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.
is not fun.
i am having so many OCD driven intrusive thoughts,all kinds,including S/H.
my anxiey is soaring and my meds do not touch it.
On top of that is my hypervigilance bringing me to the point of anxiety i have already written about here....last week?
All i feel is constant fear and it is tough to breathe through.
i just don't know what to do anymore.
i have been on a whole pharmacy of meds.
they may work for awhile,but then stop working altogether.
we are running out of options.
I really hope it gets better soon
Here with you
Sending you lots of support & very Big hug <3 <3
i have no friends in this city...i have my boyfriend who is wonderful but i can't tell him about all this-he wouldn't understand...
The thoughts are so overwhelming nothing will distract me from them-unless i end up dissociating...
Thank You for your kind reply though.
((((( lilmissy ))))
Thank You for always being there for me.
Growing up in South America I read a short story in school by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges called "Funes the Memorious." He was a cowboy (we call them "gauchos" there) in Uruguay (where I actually lived) and he fell off a horse and got (CTE)chronic traumatic encephalopathy. I related because when I was in a car bombing in Uruguay's civil war when I was 9, my head snapped back and hit the inside back frame of the car. I've had a crease in the back of my skull ever since.
Funes suffered from a unique symptom after his accident that left him with PTSD hypervigilance that made him too "memorious." He could not turn his memory off. For example, when it rained, he did not see the storm as a whole. Instead, he was so hypervigilantly aware of each raindrop that he memorized each rain drop individually by name. He did that with everything all the time, and eventually he became bedridden from the exhaustion, which is when the narrator of Borges's story meets him and tells the tale.
I never forgot that, because it presented so clearly what's so hard for me to explain to other people: what it means when I can't turn my PTSD hypervigilance off. I know what you mean about not telling your boyfriend; both of my wives were good people but I couldn't get them to understand, either. It seems like something so simple to overcome, like just flipping a switch. Folks, therefore, don't get why we don't simply flip it, as if we could.
I can't turn it off, either, silver. ll I can do is channel mine. I've found ways to be obsessed in positive roles. Roles:
1) Like being a student earning two master's degrees and a doctorate, and then working a community college job beneath those credentials. It wasn't about career, after all, it was about obsessive education in pursuit, along with therapy, of the knowledge of my past that gave me PTSD.
2) Like using one of those master's degrees to become a hospital chaplain in a Chicago ER receiving trauma patients right after their traumas happened. After all I'd seen and all of my own PTSD, friends and family wondered why I would want to see more trauma day in and day out. Duh. I was doomed to obsess about trauma every day any way, so I might as well do it in a healing context and in a healing role with healers around me who understood because we were all looking at it together.
3) Like teaching 3 death and dying courses per semester year in and year out. What normal person would want to be that obsessed with death? Only someone who can't stop thinking about nearly being killed several times in life, starting at age 9.
I'm not normal, silver, just like you. But I am functioning, and I know you can, too. It's a slow process to learn how to harness these wild horses in our heads that want to gallop in all directions all the time. I lose the reins still, from time to time. But slowly over time I've learned to get them to go in one direction for me long enough to function, to get something positive done.
The galloping (obsessing) never stops, I just make at least part of it work for me instead of all of it being chaos for me all the time. It's a painfully slow process and I'm not going to lie to you and say it's always worthwhile and satisfying. But it is what I can do. So I come here for daily support to do it again day by day. Obsessively.
I welcome your obsession, then, silver, to channel as much of it here as possible. I know it's not a solution to the whole problem, no one thing is. But I trust it to be one tool for us, anyway, because of psychiatrist Dr. Viktor Frankl and his emphasis on "logotherapy" to live on after he survived the Holocaust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logotherapy
"Logotherapy is based on an existential analysis[3] focusing on Kierkegaard's will to meaning as opposed to Adler's Nietzschean doctrine of will to power or Freud's will to pleasure."
Logotherapy means word therapy, and I use writing every day here to "will to meaning" the meaningless of the chaotic state of my PTSD mind. I also get the willpower from here for the wherewithal to "will to meaning."
We get it, silver. Please use us and this space obsessively all you need to, all you want, as one of the tools for you to channel anything and everything any time. We're here for you always.
Thank You,but i tend to keep this all to myself-my therapist and my friends here,and my best friend 6 hours away are the only ones who really know my struggles...my mother knows a little of it as well,but she can't really help....
((((( muji ))))
Thank You for taking the time to write what you did.
For your encouragement,and validation.....sometimes i admit i feel a little guilty venting here...
i loved Frankl's "Man's Search For Meaning" and need to read it again.