im in total shock i was diganosed with ptsd without knowing from anybody till now

wow im in shock emotionally being officially diagnosed an not being told until now wowwwwza omg im mean i had thought they might but wish they told me that they did

omg wow sighs what happens now im wow very shocking
i had been through adoption an sexual harssement an panic attacks so it fits but wow

Woah, easy, what this means is that you now have a meaning to the emotions you are trying to understand. So what it means is that now you are going to spend time learning how you have reacted to things from your past and it will be a beginning to HEALING. This diagnosis does not have to be some kind of life sentence you know.
What it does mean is that you have been effected by something that happened to you and you now need to learn how to address it. And it is going to take time for you to learn how to address the WHYS and take steps to understanding and recovering YOU back and regain strength in REGAINING YOU and developing a stonger healthier CORE.

And what that means is that you are going to work on redefining your past in a way that it no longer continues to effect you now and in the future.

Open Eyes

Dancinggirl,

Thanks for sharing. Wow. All the best as you go along in the days to come. Thankfully there is lots of help.

PTSD is a very difficult diagnosis to work through. I do not mean to belittle it. But as I stated, by understanding what it means and how it can effect you is a start to working at actually dealing with it. Keep in mind that the saying "You cant judge a book by it's cover" does apply here. I have been taking time to work on what PTSD means and how it has effected me personally. As we are all unique and our histories are unique it will be different for each of us.

With this diagnosis you are at the beginning of a discovery period. What I found out while trying to understand PTSD is that I was unaware of how my past had built up inside of me and how many auto pilot reactions and feelings I had unknowingly storred.

I often hear people in this forum describe a great fear and struggle to revisit painful memories with their therapist. These memories are often explained as, I just can't bring myself to let it out, or it is too shameful, or will it mean that I will be reliving it?, and people really struggle with a wonder of what will happen if they reveal something bad from their past. And often people will say that if they reveal it, it may be considered too small, or it may be considered that they did something really wrong, or it just wont be validated properly. And often the person who is holding something in does not want to consciously validate the experience in fear of being overcome by it and all the emotions it will bring out.

The significance of finally addressing it is to understand how it really did effect the mental well being of the person. Once the past has been revealed there is waiting period of what comes next. Well that will depend on how much comes out and how it is revisited. So the important thing to work on with a therapist is to set a plan of how to address the past a little at a time and allow time within the session to express feelings and then have enough time to use coping skills or time for relaxation moments in each session.

Once the revealing begins there will be many emotions that will be expressed. The important thing to remember is that the purpose of the therapy is to allow those feelings to surface and work on ways to understand that the process taking place is about grieving and finding new strength. And the reason that one has PTSD to begin with is they never allowed themselves to address the issues, they chose to hide and suppress what ever experience they had that may have been very upsetting and negetive.

Depending on the severity of the past experience or experiences many emotions will begin to appear. There will be fear, anger, anxiety, self blaming, and shame and embarassment and confusion. But those feelings are what is being locked up and surpressed with the event. The therapy is about allowing yourself to consciously with the help of a therapist finally express that emotional surpression and slowly feel relief and ways to overcome and morn the past and recognize why it was not your fault. And by readdressing the past you will find out how it has interupted your current abilities to address life situations and how YOU can change and IMPROVE YOUR SELF AWARENESS. Though you cannot change your past, you can address it and find ways to finally make conscious decisions to change the way it effects you today.
Let it out, see how you really feel about it and finally make PEACE WITH YOUR SELF ABOUT IT.

So the important way to look at therapy is the goal. The goal is to FINALLY OVERCOME IT AND MAKE PEACE WITH IT AND NOW LIVE YOUR LIFE INSPITE OF IT.
In therapy you have to have a clear mindfulness of saying to yourself consciously that you have chosen to finally just address it so you can MOVE ON. To recover you have to make sure that you have finally decided that YOU HAVE NOW SET PERSONAL GOALS TO BECOME A STRONGER PERSON. It is a conscious effort to NOT BE IN THE PAST, but TO LEARN HOW TO LET THAT GO AND BE IN THE PRESENT AS A BETTER PERSON. It is not about BEING DAMAGED GOODS so to speak. It is about allowing yourself to NOT CONTINUE TO ADDRESS YOURSELF THAT WAY. You are now going to make the necessary changes to become more assertive about how YOUR LIFE will CONTINUE ON IN THE HEALTHIEST MINDSET YOU CAN NOW LEARN AND PRACTICE EVERY DAY.

We all have things in our past that have effected us. No one has a perfect life, no one has a perfect childhood NO ONE. The whole purpose of therapy is to look at yourself and figure out HOW TO FINALLY SEE HOW YOU CAN CONSCIOUSLY REPAIR YOURSELF AND MOVE ON. And within that experience your goal is to learn how to STRENGTHEN YOU OWN CORE and MAKE A DECISION that THAT IS YOUR MAIN GOAL.

You are opening the opportunity to learn HOW TO BE ME AND NOT MY PAST. And keep in mind that you will not recover overnight, it will take you time, there is no rush, you are working on a sort of reset in your brain to learn how to live pass what has been and move on to what can be positive in your future. And learning how to control emotions is not easy, it takes time. I have to admit that I am still working on it myself and it will be somewhat of a life time work in progress. And there are going to be times when you will lose it and think you are not getting anywhere. So that means you just have to keep consciously working at it, and that is what every single person has to do, develope ways to NOT SUPRESS, BUT TO EXPRESS IN HEALTHIER WAYS.








Open Eyes

hows a way to deal with horrible intense flashbacks at night ? sometimes it gets to the point of hyperventilating
an sweating and fighting physical an tossing and turning at night cant really reach out to dbt t at night she she says but that she would be pissed if i cut during the middle of the night.

she is very worried about me

very helpful and much to consider
at someone explains it to me

Your DBT will be teaching you skills to handle your distress tolerance & give you other ways to cope with the distress rather than cutting. Doing other activities that you can find to do rather than cutting, learning how to relax through breathing rather than going into hyperventilation. Don't know if you have gone through the distress tolerance portion of DBT yet or not. That was the first unit I went through this year & the timing was perfect as I landed in the middle of a distressing situation right in the middle of that section of the group.

Don't know about you, the the trauma that I went through was a huge trigger on my anorexia. Dealing with your PTSD will help on your cutting & also with your anorexia. Wishing you the best with this new DX.....it definitely is opening doors for you that have previously been shut.

I have to admit that I take clonazapam at night to sleep. But as I have been addressing my PTSD my flashbacks at night have lessened greatly. I have to amit that I still have nervous chills at night sometimes. It all depends on how much stress I have had during the day. As I said, I am still working at it but knowing what it is has helped a great deal. I just keep trying to focus on what causes the stress before it builds up. But it takes time to consciously do that.

I have been gaining ground more and more, do I have bad days? Yes but at least I know that I can have good days too. You will get stronger as well, you just have to work at it.

Open Eyes

yeai agree an im willing to work hard and my dbt t said we are not at the place to start working through trama
and so im not exactly sure if that means she wont address my ptsd or not much at all.

Well, in a way you are addressing it but you are learning good methods on dealing with your emotions first. It is our emotions that we really have to learn how to contol and not hold in until we get overwhelmed.

So it is not all about what is in the past, it is about understanding our emotions and working at not letting them control us. I am trying to do that myself and it does take time as I had developed ways of hiding them which was not healthy and I just wasn't aware of how much I did that.

Just keep at it, remember there is no rush or timeline you have to learn the skills consciously.

Open Eyes

how can i deal with body memories my t mentioned containment any other ideas?