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Messages - Blueberry

#1
1)  :sunny:  :sunny:
2) Had nice chats with various different people today, all strangers I got talking to for various reasons
3) Finally managed  :hoovering:  :hoovering: everywhere in apt for the first time in I'd rather not say how long ;D
#2
Recovery Journals / Re: Forging New Paths
March 27, 2024, 10:46:22 PM
Haven't taken my Quetiapin since about the 24th. That's just a few days of course. I hadn't actually intended to go off them but then it happened that way... One thing I notice is that I tend to go to bed a lot later when I don't take this medicine. However once I've noted that, I can work on changing that. Like say to myself it's Quetiapin time, so get ready for bed and go instead of taking Quetiapin ;D

Quote from: Blueberry on March 25, 2024, 12:47:27 PMPsych doc says that lack of deep quality sleep will be contributing to my feeling of 'nothing to live for, no goals'. I think more, it could be, but it might not be. It might be something completely different but it's easier to prescribe medication than arrange even more therapy for me to look at why. There's been enough stuff going on - realisations and deaths and bad news and even big changes last year undoubtedly still reverberating - that could cause a huge EF of 'nothing to live for' that we don't need to go mucking around with chemicals imho. Trauma T is starting up again for me 'after Easter' tho I still haven't been given an exact date. But that will be a place where I can hopefully begin to work on what's behind 'nothing to live for'.

My occupational T agrees with psych doc that insomnia and lack of sleep will cause problems with goals simply because lack of sleep equals lack of energy to accomplish those goals. Not sure where psych doc is, but imo OT is not looking deep enough. It's not that I don't have enough energy to work on my goals :no: It's a case of an EF saying "it's not worth it" or even "I don't want to exist"!! Then I can't access my energy, it all flows away somewhere. I probably don't even want to access my energy, I just want to curl up and at best self-soothe re-reading books I know almost off by heart or, even less active, hide under the blankets where it's warm and I can just doze for hours or days. And not only can I not access my energy, I can't access my goals either - they all seem pointless, but not pointless in ways I could list, it's more like they feel completely and utterly pointless. Big, big EF.

Also a big realisation :thumbup:  :thumbup:
Only brought about thru my experimenting the past few days with meds and thru OT's comment.
#3
1) Lovely orangey-red sunset on the clouds outside my window
2) A few minutes ago same was golden
3) Got lots done today
#4
Successes, Progress? / Re: Avoided collapse
March 27, 2024, 05:53:21 PM
Thank you Kizzie :hug:

Continuing today too because I just noticed half an hour ago that I don't have much energy left this evening. Vacuuming is very overdue, but it's going to wait till tomorrow or Saturday so I have enough energy for choir practice tonight. Have to get to choir practice too and sort my music sheets before I go (chaos reigns in that file). Such tiny things can be too much. But I noticed and set my priorities :thumbup:
#5
Successes, Progress? / Re: Avoided collapse
March 27, 2024, 10:15:07 AM
Thank you all for your words and cheers :)  :)  :)  :grouphug:
#6
Successes, Progress? / Avoided collapse
March 26, 2024, 01:11:20 PM
Yesterday I realised I'd been on the brink of collapse again. BUT I caught myself and took steps to not collapse. Today I told my occupational therapist but also added he might not agree with me on the impending collapse (he tries to help me see the positive that I am managing - which is good because within a week I always manage something). He agreed with me though that over the past few weeks it had looked like brink-of-collapse.

Now I've avoided that. Or averted is maybe more appropriate. :)  :cheer:
#7
Sexual Abuse / Re: Facing my offender
March 25, 2024, 09:24:54 PM
I would tend to agree with your AA sponsor on this one.
Writing a letter can be healing if you know you're not going to send it. We have a whole board of letters-to-not-send called Letters of Recovery  https://www.cptsd.org/forum/index.php?board=43.0

I have faced abusers (family members) not even about SA, just some fairly minor stuff they did - it wasn't minor for me in its affects but what they were hearing was peanuts. I was not well prepared or at all prepared in fact and I had no support around. Result: huge retraumatisation.

If you do decide you want to send it, I'd suggest you ask yourself beforehand what you intend to achieve? In my experience, it's unlikely that writing to this person will clear up your confusion and remove the pain. Prepare well. Get support irl - not just here on the forum.

#8
Three more :)

1) I'm definitely doing better than the past while
2) The course I'm doing is helping me understand a fair bit about how cptsd affects me and those realisations are helpful
3) I found 2 CDs and a book from the public library that had gone missing in my apt... They're all due in 2 days and I've already renewed them for about 6 weeks, no more renewal possible. It feels like such a relief, such a weight gone. I'm surprised how much relief is there! I needed to tell somebody and it's too late to phone anybody here in this part of the world.

4) I listened to hymns on YouTube and sang along a bit too, practising something helpful :)
#9
1) It's a warm sunny day
2) I enjoyed hanging my washing up in the garden
3) I did a little tidying and cleaning
#10
Recovery Journals / Re: Forging New Paths
March 25, 2024, 12:47:27 PM
Stayed up half the night again. So I didn't take Quetiapin because it was just too late. Slept from 3am to 10am. I'm not sure how deeply. I was still tired when I got up and took my thyroid med. Made myself some tea and went back to bed. But fortunately I wasn't sleepy so I got up again :thumbup: and have been up ever since doing various things, mostly useful to some extent. Had breakfast, took Citalopram. I feel a lot better than when after Quetiapin! The tiredness I felt when I got up this morning feels so different and much better than after Quet., where it's not tiredness per se, it's a heaviness and inability to stay awake and slow thinking and difficulty dredging up things I actually know like the names of my meds. It took me ages last night to come up with the name Citalopram, just as a minor example.

Psych doc says that lack of deep quality sleep will be contributing to my feeling of 'nothing to live for, no goals'. I think more, it could be, but it might not be. It might be something completely different but it's easier to prescribe medication than arrange even more therapy for me to look at why. There's been enough stuff going on - realisations and deaths and bad news and even big changes last year undoubtedly still reverberating - that could cause a huge EF of 'nothing to live for' that we don't need to go mucking around with chemicals imho. Trauma T is starting up again for me 'after Easter' tho I still haven't been given an exact date. But that will be a place where I can hopefully begin to work on what's behind 'nothing to live for'.

Now I remember those drops I got inpatient didn't cause nightmares so much as: they brought up a whole pile of emotions overnight that I don't normally feel when I'm thinking up solutions. I can't remember exactly but it's possible those emotions turned into nightmares. While it might be a good thing to go into those emotions bit by bit, that wasn't actually the plan at the time. And it certainly wasn't bit by bit.
#11
Recovery Journals / Re: Forging New Paths
March 24, 2024, 06:23:48 PM
Thank you NK and Armee!

Yes, I might share how it's going for me, Armee, though a lot of that may also end up on real paper in my notebook. Wrote 5 or 6 pages yesterday. But yes I may write general trends and progress on here or maybe in my mbr journal. I'll see.

______________

The following maybe belongs in Sleep or Medication but as I think it's more self-reflection than discussion, I'm putting it here.

I'm back on Quetiapin half-dosage, so about 12mg, for sleep problems. Now instead of lying awake half the night reading in bed/doing crosswords or sitting at computer and then not being able to get up in the morning due to 3-4 hours sleep, I take my dosage anytime between 8 and 10pm, fall asleep shortly after (certainly before midnight), tend to wake up round about 7am but really groggy and fall asleep again and get up sometime in the afternoon. I'm so tired and sleepy, I don't know if I got up and took my 2 different day meds or not. My brain is too fuzzy to even know what those are.

One of the reasons psych doc put me back on Quetiapin (after I gave up on them myself after misunderstanding that they were only for really bad phases - they're not, they're for every night) was the amount of depression I feel - no goals, no reason to get up, no reason to live, no reason to do anything, except lie in bed and doze and read. But it seems I'm doing that with these meds too, just a lot more dozing and sleeping than reading. On top of that, my anxiety is up and my dreams are more anxiety-filled than normal. In my dream a couple of nights ago I had somebody spending the night who couldn't look after herself and it is somebody I care about tho not FOO, she disappeared and instead of looking for her properly and/or letting the police/SAR know, I went back to bed and thought I'd deal with it in the morning and by then it was too late :aaauuugh:   The dream is following me around now, sequels.

I'm wondering if it's worth it. My anti-deps Citalopram seem to have no bad effects on me, nor do my pills for low thyroid. So it's worth taking them obviously, though I'm not sure if I did today. I'm just not big on putting chemicals in my body especially since sometimes the side-effects are what the drugs are supposed to get rid of. At least, that was my experience with an itchy skin medication - it was so bad on a public holiday I had to go to Emergency. Yes, it's not very scientific to base my idea on side-effects on one example. There are other side-effects to Quetiapin, for me anyway, like shaking a little. On Friday I did get up in the afternoon and do some stuff like go to a funeral and I was weak on my feet and a bit shaky. Not because the deceased person was so close to me, she wasn't.

Anyway, I'm going to try to get hold of my previous GP who is more or less retired and see if he can't suggest something better for me, something natural, which I could then discuss with psych doc. My previous GP would also find it very important to discuss why I'm not sleeping, why I don't seem to want to fall asleep. Much bigger picture than throw some medicine down the hatch. If necessary, yes! - like my thyroid meds. He will probably remember that my body reacts overly-strongly to some stuff. When I was inpatient the psych nurses regularly handed out 20 drops of something I've forgotten the name of or maybe just 10 drops to try out - something soothing for when you're agitated. I felt pushed into taking it once actually and more or less fell into bed after taking it. I did sleep but with full-on nightmares. I would rather have been awake and sorting through what had happened in my head. They did put a note in my file about not giving me much again. I took it once more when I really couldn't sleep but said - 2 drops max. Those 2 drops worked. Here they try and stop me sorting things through in my head - ruminating, brooding. But maybe that's just part of who I am rather than something to be got rid of? I started really early as a child due to what was happening in FOO - wondering "Why me? Why don't my parents want me?" etc. Nowadays I think I often do ruminate myself into a solution of sorts, so it's not so bad really. Especially better than taking psycho chemicals with unhelpful side-effects.

Anyway, enough on that. My thinking processes are slowed down too. But I will go and do today's course work. I suppose it's possible that the course work is having an affect on me already and that's tiring.
#12
Once the trauma is making itself known though is still covered, in my experience trying to leave it covered doesn't work. Mine made itself known through physical pain that eventually took over my body and in exhaustion. You can put up with that, until you can't. Different people will put up with longer. Different people's trauma shows up in different ways, but it shows up.

As for 'digging up' trauma - it depends how it is dug up, how fast, by whom and what support you have. Also whether you can self-soothe in a healthy way and how much resiliency you have.

You don't have to respond, these are more questions for you to think about. Are you uncovering trauma with a trauma-informed therapist? Then I'd suggest discussing all this with them. If you're uncovering trauma on your own, I can only suggest going slowly and allowing yourself rest and recuperation between uncovering episodes.

Also it's good to touch bases here. You say you feel overwhelmed so you can't be a good person or a good mum. Feeling overwhelmed is pretty standard when recovering from trauma. It has nothing to do with being a good or bad person or being a good parent!! The very fact that you are trying to heal from your trauma shows that you have this good quality. It also shows you're trying to be a good parent - the more you heal the better you can parent. Leaving the trauma covered unfortunately doesn't prevent intergenerational trauma. Trying to heal it goes a certain distance in reducing the impact (I don't know by how much, no idea.)
#13
Recovery Journals / Re: Forging New Paths
March 23, 2024, 04:43:52 PM
Quote from: Papa Coco on February 27, 2024, 05:59:24 PMI can feel the excitement in your words around participating in this course.

I'm excited now to hear all about it once you do it.

I have started the course. Finally, in earnest, today. That is, I've dedicated a notebook for writing stuff, especially homework / being honest with myself + whatever else comes up and/or occurs to me. I might sometimes write about something on here or more likely on my private Journal but nothing like the notes I sometimes write up on freebie sessions over here https://www.cptsd.org/forum/index.php?board=272.0

Among other things, you have to pay for this course so I don't think it's fair to share all that information around. This is my view, other people may see it differently. Please no discussion of that here on my Journal.

More importantly for me, doing this course is part of my attempt to improve my self-discipline of doing things for ME, of taking those healing steps regularly, making a habit out of them, getting back up again and setting off again when I've fallen on my nose or just stopped practising for whatever reason. 

I may be on the forum a little less as I try to make space for healing steps and the exercises and daily practice in the program. I'll see how that all works out and how I progress. :)
#14
Recovery Journals / Re: Hope's Journal 2024
March 21, 2024, 08:45:27 PM
Hi Hope,

You sound upbeat and positive! :sunny:

It's nice to read  :)  :hug:
#15
Recovery Journals / Re: Forging New Paths
March 20, 2024, 10:03:42 PM
Quote from: sanmagic7 on February 23, 2024, 03:23:13 PMblueberry, to my mind, if you think it fits for you, could be helpful, why not sign up?  does re-setting your nervous system make sense to you? do you know what that exactly means? (i'm afraid i don't)

Re-aligning/re-setting your nervous system refers to getting more and more out of Freeze and Fight/Flight and into Safe & Social, which he bases on Steve Porges' poly-vagal theory. It makes sense to me.

This week I'm tracking my nervous system to see which of the three states I'm in during my waking hours. No Safe & Social so far. This is the first homework in the 12 week course.

Unfortunately I discovered today that I took the wrong evening meds the other day :stars: but at least this explains in part why I did zero today - lay in bed mostly sleeping with strange dreams, no stranger than normal for me after the correct medication though. No worries, nobody needs suggest I go to the doctor's.