Hi
I'm struggling for years already, being unable to hold a job or function in daily life without job.
It seems like I'm constantly in shutdown, and I can't even communicate my stress and desperation to a therapist because when I'm stressed, I stop expressing anything.
I also seem to forget anything that's even slightly emotionally charged. So even when I can express my emotion, 10 minutes after that conversation I have no clue anymore what I talked about.
Underlying all this seems to be some kind of fear of feeling my emotions. Anytime I feel something, I quickly notice that the feeling/thoughts disappear and I just feel numb and a headache or stomachache.
Even when I'm by myself, I can't seem to express any feelings, as If i'm trying to hide for myself.
And it seems like nobody knows how to deal with this. I've been to a few therapists and it all ends up the same. At the beginning i'm hopeful, but then after a few sessions I realise i'm getting more and more into a shutdown and express myself less and less until I eventually stop going.
Just searching for therapy seems pointless, because I don't have money left and nobody seems to understand my difficulties.
Yeah, at some point I also came across complex PTSD. And it seems to check all the boxes.
But the weird thing is that I can never really connect my current issues with things that happened in the past.
I actually barely remember anything from before I was 15 years old. And anything I do remember is just a sequence of facts, no emotions or feelings.
My last therapist was saying that it's impossible for me to have trauma (probably because I never show much emotion at all during a session)
I have found that it helps for me to do some writing of things that randomly pop up in my head, but this is always extremely difficult, as I'm rarely aware of my thoughts at all.
Yeah that sounds like a lot of emotional distress & suppression from an early age, at least in my unprofessional opinion.
O_o
Maybe they had a different definition of trauma than what I know of. There are different responses to traumatic experience. Some of them make big, flashy results. The fight response can make people highly abrasive. The flight response can make people nervous workaholics. The fawn response can make people into over-gentle doormats. The freeze response though can make people clam up, to hide and to bottle, to show as little externally as possible. It's also, funnily enough, the strongest trauma response. The other 3 are active responses, trying to do something about the danger. They're biologically preferable to freeze because they're options for solving a problem. The freeze response is a last resort when other solutions have been tried, and no way to deal with the traumatic situation has been found. Showing no emotion is not an indication of lack of trauma, it can be an indication of inescapable trauma.
Hey that sounds good! Even if it's hard to do with any regularity, having any healthy medium for processing is good. Maybe you can even try turning it around, start writing literally anything that's in your head, even if there's hardly anything you can perceive, and just keep going, see if you can sort of prompt thoughts to start flowing through a medium like writing. That type of technique works for me sometimes.
I'm sorry to hear what you've gone through, no one should have to grow up in neglect like that. Keep searching & observing, I don't know if what I've said will help you much but I do think you can find the answers you need if you persist.
Thank you. I appreciate the words.
I often find myself taking a bunch of steps to try and improve my situation, keep it up for a while, and then drop everything because I fell sick, or got exhausted.
So the progress is so slow. But I do see some. Moving more also seems to help, but it can be so difficult to get started again. I always feel so uncomfortable.