Hi,
I wondered if I could ask for people's thoughts on a problem here?
My DS has cPTSD from surgery in infancy, and unfortunately he had an extremely hard time in secondary school, where they used horror to liven things up a lot. I didn't realise how much DS was suffering until he effectively had a nervous breakdown and I had to take him out of school.
I was told that the way to help him recover was that he had to "feel safe, and be safe" at all times and I've been absolutely on that 24/7 while we home schooled with council alternative provision.
It's been nearly two years now though, and he still sees the whole world through a sort of "horror lens". He can look at quite nice normal things and see them as horror, which terrifies him and triggers panic attacks.
It can be quite simple things like trees and shrubs, or a building, or the cover of a book that has a particular font. He says trees are weird and creepy and he can't cope with them. Holes in bread are also a problem.
Yesterday he saw a plug that had no cable coming from it and was terrified. (It was a special plug to stick a usb cable into for a phone) He often can't open the fridge and he can't go places in the house without an escort, because he is afraid.
I wondered if anybody might know what this is and how to help him?
We have been seeing a psychotherapist weekly for a whole year, and he has been seen by a paediatric psychiatrist and we have been referred on to a clinical psychologist who does EMDR. They all say we just have to keep talking and trying until we find what works.
He is getting much better at telling me what terrifies him and it is almost always things he has seen on computer screens, either at home or at school. The things at home were all computer games or youtube and he stopped both completely two years ago, but the images seem to stay with him, and not get forgotten.
He never used the computer at home without me being there watching so I know what he was doing at all times. It's just that he really liked it at the time and only later once school added to the burden it became too much in retrospect.
DS says the problem was all the horror in school and it was just all the time and it overwhelmed him totally. We have completely left the school, but the horror doesn't seem to leave him. His mind seems to have seen to much horror that it sees everything AS horror now.
He also says he still feels afraid of and controlled by the school and he says it's just really hard to recover. It's like he was exposed to so much horror there that it changed how he sees and now he sees everything as horror.
DS is ASD and started reading at 18 months, but otherwise he is pretty normal.
He has a lot of food intolerances, and exposure to the wrong food makes the MH symptoms radically worse.
We've excluded a lot of food triggers, and that helped. We haven't yet tried totally organic but with all the exclusions I think adding in that further contraint would make it very hard.
Thank you very much if you have read this far. I just wondered if anybody might have experienced the same and know what to do?
Thanks!