Forging New Paths

[Blueberry]

Thank you Armee

I'm not physically unwell anymore, just emotionally. In profound state of 'do nothing, give up'.

However, I turned over a card from a stack of emotional recovery cards and found: "The question is not Why, it is Why not!  No question mark, so it's not even a question! It does appeal to me today in a 'just go and do stuff!' kind of way, rather than any kind of philosophical 'Why am I not...?'

[sanmagic7]

  

[Blueberry]

blueberry, to my mind, if you think it fits for you, could be helpful, why not sign up?  does re-setting your nervous system make sense to you? do you know what that exactly means? (i'm afraid i don't)

Re-aligning/re-setting your nervous system refers to getting more and more out of Freeze and Fight/Flight and into Safe & Social, which he bases on Steve Porges' poly-vagal theory. It makes sense to me.

This week I'm tracking my nervous system to see which of the three states I'm in during my waking hours. No Safe & Social so far. This is the first homework in the 12 week course.

Unfortunately I discovered today that I took the wrong evening meds the other day but at least this explains in part why I did zero today - lay in bed mostly sleeping with strange dreams, no stranger than normal for me after the correct medication though. No worries, nobody needs suggest I go to the doctor's.

[Hope67]

Hi Blueberry,
It's so great that you're doing that course - I hope it goes really well. 

Sorry to hear you took the wrong evening meds the other day - I hope you feel better as time goes on.  (I would never suggest you go to the doctor's - I have a phobia about doing just that!) (I mean about going to the doctor myself)...

I really appreciate Steve Porges' Poly-vagal theory - it is amazing.

Sending a supportive hug to you Blueberry.   

Hope 

[Blueberry]

I can feel the excitement in your words around participating in this course.

I'm excited now to hear all about it once you do it.

I have started the course. Finally, in earnest, today. That is, I've dedicated a notebook for writing stuff, especially homework / being honest with myself + whatever else comes up and/or occurs to me. I might sometimes write about something on here or more likely on my private Journal but nothing like the notes I sometimes write up on freebie sessions over here https://www.cptsd.org/forum/index.php?board=272.0

Among other things, you have to pay for this course so I don't think it's fair to share all that information around. This is my view, other people may see it differently. Please no discussion of that here on my Journal.

More importantly for me, doing this course is part of my attempt to improve my self-discipline of doing things for ME, of taking those healing steps regularly, making a habit out of them, getting back up again and setting off again when I've fallen on my nose or just stopped practising for whatever reason. 

I may be on the forum a little less as I try to make space for healing steps and the exercises and daily practice in the program. I'll see how that all works out and how I progress.

[NarcKiddo]

I am so happy you have started the course and wish you much healing as you progress through it.

 

[Armee]

I won't discuss my agreement with you about sharing paid content. 😉

But I will say whatever you feel like sharing about how it's going personally for you, I'd love to read and gain inspiration from. Gentle support, no judgement or shoulds here. Your "why not!" card made me smile.   

[Blueberry]

Thank you NK and Armee!

Yes, I might share how it's going for me, Armee, though a lot of that may also end up on real paper in my notebook. Wrote 5 or 6 pages yesterday. But yes I may write general trends and progress on here or maybe in my mbr journal. I'll see.

______________

The following maybe belongs in Sleep or Medication but as I think it's more self-reflection than discussion, I'm putting it here.

I'm back on Quetiapin half-dosage, so about 12mg, for sleep problems. Now instead of lying awake half the night reading in bed/doing crosswords or sitting at computer and then not being able to get up in the morning due to 3-4 hours sleep, I take my dosage anytime between 8 and 10pm, fall asleep shortly after (certainly before midnight), tend to wake up round about 7am but really groggy and fall asleep again and get up sometime in the afternoon. I'm so tired and sleepy, I don't know if I got up and took my 2 different day meds or not. My brain is too fuzzy to even know what those are.

One of the reasons psych doc put me back on Quetiapin (after I gave up on them myself after misunderstanding that they were only for really bad phases - they're not, they're for every night) was the amount of depression I feel - no goals, no reason to get up, no reason to live, no reason to do anything, except lie in bed and doze and read. But it seems I'm doing that with these meds too, just a lot more dozing and sleeping than reading. On top of that, my anxiety is up and my dreams are more anxiety-filled than normal. In my dream a couple of nights ago I had somebody spending the night who couldn't look after herself and it is somebody I care about tho not FOO, she disappeared and instead of looking for her properly and/or letting the police/SAR know, I went back to bed and thought I'd deal with it in the morning and by then it was too late    The dream is following me around now, sequels.

I'm wondering if it's worth it. My anti-deps Citalopram seem to have no bad effects on me, nor do my pills for low thyroid. So it's worth taking them obviously, though I'm not sure if I did today. I'm just not big on putting chemicals in my body especially since sometimes the side-effects are what the drugs are supposed to get rid of. At least, that was my experience with an itchy skin medication - it was so bad on a public holiday I had to go to Emergency. Yes, it's not very scientific to base my idea on side-effects on one example. There are other side-effects to Quetiapin, for me anyway, like shaking a little. On Friday I did get up in the afternoon and do some stuff like go to a funeral and I was weak on my feet and a bit shaky. Not because the deceased person was so close to me, she wasn't.

Anyway, I'm going to try to get hold of my previous GP who is more or less retired and see if he can't suggest something better for me, something natural, which I could then discuss with psych doc. My previous GP would also find it very important to discuss why I'm not sleeping, why I don't seem to want to fall asleep. Much bigger picture than throw some medicine down the hatch. If necessary, yes! - like my thyroid meds. He will probably remember that my body reacts overly-strongly to some stuff. When I was inpatient the psych nurses regularly handed out 20 drops of something I've forgotten the name of or maybe just 10 drops to try out - something soothing for when you're agitated. I felt pushed into taking it once actually and more or less fell into bed after taking it. I did sleep but with full-on nightmares. I would rather have been awake and sorting through what had happened in my head. They did put a note in my file about not giving me much again. I took it once more when I really couldn't sleep but said - 2 drops max. Those 2 drops worked. Here they try and stop me sorting things through in my head - ruminating, brooding. But maybe that's just part of who I am rather than something to be got rid of? I started really early as a child due to what was happening in FOO - wondering "Why me? Why don't my parents want me?" etc. Nowadays I think I often do ruminate myself into a solution of sorts, so it's not so bad really. Especially better than taking psycho chemicals with unhelpful side-effects.

Anyway, enough on that. My thinking processes are slowed down too. But I will go and do today's course work. I suppose it's possible that the course work is having an affect on me already and that's tiring.

[NarcKiddo]

I'm with you on the dislike of taking drugs. I would rather have a headache than take paracetamol. I would rather have a sore knee than take an anti-inflammatory. In my case it is (I think) because I want to know what is going on with my body. For so long I had to suppress everything that maybe now feeling *something* is better than nothing, even if that something is not pleasant.

That said, some drugs are without question beneficial or necessary, as you have said in different words above. So I hope you can work out what drug regime is best for you. Sleep is vital to our wellbeing, but it needs to be restorative sleep. And it seems to me that if sleep drugs are messing with your other drug routines then that is probably a consideration to factor in. I am sure you have already thought of this aspect and I am sorry if I have said too much.

I hope the course work goes well today.

 

[Blueberry]

Stayed up half the night again. So I didn't take Quetiapin because it was just too late. Slept from 3am to 10am. I'm not sure how deeply. I was still tired when I got up and took my thyroid med. Made myself some tea and went back to bed. But fortunately I wasn't sleepy so I got up again and have been up ever since doing various things, mostly useful to some extent. Had breakfast, took Citalopram. I feel a lot better than when after Quetiapin! The tiredness I felt when I got up this morning feels so different and much better than after Quet., where it's not tiredness per se, it's a heaviness and inability to stay awake and slow thinking and difficulty dredging up things I actually know like the names of my meds. It took me ages last night to come up with the name Citalopram, just as a minor example.

Psych doc says that lack of deep quality sleep will be contributing to my feeling of 'nothing to live for, no goals'. I think more, it could be, but it might not be. It might be something completely different but it's easier to prescribe medication than arrange even more therapy for me to look at why. There's been enough stuff going on - realisations and deaths and bad news and even big changes last year undoubtedly still reverberating - that could cause a huge EF of 'nothing to live for' that we don't need to go mucking around with chemicals imho. Trauma T is starting up again for me 'after Easter' tho I still haven't been given an exact date. But that will be a place where I can hopefully begin to work on what's behind 'nothing to live for'.

Now I remember those drops I got inpatient didn't cause nightmares so much as: they brought up a whole pile of emotions overnight that I don't normally feel when I'm thinking up solutions. I can't remember exactly but it's possible those emotions turned into nightmares. While it might be a good thing to go into those emotions bit by bit, that wasn't actually the plan at the time. And it certainly wasn't bit by bit.

[Blueberry]

Haven't taken my Quetiapin since about the 24th. That's just a few days of course. I hadn't actually intended to go off them but then it happened that way... One thing I notice is that I tend to go to bed a lot later when I don't take this medicine. However once I've noted that, I can work on changing that. Like say to myself it's Quetiapin time, so get ready for bed and go instead of taking Quetiapin

Psych doc says that lack of deep quality sleep will be contributing to my feeling of 'nothing to live for, no goals'. I think more, it could be, but it might not be. It might be something completely different but it's easier to prescribe medication than arrange even more therapy for me to look at why. There's been enough stuff going on - realisations and deaths and bad news and even big changes last year undoubtedly still reverberating - that could cause a huge EF of 'nothing to live for' that we don't need to go mucking around with chemicals imho. Trauma T is starting up again for me 'after Easter' tho I still haven't been given an exact date. But that will be a place where I can hopefully begin to work on what's behind 'nothing to live for'.

My occupational T agrees with psych doc that insomnia and lack of sleep will cause problems with goals simply because lack of sleep equals lack of energy to accomplish those goals. Not sure where psych doc is, but imo OT is not looking deep enough. It's not that I don't have enough energy to work on my goals It's a case of an EF saying "it's not worth it" or even "I don't want to exist"!! Then I can't access my energy, it all flows away somewhere. I probably don't even want to access my energy, I just want to curl up and at best self-soothe re-reading books I know almost off by heart or, even less active, hide under the blankets where it's warm and I can just doze for hours or days. And not only can I not access my energy, I can't access my goals either - they all seem pointless, but not pointless in ways I could list, it's more like they feel completely and utterly pointless. Big, big EF.

Also a big realisation  
Only brought about thru my experimenting the past few days with meds and thru OT's comment.

[Blueberry]

I've been off all meds for a week. I know that doesn't make anything any easier, but this cognitive knowledge doesn't seem to help. Today I finally took the most important medication again - thyroid. Maybe I'll manage anti-dep as well tomorrow.

Next week I'm finally getting back into trauma therapy, though that's not what got me moving again today.

[Blueberry]

I have started the course. Finally, in earnest, today. That is, I've dedicated a notebook for writing stuff, especially homework / being honest with myself + whatever else comes up and/or occurs to me. I might sometimes write about something on here or more likely on my private Journal
...

More importantly for me, doing this course is part of my attempt to improve my self-discipline of doing things for ME, of taking those healing steps regularly, making a habit out of them, getting back up again and setting off again when I've fallen on my nose or just stopped practising for whatever reason. 
...

Back on the bolded bit again today after idk 3-week break, tho it wasn't a planned break of course...

[Blueberry]

I enjoyed my day for the most part today. I did get a bit tired physically, which is not so enjoyable, but it's also nothing terrible.

In occup. therapy, my therapist was late - very unusual, in fact the first time ever. Me - late, that's not so unusual. I used the waiting time to write something in my paper Journal that I really wanted to write before I forgot and then I did a bunch of EFT (tapping), partly because of having to wait - that kind of ruffled the feathers of some part of me, tho in my head it wasn't a big deal. Feelings (including from the past) versus thoughts. I know occ.T well enough to know that this isn't going to become a trend and also to know that it had nothing whatsoever to do with me. Once I get going, my hands went straight into gloopy paint and onto paper. I yawn a lot, something gets released or at least there's some emotional movement, altho I don't know so far what cognitively. It doesn't matter, I don't always have to know.

I ran some errands - or attempted to - in the afternoon, which included having a nice walk along the local river. It's chilly, but no rain or sleet, in fact there was the occasional glimpse of sun. I was really tired in the late afternoon/early evening but I decided to go to choir practice anyway, tho I did waver in my decision-making, but then finally: choir practice! I haven't been for a couple of weeks, but we're singing on Sunday and I'll be singing too. I can manage that now - one practice and then sing with the rest.

So today I was involved with art and music    They're both good for me, but sometimes difficult too.

My new trauma T emailed that she's sick this week, so no appt this week after all, is that OK? Fortunately I'm doing fairly well this week, so just think to myself "Not an awful lot I or my new T could do about it if it wasn't OK!"

[Blueberry]

I'm doing well with the meditations from the course. I do them after I get up and have taken my first meds. I'm surprised (!) but it's easier to get out of bed for this non-early bird when I have my meditation to look forward to.

On Monday I planned an exception for some concrete reasons and didn't do my meditation till late afternoon. By the time I did it, I was all over the place - thoughts jumping here and there. There are a few possible reasons for that, so I'm going to keep them in mind and see if there's some clarity about that sometime.