((Alisha88)),

Yes, you are probably at a point in your healing in PTSD where you are feeling very "exposed" right now. When someone developes PTSD, they will be very sensitive for a while. Everyone that developes PTSD says, "I wish I was my old self where I didn't react as much as I am now". And that is why developing a "safe" place and a sense of feeling "safe" with a therapist is the first thing that must be established. When you first work with a therapist, what most therapist's focus on first is teaching you how to recognize your anxiety and then learn how to "self sooth" and focus on something very calming so you can actually slow down the sense of "urgency" taking place that signals cortizone to build up to prepare for "fight or flight". So what you begin to learn is that you actually "can" have "more control" than you realize. These methods are called "coping methods, but also self soothing techniques" so that you don't have to think that just because cortizol is building up, you have to suffer and even unknowingly "feed into it" just because it is taking place.

What patients can get confused about when they learn these techniques (which I struggled with myself), is that learning how to self sooth or develope "grounding methods" is not saying that you do not have "genuine challenges and worthy concerns" and it isn't in anyway meant to make a patient feel dumb or inadequate because they struggle with anxiety or or acute stress. It is more about "observing self" and recognizing that a trigger or challenge is taking place and the brain is getting overwhelmed and thinking something has to happen right now. And instead of getting all upset, you can actually learn to reverse the signals and as you do that, the cortizone buildup will stop and back off and instead will discipate again.

This is why coloring books work or what my T did with me where he saw I was struggling and told me to close my eyes. He told me to picture a big chalk board in front of me and that I had a piece of chalk in my hand and to draw the number 10, then he told me to take an eraser and erase it. He told me to write the number 9 and then erase that and he proceeded to go down to the number one. He told me that if I wanted to, I could also just draw a picture on the chalk board too. When he finished, he had me open my eyes and I did notice that I had calmed down. And the reason that happened is because I had my brain doing something calm that had nothing going on that meant I should need to "act on anything" and have to build up cortizol.

Everyone developes "subconscious" messages that tell them something bad is taking place, it may have hurt them or told them to feel bad in some way. But when someone has PTSD, these messages can be alot stronger, and often the person struggling can get confused by that. What they need to do is be able to talk about whatever they experienced that was "bad or upsetting" with a therapist and be validated that "yes, that was bad and wrong" but it is not happening now. And that because something bad did happen, we unknowingly held onto it and didn't really have a way of "processing it" where we felt we learned from it, got over it, and that it was also validated by someone else and a sense of "being validated and comforted" took place.

One of the biggest things that I have had to overcome myself is "my own victim mentality". A victim is someone who has been in a situation where they were neglected or victimized and they had to figure out how to find a way to feel a sense of safety in that "toxic" environment. When someone becomes a victim, they try to hide whatever it is that they can find to somehow self protect. Their greatest fear is that if the abuser discovers this, then they will lose that way that they have found to "self protect". Within abuse a victim learns ways to "control abuse" and sometimes that means they have to almost become "loyal" to the abuser. As this takes place, they will often believe that no one else will understand how they had to be a certain way in order to "self protect". What also happens is that there will be an ongoing fear that by exposing this intricate way they had to "handle" the situation that they will somehow "lose" some kind of protection or even risk being hurt or misundertood, if they "talk" about the experience they had with an abuser.

Often what can happen is that a person that was hurt or neglected can make some kind of deep pact that it is "their private way of dealing" and they somehow got through it and it is better to not let anyone else know it ever happened. However, what they did take away from "neglect and abuse" is certain warnings where they have to be able to see in other people as "possible abusers" too. A victim can also begin to believe that even though they want to be loved and should trust, that even if they try, the end result will be "someone will eventually let them down or hurt them".

When PTSD happens, whatever "troubled history" is there will be "magnified" and it is normal for the person struggling to believe that no one could possibly understand the depths of how bad or hurt or confused/troubled they really are. Something "bad" happened and resulted in a tremedous sense of loss and the PTSD patient doesn't know how to show how bad they are hurt, or a PTSD victim will often want to find a way to ring some huge alarm to say, "Warning this is bad, this is wrong, and it should not happen".

Therapy only works when a patient can establish the right sense of safety that the therapist will "believe them" and actually "validate the significance of the injury" that the patient feels has happened to them. This is what is discussed in what a therapist must know to treat "trama patients" that is discussed in Judith Herman's book.

No matter what a patient's history is, the bottom line is that a patient has to be able to feel safe and also feel that "they will be fairly judged, validated, and believed". Unless they can feel that, they will not be able to move through the healing process.

This is where you are feeling challenged right now ((iota)) in being judged and "believed" in the situation you are discribing. I can't blame you for struggling either.
And I am very glad to hear you have found an Alli in a professional to help you with this, very important to have that. I would have to say though, the important part of this process is that you "know in your heart that you have a real reason for what happened and you stick to that in your defense".

So "healing" and "gaining" to what I am discribing in my first post "does take time" to achieve being able to begin to start seeing. I cannot say enough how important "self observing" is when it comes to the healing process. I have been challenged so much in the past two years myself. But, the best thing I did was to allow myself to be "patient" and "caring" no matter what I was learning or "reacting like when I was triggered". I have cried many times because of some of the "realities" I recognized about myself that was a result of abuse/neglect in my past. But, I have also been learning that part of the healing is "mourning" too. And also staying "mindful" of myself and that all I can do is to slowly learn how to grow and learn "inspite" of whatever I see about myself that might be "unhealthy" about how I had adapted.
After all is said and done, "I am only human".

Open Eyes