Topics

For those of you with ASD diagnoses, how did you or your clinician differentiate between symptoms of ASD and CPTSD?

I just took a couple assessments...First the RAADS, which is for mild ASD that would escape clinical notice. This I scored 129 on which is clinically significant and indicative of ASD.  Since that was my result I then took the AQ where my total score of 34 was "consistent with ASD" and 3 of the 4 subscales were "pronounced." 1 scale was way below both normal and ASD (attention to detail).

On the 1 hand I can see how my symptoms of CPTSD could color my responses. On the other, my language development was delayed, my mom thought I had autism as a child, and I am nearly positive my mom was autistic.

I'm also curious if you have dual diagnoses if you find it helpful to have been evaluated and diagnosed for ASD?

Something happened 2 nights ago that disturbed me when I remembered it.

I was in the bath and this is a problematic place for me to be in. It's where the most wounded part lives and I often find myself passed out in the bottom of the cold empty bathtub in the middle of the night.

But this time I've been more in connection with these 2 split parts...a 5 year old part that split off an older "8 year old" part to take the abuse that she was too little to take. The "8 yr old" lives in the bathtub but is really just the 5 yr old, dissociated/split.

But when I was in the bath 2 nights ago I got completely taken over. Fully blended in parts language, or just fully immersed in a flashback to the point where I had no sense of current reality in more traditional PTSD language. I forgot this had happened until the next morning when I was driving home from dropping my kid off at school and then I remembered.

That the night before I had been in the tub while it was full of water and while blended with this 8 yr old part with no sense of current life, I heard the voices in my head saying I should just drown myself and slip under the water and die. And then I slipped under the water in an almost comatose state. When the water rushed into my nose I snapped out of it a tiny bit but just barely. Not enough to realize what had happened just enough to sit up above the water.

I have no suicidal intentions at all. But I think I was reexperiencing perhaps a past period when this might have been something I tried to do.

It scared me when I remembered this. I did tell T and he was very calm and positive about it which helped. Positive in the sense it is good that these parts are sharing what happened in the past so I can heal.

Hi building off of Dragon Dancer's thread I thought maybe we could have a general CSA support thread going?

TRIGGER WARNINGS CSA AND SELFDOUBT



I'm in the throes of an emotional flashback unfortunately. Full of doubt. I know what triggered it, a few days ago. I might talk about that later. But right now I am doubting so much.

And when I doubt, my symptoms get really bad. So I probably shouldn't doubt. But then the fear of misleading or being wrong is so bad.

But when I was in Greece a lot of stuff came up about childhood CSA including details of feeling hands re-dressing me after assaulting me pulling up my underwear, pulling back down a flannel blue carebears nightgown. And even though the details of the assault I felt just prior to those details were as bad as it can be without going into extreme abuse, that part felt so bad because it was a confusing mix of caretaking (dressing a child) and abuse and covering one's tracks. I processed that there.

But after this trigger for self doubt happened a couple days ago I started to doubt these memories. Well because I don't have visual memories so how would I know those things. And I don't remember those things but I had like a flashback but again. No visuals. So then I thought I must have read those details somewhere. I opened all the books I could think of where I might have read something like that in kindle and searched all the words I could think of to see if I "plagiarized" it on accident. I tried searching the forum. I don't know if it's real or fake. I hate this feeling. I wish I had not slid backward in healing but well that's the way it goes huh. 

Has anyone read any account like that anywhere? I'm sorry I know I'm deep in an EF of some sort.

I'm going to be removing my journals as I am unsure if someone who knows me has been reading them but I feel a little uncomfortable right now. I'm not checking out but I will probably wait to start a new journal for a little bit and then try to be a little more anonymous with what I write. But I'll still be supporting others here in the meantime. 

Now that I'm recovering some energy I'm feeling ready to start doing a tiny bit of volunteering or advocacy and took one small step today in personalizing a letter to my US representatives to support a bill to provide mental health and substance abuse care to prisoners upon leaving jail. I wrote about my father to personalize the suggested form letter. This may be the first time I am using my voice and experience in this way.

--------
Dear Senator _____,

As your constituent and a mental health advocate, I'm writing to ask you to support the Reentry Act (H.R. 2400 / S. 1165) to help people with mental illness and substance use disorders receive needed care upon their reentry into the community after incarceration.

My father was booked into jail the day I was born, for breaking into a convenience store and stealing a bottle of red wine. I never met him before he died of suicide at the age of 53. He had run away from home at the age of 14 and did not finish high school. I do not know the circumstances that led him to run away from home, but I do know children generally don't run away from home unless the alternative is worse than living alone on the streets, unfed and uncared for. Before landing in jail he was an alcoholic and drug addict. I do not know what mental illnesses he suffered from, but I know they were severe, and like so many of the prison population, likely due to experiencing severe childhood trauma.

According to the Compassion Prison Project, 78% of prisoners have experienced 4 or more Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), such as caregiver addiction and mental illness, sexual abuse, and physical abuse. Just under 16% of the general population has experienced 4 or more ACEs out of a total of 10 (I have an "ACE score" of 10). Having multiple ACEs sets people up for a lifetime of expensive and deadly health and mental health issues. For example, someone who has 4 or more ACEs is 15x more likely to attempt suicide, 7x more likely to go to prison, and 1,350% more likely to face opiate abuse.

I don't know all of what happened to my father between being released from prison and his suicide. I do wonder though: if a program such as the Reentry Act had existed in 1978 and he had been provided the mental health care he desperately needed, would he have been able to heal enough to be part of his children's lives? Instead he ended up variably homeless and in subsidized housing, in and out of jail, on food stamps, and with a litany of health issues from kidney failure to cancer to COPD and heart disease (treatment provided by the government). In the end, he had nothing and nobody. I learned from his autopsy report that I obtained several years after his death that the government even paid to have his body disposed of using indigent cremation funds. That detail honestly broke my heart. Perhaps mental health treatment would have been cheaper.

Research shows that when people are enrolled in health care upon release, they are more likely to engage in community-based services and less likely to be re-arrested, and this is especially true for people with mental health conditions. Providing Medicaid coverage 30 days prior to release for eligible individuals through the Reentry Act will help connect people with the mental health care they need. In addition, perhaps it will also provide the opportunity for a child to have a parent. The impacts don't end with that one prisoner. It also affects their families and children and grandchildren. Supporting the Reentry Act can help not just that one prisoner, but generations.

[Truth to lies]

Truth to lies

It snows in Las Vegas
And the heat-bound children make it so
by flinging the inhabitants of their sock drawers into the whirring fan blades
As underclothes and overclothes blanket the floor around them
And the blades whip through the hot furnace air threatening to give truth to their lies

And to prove their point further
The children stand atop their dresser and reach up to the ceiling
Wildly clawing the popcorn white asbestos into snowflakes that settle around them.

Their lungs burn out the searing truth. It is stifling here and they are evaporating.

[Death Valley Lullaby]

After driving through my childhood hometown, staring down the ledge of my son's suicide plan, and then driving through Death Valley I was inspired to throw some words down.

Death Valley Lullaby

In the Valley of Death

There's life abound

In the scrappy scrub brushes

Clinging tight to the ground

Until they lift up and grow legs
to tumble around


The tumble weeds I watched

Walking to and from school

A child of the desert

where the tumble weeds rolled.


Mesmerized I cheered on their free-er expanse

While nature and experience knowingly forbode

Claws dug in to the holes of a chain link fence

Bounding a desolate road


That land is houses now, stucco and bland

and I didn't see any tumble weeds

When I rolled briefly through town

To see where I lived

before I lifted my shallow (so very shallow) roots

and learned to tuck my head shamefully down


I rolled, back then, with my family

My mom stepdad my sis and me

We climbed through the desert

peaked and descended

Descended. Descendant. Dis-ended.


For a decade more I clung dead to life

dormant like a seed waiting. Waiting.

Waiting for things to be right.


I startle awake, choking and drinking

In life dismantling this rusted chain link fence

of my own

damned

making


Tentative strands of green

Cracked through the burnt ground

Grasping, intuitive, busting the seam


Reached out went to college

Unfurled found a career

Vines latching onto a husband steady stable dear


Two flowers bear two children and I awaken to find

Through the slit dirty grit of half-closed eyes

Children half-grown and a mother dies


Here I open my eyes to finally see

This deadening fear of death until one death sets me free

I tumbled away then slowly set root

Reached up and out, fighting to sprout


So roll on, tumbleweed, I'm watching you go

as I look out my window down at the woods below

I look down to MY children's garden wild and oak-y and slowly, cautiously I let myself know


I see two tall redwoods, their babies gathered round

All stand steady kind and firm in the ground

Their roots stretch far, nourished and bound

For them, there will be no tumbling

No rolling around


They know they belong and they know who they are

These are my babies and I hold them in prayer

Praying to know

Tentatively knowing the cycle ends here

Hi...

My therapist has often referred me to the DBT nightmare protocol saying it had helped other clients. Has anyone here used it? Could you describe how and if it worked for you?

I am having a hard time actually using it for a few reasons and I'm not sure if i am just making up excuses or they are legitimate challenges to using it.

1. I don't want to write down the content of the nightmares because they would be awful for my family to discover and read on accident. But technically the protocol includes writing it down in detail.

2. It centers around visualizing a new ending for the dream that is positive,  but I cannot visualize. I can think about it but not visualize it.

3. I seem to lack imagination to come up with new endings and don't like what I come up with for various reasons. I just can't quite come up with anything to replace the bad dreams with.

4. I haven't ever had the experience of being able to control or even be aware when I am dreaming. How do you change a dream if you aren't at least aware you are dreaming? Things just happen and blindside me.

I am actually open to truly trying it this time so am curious others'experiences with it.

I recently listened to this podcast on narcissistic abuse and really liked it. It talked about it as trauma. It is geared for therapists and talked about the importance of recognizing the underlying significance and pattern in examples of the abuse that may come up in therapy. I found it to be validating.

I'll also note that I get irritated that people never seem to address Borderline PD abuse alongside narcissistic abuse. The damage is the same and the abuse tactics are the same. It's just that the motivation is different which in some ways makes it harder to escape. So I tagged this as being a podcast on Narcissistic Abuse and Borderline PD abuse even though Borderline PD is not discussed in the podcast, but I think it applies as well to people suffering from Borderline abuse.
https://baltimoreannapolispsychotherapypodcast.libsyn.com/313-narcissistic-abuse-with-brenda-stephens

Ok.

So sometimes in the early morning hours my brain seems to let me into a part of it that is normally closed off. When I am there I hear things like dishes shattering, children crying, women screaming, or weird little scared thoughts that come out of the blue like "choked! Choking!!!" And "r___!"

But then sometimes when I'm there in that part of my brain another part of my brain barks at me (like I hear a dog barking but the sound is in my brain, not outside of it) and it startles me out of the other part. It's like my brain is calling me out of that other spot and distracting me with an alarming but safe sound.

I feel like this sounds super crazy but I also don't think I'm crazy.

Do other people's brains here have weird ways of keeping you out once you wander in? I mean normally it's dissociation for me. It's like once I sneak past the guards at the gates there's another layer to keep me out.

Ugh. It feels so weird. It's not hallucinations it is clearly inside my brain not outside.

Hi,

I'm a little worried that as I'm trying to process things at the moment that I'm oversharing in my own posts in a way that might be triggering to others, and not being aware enough of my responses to others. I'm going to enforce a break for myself until I feel more grounded. I'll be silently sending hugs and encouragement and cheers to everyone. You are all amazing, so so supportive and understanding. I'm glad you are here. I'll be back.

It's too overwhelming to think about writing a letter to my mom but there's so much in here. I haven't grieved yet. I haven't really felt the truth of what happened. And it's complex and my brain gets confused easily. Partially the gaslighting. Partially the lack of my own solid memories. Partially knowing that her behaviors were driven by mental illness and so I'm always looking at the flip side...trying to be honest. So I'm just going to start with a series of short memos and see what happens. I don't know what i need to say.

I'm not sure if I have dissociative amnesia or if I just dissociated so much as a kid to tune things out that memories did not get laid down, or if it's simply because I have aphantasia (lack of visualization and other imagined senses like sounds and smells) which can be associated with sparse autobiographical memories.

But I'm wondering if anyone on here has experience with treating amnesia and recovering memories. I'm starting EMDR therapy with the hope it will help with memory and visualization but I also read a few things that made me fear EMDR might actually be too effective and will lessen the vividness of my already lacking memories and make the amnesia worse.

I find it helpful to know what happened and to be able to connect reactions to an event. Has anyone had success treating amnesia? Has anyone tried hypnosis? What were your experiences with EMDR? Anyone have thoughts on the benefit or forgetting vs remembering and processing?

Is it OK to start a thread for when we could use a place to keep us accountable/have a place to check in when we accomplish something we are trying to do for our recovery? I thought about using my own journal but thought it might be helpful for others too, to have a place? But I'm not sure if this is helpful or harmful?

I'll start and please chime in if this has the potential to be unhealthy or triggering and I'll delete it.