[Alishia88]

My father died 3 years ago of cancer. he was sick for one year, I was 21 then.
Since then I´ve been having several psychological and psychosomatic
disorders, overlapping or after one another (anorexia, anxiety, panic, strong dizziness, hypochondria, depression, some obsessive compulsive behaviours, derealisation and depersonalisation). I actually "forgot" about my father right after he died and threw myself into other things but due to my psycholog.
difficulties it got more and more strenguous. At last I suffered from something like burn-out, I was panicy or aroused, nervous ALL the time, it was almost unbearable. Then I "collapsed" took 5 steps back and have been looking for psycho. help since then. I remembered only about 4 months ago that my father died and that this is actually a big thing. I still have trouble feeling that it really happened. I don´t. But i went to the cemetary once and then it hit me hard and the derealisation and depersonalisation were gone for a few hours, then it got cloudy again.
I´m feeling like when I truely really feel that it is true all the horrible things that happened, that i live in the same world where it happened, that i am still the same person who it happened to and who i was before, not someone detached to her past and detached from the world, I´ll feel a whole lot better and in control of me and my life.
Could this be PTSD?

[amandalouise]

Originally Posted by Alishia88

My father died 3 years ago of cancer. he was sick for one year, I was 21 then.
Since then I´ve been having several psychological and psychosomatic
disorders, overlapping or after one another (anorexia, anxiety, panic, strong dizziness, hypochondria, depression, some obsessive compulsive behaviours, derealisation and depersonalisation). I actually "forgot" about my father right after he died and threw myself into other things but due to my psycholog.
difficulties it got more and more strenguous. At last I suffered from something like burn-out, I was panicy or aroused, nervous ALL the time, it was almost unbearable. Then I "collapsed" took 5 steps back and have been looking for psycho. help since then. I remembered only about 4 months ago that my father died and that this is actually a big thing. I still have trouble feeling that it really happened. I don´t. But i went to the cemetary once and then it hit me hard and the derealisation and depersonalisation were gone for a few hours, then it got cloudy again.
I´m feeling like when I truely really feel that it is true all the horrible things that happened, that i live in the same world where it happened, that i am still the same person who it happened to and who i was before, not someone detached to her past and detached from the world, I´ll feel a whole lot better and in control of me and my life.
Could this be PTSD?

it can be PTSD or it could not be.. we cant tell you whether this is PTSD for you because diagnosing each other here on Psych central is not allowed. my suggestion contact your treatment providers they can help narrow things down and let you know whether what happened is part of your other problems you listed or is PTSD or is some other problem out of many that this can be.

[Open Eyes]

((Alishia88)), I am so sorry for your loss.

Well, amandalouise is right, we cannot diagnose you. But you can look up PTSD on your computer and read the symptoms and see if they match with what you feel.

What I CAN tell you is that PTSD can develope after a tramatic event. And it can take several months to several years for it to develope. And there CAN be a desire to isolate and not want to see the reality of a big loss too.

If you take some time and read about it and you feel like you may be dealing with it, you should seek therapy for it. It is too difficult to work through on your own, you will need therapy to help you. But you CAN work through it.

Open Eyes

[Alishia88]

thank the both of you!
well, the thing is, I read about it and I felt very much like this could be it.
I interviewed 3 therapists specialized on trauma on it. One said, she did not think so, the other 2 suggested trauma-therapy. But I also read trauma is not the same as having PTSD.

[Open Eyes]

Well PTSD is what can happen in the brain after someone experiences a trama. Trama therapy is designed so that therapists help their patients work through their tramas and also deal with the anxiety and PTSD symptoms that can be present.

So if you went to a therapist who specialized in working through "trama" you would also work through the bouts of anxiety and denial that you have been experiencing since your father died. It sounds to me like you never really dealt with that and what it did was make you "afraid" of becoming ill as well as not knowing what to do about how to deal with how final death is.

21 is young and at that age a death can have a profound effect and most that age simply do not have the life skills to know how to deal with it.

Some of the symtoms you are discribing sounds like you are experiencing a lot of anxiety which is something that people with PTSD experience a lot.

The only way you are going to really know is to really spend time in therapy with a good therapist. They are not going to truely "just know you" by being interviewed once or twice. And a therapist doesn't typically hand out a diagnosis of PTSD without really spending time with a patient.

If you choose to invest some time with a therapist that does specialize in trama therapy, it wont hurt you.

Open Eyes

[Alishia88]

"21 is young and at that age a death can have a profound effect and most that age simply do not have the life skills to know how to deal with it."

Thank you, Open Eyes, reading this made me feel a whole lot better about myself.
The truth is, I actually feel like such a loser because even after 3 years I seem to not be able to handle the situation and my life well. And I always considered myself, at 21, very much officially grown-up.
I used to be very motivated and hardworking. I feel like I let that totall be swept away and I feel so frustrated about it.

Your lines gave me a very different perspectice, thank you

[amandalouise]

Originally Posted by Alishia88

thank the both of you!
well, the thing is, I read about it and I felt very much like this could be it.
I interviewed 3 therapists specialized on trauma on it. One said, she did not think so, the other 2 suggested trauma-therapy. But I also read trauma is not the same as having PTSD.

here where I live and work (NY, USA) PTSD is a mental disorder, symptoms are things like flashbacks, panic, anxiety, nightmares...

Trauma is an event that causes PTSD examples ...war, tornadoes, abuse, earthquakes, tsunamis, ... any life altering event can cause a person to have PTSD symptoms.

Trauma therapy is meeting with a mental health treatment provider / attending therapy based classes to address the issues you have from a traumatic event..

example I had a traumatic event happen during work, that work related event caused me to have PTSD (panic attacks, nightmares, anxiety, flashbacks). my therapy for this was called trauma therapy because it addressed the issues I had with the traumatic event ...I talked with my therapist about what happened, and we made a treatment plan to address the panic attacks, nightmares, anxiety and flashbacks I was having due to the traumatic event that happened during my job.

[Open Eyes]

Oh heavens no, you are not a loser at all. However that feeling that you "should" have been over it by now, is also common to many who are still morning over a loss even a few years after a loss.

We tend to think that we are supposed to experience something upsetting have a short time to get over it and then we are supposed to pick our spirits back up and continue on with life. Well, people don't always "just" have the capacity to do that.

And what many people do is when a loss like this happens, they disassociate and go numb. They go through the motions of a funeral etc, but they just feel empty inslde.
And this avoidance of having an imediate emotional response can last a year or two, and maybe more. Then all of a sudden they can see it and they think, my god, dad is gone and they see the reality and finality of it. And then the anxiety and fear and sense of loss comes forward. And yes, that statement you have about thinking "I should be over" it also comes forward too. And there can be the kind of guilt you are discribing as well in wonder about why you are just now having a reaction to that loss. This is something that happens to a lot of people, so you are not alone.

People tend to think that they are "supposed to know" how to morn a loss. Well, when a loss happens, often we have genuinely not learned the "emotional response" to attach to that experience. The whole time we are growing up, we slowly learn about emotions and how to have emotions to certain events and situations. And unless we go through a loss during our childhood years where we see how adults react emotionally, we don't really know how to respond.

You have to realize that the part of our brains that has emotions is not a part of our brain that is the thinking intelligent part. Our thinking intelligent part learns how to attach these emotions to whatever information comes into the brain the whole time we are growing and developing. So when I made the comment about "life experiences" that is what I mean, you have not had time to establish that part of your emotional responses by being around that kind of loss to a point where you have developed the knowledge of the emotions that are supposed to take place.

A child growing up learns how it is "ok" to be happy and "ok" to cry when something is wrong or there is an unanswered need and they also learn about anger when something happens that is not good or not right for them. There is so much developing in the brain of a young child where they are imprinted with emotional responses according to their environment. And children pick up emotional responses by watching their parents express these emotions as well, and a lot of times children pick up things that later on they don't realize they pick up.

Here is an example I noticed myself. I taught a child private riding lessons and she would express constantly in the lesson how she needed to stop and take a rest. She had all the facial expressions in order to this presentation of suddenly being tired and had to take a break. Now this child was young, about 6 years old and she had a lot of body language that was really beyond what I would call normal for a child that age.
And what I had learned about how she developed that was that her mother battled breast cancer while she was developing her emotions and senses which takes place the most up to age five when a child then developes their ONE personality in their brain. And what this child learned and saw in those early years was her mother turning to her constantly and saying, "not right now, I need to rest a bit" and she also saw the mothers whole body language that expressed that need. So what this little girl did, was imprint that same behavior in herself. And this is what parents do not understand happens when they are raising children.

People learn all their lives about emotions and how to "feel" and respond. And they pick up messages about "how" to react in all kinds of messages they take in. They pick it up in Movies, advertizing of all kinds as well as in each person they observe and interact with. And from that we develope our own unique knowledge about how we "feel" and react to our environments.

And for people who present with PTSD who have experienced, childhood tramas, they often review these childhood events with much more guilt and shame and wonder about how that child in them didn't know better and may have even participated in something bad. They carry guilt and shame, not realizing that when they look back on that child in them that that child did not really know "how" to respond to whatever they were experiencing yet. Often they do not "know" that when they are recalling difficult childhood events much later in life, they have had many more years to develope thier ability to attach emotions, including guilt and anger and fear to life experiences.

So, I hope that helps you understand what I mean by "life experiences" where you have had time to develope your own "sense of emotional responses" to a loss. And what you are feeling now?, that sense of confusion about you and your life and how you are afraid and confused? Well, you have not really "learned" yet how to deal with this either. And that is why it is so helpful to spend time with a therapist so you can learn how to come to a personal way of settling this confusion and then moving on with your life.

Open Eyes

[Alishia88]

Thank you, Open Eyes, yes I think I understand better now

I have another question. Is it necessary to have a therapist specialised on trauma or will a "normal" therapist do. Because i´m pretty sure the T might need to reconstruct some memories I have lost. Because of these lost memories, I feel like there´s a hole and i need to reconnect to the old me.

[Open Eyes]

Alishia88,

I personally think a T that specializes in trama work is the best choice. That kind of T may understand better and they do "trama work" so they are very aware of the stages that come after a trama. I have met so many people that saw therapists for several years and felt like they were just spinning their wheels. But once with a trama specialist, who also knows how to spot PTSD, that changed their whole outlook on their recovery.

It is just "my" opinion, but given the way you discribe that whole event, I think a trama specialist would be better to help you understand that and make peace with it in the now.

Open Eyes

[Alishia88]

thanks a lot, Open Eyes