I have been down to once a month therapy appointments for the last 2 years & that has been just to go over things I have come to realize but mostly to have her help me handle the stressful things that have hit me with pain specialist issues, issues that I still have from my x-H financial irresponsibility & just everyday crap that hits at times just to make sure I have someone to remind me of the skills I learned & how to apply them when I struggle & just to talk things over that I don't want to burden my friends with & who I know I can get unbiased thoughts from....sort of like monthly maintenance. She quit working at the facility & has opened her own practice so I have to get myself set back up going to her after my last appointment in June.

I never imagined I would get to this point with how bad I felt about life before I moved but even after I was struggling with depersonalization when stressful things hit & when fall came....just the feel of the weather change would take me back to the things that happened. I'm still sensitive to that even in my new location across the country but it no longer affects me the way it did....time passing has helped me with that & new good & stable experiences are replacing the old after finally processing what happened though it seems like every traumatic event in my life has happened in the fall.

I honestly had no idea what a good T was like until I ended up with the last 2 & especially this last one. Now I would know what to look for. I knew the talk therapy FELT useless but had no idea why it wasn't working..why would they do talk therapy if it wasn't meant to help so I just kept on. I went through about 5 T's those first 13 years & they were all the same....just sit there & listen to me talk about whatever did or didn't (as in silence) come up. I lost count of the number of hospitalizations I had during those years mostly from suicide attempts or a pdoc wanting to do a med change & knowing it wasn't safe to do outside the hospital because of my horrible side effect problems that usually required medical attention. They were all so sure during those years that I was just over reacting to the loss of my computer engineering career that no one including me looked beyond that

The bad side effects caused me to go with natural aids & I was lucky that the pdoc in calif was into research & alternative treatments when he realized how bad my reactions were to normal psych meds so nothing that would wipe me out in my new living alone in the country on my farm away from any close neighbors. Lots of hot showers for my anxiety attacks but it worked & helped.

The best help has also been to have wonderful friends who I trust as a wonderful support network. Definitely something I never had while living in Los Angeles. Small town living where I was finally able to learn to connect with people & find people I could trust has helped in its own way as much as therapy. I realized what an important part of life that really is too. It's almost like starting life completely over again when I moved here being able to figure out who I really am. Would have been nice to have not gone through all that to get to this point but thankful I'm here no matter what.