dreams are coming back

I know this is not an urgent or even really important thing, but lately my dreams have been haunted by the stupid image of the stupid thing that flippin' triggers me and freaks me out. I can be having a great dream, and out of the blue, it just appears there, hanging out in the air, or it appears like a mask on someone's face.

I guess I just want to vent. I don't really know if there is a way to stop the dreams; I wake up feeling ok, and then by mid morning I remember what happened in my sleep the night before, if that makes sense. It's really bugging me. I'm not sure if anyone has any techniques to keep them from happening? (although can we even control what we dream about?)

((((Wolfin))),

It sounds to me like you are having a pleasent dream and then something comes into your mind to ruin it. This is something that I experience myself in many ways and yes, it is triggering, I hear you.

What it really means is that while we want to be happy in our lives and we can think of pleasant things, even experiences, because we suffered a trama or a history of being hurt or even abused, we feel that we don't have the full power to actually "be happy" in our lives. And this is what PTSD presents as an overall challenge to those the suffer from it. There is a "fear" that somehow something bad will happen if we let ourselves be "happy". I struggle with this myself and I can actually recall several times when I was happy and then had something bad happen that brought me down and left me to feel "very unsafe and confused".

Part of the healing through PTSD is allowing ourselves to finally talk about whatever things happened to us in our past that presented us with the feelings of being unsafe and threatened or even suffering some kind of loss of abuse. Once we gain the trust we need in a therapist so we can finally talk about things that we experienced that were upsetting to us, as well as how we struggle in the now, we finally begin to learn how to heal through validation. We are also given the opportunity to revisit the troubling things in our past and learn what they meant and how to finally process them emotionally and even "grieve" them and come to understand that these bad things were not "our fault" as well.

Each person who struggles with PTSD has their own unique history of what set them up for finally falling victim to experiencing PTSD. So, in the healing process each person has to learn how to slowly open up and finally help themselves learn how to better understand and finally overcome their own unique troubled history.

When this takes place, these troubling dreams will disipate. But it takes time and patience to address our past, what it meant to us and how we can learn to change our sense of "insecurity and fear" to finally moving forward with "new coping skills". We actually have to take time to develope a new, healthier understanding of ourselves and the situations that make us feel uncomfortable.

I am working on this myself, and it really does take time.

(((Hugs)))

Thank you, OE for your reply! It is giving me definitely something to think about and process as well. You said it very well about feeling unsafe and confused. I appreciate your response!