Been having therapy since mid summer for severe anxiety associated with complex ptsd. Have had anxiety/OCD type behaviours since I was about 5 years old, I’m now early 30s so a very long time.
I’ve had therapy before a lot but no-one’s ever gone into detail about things and this time they are, it’s a very specialist NHS team for people who’ve had complex trauma and they’re doing things very differently to anything I’ve had before. There’s two doctors and a nurse involved at the moment plus my GP.
I’m finding the actual therapy sessions exhausting. Nurse that’s doing them said they are slowing the pace because I’m finding each time I end up hyperventilating, nausea, dizzy, dissociating/blanking out and losing time.
Weekends and evenings I’m alone a lot of the time and things build, and build and I get stuck in a loop of flashbacks and losing time. Stuck a film on earlier and didn’t even see it iyswim, just caught a few seconds here and there. Sometimes I can distract myself enough but if not I just get stuck in this cycle of remembering things. More and more stuff keeps coming back, some of it is just random and some of it very defintiely isn’t and I don’t know how to sit with it.
Hardest thing is I’ve been actively encouraged not to talk about content of flashbacks unless I have to, got told I can write them down but nurse said she’s been asked by my psychologist not to encourage me to talk in detail as ‘too much too soon and could make you very unwell.’
I’ve got a sheet of ‘safety’ things to do to help but they don’t always work and I end up going down the route of totally unsafe coping mechanisms instead. I don’t feel safe most of the time at all.
Is this normal or am I completely broken somehow? I won’t see nurse again til Wed, can contact out of hours team if I needed to but don’t want to be a burden on them. Out of hours just say to have a bloody shower or make some tea/toast and watch Netflix.