Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Support Group
Find support with others who have gone through a traumatic experience. Whether you have chronic or acute PTSD, we are here for you.
I have been feeling my doubts lately. Enough to take it as a psycho nag flag and begin plying therapy tools as a precaution against the possibility of their escalating to. . . Places I never want to go again. The second guessing of all my recent decisions is beginning a backward march toward the insecurity of my throw-away kid birthrights. MUST BE PERFECT TO SURVIVE.
I find myself ready to commit to the belief that perfection is strictly a matter of opinion. Leaving other people's definitions of "Perfect" aside, a review of my own ideas of "perfection" seem far from consistent. What seemed perfect while I was coming of age strikes me as short-sighted and naive a few decades later. As my doubts pick at my world like a school of starving pirahanas, I find myself wondering if the only perfection in life is working with what life sends me on life's own terms.
Again, I don't know what I am reaching for here. Thoughts and reality checks welcome.
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I haven't written in my diary on my computer since May because I thought that my computer was dying. I got away from writing but my computer is hanging in there. I think that I will start writing in it again. It's so therapeutic.
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First, I hope everyone is doing well, and continuing to fight that good fight! Keep up the great work on yourselves; I'm rooting for all of you!So, I started doing therapy at the beginning of the year, when I was in my most depressed state, but with my therapist, I made big changes and steps in the right direction. But, over a month ago, she couldn't take my insurance anymore, and I had to stop...
In my house I yawned once when my dad was trying to tie my tie before church and he punched me in the face, so I learned to hold my breath, literally hold things in, around him.
Out in the street I went to go bowling with my buddies one Saturday morning to find rebels had blown up the bowling alley just before we got there.
It made a person superstitiously perfectionist in the pursuit of some sense of control in the world. A lot of my PTSD therapy work has been on my PTSD symptom of hypervigilance, and learning not to be on edge all the time waiting for an explosion, whether emotional like my dad's or literal in the street. My therapist from the VA sent me back to the country and the place in it where that bowling alley was bombed. That was so I would see with my own eyes that the war was over. I didn't need to be perfect any more, I didn't need to hold my breath in, I could exhale now, I didn't have to fear I'd get punched if I yawned.
We had tough childhoods, you and me, arfie. They're over, though, and we no long have to live being perfect and waiting to exhale. That's why I went to weekly meditation classes for 5 years right after my PTSD diagnosis--to learn to breathe. Still a work in progress, trusting the enough just to breathe freely.
Hugs • Pretti