PTSD and OCD meltdown

[crocodilio87]

Hi
I'm in the middle of a PTSD and OCD meltdown so I'm desperately trying to seek enough help on here which will calm me enough to be able to sleep so that I can work tomorrow. Then i have therapy booked for Thursday and am actively seeking a PTSD therapist. I'm desperately trying to deal with this myself so that my sons aren't aware and also I don't want to put this burden onto my husband. He's gone through this too, and he's so supportive but there's only so many times you can tell someone to stop thinking a certain way before you just realise you're banging your head against a brick wall (he's never said this to me but he'd be well within his rights to think it!).

I'm sorry I have posted on here before about this and have name changed because I'm so embarrassed that I keep asking about the same thing. I have OCD and it's part of that I think.

Long story short my son was born with a heart defect. He had surgery at two weeks old and after the surgeons said he was "fixed" and to treat him normally. He's nearly three now, doing amazing and has done great at his check ups. He's now on yearly check ups. Summarizing it like that does sort of minimise how traumatic the whole thing was. We had no idea he was poorly until he was born, then at 8 days old he was transferred by ambulance to a large children's hospital, he was ventilated then had his 8 hour surgery. Given scary survival odds. He did amazing after surgery and we went home 10 days post op. He did leave with two blood clots so we had to inject him with blood thinners every day, unfortunately the injection site moved and he developed a hematoma so was admitted again and had his medication changed. A few weeks later the clots went and he did amazing again. You would never know what he's been through to look at him. He's hilarious, massive, and strong as an ox. I'll never forget the pained cry he made though when he had the hemotoma and I had no idea. I thought he had reflux. So many complex memories.

My problem is that I cannot stop blaming myself for him having the heart defect. I am convinced I caused it by either:

• not taking prenatal vitamins
• getting covid and high fever at 7 weeks gestation

I go down rabbit holes reading about when the heart is formed etc. Tonight I have asked chatgpt and found out that the week the part of the heart is formed where my son had his defect is the week I had covid. I cannot stop obsessing over it being logical to think that this fever caused the defect. I can't forgive myself, the pain and regret is indescribable. I don't know how to enjoy anything. I live every day petrified for the future and the fact that I caused this eats me alive. I don't know what to do. I cannot practise radical acceptance as some people in my life have suggested. It's too painful. Please help me

Just one other thing - I know many people will say "but you didn't actively try and catch Covid". But I did know that my friend's little girl had a bad cough and I still agreed to look after her even though I knew I was pregnant. This decision haunts me. If I had said no, my son might never have had his heart defect

It is not your fault.
Enjoy your beautiful son, your mind is drifting with traumatic thought's which is understandably, remember he is here and he is safe now.

I had EMDR therapy for PTSD and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Speak with a few practitioners before choosing the person you feel is a good match.

Be encouraged by the fact that people really do recover from trauma. Look forward to the time when these horrible feelings are just a memory.

You can do it.

Lots of sympathy, but you need a trauma therapist to help you work through it, because a feature of the illness you have, is that your brain will discount and "(ir)rationalise" away all the correct, logical reasons that anyone can give you as to why it's so wildly unlikely as to be practically impossible that anything you did caused your son's heart defect.

And will equally discount the hundreds of thousands of examples of people who did the same things and had children without your son's heart problem.

I guess the only l line I'm wondering if it might resonate with you at all is: there are other children with your son's issue. Do you secretly blame and judge all of their mothers, and believe that they caused their child's heart defect? Or do you believe that sometimes there's just unfair bad luck in the world, and it's not at all their fault? Because if you don't judge them, then equally, there's no reason in the world why you should judge yourself. Bad luck is unfortunate, but it is absolutely no-one's fault.

I hope you get some sleep tonight. And that you find a helpful trauma therapist.

While you can't sleep, maybe these courses might help you understand your condition better:
https://www.thecentreforhealing.com/free-courses
There's a free certificate course on Trauma informed practice which goes into some detail, and a mini course on understanding trauma. Sometimes knowledge about your condition and some ways to handle/process it can be helpful.

Many hugs.

You are caught in a repetitive cycle of rumination.

It is absolute shit.

I do it too.

It sounds like your son is now well and healthy and is down to once yearly checks which is great.

Obsessive thoughts are shit. We ruminate on what we could have done differently and I believe that each time we ruminate we are trying to change the past- hoping to magically resolve the thing we are worried about and give it a different ending ie you wishing you hadn’t minded the child with sniffles that turned out to be covid. It helps that I talk this stuff out with a psychiatrist. I’m covered by insurance so I seek her reassurance every now and again - to get my head back on straight. I’m not sure I’ll ever totally get over it. But it’s gotten better. Our children are our greatest worry and our greatest joy. So we tend to focus on what we may have not done right by them.

This is what I tell myself:-

1. I wasn’t to blame for any of this.

2. But even if I had been to blame it would have been well past time to forgive myself. We are only human and doing the best we know how to at the time.

❤️❤️❤️ to you OP. I hope you are sleeping deeply now.

It's highly unlikely that anything you did caused your son to have a heart defect. It's often unclear what the cause is and it sounds like you're latching onto unrelated things during your pregnancy to try and find an explanation.

I know it's hard but I would strongly advise against googling looking for explanations in your current state of mind. Make an appointment with your GP and talk it through with them, they will be able to reassure you. Does your son have regular check ups with a consultant? You could talk to them about it too.

Be kind to yourself OP, your little boy sounds like he is doing amazingly well, and you sound like a great mum. 💐 There are a lot of different things that can cause heart defects, and many of them happen for no discernable reason atall. Even if it was covid that doesn't mean it was your fault, you could just as easily say it was your friends fault for asking you to watch her little girl, or the fault of whoever gave covid to the little girl, or the person who gave it to them, or, well you get the idea!
Would it help to focus on the things you can do to keep him healthy now and in the future, rather than on the things in the past that you can't change? There's so much you can do to help keep him healthy in the future; a healthy balanced diet, lots of fresh air and exercise, getting him all his vaccinations and keeping him away from people who are sick, and giving him love and support which will help his mental health. I'm so sorry you're having to deal with ptsd and ocd, I really hope you start to feel better soon. 💜

OP it sounds like you have been through an awful lot. I don’t think it’s for parents of children that have been ill to suffer with PTSD. You are not to blame. Cardiac conditions and other congenital conditions are fairly common, it’s an absolute miracle how we are formed and made, it’s completely understandable and normal that sometimes these conditions happen. You would never, ever look at another mother with a child born with these conditions and blame them. It’s absolutely nothing to do with Covid or anything you did. Please get help, look at the BACP website and try and find a therapist with experience in trauma/PTSD/EMDR. If you need to be off work, go off work. Just be kind to yourself, be open and honest with your partner, thinking of you

I struggled a lot with PTSD after my DD died, with very similar ruminations and difficult thoughts. I have had a few batches of therapy which have helped but the most useful thing for me was taking sertraline (an AD but also prescribed for PTSD). I took it for a few months first then two years after a bit of a break. It gave me a break from intrusive thoughts and let my thought patterns get into a much better state. It also get me into a state where I could engage better with therapy. It's not plain sailing coming off ADs but for me it was so beneficial in the long run.

Hi OP,

I'd try looking at Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

I'm not a therapist so I don't know which parts of what you're going through are OCD and which bits are trauma.

I know with OCD the advice is often to sit with the uncomfortable thought, rather than pushing it away. The researching sounds like a compulsion which gives power to the irrational fear.

Everyone has thoughts like "maybe X caused this awful thing to happen" but for people without OCD, that thought comes and goes without the fear bringing it back up again and again with the compulsion to research.

It doesn't mean anything to have the thought. Having the thought doesn't make the thought any more true. Your mind is reacting to the thought as a threat. So my advice would be to try and accept the thought, notice it, sit with it, without needing to disprove it. Because in the end it is just a thought. We all have them.

Easier said than done I know as a fellow OCD sufferer.

I'm really sorry you have been through such a traumatic experience, I can't even imagine how hard that was, and I hope the therapy helps you.