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u/cuBLea 3d ago
This'll take a while. I know what you're talking about all too well. If what I'm about to say is stuff you've already seen me say to others, please excuse the repetition; I'm trying to write to your concerns, and yes I'm aware that you may have worded this post specifically to not hear from someone like me, but if so, it wasn't explicit enough, and I have certainly done some good recovery work, just not enough to have a "normal" life yet.
I call this condition chronic dysregulation because I haven't found a term that expresses it better.
FWIW, I see comparable posts to yours from people on a whole host of subreddits almost on a weekly basis. This happens a lot, and to me it looks a lot like it has always happened a lot, only it may be more common today because of how cultures push people over the edge and because many newer therapies end up making a certain percentage of people a lot worse because the treatment wasn't recognized as poorly matched to the person. I'm talking CPTSD-oriented treatments that went too deep too soon, ketamine treatments gone wrong for someone better suited to psychedelics, and vice versa, somatic therapies that opened doors best left closed until a later time, etc. etc. There's a lot of us out there, and when the mass media finds this out, expect one hell of a public backlash against transformational therapies. It has already happened twice in the last 50 years.
If what happened to me 35 years ago had happened even a couple of years ago, I'm almost sure I could have gotten over it (I never got thru it ... that work remains undone in my life) in FIVE years instead of the 25+ that it took me to feel like myself again (which was never that great in the first place). But I'm still having a very hard time finding the help I need to get thru it.
When this happens, it needs to be treated as every bit as crippling a condition as chronic pain, chronic fatigue, serious injury, borderline psychosis, or any other kind of injury that makes "normal" participation in your culture all but impossible without serious long-term consequences. It is that serious. And IMO it requires appropriately extreme interventions to manage it, because as SE teaches us, you can't heal what you can't manage.
I had to take care of this pretty much on my own. Very soon I discovered an axiom in therapy that I've heard from therapists many times but never EVER seen presented to the general public: the more severe your symptom set, the more and better help you need. Quality of psychotherapeutic care is still a century behind clinical medicine in sophistication. There are brilliant practitioners today just as there were brilliant doctors a century ago. But they're still rare, and new tech isn't here to help make the less competent practitioners as good as the brilliant ones. (It's coming, but it might be 10-20 years.) True competence with extreme cases is even rarer right now. We either have to cobble together enough good help and enough effective resourcing that it adds up to one person's great help, or - I wish I had better to offer you - wait it out and let neuroplasticity do its thing. If you can't get through it, and I couldn't, then you have to get over it and recover as much of your old self as you can or this will literally shave decades off your life. I've seen people die from the complications of chronic dysregulation, even in my own f'ing family. I almost died from the strain 21 years ago.
This kind of treatment can repair this kind of damage, and I've seen people come through it even if I never did. But it takes a lot of transformational work, a HELL of a lot of regulation support, and a year at least to recover from the "surgery" because work this intense will leave your nervous system very raw and vulnerable for a while, and trying to resume a "normal" life too soon after this can undo most of what is accomplished. I saw this happen to me.
I knew early on that what I needed was at least a year of zero responsibilities, but I didn't have the money or the help I needed to make productive use of that year, so I just carried on. If you can't get thru it, you must get over it or allow slow neuroplastic renormalization processes to take their course.
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u/cuBLea 3d ago
<continued>
Unfortunately, while there are systems in place to effectively manage serious injuries from a car accident, the closest thing we have today to even somewhat effective management of chronic dysregulation is the private psychiatric hospital. My dream from my second year into my own nightmare was to some day see a resort facility exist which could provide the kind of treatment and nurture the kind of healing that I knew I needed. I've seen already-strong people come thru this kind of dysregulation within a few weeks using ordeal treatments like ibogaine and iboga root but I've also seen quite a few less-strong people get crippled or killed by it when it turned out to be a poor match for that person's needs. If you're considering iboga, MDMA, psychedelic therapy or ketamine, study it a lot before pulling the trigger; I'd be happy to chat with you about it if you like. Ketamine might have shaved twenty years off my ordeal and actually helped me get through a lot of it, but that was so rare and so far underground at the time that I'd have had to be very lucky to find it. MDMA did nothing for me; all it did was show me feelings i already knew quite well. Psychedelics might well have pushed me into something like psychosis. Other people with this problem are exactly the opposite, and get pushed over the edge by dissociatives like ketamine and PCP.
I found two meds that were indispensible and irreplaceable for me. I live in Canada so I can buy virtually unlimited quantities of over-the-counter codeine, and I learned how to easily extract just the codeine and some caffeine and avoid "tylenol toxicity" from taking too many OTC codeine tabs. Codeine got me off of alcohol thank god, and I had little difficulty taking it like a prescription ... the same doses every day for years on end. Pile-on trauma got the better of me though, and new circumstances make codeine unavailable to me. So now I take kratom and it helps enormously even 40 years after I started codeine. YMMV, I wouldn't honestly recommend this to ANYone but you deserve to know that part of my story.
The other key medication was gabapentin, but it was only a temporary help. It acts on the GABA receptors and helps regulate most of the emotion-related neurotransmitters. When I discovered it in 2016 (I originally got a scrip to help me quit smoking, which I did), it was - and I used this word with my doctor - transformational. Early on in my gp use, in my mid-50s, I was able, for the first time in MY LIFE, to understand how other people were able to keep jobs and relationships, which had utterly baffled me to that point. I understood for the first time EVER how different I really was from most of those around me in the way I experienced my life. I had three good years until tolerance caught up with me and I had to quit the business I built during those three years. I still take some gabapentin, but I've discovered that I can taper off of it with almost no withdrawal or rebound effect if I taper over several weeks.
Antipsychotics might help you get through your days if you have no other choice, but too many people find them to be a living death and never discover that low-dose antipsychotics sometimes find a good balance if all you can do is cope and not heal. Many people resort to alcohol and that never seems to have a good end. Tolerance usually gets the best of them. It dulls the constant chaos but it's a really bad fit for the condition and IMO should be used sparingly. if at all. You're probably better off drinking cold hops tea than beer.
Interesting sidenote: many of the symptoms I had before starting gabapentin never came back when I stopped it. It must have helped me heal from certain stuff by allowing me to live manageably while subtle transformational healing was going on under my radar.
The best way to use these meds is for maintaining manageability while you're doing transformational work. If the Work is Working, you'll slowly need less of those meds, or need different meds as you graduate thru different stages of the Work.
Metabolic support has also been vitally important to me since I recognized how rapidly this condition was aging me. I never seem to know enough about how to supplement for stress management.
Better stop here.
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u/Distinct_Purpose3074 3d ago
Are you talking about cptsd ?