My Support Forums - View Single Post - What treatment methods for PTSD have you/your t tried

Partless · May 01, 2015, 11:10 PM

lt12345, I have PTSD. I have never really stuck to one particular method for very long, as my Ts have used a mixture of methods with me.

Meds did not help much, I've tried a number of them, mixed them, augmented them, blah blah. They just keep me from offing myself basically (sorry for being blunt). But don't help with PTSD really. Cognitive, behavioral, acceptance/commitment therapy helped somewhat, as did relaxation. But not that much.

Best method is exposure. Not just in words, but allowing yourself to experience the fear or anger or whatever in that situation. It has tons of research support, constantly comes on top as one of the best (if not the best) way to help PTSD. But there's a small problem in that my issue is not easily translatable into exposure situation.

Long story short,

Possible trigger:

a few times when I was younger, when in a difficult situation, my parents were not there for me or my siblings. I had great feelings of helplessness and loneliness. When my sister ended up in the hospital for almost a year for sui thoughts and actions, that's when I got traumatized, cause mom in her panic and anger acted abusively towards my confused and helpless sister and dad had disappeared for some supposed business trip. I felt completely alone and witness to something that horrified me, so it touched on some of those fears and pain I had felt when younger, I think. Because mom was ashamed of my sister, she cut family relations also so I had no family social support coming in and nobody knew what was happening.

So it's tough to recreate that situation, that would require an emergency of sorts and reliance on parents who may or may not be there for me. So part of my difficulties with this method has been about how to make a plan and do the graded exercises. When situations like the above, milder though, do happen, you'd think it's an opportunity to exercise but it's not. You have to be the one in control in the first place or else you just get retraumatized. You have to gain mastery of the situation, like slowly approaching a snake and many weeks later maybe even touch it and hold it for a dozen seconds. You can't decide to exercise this just when some snake will come up behind you when in the basement, right?! You have to control the exposure, and also important that you be able to repeat it till you master the situation. But to the extent I've been able to create that emotional situation in a controlled way, this method has helped greatly!

Hope this is been useful. Btw I think you might get better answers if you post in the PTSD section.