My experience is that things went well when I asked my partner for space and support to seek help.
When I was very open with them in detail about what I was going through it was very traumatising for them. They love and care for me very much and they felt my pain empathetically very directly. And it pained me to see that pain int WHM and we went round in circles a bit.
So some times finding an outlet for the trauma outwith your close relationship can be very helpful as that allows the trauma to drain out of your environs rather than ricochet round it.
So I have found various types of therapeutic support helpful.
Firstly, physical and movement based therapies. In particular I found TRE helpful. There is also a book called “Waking the Tiger” by Peter Levine that was very helpful. Equally, the website of Pete Walker and his books is just amazing. They are geared towards C-PTSD rather than PTSD but the advice on managing flashback/panic attacks is invaluable.
I also found massage helpful and particularly a technique called visceral manipulation (Google the Barral Institute for practitioners).
Talk therapies can be helpful. I would agree that it is best to avoid CBT as it can be retraumatising. I would also sound a note of caution- the therapeutic relationship is key. You have to be absolutely comfortable with the person you are talking to. Be aware that a lot of EMDR practitioners also have a CBT background
Sadly I tried the functional nutrition route and it set me back over a year I’d say. Focussed too much on symptom management and not enough on the underlying causes. It may have been the particular practitioner of course but I would read very carefully in that arena.
Some of the most useful things for me have been peer to peer. That is where you get that feeling of being absolutely able to be totally open about your experiences and find straight up understanding. Support groups are one source of that.
Another source of that is a pretty amazing community of people on Tik tok all trying to heal from trauma and sharing their experiences.
Trauma tok is full of people freely sharing what has and hasn’t worked for them. Mostly it is people genuinely sharing their experiences and wanting to help others without no expectation of financial return. It’s a blend of science based and spiritually based things and it has been amazingly helpful to me.
You do have to balance discernment and an open mind to get something from that, but it’s very easy to scroll down if you come across something that strikes an off note with you.
Incidentally my trauma started to really improve when instead of trying to avoid or control symptoms I embraced them and sat with the feelings that were coming up and traced and integrated them into my experience.
WWhen we experience trauma our minds store memories differently than usual memories. Literally in different parts of the brain. That’s why things like smells or sounds or textures or times of day can spark something in us.
Those sense experiences literally connect to parts of the traumatic memory that have been stored in different centres of the brain.
If when those feeling come up you relax into them and trace backtrack o where they are coming from, what is happening is you are building neural pathways to those fragmented memories and integrating them into your conscious experience. You are recovering things your mind hid from you at the time.
You mentioned both that you had a road traffic accident and that you are most likely to feel sick in the morning. It can be very illuminating to try to understand the patterns and the connections to the triggers.
So how I would handle that is to next time I felt like that, I would sit with myself, do deep breathing and gently try to guide myself to understanding the connection there.
So it might be something like the accident was in the morning. Or it might be that you associate getting ready in the morning with them going to drive or be driven somewhere or cross roads etc whilst a pedestrian. Or it might be that there was a cup of tea in the cup holder in the car when you had your accident. Something like that.
The important thing is not to force yourself to remember. Be gentle with yourself. A mild amount of discomfort that you can reassure or calm yourself through is ok, distress is not.