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Messages - Slackjaw99

#1
Welcome. I'm also in my 50s and I was recently in the same situation where more and more memories- both cognitive and emotional were bubbling up to torment me daily. I recently engaged in some highly experimental therapy that worked beyond my wildest dreams, and I'm now in remission from cPTSD. One takeaway from my experience is that the memories and emotions bubbling to the surface are actually a blessing in disguise because they give you a better shot at grieving them away for good given the right type of therapy. Put another way, I always ran from my emotional flashbacks through drugs, drinking, sex, or any other dissociating vice. Now I run towards them- that is if I have one given that I haven't had any for about a month now.
#2
Please Introduce Yourself Here / Re: Saying hi
March 28, 2018, 03:57:57 AM
I suspect if you were to take a history of anyone with PTSD the majority would actually qualify for cPTSD. In the USA where I am, returning soldiers are routinely diagnosed with PTSD, yet 50% of kids going into the military come from traumatic situations including broken homes, poverty, and domestic violence. That up to 50% of new recruits with some level of undiagnosed cPTSD who go on to witness the horrors of war.
#3
Please Introduce Yourself Here / Re: Hi, I'm new
March 28, 2018, 03:48:05 AM
Hi James and welcome. From your intro, I'd say you are definitely qualified to join our club. Given that you have difficulty connecting with people, I'd encourage you to learn all you can about developmental trauma disorder (DTD) and how your family of origin (FOO) ended up blessing you with such an awful gift. For me, it was my mother (also a cPTSD sufferer) who recoiled from the sound of my crying as an infant and failed to meet my basic needs. Having an insecure maternal attachment plus later emotional abuse from my FOO completely handicapped me when it came to trying to connect with others. Other people could sense in me a level of anxiety combined with no self-esteem that caused them to not want anything to do with me. The exception were bullies who could smell fresh meat whenever I was near.

There's one thing that all people with cPTSD or even PTSD have in common. That is the inability to release accumulated traumatic energy through cathartic grieving and angering. So much attention is given to what caused the trauma by the support and therapeutic communities that this common denominator is often overlooked. I was fortunate to have such a catharsis, and now consider myself trauma free (although I'm still dealing with all the orphaned thinking and behavior habits). Feel free to PM me if you want to know more about how I was able to gain freedom from cPTSD.
#4
I've noticed this topic getting more attention in the therapeutic community lately. While I can relate to the categories of neglect, emotional abuse, and perpetrator mental illness as describing the actions of my own parents. Seeing those causes in a vacuum caused my to view my parents with contempt and hatred to the point of estrangement for a couple decades. It was a level of hate that had to have taken a toll on my physical health.

Once I became "trauma informed", I did a deep dive into my family history, as well as learning all I could about DTD (developmental trauma disorder). Turns out my great grandmother emigrated to this country from Russia where her family was subject to sadistic pogroms which must have traumatized her. I don't know what my great grandmother's relationship with my grandmother was like, but I know my grandmother appeared to be extremely narcissistic and hysterical, and my mother was completely shut down emotionally. My mother told me she spent something like 4 years on a psychoanalyst's couch in the early 60s, and she still has severe anxiety. I have no doubt that my mother was traumatized by my grandmother.

From what I understand about early childhood development, our brains are still developing after birth- especially in regard to programming the brain's social structures and developing emotional/autonomic regulation. The difference between autism and cPTSD is that autistic kids have a "hardware" problem (malformed or missing social neurons) and cPTSD is a "software" problem where the neurons are there but programmed incorrectly. For normal social development to take place the mother must be attuned to her child. The child cries to indicate it's hungry, tired, itchy from poop, or scared, and the mother soothes her child and meets its needs. This is how secure attachment and self-esteem develop. From a position of secure attachment, a child eventually begins to explore farther and farther on her own. When the child is old enough, the mother takes the child to the playground sandbox to play with the other toddlers. She teaches the child how to share and how to recognize the emotions of other children.

But a traumatized mother has problems performing these basic caregiver activities resulting in DTD and later, cPTSD in the child. A child cries, and the traumatized mother recoils.  I can now see how this dynamic has played out in my maternal ancestry going back 4 generations. It has allowed me to replace my toxic, parental hatred with grace and love and ultimately, I believe, is helping me to find healing. I've even been able to grieve for my mother. Had I not found this knowledge, I'd still be telling others that my parents were two of the most narcissistic assh*les on earth.

The posts I've read here on OOTS make me suspect that trans-generational trauma is major contributing factor to many here with cPTSD as the descriptions of parents who were "narcissistic", addicted, or victims of mental illness themselves are plenty. But those things don't just happen in a vacuum. Trauma is usually a contributing factor. I'd imagine that it's exceedingly rare to find the truly evil parent that hates and abuses their child for no reason other than entertainment.

I believe the trans-generational trauma in my family has been passed down via entirely environmental factors, but there are researchers such as Rachel Yehuda who believe epigenetics (gene expression) plays a factor based on some small studies of children of holocaust survivors. Regardless of specifics though, I think trans-generational trauma causing cPTSD is a topic worthy of more discussion on OOTS. WDYT?

#5
I think self-hatred should be part of the definition of cPTSD if it isn't already. Self-hatred is how I defined myself for decades. My only emotion was anger. Although like DR states, anger is sometimes "righteous". Righteous anger comes from seeing someone mistreated. In our case it can come from seeing how we've been mistreated, and that's actually good. It's good because this type of anger combined with being so sick and tired of this condition provides the requisite motivation to do the one thing different that will allow us to recover. 

That one thing that's so difficult to do is to is to "self-parent" your angry inner two year old with *unconditional love*. You have to give your angry two year old permission to feel- to yell and scream and, most importantly, to grieve for the lifetime of injustice and loss. This is the "psychodynamic" way of saying you need to turn towards and embrace your emotions as part of you. Grieving and angering are the only way that we humans can release the traumatic energy from our brains and live a normal life. The paradox for us is that we've been taught to fear and stuff our emotions as a matter of survival making this task near impossible. The stuffing of our emotions is how self-hatred breeds.

Having recently had my own cathartic release of a lifetime of grief, I can say that my inner critic is gone as is my hair trigger anger- replaced by self-love. My irony is that I still seem to have a healthy but orphaned outer critic due to a lifetime of habitual thinking that I'm confident can be overcome through mindfulness and willpower.

#6
Ideas/Tools for Recovery / Re: SMART recovery?
March 23, 2018, 10:31:55 PM
I'd like to very respectfully disagree from some of the previous encouragement towards alcohol abstinence via SMART, AA, Rational Recovery, etc. Here I'm assuming you acquired your drinking habit from the desire to numb the trauma caused by losing all your caregivers so young and not because you actually have the "alcoholic gene". If do you have the gene that causes you to crave alcohol no matter what, then by all means go to SMART or whatever works best and disregard the rest of what I have to say...

...otherwise, pursuing programs and treatments for *symptoms* of cPTSD rather than the causes is tantamount to wasting time playing whack-a-mole. I say this because I did this. I spent 35 years drinking nightly to smooth the pain from my traumatic memories bubbling to the surface. My family and insurance spent approximately $100K on residential and out-patient treatment programs, and I spent 10 years in the AA rooms "working the steps"- all thirteen of them. In the end, after following every suggestion for recovering, all I did was trade in alcohol for nicotine and sex/porn addictions because I still needed something to cover up the core trauma. The end result would not have been any different if I had gone to SMART or some other AA alternative. I don't know much about SMART, but I can say with confidence that that program is not "trauma informed" in their foundational approach.

If I had known then what I know now I, instead of all the time wasted whacking moles, I'd have sought out "trauma-informed" treatment and support, as well as learning everything I could about the psychopathology and neuroscience aspects of cPTSD on my own. I say this because having found a successful method for cathartic release of traumatic grief has eliminated the core pain that caused me to seek alcohol, as well as other drugs and vices to cover it up. In other words, treating the cPTSD has effectively treated my alcoholism where "abstinence programs" have failed miserably.
#7
Chiming in a bit late hear, but felt I had some experience to share with meeting people.

You described my social experience throughout my life perfectly- inability to fully connect with people, intense loneliness, depression and longing for some type of intimacy. I've looked back through my life recently to find the same pattern over and over- failed attempts to join social circles, getting rejected and ostracized, and wearing another layer of shame and self-deprecation decade after decade.

During one recent therapeutic healing session, it was revealed to me that my fundamental development arrest was my insecure attachment to my mother and it's detrimental effects on my ability to relate to others in a manner that considers their needs and emotions in proper proportion to my own. My mother, due to her own traumatic background, recoiled at the sound of my crying as an infant. She was unable to sooth and comfort me in my distress, and that only caused me to cry louder. The resulting punishment and neglect forced me to learn to suppress my emotions in order to get my nominal survival needs met. But my emotional needs went unmet, and thus kicked off that lifelong search for someone who would meet my emotional needs while handicapped with the inability to meet theirs. No wonder every friendship and romance throughout my life was fleeting and fraught with anxiety and suspicion. I was always trying to come up with a new gimmick to meet women and ingratiate myself into social circles and cliques always with failure.

It wasn't until I became "cPTSD informed" that I became aware of my self-defeating relationship patterns including unrealistic expectations of where I fit in. This allowed me to gain a toe hold with my left brain when, through sheer luck, I met a fellow misfit at a singles trivia Meetup group. What was lucky was that despite her shortcomings and traumatic background, she had a secure attachment with her mother, and thus helped provide me with some emotional regulation.

More than anything this past year, I've been in a running battle with my outer critic who wants to do everything possible to break up our relationship. My OC produces endless reasons why I should get out of the relationship- her looks, her nerdiness, etc. But becoming cPTSD informed has taught me that the real underlying reason is my fear of loss, and my fear of my own reaction to a potential loss. The relationship won out because at the end of the day I realized that she was able to love me unconditionally, and that was foundational to the recent cathartic healing sessions I experienced. Now at 51 I'm working to nail down a wedding date with my new fiancee for mid-June.

Another precursor to my recent therapeutic success was locating a therapist who I grew to trust, not because of this therapist's knowledge of cPTSD, but because this therapist trusted my knowledge of myself and what I'd learned about cPTSD in a way that empowered us to experiment with modalities until finding one that worked. Contrast this to most therapists who attempt to shoe-horn your particular situation into their preferred modality whether CBT or some novel, patented somatic therapy. Most therapists will sublimely disempower and belittle you in this manner. My current therapist would not even have to know about cPTSD in order to still fit my definition of a "good enough therapist".

To summarize, a best friend and a "good enough" therapist were the allies I acquired and that were *made possible* first and foremost by becoming thoroughly knowledgable on how cPTSD resulted in my shortcomings, relational deficits, and applying that mindfully to "right-size" my approach to meeting people. Put another way, becoming cPTSD informed, opened up a whole new world of potential social support not available to me previously when all I was searching for was the perfect savior who could meet all my emotional needs.





#8
Quotehave you read either "CPTSD: From Surviving To Thriving" by Pete Walker or "The Body Keeps The Score"?
Those were the first two I read. Pete Walker's writings on grieving were the psychotherapeutic blueprint for the dual awareness in my healing sessions. What a shame to hear about Van Der Kolk.
#9
Welcome to the community! I first understood from OOTS that the cPTSD diagnosis fit me as well. I'm an example that recovery is possible if you want it badly enough. If I could share one key piece of knowledge, it would be that despite the many ways we might have suffered traumas in the past, we all share one common denominator now. That is that as a consequence of cPTSD we are unable to release the traumatic grief and energy that torments us. But with hard work and persistence you can learn to do so like I have. To borrow a phrase from AA: "keep coming back".
#10
My big complaint last year fueled by my fatalistic cPTSD outlook was the lack of "trauma-informed" therapists in my area willing to treat me. This was confirmed, of course, by the grand total of two trauma practitioners I met with. The first was a "Somatic Experiencing" practitioner who immediately had me lay down face up on a massage table. She placed a hand underneath my back, ostensibly grabbing my kidney, and asking if I felt better. For the $250, she could have at least grabbed something more pleasurable.  The second was a "SensoryMotor" psychotherapist. After spilling my guts to her, she seemed so visibly disturbed by me that I almost expected the followup email stating that we "weren't a good fit" and ending with a list of referrals. All I can say about that was at least the kidney grabber didn't cause me additional rejection trauma.

From what I've gleaned on this site my complaint is shared by at least a few others.

On the third try I did find a person that I would say fits the description of a "good enough" therapist. This person while being "trauma informed" wasn't able to apply their preferred trauma focused modality to my particular flavor of cPTSD, but they did allow me to direct my own approach to therapy taken in large part from Pete Walker's From Surviving To Thriving. They were also open to experimental sessions using a certain plant medicine recently legalized in my state. Less than six months later and I now consider myself to be trauma free.

The lesson I learned from these experiences is that there are only two kinds of therapists out there, and I'm not referring to trauma-informed vs. trauma-uninformed. There are those who want to run the show, and there are those who will let you run the show. Over the decades I've suffered at the hands of therapists who like to run the show. I'm referring to the psychiatrists, psychologists, MFTs, LCSWs, etc who each come from their various schools of thought and research, and who specialize in treating certain "disorders" and even one or two who've invented new "disorders". My favorites were the self-proclaimed "addiction specialists" who hypocritically helped me trade my alcohol and benzo addictions for dependencies on powerful insomnia meds, brain-destroying anti-psychotics, and sex. In the end, all that was accomplished was a futile loss in a game of whack-a-mole.

Another lesson I learned is that relying on a therapist to "know it all" is a bad bet. A better bet is to take the initiative to read books written by therapists expert in cPTSD, distill the knowledge and apply it to my particular therapeutic needs. The takeaway from my recent experience is that to recover from cPTSD I had to become my own therapist- literally. My healing sessions required a "dual awareness" (mindfulness) approach where my left brain played the role of therapist/parent while speaking to my right brain AKA inner child self AKA emotional brain to effect a massive catharsis of grief.

While I am now working with a therapist who is "trauma-informed", I'm probably more trauma-informed than he is. But none of that matters. It wouldn't even matter if he wasn't trauma-informed. What does matter is that he respects the knowledge that I bring into therapy from authors like Pete Walker or Bessel Van Der Kolk. He's open minded, and is open to experimenting to find the right modalities for my situation. Beyond that, he listens to whatever I want to kvetch about without judgment. I believe that in order to do that, a therapist must have dealt with their own issues successfully. Because of these basic attributes, I found the first therapist in my life who I could *trust*.

Having a therapist that is trustworthy and empowering is much more valuable than a therapist who is necessarily trauma-informed. I say this because cPTSD is not a disorder you can ever recover from by relying on a therapist to hold your hand through the process. Conversely I say from my own experience that learning how to self-parent, and by extension being your own therapist, is a critical factor in ultimately reaching a place where its safe to release the pent up traumatic grief once and for all.  Would love to know WDYT.




#11
I'm still taking stock of which symptoms have vanished and which remain after my catharsis sessions.

It seems the worst of my symptoms are gone- I'm hoping for good. This would include:
  - protracted, infantile temper tantrums brought on by the the slightest triggers
  - core self hatred- replaced by unconditional love of my IC self
  - core fragmentation of my IC (emotional self) has been re-integrated
  - somatic symptoms such as IBS, hyperhydrosis, exaggerated inflammatory response, ET, insomnia, etc.
  - anxiety, existential dread, abandonment depression, or whatever you choose to call it- replaced with an inner peace
  - inability to release traumatic energy- replaced with a solid method for release providing an "inoculation" against future trauma
*A bonus I've noticed is the ability to taper my anti insomnia, depressants, and anxiety meds by a good chunk each week with no adverse effects.

Unfortunately, and as probably to be expected, the bulk of my developmental arrests and dysfunctional (protective) habits / thinking patterns remain in full force. I described these cPTSD artifacts to my T as "orphaned protectors" because there is no longer a core wound to protect. Perhaps this would not be an issue with "conventional" trauma therapy over years and decades as developmental arrests would be addressed alongside attempts at trauma processing. Some of the issues I continue to struggle with include:
  - hyper vigilant thinking and habits including watching too much cable political news
  - struggles with staying in the present
  - lack of discipline and focus in completing complex tasks
  - continuing to engage in traditional dissociative behaviors not out of anxiety, but out of boredom given that my condition has robbed my life of constructive hobbies and social contact
  - the "pro-social" areas of my brain are still mostly dark

Given the traditional, three phased approach to trauma informed therapy I'm likely in uncharted waters. I've unexpectedly completed stage two and part of stage three before stage one (stabilization). My instinct tells me that from here on out it will take a great deal of mindfulness, willpower, and proper reparenting to peel away the layers of orphaned habits and behaviors born out of decades living with cPTSD. Until my developmental arrests are fixed, I think it makes sense to describe myself as "in remission" rather than cured.

All this said, my inner * is gone, so the challenges ahead are really quite trivial compared to the core injury that "plant medicine" has helped heal.
#12
As someone who was "blessed" with DTD, I suffered two devastating impacts- the inability to regulate my emotions and the inability to regulate my autonomic nervous system (ANS). From age 15 for the next 36 years I both self-medicated and gobbled down every class of chemical produced by the profiteers of Big Pharma in an effort to get through each day. I've taken MAOIs, tricyclics, tetracyclics, SSRIs, anti-psychotics, stimulants, depressants, anti-convulsants, opioids, anxiolytics,  supplements, nootropics, eugerics (sp.), placebos, and let's not forget good Ol' Grandad. I probably left a few out, but you can get the idea. The sad part of all this was that some of the most destructive and toxic substances were prescribed by so-called "addiction specialist" psychiatrists rather than those that were self prescribed. I finally got so fed up with Big Pharma and Big Psychiatry that I decided to become my own psycho-pharmacologist and perform a neuroscience deep dive into the psychiatric drug discovery pipeline.

The following are my buckets with explanations to follow in future posts and edits. I hope we can agree to respectfully disagree where appropriate.

The Good (symptom reduction with less adverse impact):
    - off label anti-convulsants for anxiety and SNS control such as pregabalin, gabapentin, or baclofen.
    - off label blood pressure meds such as propranolol, Minipress, or clonidine.
    - some off label first generation anti-histamines (short term use) - promethazine, hydroxyzine
    - some 5th generation anti-depressants in the approval pipeline such as NSI-189
    - some MAOIs
    - plant medicines that must be discussed in another forum section

The Bad (some symptom reduction with more adverse impact):
    - most tricyclics
    - SSRIs, SNRIs - Prozac, Celexa, Effexor - examples of Big Pharma corruption and disinformation to be explained in a dedicated post at some point
    - most insomnia meds - including Ambien, Bellsomra, Lunesta

The Ugly:
    - benzodiazepines - clonazepam, lorazepam, diazepam, or any other 'pam'
    - opioids including Kratom - abuse, addiction
    - anti-psychotics - all "generations" including Seroquel, Geodon, Zyprexa. These are over prescribed, especially to  children for behavior control. They are grossly mis-prescribed to those with DID. They directly cause type 2 diabetes and movement disorders via cumulative destruction of dopamine neurons in the brain's movement center. The latter officially qualifies anti-psychotics as actual poisons or slow acting chemical weapons
    - alcohol - toxic to every type of cell in the human body

#13
Tomorrow I'll be 51 years and 3 months old. For 51 years and 2 months I suffered from a brain with the "fight or flight" switch stuck in the on position. As an infant, my cries for attention triggered my mother (a trauma victim herself) to recoil from rather than sooth me. I quickly learned to fear my emotions as a matter of survival- effectively eliminating access to the process by which humans discharge traumatic energy.

The mold was cast. I became a fearful and withdrawn child who preferred to play alone. I was easily bullied and ostracized. Were I to come home crying after being bullied, my mother's defensive reaction was to, at best, dismiss my distress, and at worst, ridicule my crying. While there was some physical abuse at home, the extreme emotional neglect and abuse took a far greater toll (the new ICD11 diagnosis misses the mark badly!). I was unable to make true human connection, yet to be accepted socially was all I craved. This set the pattern for my life- desperately seeking acceptance from women, from co-workers, from social groups, always coming across as weird, needy, or hiding something, getting rejected or ostracized, and slinking away in shame and self-hatred while adding yet more people and groups to my * list.

Each stop down the long road of cPTSD saw more and more loss until the resiliency of youth wore out and I began to give up. About 10 years ago I gave up on the idea of ever finding a life partner. About 3 years ago i gave up on trying to cultivate a career. Unemployed and friendless I was even bullied and ostracized by the HOA in a condo I was renting causing extreme agoraphobia. Along the way I took every psychotropic pill invented by Big Pharma, played whack-a-mole with at least a dozen different trauma-uninformed psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers, and even spent a couple years institutionalized for "alcoholism". I reached the point of active contingency planning for my own euthanasia.

Despite the horrid omission from the new ICD11 diagnostic criteria, I was well qualified for a cPTSD diagnosis. An LCSW from one of the local medical groups diagnosed me with PTSD in lat 2015, but it wasn't until February 2017 that I became truly trauma-informed and diagnosed myself with cPTSD. Since then I made an effort to learn everything possible about the condition from the neuroscience to the psycho-dynamic theory and even the anthropological aspects of trauma within our hunter-gatherer forbearers. The most intriguing phenomenon I came across was the growing number of case studies of trauma victims being "cured" by plant medicine (psychedelic) infused therapy in just a few sessions. This includes the ongoing studies by MAPS.org with MDMA, as well as all the sensationalist articles about Ayahuasca ceremonies deep in the Amazon jungle. Contrast this to the reports of conventional therapy taking years if not decades to produce a significant reduction in symptoms.

This being the short version of my healing journey, suffice to say I was beyond blessed to have partaken in the benefits of psychedelic assisted therapy using cannabis extract. After a period of preparation and trial and error, I experienced four healing sessions over the course of two weeks involving trauma catharsis where visually I appeared as if in a grand mal seizure, and acoustically I produced a wailing sound that could only be described as blood curdling. There was much more to these sessions that I will expand on here, or can be gleaning from looking at my resent posts in other areas of this board. http://cptsd.org/forum/index.php?action=profile;area=showposts;u=3013

Since these sessions part of me is still thinking this is too good to be true, but as I witness my most debilitating symptoms evaporate after 50 years of * on earth, I'm reminded of the miracle I experienced. My goal now is to share more details of my experience in future posts as I'm convinced that "plant medicines" will be integral to fast track trauma therapy in the future.
#14
UPDATE: I'm still sorting out all the aspects of my recent healing sessions.

Since my last post, I've had a fourth, very intense plant medicine healing session similar to the previous three. Rather than grieving past losses, it focused on the key developmental arrest of not being able to relate to others from a position of a secure maternal attachment. I had the opportunity to *visualize* myself taking my IC to the playground sandbox to play with the other toddlers. I taught my IC how to share, and how to be aware that the other kids had feelings too. I even introduced my IC to my girlfriend telling him that she was a very nice person, she wanted to be our friend and we could *trust* her. All this time I was outwardly crying as if just learning my entire family was killed in a car wreck. As a child my mother never guided me through these most basic social development tasks, and instead she just labelled me as "shy" while I played by myself afraid of the other kids. In adult life I always saw relationships in selfish terms of how they could fulfill my needs not visa versa. I think the crying may have been the extreme gratitude my IC was feeling from finally having a "loving parent" pay attention to him.

So far my daily, hair-trigger, life-limiting temper tantrums have vanished. The other day I was shocked to find out I wet the bed- not due to emotional issues, but because I now sleep so soundly that I no longer need my arsenal of insomnia meds. My body is much less reactive and inflammatory. The most profound effect if that I now feel at peace with myself to the core. My inner bully (IC) is nearly gone, as are my EFs. In a nutshell, it seems like these sessions have had an immediate impact on my list of somatic issues, and my core emotional issues.

The areas I'm still struggling with seem to be with the layers of dysfunctional habits and thought patterns built up over a lifetime of compensating for my DTD and cPTSD. The analogy of the TBI patient learning how to compensate with the intact portions of their brains seems apt. In the case of cPTSD it's an NTBI (non-traumatic brain injury). I'm also struggling with what I believe is a dysfunctioning dopamine system due to some of the excessive dissociation behaviors I've turned to in recent years. This results in difficulty planning and finding the motivation necessary to complete the tasks necessary to move my life forward. The challenge ahead is continuing to identify, confront, and correct the laundry list of key developmental arrests.

Plant medicine (psychedelic) therapy is by no means a cure-all for everything cPTSD related that the sensationalist stories of Ayahuasca retreats in the Amazon would have you believe. But it does seem to allow a path to inner peace at Star Trek like warp speed. It WILL be the future of cPTSD therapy.

#15
Therapy / Re: Need a push in the right direction
March 05, 2018, 01:49:31 AM
Two things jump out at me from my own experience:
Quote
but I just felt tired. I have to find my own therapist, and I've been looking, writing emails (calling is difficult). It's so hard for some reason, I manage to write one and then my energy is lost.
Tiredness is one of those "feelings" that often pops up to derail whatever productive, but unsavory task is at hand during the day. After digging deep in therapy to understand all the ways I fall into dissociation, turns out phantom tiredness is one of the primary culprits. What's it protecting me from? Perhaps it's the fear of failure or other negative outcome.

You've found one possibility for a new therapist (and life-changing healing), but that could turn out to be a bust based on past experience. Why not derail the process before you ever get to the point of being disappointed! What if the therapist turns out to be a good one? Then there's a lot of difficult work to be done such as looking at past traumas. Again very "tiring". I believe that at the core "tiredness" in the face of existential decision making is really about two things: fear of one's reaction to a negative outcome, and inability to live in the present. Writing the email is ALL you have to worry about NOW. Deal with the rest when it comes.

QuoteBut I havn't written them back yet, it was 3 days ago. Why don't I write back? What's keeping me? I usually do everything I should. I went through meeting the doctor, answering all his questions and now I decide to be passive!?
It's frustrating. I want someone to tell me to do it or help me do it, be there when I look for help and support me. I guess that's what's wrong.
During the years I was institutionalized (hospitals and rehabs for the cPTSD symptom of alcoholism) I recalled that there was a certain comfort in having my entire day's activities planned for me- kinda like kindergarten. Even now I struggle with excessive amounts of unstructured time because I haven't mastered the art of proper self-parenting. My parents were the exact opposite of the nurturing mentors they should have been in order for me to learn the self discipline necessary to tackle difficult tasks. How I would love to have a dedicated personal assistant to hold my hand and take care of life's chores while I go off somewhere to play by myself. The reality is that the inability to self-parent is a key developmental arrest that must then be learned later in life.

There's a term I like to borrow from the Millennials called "adulting" that's equally applicable to those of us blessed with cPTSD.