young or she wouldn't be the way she is. I hope all the members of my family can learn to heal from these awful patterns.

Edit: thanks for the support, storyworld and woodsgnome. It's nice to hear <3

Well, here I go. I've journaled before, but not in a long, long time. I got really tied up in my head around the feelings that come up with journaling, I guess. I think it may have been since my 2nd health crisis started.

.. So many thoughts swirling. I wasn't very comfortable with that feeling, I Rember.

It's weird how you have to deal with the present in order to deal with the past. I haven't been in the habit of feeling safe for a very, very, very long time. When you have OCD, you know you can't run from the bad feelings. So I learned to repeat them to myself, so I could figure out solutions. But when you're absolutely sure your problems have no solutions anymore, because everything you try blows up in your face, you just end up drowning yourself in regret, shame, and guilt.

I think about those feelings a lot.

I've shared in group settings before. Al-Anon, ACOA, stuff like that. It feels so good to share but sometimes it can be so hard to listen. Especially when my mind was so predisposed to make judgments. Also to make decisions to try to get myself closer to the internal safety and peace that I so desperately craved.

So yeah, I think it will be good to come here and write for myself, and take in everything else at a slower pace than I used to.

I hope my life situation will be stable after everything changes. Because I really want to keep working on myself like this. There's nothing I want more

Thanks so much! You too

Thanks tofu. I'll look at the journaling section. And I'm not currently in a spiral or anything, although I definitely have been in those. ... I think I just realized the way I communicate about my issues is heavily influenced by the time restrictions that you always get in therapy. Hopefully I can relax out of those habits in time

Hi everyone. Thanks for the kind words. I really appreciate them.

I'm hoping being connected here can help me, although I'm really not sure how I should go about best using the site. I guess it varies from person to person. I really wish I had more like-minded people IRL because in the real world there's so much of this attitude that much of this is my fault. I think that's part of the culture that keeps us cogs in the cruel machine.

Also I'm a little worried (it's probably nothing) about the name I chose here, different from my normal online names to stay anonymous. It's Remberin (as in "ember"), not Rememberin, but I'm not sure how important other people getting your name 100% correct is for the functioning of the website.

Anyway, replies to specific people (I've cut down the quote sizes to take up less space):

have you tried to see if there are any OCD specialized therapists in your area?

Coming here and sharing what's going on and also starting therapy with a professional who knows trauma are two good places to start.  Having support can help when you feel like you can't hang on. [...]

I'm on anti-anxiety medication [...] I have been told that OCD is often the result of past trauma. I don't know how often this is the case, but if there is a strong connection, then it seems to me that as one heals from their past trauma, their OCD decreases. [...]

So yeah... I've tried lots of therapy, including trauma and OCD specialists, and lots of meds. Unfortunately I've had so many problems with those. It all feels so forced and like they're not addressing the root problems. I don't like to go straight to talking about finding another therapist. I mean that with my whole chest, so please respect it. I have trauma from the psychiatric system. Some therapists have treated me really poorly, some have refused to continue treating me due to insurance BS. I just have so much pain wrapped up in that so that is not the support I'm looking for right now. I will open up my search again when I'm ready.

Yes, I agree that my OCD definitely seems to be related to my trauma/abuse/CRTR. I've wondered if OCD is a form of CPTSD, back before I found this site. But unfortunately, I've tried many therapists and meds already. My 2nd major health crisis (starting in my mid 20s) affects the way I process all kinds of drugs, including alcohol, advil, other painkillers, medicinal MJ, and every psych med I've tried. It's really scary and really sad for me, actually.

Unfortunately the side effects for psych meds are too much for me to handle. It's traumatizing to go through those side effects. I also have trauma about psychiatrists and therapists pushing me to stay on meds to "fix" me and ignoring/minimizing the side effects. It makes me feel so broken, so wrong. But also so betrayed by those people. I think honestly the first step is to better address the health problems, but so far that has been incredibly hard for me. Opening up here is giving me some hope though, so maybe I can work towards that at my own pace.

As far as those treatment modalities go, Storyworld, thanks for the info. I'll use that when I open up my therapist search again.



Well, it feels good to get that out, at least. Please be gentle with me. I hope I didn't offend anyone, and I certainly didn't mean to. But it's very important for me to set boundaries because I have a lot of triggers that bring up so much stored pain. I hope you all understand.

Hello everyone. I am struggling mega hard right now and since forever. I lived through abuse as a child and it turns out I've had OCD at least since I was 8. My life has just been filled with so much pain. There's traumas, disabilities, illnesses, and trust issues. Everything seems to be reinforcing each other. With mental health, I've been hospitalized in the psych ward over 6 times, seen specialists, done intensive programs. Nothing helps. It feels like every time I try something, it backfires in some way. It's gotten so hard to keep trying. I just honestly don't know what I can do anymore.

As a child, my father was an alcoholic (later dying from OD of hard drugs when I was 26) and my mother was a control freak. We were low income. My little brother used to have a terrible temper which I got the brunt of. Physical torment multiple times a week. My mother didn't do anything about it and sometimes blamed me.  I also got in a serious bike crash with a serious concussion. After several years, my family ended up splitting up; my dad and I in one state and my brother, mother, and her "boyfriend" in another state 1k miles away.

I was finally free from the physical abuse but something even worse started. My (undxed) OCD started focusing on a certain aspect of my physical health that I don't want to get into, but anyway it took control of my psyche and started to completely unravel my life. I knew it was going to ruin me. I knew it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I couldn't stop because I knew nothing about OCD. It was awful. I, a previously school-focused kid, started missing chunks of school in 11th and 12th grade to try to sleep the days away. It was eating me up. I could not find any help because it was so terribly embarassing and the few doctors I did see were no help. I ended up being controlled by suicidal thoughts for much of my 20s because of this issue. I had no success in my career because of the emotional difficulties.

I tried to get help with meds and therapy, but obviously they weren't very helpful. I tried my heart out, but nothing could heal the holes in my soul. Then I started having new health problems in my mid 20s. Doctors constantly minimized what I was going through and denied me (which I was already so sensitive to from before). They blamed it on "depression" and kept saying I was fine. Then my dad died as the problems were getting really bad. I had to live with people for free for 7 years, including the first 3 of the pandemic.

The pandemic has been incredibly hard for me with my personal anxieties. I have no sense of community and I feel constantly under attack as a disabled person. I have very little hope or faith and am so terrified of what is going on in the world at large. To top it all off, my partner's kid was diagnosed with cancer 5 months into us moving in together, and we're going to have to sell the house and move.

Support is appreciated. I honestly don't know if I can hang on.