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Old Feb 01, 2013, 02:38 PM
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Yoda Yoda is offline
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Member Since: Oct 2006
Location: Appalachia
Posts: 9,968
How often are you seeing your T and pdoc now? After the death of my BF I saw both my T and pdoc once a week and scheduled them a few days apart. I would look at the calendar and say if I can just make it two more days, if I can just make it one more day...

I imagine you are having some pretty horrific PTSD after that. I have read that Zoloft is often helpful when given early after PTSD symptoms begin. What meds do you take? But no med is going to fix you. It may help but you your life is forever changed. You need to learn what to do to make it through each day. Sometimes each hour.

Do you have any pets or would you want one? When my PTSD was really bad I would go to the barn and sit in my chair and feed my horse, Dusty, some grain and I would look at his calm eyes and I tried to emulate him. Sometimes I would hug him and bury my face in his neck. Other times I would pick up kittens when we had them. I would take a couple of young kittens and lay down in bed and placed the kittens beside my legs and I would focus on their soft furry touch.

Nobody told me until a couple of years later (or perhaps I couldn't hear them) but there is a technique called grounding for PTSD flashbacks. When your head starts rolling that tape again and it is real as it was the day it happened you cannot say it is not real because it is real but it is now over. That is a hard step to make when your head is still seeing 'that day'. You use grounding to divert your thinking to something different than what you experience during flashbacks. Touch is a big help. Touch the fabric of your chair and focus on what the sensation feels like. My pdoc gave me a stuffed dog and I would hold the dog and touch his ears.

You are still in a state of shock and will be for a very long time, I imagine. But it is not hopeless. You won't ever forget the pain but it becomes less frequent. Instead of every minute, every hour on your mind it someday will be thoughts just parts of the day. My trauma was in 2000 and it has only been in the past two years that I feel I am really coping now. Now I only think of the trauma a few times a week or so.

Have you talked about when to know when you need to be inpatient? I was inpatient for five weeks at first, then ten days or so a couple times a year then just at the anniversary of the death for awhile. Then I did an outpatient program for five hours per day on three to five days per week. I learned some things in outpatient and got some support but having a place to be and something to do helped me.

How is your sleep? I slept twelve to sixteen hours a day for a very long time to stop thinking.
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