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.
My husband is at archery training and I'm at home. I should eat something but I can't stop crying. I didn't think I'd get to the point where I want to die again, I thought I had overcome this. I have not.
I won't do anything, I promise. It would break my husband's heart, I can't do this to him. He deserves a better wife than me but he doesn't deserve the shock of losing me this way.
I can't cope anymore. All my coping tools just don't work anymore. Even prn doesn't work as it should anymore. I've seen my therapist today and my psychiatrist was there, too. As a first step, he told me to take 10mg diazepam every day and increase it to 15mg if that doesn't work. I'll see him again next monday, we'll talk about medication changes then. Hyperarousal is so bad that I jump at every sound, I'm anxious all the time and flashbacks can hit me any second without warning. I have nightmares, sometimes I remember, sometimes I don't but then my husband says he heard me screaming in the night.
I lost hope. I don't think I can go on like this much longer. I know the cPTSD cycles all too well, the first flashback of repressed memories was 16 years ago and since then it was: Flashbacks of repressed memories, shock, coping, getting better, new flashbacks of repressed memories, shock... and so on. I don't think I'm strong enough for this. Maybe these last "new" memories of my mother sexually abusing me were the ones that were too much for me. I don't know if I'll ever get well enough to have a life that I don't feel like it consists of way too much pain and not enough peace and contentment. I think my chances are bad.
I have no control over my life anymore. I feel like a leaf in an autumn storm, just being whirled around by cPTSD symptoms.
I feel broken. Fighting a battle I can't win. I can't surrender either. I'm stuck.
-
... observed a solar eclipse.
-
Mornings or Nights?*You can’t say both (or neither), or add stipulations, or make substitutions- just commit and pick one of the two choices!
Concentrating on breathing. Just breathing. Even if the usual coping tools aren't working, keep using them as a sort of "healthy habit" routine thing --- that sometimes helps me feel as if I *willl* get results, like a placebo self-administered....
I continue to use my tools, just in case they start working again... Desperately groping around for something to keep me from drowning, I guess.
Yes, breathing, just keep breathing... As long as I'm breathing I'm alive, right?
You can overcome again. It gets easier with practice. You are not alone.
Have you read the book, "The Body Keep Score?" it's the best book on PTSD I've read yet (though I too have CPTSD). After, I read it I felt new hope that more people will find relief. I had this belief that it was something survivors just had to deal with, that there was no such thing as full recovery, but I have hope that it is possible now. Many people find EMDR effective, and it has been helping me.
Also, I watched a web presentation on MDMA for PTSD and wow! People who have had developmental PTSD for decades have experienced full recovery in the clinical trials. I even spoke with someone who was part of the study and he claimed he found so much relief, it changed his life and he changed his career path and is going to become an MDMA assisted psycho-therapist. It's so effective, it's being fast-tracked by the FDA so that patients have access to it ASAP, but still it may not become legally available until 2021. You can't do the drug alone, it's the drug in combination with psycho-therapy which is allowing people to do amazing work.
I know it seems hopeless and so over-whelming when you are crippled by your own emotions during a flashback. But, please keep working on your recovery. Healing is possible and you deserve to be free of your suffering.
I've calmed down a little, going to take meds and sleep soon. (It's evening here)
For me it was like being the weatherman. I could report the activity in the sky (my brain) without taking the blame of the credit for it; it's just nature doing its thing, and everything in nature passes some time.
It took the place of the other approach I'd been taking for years, the approach of being an air traffic controller in a control tower and all of those feelings out there being planes I had to land safely. Screw that, there was no way I could control all of those things buzzing around.
I never asked for them in the first place; as a kid I saw stuff no kid should see. Like everybody here, I had stuff done to me that should never be done to any kid.
So that's the mental imagery shift I used so I wouldn't be exhausted by all of this stuff floating around in my head every day all day. I'm not the air traffic controller, I'm just the weatherman.