ctpsd

It's been a while since I've been on the Mighty, and it's good to be back. I started working at a new school this September. I had some really bad experiences at another school, and have been struggling to feel safe at my new school, even though all of the teachers and staff incredibly nice. I am excited about the work we are doing and am thrilled to be there, but managing my anxiety has been extremely difficult. I haven't worked in-person in a year and a half, and had become a bit of a recluse while going through trauma therapy during lock-down. Just being around other people is creating so much anxiety I feel like my chest will either implode or explode. I'm viewing this through an attachment disorder perspective, and think I can understand that there are all of these new people who I don't know are safe, and I'm trying to manage those relationships from a position of gripping fear that I try to hide. As a kid, my responsibility was to anticipate my parents moods and say or do whatever would work in the moment to smooth over potential conflicts between them and protect myself and my sister. I understand logically that those experiences now impact my relationships with my workmates. I "pick up" on all sorts of signals that aren't actually there, and am paralyzed by the fear that I won't validate someone's kindness and they will be hurt. It's impacting my relationships at home, too. I work on a team with two other teachers; the beginning of the week was a transition because one of the other teachers was gone for a few days and I worked on figuring out how to relate to the other teacher one-on-one; when the other teacher came back, the anxiety and panic when through the roof- not because of her, she is amazing!- but because I want them both to feel supported and am running interference between the two of them if there is any hint of conflict, obsessing over whether I will hurt one of them if I say something affirming about the other teacher- it's like sitting on a chair that spins, tying a long rope to the base of the chairs and holding onto the other end, and then spinning around and around, the rope getting tighter around my chest the more wrapped up I get. I have had a lot of relief from panic in the past with DBT and am still practicing the skills that help me, but I am sure I am forgetting some skills that might be really helpful. I'm having trouble sleeping, have heart palpitations, my chronic conditions are flaring, and I just feel flat out panic. If you have experience something similar, or have suggestions for a DBT skill that might help, or a strategy that has worked for you, or anything else, that would be really helpful. It would help not to feel so alone and have some strategies to try out that I may not have thought of. Thank you

I got hit with a bunch of work three weeks ago and it just hasn’t seemed to stop since. I can’t find time to write on a project I’ve been working on for too many years. I can’t quit working because we have to pay back debt. I’m obsessed with, why did people bully me as a kid? What did I do to deserve it? My son with autism just aged out of public school and I’m terrified about his future. I’m afraid that when we’re gone, he’ll be left alone with no one that cares about what happens to him. I hit a bad period of depression last week and started obsessing about a particular person who I’m not sure likes me or not. (She’s friendly to so many people at my church, but although she’s polite to me, she’s cold, or at least not as warm to me as to others. And I’m afraid to say anything because I don’t want to blow things up into something that may make a bigger problem. My biggest problem there is that I am *physically tense* when I’m around her. )

I got sick this past weekend and although I thought it was a cold, I think now it was an adrenal crash. At the end of the first week of getting “hit” with extra work (I proofread from home for a company in another state) my body was screaming, “I’m exhausted.” I haven’t had time or transportation (my husband had our one and only car last week) to get to the gym; yesterday, I finally took a walk around the neighborhood. I used the word ‘unhappy’ to describe myself, and I feel guilty for feeling that way. Because dwelling on the word ‘unhappy’ makes me even more unhappy. And when I think about how scared and afraid I get about my son, the word “afraid” triggers my mother screaming this sentence at me (in the middle of a lecture she was giving me about something), “That’s all I ever hear from you! I’m afraid, I’m afraid, I’m afraid!” (In context, that week, my parents had pulled me off the school bus after numerous events of bullying; I was realizing that a relationship I had with my first boyfriend was going sour, and that was also my senior year of high school The day my parents told me I was no longer going to be riding the bus to school was the day the bullies won. My mother or father drove me to school for the rest of the year, and I was bullied about that, too. Someone saw me in the parking lot and yelled at me, Hey, why don’t you ride the bus anymore?)

I can’t let the bullying go, it seems. It was personal. It lasted from first through twelfth grade and no one really did anything terribly authoritative to make it stop. I once listed the people who’d bullied me at one time or another and I came up with 40 names. If that many people bullied me, and I’m the common denominator, then it must mean I did something.

I’m also a survivor of spiritual abuse. I still believe in God but I have a lot of questions about Christian culture.

I had to cut back my therapy sessions to one a month because my counselor switched to self-pay, which drove the price up.

This is at the post limit.

How many of you have C-PTSD and were misdiagnosed in your childhood and teen years? I was always told I just had major depression. Only after two hospital stays, my last one being last fall, did they finally diagnose it as Complex PTSD. Once I started researching the condition it totally made sense. The only thing I wonder about now is how much damage did the previous medications do that I was on when I was younger. I am getting better as far as recovery though. #ctpsd   #PTSD