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Chart, sanmagic7
Hi guys! Just dropping by to express my gratitude for your support. I hope you are well

I've been riding a wave of sorts. It involves gardening and social interaction. And all the other stuff I do to positively impact health in the broadest sense of the word. I feel it's very important for me to forge this iron while it's hot. I've been positively surprised with how well things have been going overall. The sleep disordered days and overwhelm are sprinkled in between and it remains a delicate balance. So I currently haven't found the space to hang out here. I will again, for sure. I've been away from the computer, the news, and indoors quite a lot. It's lifting my spirit to hang out with folks and to have a taste of my old love for gardening at the same time again. It's really positive and it's turning my life around quite a bit. Just like official therapy, which also still continues, it's good and destabilizing at the same time. It's the right kind of medicine for now.

Hugs from Holland.  

sanmagic7
Thanks for your support. Even though I didn't reply earlier, it was great to see your comment here when it mattered most. 

Chart
I'm afraid this is about how it usually goes after a really bad night. It often takes all day before I start to feel a little better. My mental coping largely consists of mindfulness. I do my best not to fight with what is/go into story mode. As in the example above, I don't necessarily succeed completely at that. To the degree that it doesn't spiral out, I largely credit my meditation/spiritual practice. This also relates to the name of this journal. The whole C-PTSD enchilada has become a different dish than "getting better". I'm dragged there sometimes kicking and screaming, as happened on the day I described, and again two days later. I can't discern a link with recent additions to the stack of interventions to my current coping, but who knows? It's not hurting me, I know that. 
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Wow. I just came out of an amazing therapy session. A good dose of IFS was mixed in unexpectedly and organically. Psycholytic parts work :-) I noticed a protector part and that got the ball rolling. I was in tears and T was totally welcoming, safe, and loving like she always is. Like last session, a part of me was not going along with it. I started to refer to the part as the protector part and to share his thoughts with T. A part of me was not engaging. Ever so slightly. Not completely here. Not believing, not accepting, not letting in. Just like in life in general. It felt like exposing a secret when I spoke it out loud. I don't think I've ever been so explicit about this inner process to anyone. Sharing this while it's ongoing with the person involved, really brought it out of obscurity. A bit like writing out your thoughts can make it more clear what's actually on your mind.

The part was welcomed. It hurt. A lot. It hurt to be welcomed. And it felt good. Both at the same time. There was no strong tendency to escape. It was in the background somewhere. On another level I was registering the significance of what was happening here. I was repeatedly flooded with tears of gratitude. I felt grateful for the safety in this connection, grateful for being welcomed so fully, grateful for having this struggle acknowledged, and grateful for this beautiful moment. The reward for this kind of deep work has a specific kind of sweetness to it.

There's a part of me resisting. And there's a part who is widely opening his heart for this new reality. The latter is also the one who recognized this one among all those modalities, and went the extra mile to go there. These two parts aren't the best of mates. Yet they aren't at war with eachother either. It's very clear where I want to go. It's new. Like a toddler exploring new spaces. Always ready to run away from danger, yet really curious. I'm taking things in at the pace I can handle. Which is at lightning speed compared to a lot of my therapeutic history.

There has been a long journey before this, which is part of why these sessions are going so well. A lot in my life has been preparing me for these. For the vast majority of the time, I wasn't ready to let someone in on this level. I have been exploring ever deeper aspects of trauma and identity on my own first, before I could do this. It feels really good to finally show up like this. All that too was mixed in with my tears of gratitude.

sanmagic7
Thank you. So much depends on sleep that I feel I have no choice but to try every sensible option I find. It puzzles me I still haven't gotten through the end of that.

Gosh, you actually went through that benzo horror show. I don not envy you. The closest I got to that was two stretches of 2-3 weeks of daily benzo taking. Weaned off in a couple of days and what happened then were terrible withdrawal symptoms. Rock bottom as a side effect of prescription drugs. Even after such a short period. 
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Today is a rough day. Yesterday I had another really good day. I ended it with a PMR session which made me feel relaxed. I could carry the relaxation into the meditation session I did afterwards and into going to bed after that. It amazed me I could keep tapping into that bodily sensation, even though it wasn't as pronounced as it was right after/during the PMR. It was very welcome, as that night I wasn't going to take a benzo, contrary to the night before.

I started waking up. Very brief moments. No big deal. I've become quite good at not switching on my thinking and falling asleep again right after something like that. This night I kept waking up dozens of times though. Just like the other non-benzo nights the past week. Not a good sign. I recall that I woke up from a very deep sleep many times. Not the way I'd wake up from a nightmare, which also happened that night. As a result, I'm having a horrible day.

It's been hard not to go into catastrophizing mode. A lot of my effort has been going into that. I couldn't distract myself or do some work in the garden like I have been doing for the past couple of days. I've been feeling dramatically lonely again. Like the switch has been flipped overnight.

In the past 7 years or so I've had to deal with horrific triggers from noisy neighbors. That finally got a lot better, over a year after I moved for the second time for the same issue. It comes up from time to time, still. Today too. Hours of blasting music. Really bad timing. My stomach was already in a knot before it began. There was no safe place away from this. I didn't feel safe enough to go out, let alone say something about it. I was silently raging at the anti social %$#$@(%. Just when I started to make peace with the only thing I was suffering from, my own reactivity, the music stopped.

I still feel bad. A little less so, 12 hours after I got up. Luckily I could shed some tears. It's such a fragile balance, more difficult to find the way upward, and even more so to change de default. I'm just continuing with my stack of interventions for now. This never was an overnight thing. Pun intended.

[AWSESOME]

This is awesome Dalloway! AWSESOME. Such a brave step to take.
It too has come up for me over the years, to somehow make this life's experience of suffering to use for others. It's inspiring you actually are taking steps in this direction. I'm cheering you on 

Wonderful description of your progress PC. It's not a term that's used anymore, I believe, but I still like "muscle memory".

...A lot of authors say that we can change the past, and up until now I thought those were just poetic words, but after reading how Somatic Experiencing works, I realize that the past is still real, and I still have a chance to heal it...

One of my teachers says the past is a story that is believed now. There are only thoughts and sensations in this moment. How we relate to those is about as empowering as it gets. Easier said than done when the excrements hit the fan, but still. I'm happy for you that you have such a great therapist. Them not mentioning SE but just putting it into practice has a poetic flavor to it to me. Like secretly sneaking in healing  

[if]

Chart
... and one for you 

sanmagic7
Yeah, Quviviq is definitively a prescription drug. Do you mean you already have Unisom at home but haven't tried it yet? In that case we may be similar. The other day I was joking with my shrink about the fact that I'm using Ativan tablets which expired four years ago. I've always been a very reluctant benzo user. More recently I've started to wonder if I haven't been doing myself a disservice with that. The kind of nights I often get may be more destructive than responsible use of benzo's. There's no such thing as a risk free option in this case. 
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A bunch of stuff! I've helped an acquaintance in what I'll call a community garden for simplicity's sake. Did that before every now and than in the past few years. It'll be every friday this season, which offers me a social event once a week. This is great. I like working in the garden and I generally feel comfortable around the people who hang out there. Last week I spoke with a woman who is also volunteering there. I noticed I had zero issues sharing about the reasons why I have the time to do this. It's such a relief to not be so contracted around something so integral to my life. I had a really nice day overall. The okay-ish preceding night helped a lot. As did the weather. I've been enjoying the spring sun lately.

This weekend I went to a friend. He and I go way back. Guaranteed deep and wide ranging conversations whenever we meet. Which is rarely. As if it wasn't already crystal clear, the joy of this meeting rubbed it in how much I miss being able to be human like this. In connection. My social side is starving on most days. This is a special kind of suffering I only recognized as such later in life. It's been with me quite possibly my whole life. It has gotten louder and louder over the years. I generally do well with the few people I interact with. Most days I see no one at all. That was a blessing and a curse. It has become a curse and a blessing. For reasons I won't go into now, it's very difficult to find a middle way.

I started a six week commitment to progressive muscle relaxation [PMR] and invited a friend to join. She agreed. Nice. I'm in a team! I feel incredibly stupid for not giving this a go before. It was part of a sleep disorder intervention that was offerd to me six years ago. I declined, because I was so triggered by the CBT component in it. I have many years of invalidation experiences around that, which tie into my original trauma. So I don't regret that choice. What I do regret is not giving the PMR a try in the comfort of my own home. Like I did succesfully with sleep restriction. Lesson learned, I hope.

I started out with the PMR rather neutral, I think. I was genuinely surprised to experience relaxation afterwards. Exciting! No, relaxed, haha. Good stuff. I'm doing this as a result of the Putting Trauma to Sleep book I've been soaking in. Thus far it's been the book I've been waiting for. I won't go into detail here, but I love how the author's steer clear of reductionism and still go to the heart of the matter while offering practical interventions. I'll have a lot to chew on for quite a while.

I agreed with my shrink to start taking Ativan three times a week for the time being. Recently my sleep has been quite bad and I got up a lot better when I took an Ativan. I'm putting that to good use. I'm doubling down on the other interventions which tie into sleep, of which PMR is one. And I've been working in my garden and taking on some projects in the house [which has been a gigantic mess for years]. I'm not entirely sure where all this is coming from, and don't particularly care. I'm just expanding my stack of interventions and surfing the wave, bad or good, as best and constructive as I can. I had fun the past couple of days. Even today was pretty okay. I had a terrible night and still did more in the garden than in a whole year. I did not force anything. I was slow and chaotic. I don't care. It has been so much worse in the past years. Infinitely worse. I did things I didn't have the juice or the cognitive clarity for in ages. Every day I saw things I thought I'd do if I'd ever get in good enough shape. Years! So demoralizing. This is the other side of that coin. Just a couple of days being able to do a couple of things. I'm not even in ketosis anymore.

Chart
I didn't listen to the preview myself. I started with the audio book. So you likely have heard thing's I haven't yet. I'm about 5 hours into it and I'm really impressed by the depth of this book. The author's even mention in utero influences and developmental attachment is a central theme in the book. No quick fixes or easy scoring.

You make a good point about the calming techniques. That coincides with a thought I had the other day about what relaxation has come to mean to us (starting from early development). It equals unsafety or worse for us. It's so obvious, yet it never really made sense to me like it does now. There has to be a very good perceived reason not to be relaxed, since it's so incredibly expensive to be switched on all the time, even during sleep. It's not just a wrong turn our system took at some point. It's also about what keeps driving that "choice". The association our system has with relaxation itself is off. This is a bit of a light bulb moment for me.

It literally never felt right for me to just relax. On the other hand, I did the Reitav PMR exercises the other day and I actually did feel deeply relaxed afterwards.   It's basic progressive muscle relaxtion. I'm starting the six week training with that YT video he recommends tomorrow.

Dissociation complicates things off course. May I ask if you dissociate if you are getting (somewhat) relaxed? That would be an immensely cruel mechanism.

With regards to the effects of getting a diagnosis, I can pitch in that I've experienced retraumatisation as a result of misdiagnoses and being approached accordingly by health care professionals. Still today, I have not been officially diagnosed with what I actually suffer from. That diagnosis does not exist here. This has an impact on how I communicate about it to the outside world. Even to health care professionals. Sometimes I almost feel like a closeted attachment trauma sufferer. This stuff is so complex and all pervasive that few grasp just how devastating it is. That situation is detrimental to my wellbeing itself. And so on and so forth. We will get out of these "dark ages" one day, but I'm not sure how much of that I'll see happen in my life. 

sanmagic7
It's great if antihistimine medication like unisom works for you. I've had no luck with those unfortunately, but I know two people who are having great success with it (I don't know which specific brand they use). The medication I was talking about is Daridorexant, which goes by the brand name of Quviviq (who made that up?). You can find more info at the wiki page here. I can't even imagine what life without a chronic sleep disorder must be like. Sleep has such a huge effect on the quality of life, and it's so difficult to alter if the common interventions don't do the trick.

sanmagic7
Yeah, the news is just a bit too much currently. My shrink said I'm far from the only one struggling with this. I have two friends who checked out entirely. I'm firmly stepping on the brake now, until I figured out a middle way.

There's a promising new (non-benzo) sleep med out I've been wanting to try for some time. It has been available in the US for quite a while, but not here yet. My shrink told me it may be possible to import it if insurance complies. If you're interested I can look up the name. It can't be overestimated how important proper sleep is. I'm sorry you understand this. Thanks for your support. Love and hugs to you too 

Chart
Yes, keto. If you're a sweet tooth, that must be really hard to stick to. I've been lucky in that regard. If you're trying to kick sugar, keto is brutal, I imagine. I'm going to experiment with cyclical keto this time. I don't like how keto makes you a social pariah and that it's the perfect storm for kidney stones (I've had a few without it). It's more like a limited intervention than a way of life/religion for me. I've been doing intermittent fasting, low glycemic, and two meals a day for many years. This also has a stabilizing effect on mood.

It all began way back when I was diagnosed with IBS (I remember you mentioned this somewhere). It's insane how much time I spent trying to answer the question what is a healthy diet. It's a lot more complicated than that. I'm quite sure these sort of mystery issues are often linked to sympathetic dominance. The parasympathetic nervous system is often referred to as the "rest and digest" system, which explains a lot without even looking at what and when you eat. I'll leave that can of worms at that. Good luck resting and digesting! 

dollyvee
Thank you. "Connect or perish" was my motto for a while. It still kinda is :-) I hope you'll hold on to connection. We're all in this together. Also "the others".   
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This morning I woke up just before the alarm. I did not feel like a trainwreck. Outrageous. Even more so because I had trouble falling asleep.

I recalled a part of a dream. It was a bit scary, but I was actually relating to the people I encountered. A whole bunch of cousins and their kids I'd never seen before or barely remembered. With the vaguery of a dream poured over it. The significant part of it was that I was relating to them on a human to human level, despite it being a bit scary. Normally, I relate to a lot of what I encounter in my dreams (if I remember anything at all) strictly as a threat. Even though I don't often end up in mortal danger in my sleep very often anymore, threat is persistent.

It's fascinating to see my new therapy starting to manifest in my dreams. In a positive way this time. It's very scary for me to relate under the influence of psychedelics and to be so exposed and vulnerable while in primary consciousness. The vital part is that it happens in a safe, relational container though. It's great to see I'm slowly internalizing a bit of that.

I'm in ketosis for close to two weeks. I mainly started it because of a potential autoimmune disorder that was flaring up. I remember it cleared up after seven months in ketosis, years ago. In addition, I was hoping to get some mental stability, as I recall from previous times.

I'm not disappointed on both fronts. I'm pretty far from emotionally stable. Multiple reasons. And yet I clearly experience this quiet of some sorts. I had forgotten how it feels to be in ketosis. This is very welcome. What I did not consider this time, was to get more energy. I think my mitochondria are more happy now. It was surprising to notice I could continue functioning, even after a really bad night. What really surprised me, is that I spontaneously decided to take on a project that I had no energy for in the past year or so. Very physical. Hours of digging and such. I finished it in a day.

This keto part is as wonderful as it is sad. I have spent an ungodly amount of time looking into health in the broadest sense of the word. The topic is insanely complex and nuanced. I do not believe keto is the be-all and end-all answer, nor do I want to commit to it long term.

C-PTSD, and in particular the sleep component, is what's been messing everything up. It's been an important driver behind my despair that no single doctor, book, podcast, lecture, or article from whatever sleep expert was ever about what I deal with. It looks like that just changed. I have discovered a book which I think I've been waiting for. I don't expect any easy solutions, if any at all. Right of the bat, it's just a much deeper and comprehensive take on this multifaceted beast of a challenge. It looks at the interplay between trauma and sleep from an angle I haven't come across before. It is written for therapists and it's a bit academic, so not everyone's cup of tea I guess. If anyone's interested, see here.

[Putting Trauma to Sleep: Attachment-Based Neuromodulatory Interventions for Stabilizing the Brainstem]

Putting Trauma to Sleep: Attachment-Based Neuromodulatory Interventions for Stabilizing the Brainstem

Sleep disturbances and trauma are intrinsically linked—so why aren't therapists trained in sleep repair?

Anyone who has suffered from trauma knows what it means to have sleepless nights. In fact, research has shown that at the heart of both trauma and sleep disorders is a dysregulated brainstem with heightened sympathetic nervous system activity. Yet, current trauma treatments largely ignore this profound interconnection between trauma and sleep. Putting Trauma to Sleep proposes that incorporating a therapeutic TABS model (traumatic events, attachment disturbances, bodily symptoms, sleep repair), therapists can better aid their clients in both healing from trauma and restoring sleep.

With practical clinical approaches and illustrative case examples, sleep specialists Jaan Reitav and Celeste Thirlwell demonstrate how therapists and their clients can integrate sleep repair into trauma work by enhancing parasympathetic nervous system tone and actively attending to shock reactions in the body. Dysfunctional sleeping patterns have been ignored for too long within the psychotherapy sphere; this indispensable resource will transform readers' understanding of both sleep and trauma therapy.
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/215616088-putting-trauma-to-sleep

dollyvee
The void gets excruciating from time to time. Yesterday was such a day. A chronic sleep disorder plays a significant part in that. I took a benzo last night in the hopes to have a better day today. That payed off very well. I had a good day today, thank you.

It's very important to keep your inner fire burning. Hooray for tapping into that! It's a delicate balance with C-PTSD. In my case I need to prioritize my mental stability at the moment. It's starting to feel a bit empowering to be even more strict in how I allocate my attention. I can't afford an amygdala hijack being sneaked in via the utter madness on the news every single day now.

A friend came back from a long journey. She told me she doesn't want to follow or talk about the news, because it stresses her out too much. Not the first friend to take this measure. It got me thinking it would be good for me too, since the breakneck speed of horrific events on the world stage has definitely been undermining my stability. It's been downright frightening. Watching the news of the day before has long since been my breakfast companion. I know, it's horrible. Lately I feel like this sets the tone for the day, and if I'm not careful I'm digging deeper during the day in an attempt to make sense of what's happening. That usually gives me some peace of mind. Not in this case.

Even though I'm a part of this world and don't want to retrieve further into my cave (on the contrary), it seems like the right thing to do for the time being. There's something I really don't like about looking away though. I guess staying informed is part of my survival strategy. That's been coming at a high price lately. It has been affecting my mental health big time.

I started not watching the news in the morning (or at all) today. It's disconcerting how uneasy I am about it. I've noticed many impulses to check the website. Apart from a survival strategy, I was clearly filling up loneliness and the emptiness of a life on disability before. Watching the news was only half an hour of my day, so technically it's not a big change. But routine is part of my coping mechanism. Now it seems even more of the void is blasting through.

sanmagic7
Yeah, the body keeps the score, right? No sleep, no nothing. Restorative sleep would be a game changer for many here, I guess. Thus far the TRE hasn't had a noticeable effect on my sleep. I'm shifting the time of day when I do it, so I can enjoy a bit of the relaxation (I usually have no problem falling asleep). Love and hugs for you too