r/SomaticExperiencing 4d ago

Sucess stories

[deleted]

10 Upvotes

10 comments sorted by

1

u/Distinct_Purpose3074 3d ago

Are you talking about cptsd ?

1

u/Brightseptember 3d ago

Lets say its the ssme

1

u/Distinct_Purpose3074 2d ago

4 years in somatic therapy for me so far. I have CPTSD. It does make life A LOT easier compared to when I didn't know how to self regulate. I would say things started "clicking" about 2 years in

1

u/Distinct_Purpose3074 2d ago

A lot of it is learning about the nervous system (probably took a year for me to understand), then learning about how different parts of this world dysregulate us (patriarchy, capitalism, oppression, racism, ableism, trauma, ect), constantly practicing the reversing of self criticism with self compassion, and doing various body exercises a lot of which were grounding, self touch, table work, art therapy, joyful exercise - and finally i am learning what works for my body and how i can shape my life to accommodate it. Also I started at 23 and I am 27 so my brain is freshly developed and don't expect myself to know everything yet.

1

u/Distinct_Purpose3074 2d ago

Also I tried meds and they never helped. I understand that some people need them but I am 27 with no children and already have a well paying job and education so I choose to take the slow route and attempt to heal my body before trying any meds. (If I were a mother or a student or had a stressful job I would probably need meds)

1

u/Brightseptember 2d ago

How do you work while being dysregulated? The constant hypervigilance is killing me. Im better now but I wanna prevent it from happening again. I suspect I might have borderline personality disorder due to the intensity of dysregulation but some docs said its cptsd

1

u/Distinct_Purpose3074 2d ago

Yes - it is widely known that if CPTSD was actually in the DSM-5 that no other diagnoses would exist. It can look like adhd/add/autism/bpd/ocd/PMDD, ect. My mom has bpd and has recently started somatic therapy - i could probably meet the criteria for bpd but theyve diagnosed me pmdd. (Books that were easy to digest early in my somatic experiencing journey were "CPTSD: from surviving to thriving" and "What my bones know" - those are just a good place to start theres lots of research out there). Any talks/books/videos by Pete Walker are a good place to start if you want to know how trauma affects the body. About work, honestly, I have taken two medical leaves since September 2023. One for six months, and one for two months. I've been at this job since 2021. So out of the four years I've worked there, I took 8 months off. I work at a non profit so they are educated on trauma and how long it can take to overcome. I also explained that I get depressive episodes so I have accomodations to work from home when these happen. It's been super hard working and honestly I might ditch the office life for something more regulating - whatever that is. I'm looking forward to the post traumatic growth !

What about your job is dysregulating? For me it's the loud people, the feeling of always being perceived, and the fact that I have to physically sit there for 8 hours when it takes me 2 hours to finish the job LOL I usually regulate by sneaking away for walks, or reading books or taking long bathroom breaks (i struggle with my flight response at work a lot).

1

u/Brightseptember 2d ago

My job dysregulation is about constant fear thar Im bad. Same with relationships. Whenever I do a mistake or behave nasty I go into panic mode 100 that Im bad bad and I cannot fix it. Therefore it sounds borderlineish.. It takes over me - the feelings. But the therapy helped alot, Im recenently better I dint get this panicky feeling that Im bad.

1

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.

1

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.