Post-Traumatic Growth Journal

[sanmagic7]

SO, i'm w/ you and dolly on the news situation.  like you, it feels important to be connected, but i get no peace of mind (in fact, i think i lose a piece of mind!) in checking the news, mainly because instead of making sense of what i read, there's more insanity piled on top.  sooo . . . a day at a time, i guess, and we do what we can.

i'm glad you're beginning to see some therapeutic results.  keep up the good work.  and i empathize about the sleep problems.  they suck!  love and hugs

[Chart]

SO, Are you doing the Keto diet? I'm trying my best with the with it. It's hard and I'm always pushing the limits seeing how far I can go with the occasional sugar binge. What I notice most is the depression-lows a much less extreme. Just that alone keeps me avoiding sugar (as best I can).
 

[SenseOrgan]

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 

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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! 

[sanmagic7]

hey, SO, yeah, i'd like to know what that sleep med is. something that has helped me at times has been advil PM, altho i discovered thru my old T that it contains di-something, which has been related to dementia, but unisom does not contain that ingredient, so i'm gonna look at that next. anyway, we live, learn, and adjust.  good luck w/ it all, let me know if it helps.  this sleep thing is so annoying!  thanks.  love and hugs

[SenseOrgan]

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.

[Chart]

 

[sanmagic7]

yeah, no kidding, SO, about the whole sleep thing. thanks for the name.  i take it that's a prescription med.  i haven't tried unisom myself, yet.  it was just given to me as an alternative aid.  we'll see.  i agree how much of a difference it makes to get some decent sleep.  i just wish we didn't, none of us, have to deal w/ it.  love and hugs

[SenseOrgan]

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... 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.

[sanmagic7]

hey, SO, i do hope you find some good sleep somehow.  i'm doing a lot of those things, altho i haven't tried PMR yet, so i might give that a go.  not being able to sleep properly is the worst.  i was on major benzo's for years, and while it took some doing to wean off them (or i guess 'titrate' is the word to use now.  i'm old, so don't always keep up with the changes, lol!) they were so helpful.  and i've used years-old ones as well - they worked perfectly fine for me.  good luck w/ all of it.

very glad to hear you were able to be outside, working in a garden, connecting.  sounds great!  i hope you'll be able to keep it up somehow, or at least some of it here and there thru the year.  but no pressure.  i get how we have energy for some things some of the time.  do what you are able - it's good enough.  love and hugs

[SenseOrgan]

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.

[sanmagic7]

hey, SO, so sorry your day was so rough.  i hope today is better.  love and hugs

[Chart]

Sounds really rough, SO. Also sounds like you're lucide and coping, if not perfectly, nonetheless effectively. "...a little less so" is significant, maybe not major, but concrete. Can you make a link with your recent nervous system modalities? Not a leading question, I'm truly curious.
 

[SenseOrgan]

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

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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.

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[sanmagic7]

this is so wonderful to hear, SO.  so very glad for you.  coming to a realization as big as this contains so many facets, so many directions.  well done, you, for getting yourself ready so that you could come to this and be ready to embrace it, envelop it while it envelops you.  very good to hear you have your own pace, are aware of it, and are honoring it.  again, well done!    love and hugs