[brownhare]

Hi everyone,

I am finally engaged in therapy for my Complex Trauma and it is helping me empty the load and offering me a safe place to work through all the things I have tried to keep hidden for years in the workplace and from family and relationships and friendships.

I am finding this a very releasing and positive thing and whilst I am happy to tell my family that I had a good or bad session ( all good so far) I am still more comfortable with this past trauma being outed and dealt with outside my family home and relationships. Here is one of my safe places

So I was hoping that as this can be quite a positive thing, this therapy space and this forum, perhaps people would like to share the highs and lows of their therapy session for CPTSD here be they good or bad.

I'd really like to hear how people are getting on with their therapy and what their experiences are. If not that's fine, I understand that this is a very personal and hard thing. But if anyone would like to share I am keen to hear how others are finding therapy and what their experience of this is and how it is affecting their CPTSD one way or another.

Best wishes and love to all dealing with this from BH xxx

[Out There]

Hi brownhare , I'm so glad this is going well for you , CPTSD is a very difficult thing to deal with and work on and a lot of people have trouble understanding it. I have a good T and also here people are like minded and do understand and will be supportive while also being semi - anonymous.

[brownhare]

Originally Posted by Out There

Hi brownhare , I'm so glad this is going well for you , CPTSD is a very difficult thing to deal with and work on and a lot of people have trouble understanding it. I have a good T and also here people are like minded and do understand and will be supportive while also being semi - anonymous.

Do you, did you ever have any odd dreams after therapy sessions?

After my session last week when I offloaded a great pile of toxic memories of my Mothers physical and emotional abuse I came home feeling emptied and calm but that night wow....

Buildings falling in a city scape, buildings with big skeletons sculpted onto the outside and me running like a little ant through them all as they toppled and roofs caved in and glass shattered and then holes in the ground opening and swallowing the ground. This was followed by a tsunami, a literal wall of water smashing through everything and carrying it away.

I woke up thinking WTF was that all about? I rarely have nightmares but this one was a humdinger at one point I looked down and my hands and feet were cut and bleeding. I wondered if anyone else had found that therapy creates mad dreams or nightmares and I wondered what people thought of this whether this is a healthy part of the process of spading through the locked in 'bad' memories or if this is a bad reaction to it.

I'm going to talk to my therapist about this next week. It felt very scary at the time but in the days after I felt mostly OK in my day to day and I'm wondering if this sort of dream is just the subconscious getting on board with the walls coming down and me letting the stuff out to a therapist.

Has anyone else found that disclosure creates big scary dreams? I am worried as to whether this is a sort of positive aftershock to be expected or if it is a sign that I am going to places I shouldn't with therapy.

I know other peoples dreams are a bit boring, but if anyone else has had an experience like this or has an understanding of why can happen I'd like to hear from them.

Thank you

BH xx

[Out There]

I had some neuropsychology show up in a dream pre cognitively. I dreamt my T had asked me to meet him in London at a three storey building to talk to three other T's. I was recreating my physical body as a building , I came up the stairs behind him , like going up the spine into my brain , which I'd made like a theatre ( inner theatre ) the right side just had a jumble of tables and chairs , the left side was more clear. I saw my T running a power cable down the aisle to a stage that was dark ( along the corpus collossum to the pre frontal cortex ). My T was also being the brain stem.

[brownhare]

Originally Posted by Out There

I had some neuropsychology show up in a dream pre cognitively. I dreamt my T had asked me to meet him in London at a three storey building to talk to three other T's. I was recreating my physical body as a building , I came up the stairs behind him , like going up the spine into my brain , which I'd made like a theatre ( inner theatre ) the right side just had a jumble of tables and chairs , the left side was more clear. I saw my T running a power cable down the aisle to a stage that was dark ( along the corpus collossum to the pre frontal cortex ). My T was also being the brain stem.

That is really interesting because it sort of hints that the subconscious is working all the time to integrate conscious learning but turfing it up as metaphor and imagery.

That might explain my buildings with skeletons all falling and the ground opening to take the walls that I have built over the years. Perhaps the water rushing through is demonstrative of the emotional cleaning that is taking place with my therapist.

Your feedback on your dream makes me think this stuff probably isn't something to be frightened by. Perhaps this is what happens once the conscious, the body and the unconscious all start to get synched up again.

I'll ask my therapist what he thinks about this next week and leave it in the thread. Thanks for sharing your experience it is really helpful to hear what others have experienced when taking on therapy and disclosure.

BH x

[brownhare]

I am finding that talking is helping me. My therapist often doesn't say very much just asks one or two questions and then reinforces positives when I disclose things.
He is very kind and open to my need to 'dump' he trauma somewhere and I am finding that the simple act of saying and being heard somewhere totally safe and unconnected with anyone who knows me is lightening my load.
I'm really prone to overthinking and intellectualizing and rationalising trauma.
This therapy gives me a space to just cry and cry and feel sad and to grieve and to get a bit snotty and messy and emotional without fearing it will worry or hurt significant others or affect my professional standing and reputation as a teacher.
It's really surprised me how much just 'saying' has done for me.
My therapist doesn't offer any solutions, he just hears me out and reflects on the really strong and awesome leaps I have made in carrying my trauma and not inflicting it on my loved ones.
I am finding that having a place to offload is sorting out my anger, joylessness, depression and stress.
Letting it go on his fluffy couch and leaving it behind is allowing me to live without harbouring tons and tons of secret pain.
This is really helping.
This is really surprising.
I wanted techniques to cope and have found that just 'saying' somewhere really safe has taken away the need to cope because I am leaving the burdens at the counselling place.
To me this has been a big surprise because it seems so obvious.
But when I think about it disclosure is always something you initially want to do with safe people, ie loved ones, however with this sort of disclosure it can overwhelm and burden them because they feel a solution is needed.
I've learned that therapy for me, is the perfect opportunity to sort through pain and grief and anxiety without someone feeling horribly ill equipped to help or handle.
My therapist is like the worlds most accommodating and friendliest skip.
I pay and talk and he accepts and hauls with genuine ability to take the job and feel fulfilled by it.
I guess his joy is pretty up front, it makes dumping a load on him feel truly OK and for me this works.
I can't really explain how talk therapy is working for me but it is and I would recommend a try.

[bunnifoo]

I just started with a new therapist. She wants to try EMDR so we're working on the set up process of that but also talking about stuff. I had a rough week and a really weird/scary experience with flashbacks and so we talked about that some.

I get that we have to do work before doing EMDR so it's safe but I really just want to try it and also talking about the preprations makes me feel like I can't deal with the immediate issues going on .That's what my therapy is like.

[Out There]

I had EMDR with an adjunct T. I saw my regular T as well throughout the process. We did mindfulness , grounding , safe place and some trauma focussed CBT. It was gruelling as any trauma work is , but it was so worth it.

[Open Eyes]

brownhare, I can relate to what your therapy does for you.

When I found my last therapist that I spent the most time with I was such a mess. Up until that point the therapy I had was not helpful at all, but this therapist was very different because he specialized in working with "trauma" patients.

One thing my last therapist told me is that he could see I was working very hard at it and that it's not always like that for him as some of his patients have to be spoon fed and their progress is very slow.

As you have described, what helped me was having a place to dump. Then after a while when I went to see him one day I had realized something. I told him how much I realized how lonely I was because I did not have anyone in my life to talk to like I do with him. Unfortunately, a lot of people do not know how to actually "listen". Often what so many are good at instead is "judging and criticizing".

It is always so nice to have someone who knows how to listen and not criticize.

[bunnifoo]

I was doing Internal Family Systems therapy with my last therapist (I moved to a different state) it was grueling and opened up some stuff that has made me feel more vulnerable but was also necessary. I really wanted to continue with it but the closest therapists that practice it are about an hour a way. I can't justify doing that for therapy.

This therapist also does DBT and if the EMDR is too much or doesn't feel right I'm going to ask to try that.

I actually had a weird breakthrough yesterday on my own where I was sleepy and kind of..not altered but more open to the things I was thinking (and on cold medicine) so I just started writing things down. I'm going to copy them into a notebook and show them to my therapist so she can see what is going on in my head.

Mostly I'm realizing how completely detached I feel most of the time. From myself, from the world.

[Out There]

A combination of things is good sometimes. The slightly altered state of consciousness you experienced being sleepy / cold medicine is important and do share this with your T if you can.

[bunnifoo]

I told her some of it but forgot to take my journal in.

We did the last prelim step before actually starting EMDR next week. I'm still not sure about it but I'm willing to give it a try.

[bunnifoo]

I did the EMDR session last week and it was...not helpful. Or I don't think I had the right connection with the therapist. Partly her office feels more like a shrink's office than a therapist's office but also I don't think we communicated well.

Yesterday I saw a different therapist, a man (first time in decades seeing a male therapist) but I liked him and his office was light and airy and cozy at the same time. Plus his practice has some group therapy type things I'm going to talk to him about. It's not that convenient but he was nice and it was relaxed and I felt like I could relax. So now I have to break up with the other therapist.