Post-Traumatic Growth Journal

[Sanctuary]

Words feel so inadequate in response to what you've been going through. I struggle so much when there are weeks/months with disturbed sleep, so can hardly imagine the toll that decades of your sleep disorder would take.

I know that connecting with people online is very different to being around people but for what it's worth, you are not alone on here. There are others who can relate to your struggle and admire your strength in continuing to eat healthily, exercise, meditate, and keep trying approaches to bring positive experiences back into your life.

We joined OOTS at around the same time and your messages have meant a lot (although there's no pressure to continue messaging - my own returns to the forum are unpredictable and there may be long gaps). You are in my thoughts.

[rainydiary]

I am also grappling with isolation and relate to what you shared.

[Chart]

Funny how we can nonetheless "be around" people but still be alone. I just went and talked with a very nice young couple to help them pour a concrete floor. I was terrified all the way through. They had no idea. All went well, but when I left I was so relieved. The terror was... was... "annoying", if that makes sense..? I'm so used to it now... Just want to cry when I think about it. I'm considering trying antidepressants again. Is a life half lived still a life?

[SenseOrgan]

Sanctuary
Thank you for your kind words. I'm having trouble imagining anybody here waking up refreshed and revived, and eager to take on another day in the morning. Sleep is a big thing. And not separate from how we function when awake. The sleep side of things may be more pronounced in my case, but I think the long, exhausting grind of our trauma's is a big part of what we're all facing here. I'm afraid you do know what toll that takes. But I appreciate what you're saying. Chronic poor sleep is rough. Thank you for acknowledging that.

The recognition here is unlike my experiences elsewhere. It's validating to see people dealing with similar issues and viewing that through a cPTSD lens. I'm so tired of misdiagnoses and having to explain something so elusive and devastating to people who can't fathom what living such a life is like. It takes a bit of the loneliness away when I read what others are going through, and it's encouraging to see how they keep moving forward. I'm happy if I can reciprocate in some way.

It doesn't compute with my low self esteem that my messages have meant a lot to you, so I'll accept the homework this invites me to do. For me it's a relief to be able to speak about cPTSD with somebody who's in the trenches herself. Thank you for being so open about your struggles. That in itself is a big invitation for me to do the same. What you and others here communicate, revived my conclusion that nothing ever was wrong with us. We're all just human beings, working very hard to come back from things that overwhelmed our coping capacities.


rainydiary
I'm sorry to hear that. Thank you for sharing that.


Chart
Yeah, being around people can feel even more lonely. It's maddening to feel that and terror on top of it. Time after time. It makes sense that that's annoying at some level too. What has frustrated me so much about it is having the willingness to do whatever it takes, but still landing there after all these years. I do have a strong experiential lead where to take it from here though. I'll journal about it at some point.

AD's may or may not have helped me in the past. I took SSRI's for about 12, and SNRI's for about 5 years. A few desperate times per year I wonder if life would be better if I'd start taking them again. Then I wonder if my chemistry is permanently messed up and this is the way to make things somewhat bearable. But that never sticks for long. I've felt horrible and perfectly fine with and without meds. The past 6 years have been the best and I wasn't on them. I have even experienced what it's like to be free from the terror you speak about in situations that would have been horribly stressful before. With this very brain and body, without meds. The way I see this most of the time is that I don't want to put some tape over that flickering red light on my dashboard. I am still alive because I took it very seriously and followed my intuition through the depths of darkness. I hope I have some more of that in me. I'm not making a case against AD's by the way. This is a highly individual consideration and taking AD's again could be the best choice for you right now.

[Papa Coco]

SenseOrgan

I've been absent from the forum for several weeks and have been just now trying to get caught up with the posts I've been missing. So, I just read this entire thread from start to now.  First off, I can really feel you. Nothing you say is foreign to me. I feel the same way about most things as you write about on the forum.

I was also a late bloomer, and I also paid the price. Like you I was also surprisingly strong. Starting at age 9, my dad bought a pickup truck, a wheelbarrow, a chainsaw, two axes, two weed whackers (which were not powered back then: they were a blade on the end of a wooden stick. I literally beat the underbrush to death with it) and he would take me up into the woods on Saturdays to log the forest, and cut a roadway into the side of a hill, by hand to make a clearing on some land he owned. That went on until I was about 16 and he sold the lot. As a boy in Catholic school the other boys tried to beat me up a few times, but they had no idea how strong I was. It was core strength from years of heavy lifting, climbing and falling trees, swinging an ax, laboring over a chainsaw, pushing an oversized wheelbarrow, overloaded with firewood up into the bed of the truck. I did not have those pretty gym muscles that make us look stronger than we are, so I was stronger than them, but looked weaker. But like you said above, we aren't taken for who we are, we are taken for how we look. While my strength was on my side, not much else was. Smaller boys get picked on. Period. And the issue stayed with me my whole life. I always felt a need to find ways to sneakily show my strength.

Before I retired, when I was working in my cubical, the water cooler was right next to my desk. Whenever it would empty, I'd make sure people were watching and I'd go over to it and lift the 5-gallon bottle of water bottle off the floor, spin it end over end and flop it into the water dispenser, 4 feet above the floor, all using only ONE ARM. I'd pretend I didn't know anyone was watching. I was 59 years old then, and like a little kid, I was still trying to show my peers I was strong. And yes. THAT'S WHY I DID IT. It would have been easier to use both hands, but I was making it about showing off. Why? Residual pain from having been treated like a weakling for too long.

In my twenties I experienced what you talk about with people thinking I was young and stupid. I once heard that Hydrogen Peroxide could turn brown hair gray so, without knowing what I was doing, I used to put a little in my sideburns to try and start going gray young just so people would stop treating me like a dumb kid. It didn't work. And now I'm 64 and fully gray.

I get really into your posts. I just feel like you are saying so many things that I can connect with.  Your friend's maga hat photo was a good story. I'm impressed that you took the courage to write to him about it. I know the feelings of an upset stomach after hitting send, but I'm impressed you didn't hold back. Courage is the act of working through our fears. What you did took courage.

I'm so sorry to hear of your sleep disorders. I have them from time to time. I do sleep on a CPAP machine because of Apnea, but also, I have times when the only way I can sleep is with some now-legal pot edibles I can buy here. I eat one a night, otherwise I'm up all night, or waking up every hour to pee or just stare at the ceiling for a while.

I'm sorry to read of how out of sorts you've been feeling lately. I'm feeling it too, which is why I was so uninvolved with the forum for a few weeks. I was too isolated to even write.  I do know that this time of year adds to my distress. The fall is a trigger time for so many people, me included. I don't know if you have seasonal moods, but I have a few. My best friend turned into a monster when I was ten. It happened right after Spring break 1970. Ever since then I have bad depression and abandonment issues that flair up big time during the Spring break time frame. During the Holidays, right now, I find myself really connected to my childhood abuse. Sometimes it gets so bad that I wake up from a sleep not knowing if it's 2024, or 1974. Dissociation draws me back into the past as if it's happening right now.

I am writing too much. I write too much. I say too much. I'll go now. But I'll be checking in more regularly as I'm starting to feel a little better.

Papa Coco

[SenseOrgan]

Papa Coco
Thank you very much for sharing that. I'll respond properly later.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

It took me three hours to get out of bed this morning, because the night had apparently been so terrible. Muscular tension or whatever it is and just plain exhaustion. This is like the old days. Normally I can force myself out of bed and I do so because sleep restriction does make things less bad.

When I checked the news, I saw a big item which relates to my income. All of a sudden it's uncertain what will happen with it. The decision that was once taken about my situation is at risk. Just like that. It was once determined that I don't have the ability to work and never will. All question marks behind that conclusion aside, this outcome was an immense relief for me. I did not have to worry about income anymore and thus about having to deal with the extra stress from a work situation. Just being alive was hardly bearable for me. If fate would have decided otherwise, I would most likely have ended my life.

There's a big scandal in the making about the governmental agency concerned. It's been a big steaming mess for decades and every so many years national politics makes a futile attempt to clean it up. Another one is in the pipeline and it's uncertain what will happen and when. The minister is looking into it. What he decides can have far reaching consequences for me. It's not looking good.

To my surprise I'm not in panic. I do realize that I don't know what will happen and that it's out of my hands. I will have to deal with whatever is decided. Devastating or not. Regardless of what my mind comes up with now. I do have a lot of worries and scenario's that do play out in my mind. I stop them as best as I can. A part of me is open to the possibility that this, if things will change for me, can be a blessing in disguise. This is not toxic positivity. It has happened to me before. I truly do not know how this could affect me. It's all thoughts now, not reality.

In any case, life unfolds as it does. Not necessarily as I think it should. I'm realizing how different I respond now than I would have several years ago. There's a very big difference between those. I feel gratitude for what happened, for what has been set in motion that one day with aya. I did start to open up to life as it actually is. Sometimes it's gone again. But it shows up in moments like these.

[Chart]

Thank you for sharing all that SenseOrgan, it helps me. Acceptance when done consciously and without coercion or force can be very relieving.
 

[Papa Coco]

SenseOrgan,

I'm sorry to hear of the possible upheaval in your future. Not knowing if we're going to be okay tomorrow is a big worry.

I'm glad to hear you aren't panicking over it, just expressing concern.

Please don't feel obligated to respond to my long posts. I know I write too much. It doesn't hurt my feelings when I'm not responded to on every topic. Just writing a quick hello lets me know I'm still welcome here and that's all I need to feel good about myself.

My joke, which people who know me find quite funny is: The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The longest distance between two points is found when asking me for directions.

Papa Coco

[SenseOrgan]

Papa Coco

Thanks so much for reading this entire! thread, for sharing here and for your kind words! Never before has anybody shared experiences with me that are so similar in this specific regard. Thank you so much for that. I wasn't even aware just how much this void has contributed to my sense of alienation, of otherness. I know there is no justification for that, but the illusion of being "the only one" is hard to see through in isolation.

I shocked some much bigger boys when I was a kid by kicking their *. I'm not even sure if it was just physical strength. I just didn't tolerate injustice. When justice was on my side, I felt no shame and fear didn't stop me. I'd unleash something like the energy of a victim willing to risk his life for vengeance. That energy did not come from what those kids thought they could get away with... It came from a very deep place I don't think other kids tapped into. At that point it didn't matter who was in front of me or how big they were.

When I went to secondary school a lot changed for me. It was very intimidating. This is where I mastered the art of using humor as armor. It was one of the most destructive "decisions" I ever took. Off course it could not protect me from the insecurity about my hight and physical development. Off course things got to the sensitive guy I tried so hard not to be. Nobody could touch me. And nobody knew me. I was acting like a stand up comedian while I was dying inside.

I stopped being funny years ago. Thank god I don't have to keep the whole world at bay with my witty remarks anymore! And just like you said, this insecurity never left me. It has showed up in all sorts of ways. Those trauma traces still linger in my system. I have not felt all of it, because I'm still defending against it in ever more subtle ways.

I can totally get why you tried to grey your sideburns. Same sentiment. There isn't much sideburn to grey in my case. It barely developed. I had a goatee in my twenties and clearly remember my therapist urging me to shave it off for therapeutic reasons. Eventually I did, and it was terrifying to walk around with my baby face. So exposed and vulnerable. Just like I had felt in school underneath my facade. Nowadays I keep a bit of a shadow beard going. I'd still feel very uncomfortable with a clean shave. Sad but true. On the rare occasion I do purchase alcoholic beverages in the super market, the old fear of being asked for my ID can come up. I've passed the legal age by decades now, and the grey hairs are slowly marching in, but this hasn't left me. This * runs deep. It doesn't help some people are shocked when I tell them my age. People are capable of suffering just about anything. That I take this specific thing as something negative has nothing to do with how I look. It's my mind resisting pain and therefore perpetuating the suffering.

Sleeping with a CPAP can't be easy, I reckon. Do you get many stops per hour if you don't use it? A sleep study revealed that I have dozens of "micro arousals" per night and wake up so shortly that I don't register it. I imagine that the resulting fragmented sleep has a lot of similarities with apnea. It's madness. Thank god for the invention of CPAP. In the not so distant past I often used Cannabis oil for sleep. I'm not sure if it helped the quality of my sleep, but I remember having some unintended psychedelic experiences once in a while.

My sleep is usually better in the colder seasons. I've started to dislike the heat and appreciate the cold more over the years. As far as sleep and mood goes, I've pretty much stopped to look for answers in favor of being with what is.

I'm sorry you were so isolated you couldn't even visit the forum and the fall is a trigger time for you. It sound awful that the years are mixed in your current state. I do know what it's like to wake up not knowing where I am, but I think what you describe is of another caliber. It makes me appreciate your visit here even more. I'm getting nothing but good vibes from you. Thank you for being here.

Much love

[SenseOrgan]

Chart
Thank you too! It's so good to be here on this wavelength with you

[SenseOrgan]

Good news. Over two years ago I discovered PSIP. It was like I had survived the age of bloodletting and stepped into the modern age of medicine. Finally there was a therapy for what is really going on with me, coming from an actual understanding of the depths of attachment trauma. Far below all the well sounding bs peddled by people who frankly, haven't got the slightest grasp of what they're talking about. I feel this one in my bones.

I'm not even thinking about being healed. I'm thinking about something which actually gets me to the place where that can start. It drives me crazy that nearly every therapist I've ever dealt with believes that changing the story even touches that which matters. That place they themselves have lost touch with, and therefore cannot relate to and connect from. Good intentions and intellectual understanding have nothing to do with this. The system isn't designed around heart based healthcare and that's why it fails so many people who suffer so greatly. I'm sick and tired of being a canary in the coal mine. All I want is a fair chance to live. But I digress on my soapbox...

When I reached out to the PS Institute, I found out there were no therapists in my country. It's basically a US based crowd, even though trainings were given in The Netherlands. This maddening situation continued. Two years later, no therapists. I've been to the US for therapy before and just wasn't up for it again. Even less so in the current political climate. I don't want to offend anyone, but the country scares me.

So the good news. From time to time I check the PSIP therapist list. A recent flareup of despair nudged me to have another look. I saw a therapist not insanely far away on there and decided to reach out. The way things were described had me anticipate there were insurmountable legal barriers for me as a foreigner. But there aren't. We're going to schedule an online consultation and take it from there. I've been ready for this for two years. I'm so ready to relate from a vulnerable place with a safe other! Someone who really gets this and knows what they're doing (equals a great degree of safety for me). There are very few of those around. There isn't anything I'd want to spent my savings on more right now. I have those savings because I don't live. I survive. By Dutch standards I'm poor. If my money can buy me therapy which actually deserves that title, I'm filthy rich and privileged.

[Armee]

 

I so hope this therapy is helpful. You deserve to be filthy rich in healing. 

[SenseOrgan]

Thank you Armee, fingers crossed. 

[SenseOrgan]

The first online preparatory consultation is tomorrow! It's awesome. Wow, that's fast. Now I'm stressed for this. I'm afraid I won't be able to communicate how I was traumatized exactly. That I'll shut down and my cognition will go partially offline. I can't shed the fear that the T will conclude this whole thing is not going to happen for me. It's all thoughts. I see that it's irrational and still I'm in the grips of this. I'll review some old blog posts from elsewhere and the PSIP references and take notes I can reference tomorrow. Just a few days ago I had no clue I'd get this chance this fast, but I'm grabbing it with both hands.

[Armee]

All normal rational fears to have! And I know you said logic doesn't help and it never does when it is trauma. But sometimes getting logical reassurance from someone else helps me even if I have the same logical knowledge and it doesn't help. Does that even make sense?

Anyway, 3 things, maybe 4 or 6 or 10:

1. You are so courageous to try something new and to not give up on feeling better.

2. Not being able to speak about trauma - whether that is literally not being able to open your mouth and get a word out, or if it is that you can't say things in a way that make sense - that is a hallmark of trauma. The symptoms of trauma.

3. This is no more under your control than a stroke victim's ability to form words or movements.

4. If your new therapist does not understand this then she doesn't understand trauma

5. If your new therapist doesn't understand, trauma treatment won't go well.

6. If your new trauma therapist doesn't understand trauma and trauma treatment doesn't go well then the failure is of the therapist not of you.

Got it? Good. Go to therapy. Be as your trauma brings you. See if the therapist understands and can help what trauma actually does.

And no you are not alone in these fears or willingness to bring all the blame onto yourself. Another trauma hallmark.

You are brave.