This is what I can experience myself seesaw. I am in a new kind of therapy called "Accerated Resolution Therapy" and my new therapist explained to me how he has found this therapy more affective than CBT, DBT and talk therapy in that they have learned that the area of the brain that is reactive doesn't really respond to these other therapies as well. What you never really processed in your brain was the old trauma you experienced that you did not have the skills to prevent whatever it was you experienced. Our brains are set up where when we sleep we have a period in our sleep called REM sleep. This is when things we experienced are processed in a way where our eye movement acts as a way of taking whatever we experienced and connects that to another area of our brain that uses our skills to look at it and file it with the different skills we have developed in our mind.

For myself, when I experienced a major trauma, I struggled to sleep, was even AFRAID to sleep for fear of these nightmares I would experience. So I took medications so I could at least sleep, however, when the medication wore off, I would often wake up from a bad dream which means that even though the medication knocked me out, my brain still needed to do REM and process which it would try to do when the medication began to wear off. What my therapist is doing is he is simulating this with me and having me revisit these old traumas while having my eyes follow his hand and he has me pay attention to how my body feels too. When I get triggered, I don't JUST suffer with emotional triggers, but I also experience it in my body as well and it can get very painful and exhausting for me. Once I revisit whatever it was, he has me create ways to reduce whatever it was that I experienced and he also has me blacken it out and even change the event. Well, in all honesty, that is often what we actually do in our REM sleep too. But with trauma that overwhelmed us in some way that can get triggered when something similar happens, we CAN relive it and as you know that is extremely disturbing leaving someone to say "I can't control my brain" and "then I suffer when I honestly do not want to".

So, this person's interactions with you triggered you. What happened from that? A nightmare right? It's not that person that's REALLY the problem, it's more about something you experienced that your brain could not seem to process and it's still unprocessed because once again your brain tried to process and could not and instead you woke up all upset. Actually seesaw, your brain just showed you something when that happened and in all honesty, I think that if you did this therapy I have been doing it could help you finally process that old trauma where you are not so reactive like you "still" are.

OE, I know you are trying to help, but please don't assume what I have or haven't processed.

I have a strong feeling that your challenge with sleeping stems from your "fear of dreaming" that developed from your inability to process some old traumas you experienced. This is a false premise, and I find it invalidating to my very real neurological medical challenges. I know you are trying to help but you often do this where you project your situation onto mine. If you want to relate your experience, that's great and I appreciate validation in that way, but you then often go on to make assumptions that I am you. I am not. I am me, and my experience is different. Please don't tell me what my problem is or isn't. I personally find that very invalidating. I know you mean well, so I'm being honest with you that this approach does not work for me.

In all honesty, after listening to this therapist explain this therapy and how it has proven to be the one thing that has helped his patients the most, is that often a trauma can cause a person to begin to "fear" sleep and then without realizing it, these individuals begin to only sleep up until they might begin "rem" sleep. What I have learned from this therapy is that while I can never change what I experienced in a trauma, I CAN change how my brain continues to react to it in that "stuck" way that I could not seem to process and often experienced what is called "night terrors". I do not fear sleep.

What are manipulative people looking for? One thing that tends to come to me when I sit and analyze an encounter is "control over". May even be their own effort to gain control over their very own fears seesaw. That tends to be what some of the crazy things my sister comes up with that I know are not true but she needs to insist on them being true as it's what fits in with HER own need to believe her truth is the ONLY real truth. Totally agree. They lack control and so are trying to gain it through manipulation.

Sometimes, a person really does believe their own cognitive distortions. For example, one evening my sister was blow drying her hair and glanced into the darkish hallway where the front staircase is. She saw a light that to her looked like a ghost moving down the stairs and she ended up screaming in fear. She decided the house was haunted and she even went out and got this Ougi board and a tape recorder to see if she could communicate with this so called ghost. She decided that because her bedroom was cold that the ghost was also in her bedroom too. She fed into this belief of hers that it was a fact the house was indeed haunted.

Well, I NEVER saw any ghost. However, one night when I was sitting in that room with my father I heard a car coming down the road as this house is OLD and is very close to the road. I happened to be facing this very same hallway and could see how this passing car's headlights ended up shining on these stairs where it looked like a ghost coming down the stairs but THAT IS NOT WHAT IT REALLY WAS. Also, when she moved out I ended up moving into her bedroom, and it did tend to get cold, however, the reason that was so was because the heat was blocked from getting into that room properly and once my father fixed it, that room was warm and fine. However, to this moment, my sister STILL believes she saw a ghost and that house is haunted when in reality, with that house being so close to the road and how that road can get busy, often the car's headlights coming in both directions can shine through different windows where the light can appear to be some kind of ghost if one wishes to perceive that, however, that is not REALITY. Well, I was the last child to live in that house, I was the youngest child and lived there the longest and other than these occasional headlights shining in from passing cars there was NO ghostly figures and nothing suddenly moving on it's own either. To this day my sister still accuses me of causing my mother to have a stroke, that is simply not true and luckily I happened to be with her to witness her experience a mild stroke and when they looked at my mother's brain there was no new damage HOWEVER they did see damage from an earlier stroke to the motor area of her brain. My mother had been calling me in tears about how mean my sister was being to her about getting up and moving around and my mother kept telling me how she was trying but just could not do it like my sister kept bossing her to do. Well, there was good reason for that because my mother had already suffered a stroke that did cause damage to the motor area of her brain. Even though my sister, after storming through the ER doors and raging at me for being the cause of my mother's stroke, learned about the damage that was ALREADY present, she STILL needs to blame me when I had nothing to do with it. Truth doesn't matter to her all that matters to her is what she FEELS is truth. Unfortuantely, that is just how some people are, for whatever reason they decided that if they feels something is true then it is true and they base their own behaviors on these distorted cognitive beliefs.