Off topic but answering SleepsWithButterflies question/paragraph to me....

It wasn't my not clicking with the therapist that made me make this decision It was that I grew to care too much for that therapist that got fired. I depended on her to ALWAYS be there, And up until she got fired she was there day or night for me. And then suddenly I had only a few days with no explaination (she finally did explain against agency rules why she was fired and why she was fighting them in court) but I was left hanging and it took me years of bouncing from this therapist or that to find someone that knew what flashbacks were and how to help me the way she was. Back then in the 1980's people were just beginning to understand the effects of child sexual abuse let alone figure out how to help someone with non war related flashbacks.

and I never want to feel that helpless and dependant on a therapist to ALWAYS be there. Therapists are human and the ***** hits the fan for them too and like I found out sometimes the ***** hitting the fan for them means clients are left hanging and theres nothing that can change that.

And the way I see it - Most of therapy work is done by the client anyway. if the client is lucky they see or hear from their therapist 2 hours out of 168 hours a week (24i in a day X7 days a week). That leaves 166 hours where the client has to take care of themselves. So when I decided not to be so helpless and dependant of my therapist to ALWAYS be there I started taking care of and control of what gets done during therapy time too by taking my peoms journals and so on with me and coming up with projects of my own geared to help me with my problems. and if its something like suicidal thoughts where I don't want to put the therapist into a position of choosing not to hospitalize me or the agencys protocals that require her to do so I make sure am taking care of it the right ways - with my friends, writing and so on.

Why did I stay up all night?

I dont intentionally stay up nights my sleep cycle got messed up and there was no reason for me to do any thing about it.

my sons not here so I don't HAVE to get up at all if I don't want to so I just go with the flow. When Im tired I sleep, when Im hungry I eat, when I want to go for a walk I go. Since its just me now theres no real need for any schedules.

besides theres no need for schedules here now Without having my son to take care of I have nightmares and panic attacks, not having my son asleep in his room I worry about him, where he is, where he is sleeping tonight, did he try to run away today...and there was a whole bunch crap from a DHS case worker bla bla bla the list goes on but the jist of it is my body's sleep cycle slowly changed until I now sleep only a couple hours at a time and then Im up for a bit.

It's not too bad I still get out and do things and get things done but right now my therapist and I are starting to work on one of my therapy ideas and to do this I need to know if the pattern of the nightmare has changed as in what days are hardest and more detailed and so on so I need to get back into sleeping nights so that I can compare now to the pattern that was there before my sleep schedule started going haywire.

So this week instead of sleeping from 4am to 6 or 8 am and then again a few hours later sleep for an hour and so on .. when I woke up the first time yesterday morning I made myself stay up so that by 10:30 I was ready to start my bedtime routine (long bath and relaxation music and sleeping) It sort of worked I fell asleep with the tape my therapist made me around 12 and woke up at little after 4 then I used the tape again and fell back to sleep by 530 and woke up at around 8. then I stayed up all day today.

Tonight its almost 8:30pm and Im ready for sleep but am going to stay up until 10-11. if this works by the weekend I will be back on my normal sleeping schedule I was when I made the last charting of the nightmare and starting next week I can start logging in the nightmare patterns Which will tell me if anything has changed how and why.

this will give my therapist and I a starting point for the therapy plan we are starting to work on - using relaxations techniques (also otherwise known as self hypnosis, or dissociation) to find out the content of the nighmare because I have no memory of the content after a certain point but wake up in panics. Do I recommend others to try this - not without their therapist help and they need to have complete trust in their therapist judgement and the therapist needs to be completely comfortable using various relaxation techniques.