Bit of a mental mess...

Started by east17, October 22, 2017, 07:01:16 AM

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east17

Hi, also new here, lot of confusion....lots of questions....

Referred to MH services with depression and anxiety, but recently told they consider CPTSD is the main problem. Had just started Schema Therapy but having received this CPTSD dx, Psychologist has decided it would be better to go down the EMDR route in conjunction with DBT.

Will dealing with the CPTSD also deal with the depression and anxiety? If yes great, two issues solved in one go! If no and they still have to be dealt with afterwards as a separate issue, I'd rather concentrate on them now and leave the trauma stuff alone.

When I think about my life events and triggers - I just can't equate them to 'trauma'. Am having trouble getting my head around this dx. I feel like a fraud, that it doesn't apply to me.



AphoticAtramentous

CPTSD and Depression usually go hand in hand I think. When you experience trauma, it's no surprise that you find yourself in a bout of depression and usually coming to terms with your trauma and going through therapy for your trauma will lessen or remove the depression. Well, that's how it is in theory. :P In reality, everyone is different, your depression might just be a biological thing, or it may be caused your trauma. You'll have to figure that one out yourself I think and decide what to do from there. Unfortunately there is no easy way to tell if your depression is linked to your CPTSD or not, but there's a good chance that it is.
A lot of us have had trouble wrapping our head around our past events and defining them as 'trauma'. A symptom of CPTSD is that we doubt the severity of what has happened to us and will often at first have trouble realising we actually have experienced trauma. That will go away though, with support, therapy, and time. :)

And of course, welcome to the forum. ^-^ Hope to hear from you again.

Libby12

His, east17 and welcome.

I certainly agree that depression and anxiety are a big part of cptsd.

I had twenty sessions of CBT for depression and anxiety a few years ago. It helped a little, but as it never addressed the root of my problems (life long emotional and physical abuse by parents)  there were few lasting effects.

Like you,  I am in the UK and have never been offered any other treatment. I paid to see a counsellor and actually found that much more helpful than CBT because I just talked and talked about all my issues.

So my advice would be to seize all the help you can, don't ignore the trauma aspect and try the treatments your psychologist has discussed.  Don't minimise what you have been through.  The NHS wouldn't offer you these treatments if they didn't believe you need them.

All the best to you.

Libby

helliepig

HI I'm in the uk too
I'd say it's all one big lump of intertwining threads.  Trauma represents lumps of festering pain and fear that when triggered leave you anxious or as vague unease all the time. I also think that with CPTSD you feel so many things at once it becomes an amorphous blanket of grey pain which can feel like depression.
Therapy teases it all out slowly and starts to make sense of things. And then at the bottom of it there's the grief - once you clear the trauma you have to mourn what happened to you and what you lost  - and that masquerades as depression. For me, often long bouts of it because it is so hard for me to feel sadness and grief.

EMDR totally rocks. In my experience the CBT side of things helps to understand processing what the EMDR churns up, and is useful in going out into the world after to do things differently, but for me I needed and still need the EMDR to clear out stuff that nothing else would reach and that was too painful to tolerate eg preverbal stuff that rational thought cannot get at. Everything helps a bit though...

I still sometimes look back at what I've uncovered and can't believe it's me- the dissociated memories were never part of my life schema because they were too much to bear, so they were always going to feel "not me". But then I look at the huge pain and difficulties I have had and I think, yes it must have happened in order for me to be so traumatised and affected. Accepting it all is hard and an ongoing process.

barbidoll

I do not have anything to add on the treatment aspect but I am very familiar with the minimizing my trauma. Last year I was seeing a psychologist and she said that I have a lot of trauma.  When I left I questioned what she said and even now have doubts as to the severity of my traumas. I am guessing that is normal and a way to protect ourselves.  It'd probably not the best coping mechanism but I think very common for those of us who experience trauma. 

Eyessoblue

Helliepig, I totally agree with you on the EMDR front, I'm the same have had a lot of sessions and it really works but does drag up a lot of other rubbish things which I have both psychotherapy and EMDR sessions to clear it out and it really does, as painful as it is at the time it is well worth doing, it somehow frees the mind and enables previous unresolved memories to be processed into their correct place within the brain, I can't praise it enough. I'm also on the nhs and have been lucky to get these sessions through the nhs and have an amazing psychologist to work with who totally 'gets' me, which is the first time ever.

JamesG

greetings E17, from E17, London... synchronicity there.

I'd say that the deppression, anxiety and the C-PTSD will be all one big blob and treat one you treat all. I have to say that I was incredulous when PTSD was first put forward to me, but there are so many falsehoods spoken about it that I'd ignore all that. Trauma can come from many sources and effect us all differently, the cause is irrelevant in some respects, it's the now that matters and if you have the symptoms then that's just how it is and any judgement on you for that can go hang.

CBT is very good, especially if you back it up with lots of research on the psychology and physiology of trauma, understanding how it works is a huge weight off you. A natural response to unnatural events. Your body is just doing what it needs to recover and what may feel like crazy stuff is actually healing.

Take a seat

Rainagain

 Hi east 17,
I have a similar diagnosis to yours and if I were you I would go with the psychologist recommendation.
I've had emdr and it worked for me, took effort to go through but was worth it.
Getting the right diagnosis is a vital first step which hopefully you now have.
I try not to over think things, just accept where I am and take baby steps toward recovery.

east17

Thank you all for your replies.

Last week was the first 'practice' session of EMDR, we picked a not-so-traumatic memory to work with, so I realise it's early days yet; but the recent change from Schema Therapy, which I was just getting used to, to EMDR has left me feeling like I've been 'shut down'.

I had been writing stuff down and taking it in for the therapist to read, to help her get some idea of some of the issues I am dealing with, so in Schema Therapy there was more talking about and around these issues. In EMDR last week there was just a brief description of one 'scene' from an issue and that is all that was focused on.  I'm confused. 

She was encouraging me to try to express, describe, verbalise - all the things I couldn't say.... and now it feels like 'you don't need to talk about all that anymore, just a brief description will do.'  Is that all it's going to be every week, until we've gone through all the really distressing stuff?  Like once it's been filed away in the correct place in my brain it doesn't need to be talked about anymore?
Because difficult though it is - I do need to find a way to talk about it.

Three Roses

The way I understand, when we experience trauma and it's not processed by the brain correctly (the brain, not the mind), the brain stores it not as a memory but as a current event. EMDR moves the memories to the correct area of the brain to store them as a past event. That's why she's focused on individual memories, but that's only for right now.

EMDR can only take you so far, after the memories are stored in the correct area you'll be able to talk about them in therapy. Please let your therapist(s) know your concerns, and hang in there.  :hug:

Rainagain

Stick with the emdr.

It is a bit weird but I felt it did actually change something inside me.

I had low expectations but was really surprised.

helliepig

EMDR removes the blockages and fused parts of your brain and allows processing, after which you get a lot of insights and things seem subtly different. The thing you did the EMDR on has shrunk or just disappeared. It really is amazing.
But you also need to learn all the stuff you didn't learn, integrate the experiences and make sense of all of it with someone. And a CBT- like approach to get past the things you have learnt to fear and to re-experience life and people differently, learn relationship skills, connect and find who the new you is meant to be.
And then grieve it all. Once the trauma is cleared and your system is no longer on red alert there is room for rage and grief and that is hard because often you've never known how to feel either, let alone cope with all the losses and regrets at how you life has been so hard.

But EMDR is the powerhouse. It has been a life saver for me and reached things that I would never have been able to tolerate experiencing for long enough to get at it via other therapies.
It's also exremelly powerful and has on one  occasion for me broken down so many dissociative walls at once I experienced flooding- for 3 months -  which was beyond terrifying. This was with a therapist who is an internationally known EMDR consultant but who, I now realise, knew little of dissociation and child development and who was probably dissociative himself.
Subsequently I found a specialist who had trained also in those areas and her skill and ability to see what I need is incredible.
I have learnt the hard way It has to be done by someone who knows what they are doing and knows how to reach the child parts of you and keep them safe alongside it and how to help the arrested development of those parts.



sanmagic7

hey, east17,

i am an emdr therapist, and since you're just beginning this therapy, i believe it's a good idea to go slowly.  starting with a smaller trauma for you would be a good step. 

the idea that you don't have to talk is an option given to people who have a difficult time speaking their truth, can't find the right words, or don't know how to explain it.  it's not necessarily that you'll never talk about it, just that you don't have to if you don't want to.  the emdr process will still 'work' even without the talking, tho.

but, yes, if you want to talk, speak to your therapist about it.  emdr is an entire therapy, not just a part, so all parts that are important to the client are respected.  it is a client-centered therapy, so the client can make the decisions and the therapist will be the guide. 

i know it can be confusing, especially in the beginning.  it can also seem overwhelming at times.  keeping a journal between sessions is always a good idea because our brains keep working after the session.  our brains and our minds want to heal and be healthy, so they continue to do so, sometimes even when we're sleeping.  you might experience more dreams than usual.  maybe.  as someone said, it's different for everyone.

one step at a time - just keep moving.  bring up your concerns and hopefully they'll get resolved, and the confusion will lift.  and, yes, i had both anxiety and depression as symptoms of my c-ptsd, but as i continue to recover, they have been lessened.    best to you with this.  big hug filled with calm and soothing is winging its way to you.

Eyessoblue

Hi totally agree with everyone here, been through the EMDR therapy myself and it's totally life changing for me, but what my psychologist has said and I believe to be true is that you will need intensive psychotherapy afterwards to explain/rationalise all those 'bits' of the jigsaw puzzle that have come up and find out your thinking/reasoning behind it all. I'm currently just about to start this and have had the most amazing psychotherapist who's helped me no end. She's definately gone that extra mile for me and without her help I don't know where I would be.i hope you too have been offered the extra psychotherapy after the EMDR because without that I'd hate to think where you would be, yes it moves everything logistically in the brain but it won't answer all that you're left with and need help for and this is what psychotherapy will do for you.

east17

I don't know if there is anything further on offer after the EMDR is finished, I get the impression that once it's done, I will be expected to 'be ok' and have no further need of MH services.

A couple of weeks ago, I felt like I wanted to talk and talk all this stuff out of my head....
Now it's like, the things that happened earlier in my life, what do any of them matter? The clock can't be turned back, those years can't be reclaimed.
It feels pointless going over it.