Well I did it, I went to my first therapy appointment last night!! :) With the help of a few pushing me to face it and push through the emotions....I did it! It was such a big step and was hard, but I know its going to help me get back to the place I was. Get back to me. I was worried about going in and having to face everything at once. I was worried about dealing with a lifetime of trauma all at once and the emotions that go with it. But that is not at all what happened. She had enough of my back story that she didn't want all of the details or the entire history. She gave me some control in what I wanted to address and work on first, and I really liked that. I cried, way more than I thought. And I tried to stop myself, but she let me know that I needed to cry, I needed to stop suppressing it and I needed to let it out.
There were some things I have been dealing with, and to a point not even realizing it. I thought my PTSD was only when I was having visual flashbacks, and the emotions caused from them. When in reality, I have been living with the full blown effects of PTSD since January of last year. Since my first offender originally contacted me. Now, I will always have PTSD, but is something that is usually very well controlled and not present for most of the last 10 years. Part of PTSD is feeling the same feelings you felt during that traumatic event. I have been feeling these feelings (sometimes more than others) since he contacted me, and didn't even realize it. She said no wonder that I was so overwhelmed. I have been suppressing and disassociating (which I will talk about later) for a year now. You have coping skills that you use and your body resorts to in traumatic or high anxiety situations, and I have been living my life stuck in that mode. And that's when things go wrong.
I beat myself up quite a bit becomes sometimes I feel like I have no reason to feel this way. I will wake up in the morning, without having dreamt anything, before I even think about life and the situation I am in, and just feel so down, sad, angry, shamed. I didn't understand why. I get when I am having a visual flashback or thinking about those situations, that I react that way. But I didn't understand why I felt that way other times when those things weren't happening. It's because I never worked through him contacting me, and then had a new traumatic situation added into it. Now I am just on auto pilot because of it. I go through the motions in flight or fight response daily, instead of feeling it, coping with it, and finding ways to handle it.
Disassociation is "a psychological experience in which people feel disconnected from their sensory experience, sense of self, or personal history. It is usually experienced as a feeling of intense alienation or unreality, in which the person suddenly loses their sense of where they are, who they are, of what they are doing. Dissociation often occurs in response to trauma, and seems to have a protective aspect in that it allows people to feel disconnected from traumatic events. This is sometimes described as an "out-of-body" experience. However, dissociation can be distressing when it continues to occur, even when people are engaged in everyday activities."
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