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I know this is an old thread, but it's actually a much more important topic than most cPTSD sufferers realize.

I used to fear and run from my EFs like nothing else, now I run toward and embrace them as opportunities for healing. From age 15 to 51 I used every substance legal and illegal I could get to suppress EFs especially before I knew what they were. I've been to alcohol rehab multiple times. I have a large toolbox of dissociation activities designed to distract from these episodes.

Recently, one night I decided to try the opposite during a particularly strong EF. I sat down in a dark, private room, ingested some plant medicine, and after about ten minutes of holotropic breathing to stimulate my vagus nerve I asked my IC what if anything he was trying to tell me. It was quite similar to that scene in The Sixth Sense ;-)

What happened next was the most intense cathartic experiences of my life! I was able to give my IC permission to cry unrestrained for the losses and hurts of childhood. I sobbed and writhed to within my physical limits of my strength. Every muscle in my body was engaged for 30 minutes, and I released a major chunk of lifetime traumatic energy. I've had a handful more of these experiences since to the point where my cPTSD is now in remission based on watching my symptoms evaporate.

A lot of us are convinced that running towards our past trauma would be too overwhelming, but coming away from this experience I believe that our brains truly want to heal and won't give us more than we can handle during such experiences.  I've been transformed by knowing I not only never have to fear another EF, but now welcome them because I now know that they are really just a reminder to check in with my IC (which in a neuroscience translation is the emotional center of my brain) to see what's up and release any lingering trauma.

In a recent mind exploration session a voice from somewhere deep in my subconscious told me to just breathe. It's one of the most basic functions for life, but for those with cPTSD it's one of the most basic dysfunctions.

It's a fact that when stuck in fight and flight mode our breaths become short and shallow. So no wonder we have all kinds of muscle ailments- neck pulls, tight shoulders, stiff lower backs, and the pain that goes with them. It's due to lack of oxygen. I used to swallow ibuprofen and acetaminophen like candy until I realized all I had to do was take full breaths and my spasming muscles would calm after just a few minutes.

The diaphragm is the only muscle in our bodies that can be controlled by both our autonomic nervous system (ANS) and conscious thought. Our ANS's are essentially broken in cPTSD. In my case, my sympathetic nervous system (SNS) operated at level 10, and my parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) operated at about level 3.  Consequently, I was always plagued by excessive sweating, IBS, tremor, and insomnia- all signs of an overactive SNS and vagus nerve dysfunction.

As it turns out, the one way we can hack our ANS to our advantage is through conscious breath. The Buddhists have used breathing as the basic tool for calming the body and mind through meditation for thousands of years. But it's only in the last 25 years that we've begun to understand the neuroscience behind meditative breath. Conscious breath or focusing on filling and emptying the lungs fully and at various rates stimulates the vagus nerve in various ways. My favorite is extremely short but full in breaths and long full out breaths with a little resistance (humming) to stimulate calmness, lower heart rate and BP. 10 minutes of this before a therapy session makes all the difference in the sessions' effectiveness. Apparently those of us with highly refined meditative breathing practices can stimulate their vagus nerves as well as, if not better than implanted electrical vagus nerve stimulators.

The ability to stimulate the vagus nerve via conscious breath to calm the mind and body is a fundamental prerequisite to recovering from cPTSD. It's the most basic somatic therapy to master given that all somatic therapies really just stimulate the vagus nerve in some way. Best of all it's free as long as air is free. But conscious breath is often overlooked as we tend to focus on paying thousands of dollars for therapists who've graduated from places like the Somatic Experiencing® Trauma Institute where all they teach you is how other mammals release traumatic energy. Anyone seen the video of the polar bear? I've had several healing sessions where breathing to stimulate the vagus nerve preceded spontaneous cathartic grieving and release of traumatic energy.

Re cannabis - Unfortunately, for me THC does seem to alert the guards on the wall rather than open the door inward.

Yes, me too... that is until I discovered thru serendipity that the meditative (holotropic) breathing to stimulate the vagus nerve actually defeats this aspect of THC!

My layman's guess is to what's going on is that when a person storing trauma ingests THC there's excessive electrical activity in the brain's fear centers... except when the vagus nerve is engaged. Engaging the vagus nerve may shift the electrical activity towards it's endpoints in the brain which are the pro-social, calming centers that go dark when the brain re-optimizes for fight and flight in response to trauma.

"Psychedelic therapy" is a misnomer. It should really be called something like "hyper-vagal stimulation therapy" since it's all about the vagus nerve which is weaponized with the psychedelic agent. The therapy protocol in the MAPS study also calls for vagus nerve stimulation with music and meditative breathing at the beginning of sessions.

We've all heard it said that soldiers who experience battlefield trauma are victims of "shock" trauma or regular, plain ol' PTSD. However, what's really going on is that a soldier on tour in a battle zone normally experiences multiple instances of battlefield horror. The trauma becomes ingrained not because of what the soldier experiences, but because the soldier is expected to maintain decorum in the aftermath and s/he is part of a culture of machismo where emotional display such as crying (how humans release trauma) is just not allowed. The solder is, in effect, held hostage by their branch of service which is akin to the abusive family or lover where emotions are punished, and without a way to release trauma is highly subject to internalizing future traumas no different than someone diagnosed with cPTSD. WDYT?

YES.
I've been able to release a good chunk of trauma thanks to a handful of psychedelic therapy sessions over the course of a couple weeks! I love Pete Walkers book and have used his chapter on grieving as a template for the Mindfulness component of these sessions. The key to these sessions are a simultaneous top down, psychotherapeutic (Mindfulness around Pete Walker's book while visualizing my past) and bottom up, somatic (holotropic breathing, vagus nerve stimulation amplified with the psychedelic) approach. This has allowed me to get my left or rational part of my brain to talk to my right or emotional part of my brain- the part that gets walled off in self protection when we learn to fear our emotional responses as a matter of survival. I literally had to give myself permission to grieve, but when it came, it came out with a force so strong that every muscle in my body contracted like a seizure and the sound made could have brought the men in white coats.

That's how we release trauma- crying/angering. No need to live with it year after year. I feel like I've had a complete mental reset. In my last session I learned that with the fear of my emotional reactions gone I could now play in the sandbox with other children and make new friends.

I am my Emotions
my Emotions are Me
I need no longer fear my Emotions...and

because of this
    I give myself permission to Feel
because of this
    I am no longer afraid to Cry
because of this
    I am no longer afraid of Loss
because of this
    I am no longer afraid to Trust
because of this
    I am no longer afraid to Love
because of this
    I am no longer afraid of Joy
because of this
    I am no longer afraid to Laugh

I experienced the same a couple weeks ago when they announced the upcoming Mr. Rodgers biopic and documentary.

I sense that psychoactive substances allow us to access the protective part that reassures the IC  that s/he will be not die (spiritually or physically) and that that s/he has help now to get through it all. I do not have great reaction to even low doses of THC myself, although I have not used it under any kind of T supervision.  Canada is in the middle of legalizing cannabis so once it's available legally I may try again.

Anyway, glad to hear it went well for you.  I did want to ask if this under the supervision of a therapist?

The current theory is that psychedelics cause parts of the brain to communicate that don't normally do so. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is thought to be the gatekeeper or "protective part" that psychedelics can bypass to reach the emotional centers that get walled off as the brain's reaction to stored trauma. I don't believe THC can be effective without significant vagus nerve stimulation, mindfulness and strong familiarity with the general effects of cannabis. That's why the main MAPS study is looking at MDMA. It removes the "paranoia" that THC can induce making it much gentler for a first time user. The same could be said for psilocybin, but not others like DMT or LSD. I'm familiar with the effects of cannabis since I'd been using medical MJ to fight trauma symptom for a couple years (insomnia, IBS).

The first session took place at my T's office. The second and third took place at home during EFs where I could ingest a greater amount late in the evening when the flashbacks occur. Given that the grieving, etc was happening in my head in a largely non-verbal manner, my T wasn't needed for guidance.

That's really inspiring, I am in a similar position and know if I could just sit with it, and grieve for everything that went wrong in my childhood that I would let go of something major inside. Instead I try to say it's ok I don't need to cry I am strong where as I'm as vulnerable as anything and need to be able to do this, something just keeps pulling me away from my feelings and I'm not sure what that is yet. So pleased for you that you could do this.

The common denominator among everyone with cPTSD is that we learn to fear emotional expression because in whatever captive situation we were subject to, suppressing our emotional display in response to trauma seemed necessary for survival. The catch-22 is that emotional display (grieving, angering) is how humans discharge stored traumatic energy. The problem is reinforced by Western society which equates emotion to weakness (the British stiff upper lip, American rugged individualism, etc.). That should answer your question as to what "that is".

To overcome this hurdle a voice from within told me that "I had permission to feel" and subsequently "I no longer had to fear my emotions". Our brains want to heal, and I believe that is where that voice came from. My suggestion would be to try visualizing yourself (as the unconditionally loving adult) holding your "inner child self" and saying these phases to him/her, or something like "you can cry over all the bad things that happened for as long as you want to, and its ok". The best time to do this is during an emotional flashback.

This past week I've had 3 psychedelic assisted therapy sessions focused around the grieving process suggested by Pete Walker in his book From Surviving to Thriving. The setting and process was very similar to the MAPS study using MDMA. The psychedelic used in this case was THC (vaped hybrid cannabis concentrate, legal in CA, USA). The process involved went something like this: dark, quiet room, comfortable couch --> ingest THC --> acute vagus nerve stimulation through holotropic breathing --> mindfulness based visualization of traumatic periods of life. Out of nowhere a voice in my head said you now have permission to feel. I then launched into intense grieving for the losses suffered to the point where my body was contorted as if in a grand mal seizure. I grieved the losses of childhood. I grieved the repeated disappointments throughout adulthood. Finally I grieved the loss of relationship with my mother in infancy and understood at the core level that her own cPTSD meant that my infant cries triggered her to recoil from me when she should have comforted me. I then forgave her and grieved for both of us because of the lifetime of guilt she felt for abandoning me emotionally.

Sometime during the second session the grief turned to the realization that rather than learning how to regulate my emotions from my mother's mirroring, I had actually learned to fear my emotions as a threat to my survival. But I simultaneously realized that it's only through unrestricted display of emotion that trauma can be discharged and let go of ... and that's what I had been doing during these sessions. In my third session the outward crying from grief turned into crying out of intense happiness beyond words due to the freedom and relief I was experiencing in knowing that the lynchpin of my cPTSD was broken. From now forward I can grieve over the remaining losses and trauma of my past and know that there is no concept of future trauma because I now have the tool to release rather than hold it. The key is embracing not fearing my emotions. So much of my life was lost because I feared my emotional reaction if an endeavor did not produce a positive result.

So far my hypervigilence, dissociation, and emotional flashbacks are fading, and my hair trigger anger over minutia is gone. What took Pete Walker 30 years to accomplish through conventional therapy, took just one week with psychedelic assisted therapy (albeit I did a tremendous amount of prep since becoming "trauma-informed" one year ago). Neuroscientists speculate that psychotropic compounds might allow us to bypass the PFC allowing our cognitive brain structures to communicate directly with our emotional brain structures in a healing manner.

For 50 years I was a prisoner. Now at 51 I am free!

Sounds like you already know the answer to your question. You are worried about offending your FOO when they've repeatedly offended you. But you moved away for a few months, and your trauma symptoms improved. You inadvertently created a temporary *BOUNDARY*.  Why not keep that going and gain even more health?

As mammals, humans and dogs share the same limbic structures in the brain. Because of this, dogs can mirror our emotions and help provide us emotional stability and regulation (assuming the dog is also not traumatized). They can do this in an unconditional way that our primary care givers could not, thus the value of emotional support animals is far understated and backed by neuroscience.

Another neat feature of dogs is that they have no fear of their emotions. People with cPTSD, on the other hand, all have one thing in common. At some point along the way, either because of an abusive or neglectful primary caregiver we had to learn to suppress and subsequently fear our emotions as a matter of survival. The only problem is that emotional expression is the ONLY way humans are able to release or discharge trauma- something to learn from man's best friend.

I'd like to post a shill for an organization raising money to conduct scientific research studying the efficacy of psychedelics in treating PTSD. As a neuroscience junky, I'm greatly intrigued by reports that this class of chemicals used in a therapeutic setting can potentially condense not just years but decades of therapy into weeks and months. It's hypothesized that they can rewire the brain in a way that causes a "reset" back to full integration of hemispheres and structures that become fragmented through traumatic events. Even therapeutic (not recreational) use of cannabis can help us smash through our "inner-critic" which is the primary blocker of good psychotherapy work and help us live in the "here and now".
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is a US based non-profit that conducts this research, but relies entirely on private donations given that our draconian federal government sees "no medical value" in this class of chemicals. If you want to support the search for and effective "cure" for cPTSD check out www.MAPS.org.

As a life long cPTSD sufferer my sympathetic nervous system operates at about a 10, whereas my parasympathetic nervous system operates at about a 3. Because of this I have all sorts of physical problems like hyperhydrosis, tremor, high BP, IBS, muscle tension, cramps, etc. Turns out that albuterol (oral, not inhaled), an old and generally safe asthma medication which I started taking to help burn fat during cardio sessions, increases the action of the sympathetic nervous system until tolerance develops (rather quickly). As my tolerance developed, I noticed I was having less issues with all the symptoms listed above.  I believe off-label use of this med could have great value to cPTSD sufferers who currently take BP meds off label (propranolol, clonidine, minipress, etc) to control physical symptoms given those meds also lead to tolerance and blood pressure issues. So I thought I'd share this.

I use it as needed. It blocks adrenalin at post synaptic sites in the peripheral nervous system thus helping to tone down the sympathetic nervous system.  It stacks great with clonidine which blocks adrenalin at pre synaptic sites in the central nervous system.  Ideal for those of us plagued by tremors, shaky voice, etc caused by the typical imbalance between sympathetic / parasympathetic NSs. Another med, minipress (Prazosin) taken together might also greatly boost the effectiveness of propranolol given the two block adrenalin at complementary post-synaptic sites.

There is some research that suggest that taking propranolol immediately after a traumatic event can lessen the impact.