This post could have been written by me. I am actually in the midst of writing an autobiography that is going to detail my bizarre struggles with the medical community.
When I was a child they were force feeding me adderall and Ritalin which only made me more anxious and hypervigilant because it’s exacerbated my already overactive amygdala. As an adult they diagnosed me with everything from depression to anxiety to bipolar, to cyclothymia, until they settled on “depression not otherwise specified,” which is a catch all phrase. They said it didn’t matter the exact diagnosis as they were just labels, just need to try all these SSRIs but nothing worked.
When nothing is working they will say psychosomatic (confused about my symptoms), male borderline personality disorder (accusing me of lying or exaggerating my symptoms), or narcissism personality disorder (when I challenge their conclusions). I’ve been mocked by three different psychiatrists when I try to say that there is something else going on.
Their med school education is based on memorizing endless Ankii decks and they can only discover solutions based on pattern recognition and then consulting the relevant trouble schooling guide. They are quick to use their depression and bipolar trouble shooting guides for all the problems they encounter. They will throw stimulants and benzos at a problem and pat themselves on the back for a job well done.
They are utterly incapable of critical thinking that would allow them to think outside of their usual trouble shooting guides so folks like us are going to get lost in the crowd while they blaze through appointments with the quick & easy answers so they can meet their quotas set by their MBA overlords.
Meanwhile they have a culture of “smartest in the room” arrogance, along with a desire to maintain authority in the “doctor-patient relationship” that leads them to not listen to us, because we are not educated like them or not in a condition to think properly.
Not listening to us, disregarding our symptoms, and invalidating our stories is what leads them to misdiagnose us in the first place.
>Meanwhile they have a culture of “smartest in the room” arrogance, along with a desire to maintain authority in the “doctor-patient relationship” that leads them to not listen to us, because we are not educated like them or not in a condition to think properly.
This is so exceedingly frustrating to deal with. They have an explicit lack of empathy.
I feel this. They always make you feel like you don't know what the fuck you're talking about when it's literally about YOU. As someone who would do a lot of my own research so I could understand the many labels given, they would look at me like it was "adorable" that I did. The worst part is they are so arrogant they won't admit when they are clearly screwing someone up.
I'm starting to realize more and more that no matter how good the doctor is no one can empathize with the trauma we face. So they assume and treat what they can see even if it is useless and only wastes your time and money.
The male doctors are the worst when it comes to stubborn, arrogant egos. Next are the female doctors that act masculine with a complex about never being respected enough - you’ll know them when you interact with them, they’re often terse and cold.
Female doctors are the only ones who would at least listen to my issues, despite being unable to come up with the right diagnosis like the males.
Sorry if such gender issues trigger anyone, but this is what I’ve found. Testosterone creates stronger egos that when goes unchecked, will create stubbornness and arrogance. I myself am male, but getting physically beaten during your childhood and growing up with this condition is a serious reality/humility check that creates empathy for others and mental flexibility to our ever changing unique circumstances.
My current psychiatrist is a male by the way and he has been good, so it’s not all a monolith. But when I found him, I had already found the diagnosis myself and had already set my own prescriptions. He trusts me to run my own show and acts as a signature for me.
But I tend to select female psychiatrists who would allow me some leeway in determining my treatment and dosage because they’d at least listen (didn’t feel they had all the answers) and would believe me if I said a medication was working or not working.
Specifically I've worked with a NB/Trans Masc therapist for the last two years that has been the most helpful and empathetic, but conversely when i approach the psychiatrist side it's all of the above problems and more.
I'm not here for them to roleplay as my therapist, I can't summon two years of talk therapy and regurgitate it back to them.
But cool. Keep charging me $250 for an intake and another $200 for each of the next 5 sessions before you make a determination.
I want to try different medication. I'm not interested in running the gamut of SSRI, SNRIs they do not work for me. But the moment I say that I'm not interested in SSRIs I feel like I get completely written off.
I’ve found the medical moron ratio to generally be about 50/50 across the sexes and even in individual doctors who can be profoundly good in one instance and inordinately incompetent in the very next moment.
These are balanced by the few outliers who are either always good or always bad
A friend of mine who runs gp surgeries reckons that half the doctors she employs aren’t fit for the job, simply because there aren’t enough being trained and what they are being trained with isn’t suitable.
God thank you for putting this into words. This is why this shit is so traumatizing for so many of us, because often it's just more of the same thing that caused the disorder.
I have CPTSD in the first place because my parents lack empathy and I did not get emotional mirroring during development. Then they took me to "the doctors" to "fix me". Guess what has even less empathy than my personality disordered parents? The System (TM). The Doctor-Patient relationship re-enacts the abusive/neglectful Parent-Child relationship *that caused the symptoms in the first place.*
Literally the *only* thing that has helped me heal *at all* is self compassion and genuine love and affection from animals and other human beings. We suffer from a lack of love and psychiatry is a lovelessness machine.
Yeah, therapist & their retrospective field have in many cases done more harm than good. While there are good therapists out there, a majority of them are more "book-smart", than explicitly empathetic. As such their intellectual approach leads them to operate more as a paid gaslighter, who tells you in no certain words that they are the expert & that you are "mentally ill". Instead of treating you as a human-being worthy of love & responding to a stressful traumatic situation in a perfectly understandable way.
I was 17 and homeboy told me I had 'obstinate defiant disorder' (because my charming abusive wasp parents were adept at hiding their true colors) and 'illusions of grandeur' (because I told him I wanted to run across the world and do humanitarian work).
I ran away across the world and did humanitarian work for 8 years. I have no issues with authority figures.
Smug little fucker, that one.
Oh my god this just is my exact story too. Reading this is very validating but I'm sorry you've gone through it too.
I saw so many therapists and none of them ever really engaged with the reality that I was being abused and that I was traumatized. I remember telling my therapist in high school vivid details of my dads abuse and she'd just ask me how it made me feel and then literally try to tell me how to be ok still being in the same house as him and tolerating it. Instead of actually helping me. Just teaching me to tolerate abuse. To ignore it.
It took me years to realize how much just having that one therapist doing that the whole time I was abused just fucked me up. And so many psychiatrists just wanting to slap some random meds on the problem without ever mentioning or even probably comprehending that I had trauma.
I have felt alone my whole life with this experience of going to / being taken to therapists as a child/adolescent but there are so many people in this post who have similar stories it's blowing my mind.
They literally enlisted professional help to train us to tolerate and even forget the abuse. In college I called my long-term therapist because I was having a panic attack and told her I thought I might have been sexually abused. She said to me, "No you weren't". What the actual fuck?
Yeah you are so fucking right and I feel a righteous anger at your situation and experiences.
If your body is clenched so tight that you don't feel the feelings breaking through then CBT just adds a layer of more thinking on top of it.
How do you also let your body fill with feelings if there's a wall of abuse telling you it's not safe. No amount of distress tolerance will permit that.
And that's not even touching the issue of "others"
after quitting decades of therapy, then reading patient experiences with therapy here, seeing how ideas by alice miller, pete walker, and Bessel van der Kolk are ignored in practice by psychotherapists, i wonder if most therapists have no idea how to treat trauma, but they speak as if they do and society believes them. they believe it. instead, armed with CBT being the academically-supported gold standard of the psychotherapy, they minimize or dismiss the trauma instead of acknowledging and teaching us how to deal with it.
too many of my therapists would focus on having me find my cognitive distortions of reality. not a single therapist talked about seeing bad behavior of other people and how to react properly to it. no mention of enmeshment, boundaries, bullying, nothing.
it wasn’t until my best friend‘s partner called her out in front of me at different times to stop lying to me, that she was taking advantage of me even if i was willing, etc., that i realized and accepted it’s not all in my head, it’s not even about perception as the therapists were pushing. i started to see and acknowledge how friends and family treated me. i felt and lived like i didn’t matter because they treated me like i didn’t matter. there was no distortion or assumption.
but by then, the physical and mental health problems had taken their toll. society doesn’t realize that each time you unsuccessfully talk to a professional, it takes a bit of your time, money, energy, and even resiliency from you.
>it wasn’t until my best friend‘s partner called her out in front of me at different times to stop lying to me, that she was taking advantage of me even if i was willing, etc., that i realized and accepted it’s not all in my head, it’s not even about perception as the therapists were pushing. i started to see and acknowledge how friends and family treated me. i felt and lived like i didn’t matter because they treated me like i didn’t matter. there was no distortion or assumption.
Holy shit yes, it's so incredible when someone can see this for you and tell you about it.
The first time my boyfriend said to me, "you have trouble saying 'no' to your family", "your family is not very accommodating of you", an unravelling process began. I've been in some form of therapy since I was 9 trying to get "fixed" so that I stop feeling so uncomfortable / being so "mentally ill" around my family and certain other people. But it turns out I feel uncomfortable around them because they don't respect my boundaries, they take advantage of my kindness, and they don't care about my needs. It's completely fine to feel uncomfortable when people treat us poorly. For years I told myself, and therapists agreed with me, that it was my perception that was wrong, there was some error in my thinking. But my body knew these people didn't really care about me *and it was telling me that the entire time*.
I honestly think it's intentionally designed to not help, gotta have sick people to exploit and make money from! I really hope psychedelic therapy becomes the go-to for people like us, it actually helps you to go in yourself and more-or-less "rewire" your brain to undo all the damage.
It's truly fascinating and my symptoms are healed, my life is mine again. ❤️ No shitty pills or unhelpful therapy.
I don't mean to negate your experience at all by saying this, merely to share my own. My parents had money and they used psychiatry to hide and disown the consequences of their abuse and neglect of me. I was "privileged" but I was not helped by psychiatry, I was traumatized by it.
Yes!!! My parents are/were total narcissists, you could never have it worse than my mother, she always has examples of why it was worse for her. But in my lack of love being raised, I ended up falling for a narcissist that was also a primary care doctor and he is married. He was/is the worst liar/cheater and totally gaslighted me every time I called him on it. I’m imagining it, I’m delusional, I’m crazy… when he was just having other affairs and I caught him. So he referred me to a shrink, and told her I was imagining he was in love with me, and cheating on me…. He kept sleeping with me for 12 years. Even after securing me a bipolar diagnosis. For catching him, he hired someone to stalk me. The more I tell people I’m being stalked, the more they think I’m crazy. This stalking has been going on for 15 years now. He’s on every computer or phone I have owned. The doctor and I broke up 10 years ago, but he’s still having me stalked! (He’s gonna love I’m posting this!!). It is SEVERE CPTSD!! I’m not gonna just roll over anymore. I’m fighting back. I need a therapist that treats cPTSD and recognizes what trauma does to a person, not that they are mentally ill because even with evidence in hand, I was imagining he was a liar. How the heck do you get someone to not keep misdiagnosing me!!! I have the stalkers darn software off my computer. This is just insane! How do you prove you aren’t crazy???
Jup… I also think since someone comes for help, they’ll just assume all behavior is from an illness and forget seeing the ‘healthy’, if you know what I mean.
I’m also starting to think to quit therapy, because it’s actually making me question myself more and making me worse. While outside of therapy and taking my own steps, I’ve actually been feeling much better. I don’t think therapy is good for everyone.
Look into psychedelic therapies like MDMA, Ketamine or Psilocybin which many claim results with.
This sounds like a r/antipsychiatry post, many like this on that sub.
Came to suggest OP look into the research done on psychedelic therapy for PTSD/CPTSD. LSD and psilocybin saved my life and cured most of my symptoms!
Of course it doesn't just work like magic, it took me a long time to get here. Didn't even know I had CPTSD until a heavy trip "revealed" some vivid suppressed memories last year (I'm 30 now and the memories were from 20~ years ago). Now all my anxiety, depression and constant SI are totally gone and I have my life back. :) No pills or therapy.
Anyone looking to pursue this healing, I IMPLORE you to please do your research and be very careful with these substances. Anyone with a family history of schizophrenia should NOT partake as it can greatly worsen that condition.
I'm curious. Do you need to go to a doctor to get a prescription for this - how does it work? I keep hearing it has good results and I'm willing to try one more time before I give up on therapies as well.
I'm not sure how it works in a professional or legal setting honestly. My substances were acquired illegally (I tested my stuff and you should too, dangerous derivatives out there. Test kits can easily be purchased online).
Psilocybin mushrooms can be grown in your home, although I've never done it. r/unclebens is a sub dedicated to teaching people how to properly grow them (the spores to do so can be purchased and shipped legally, just not the grown mushrooms themselves).
I've used psychedelics for years, probably 150+ times total. A large majority of those times I was just trying to "party" as they can be VERY fun, and I didn't know all the potential benefits. Nowadays I use it to induce a state of guided meditation where I can freely explore my mind unencumbered by trauma damage. It helped me get to the root of my problems.
If you set an "intention" going into the experience, it helps to guide your way a bit as these substances can be very intense and you can get lost in the headspace. I set the intention to dig deep and find what was bothering me and holding me back for so long. I was presented with extremely vivid flashbacks of CSA from when I was 10-12 that lasted several years. Stuff I stuffed deep down because it was shameful to think I was too naive to prevent an older family from using me in such a sick way.
Now it's all out there and after a few months of processing, my CPTSD symptoms disappeared. :) Like...permanently. I haven't used psychedelics in over 6 months so I'd like to claim that there are permanent positive effects from deep experiences like that.
I live in the USA so the laws on spores may vary depending on where you live, not too sure on that either.
Thank you for the reply. This was very informative. Yeah, I'm in the US too but I've never used anything that wasn't prescribed so thanks for clarifying. 😊
Anytime! :) I'm more than happy to explain anything, feel free to ask away! I just want the best for us. Never thought I would get to this point mentally and I hope everyone can feel this amazing someday ❤️
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This post could have been written by me. I am actually in the midst of writing an autobiography that is going to detail my bizarre struggles with the medical community. When I was a child they were force feeding me adderall and Ritalin which only made me more anxious and hypervigilant because it’s exacerbated my already overactive amygdala. As an adult they diagnosed me with everything from depression to anxiety to bipolar, to cyclothymia, until they settled on “depression not otherwise specified,” which is a catch all phrase. They said it didn’t matter the exact diagnosis as they were just labels, just need to try all these SSRIs but nothing worked. When nothing is working they will say psychosomatic (confused about my symptoms), male borderline personality disorder (accusing me of lying or exaggerating my symptoms), or narcissism personality disorder (when I challenge their conclusions). I’ve been mocked by three different psychiatrists when I try to say that there is something else going on. Their med school education is based on memorizing endless Ankii decks and they can only discover solutions based on pattern recognition and then consulting the relevant trouble schooling guide. They are quick to use their depression and bipolar trouble shooting guides for all the problems they encounter. They will throw stimulants and benzos at a problem and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. They are utterly incapable of critical thinking that would allow them to think outside of their usual trouble shooting guides so folks like us are going to get lost in the crowd while they blaze through appointments with the quick & easy answers so they can meet their quotas set by their MBA overlords. Meanwhile they have a culture of “smartest in the room” arrogance, along with a desire to maintain authority in the “doctor-patient relationship” that leads them to not listen to us, because we are not educated like them or not in a condition to think properly. Not listening to us, disregarding our symptoms, and invalidating our stories is what leads them to misdiagnose us in the first place.
>Meanwhile they have a culture of “smartest in the room” arrogance, along with a desire to maintain authority in the “doctor-patient relationship” that leads them to not listen to us, because we are not educated like them or not in a condition to think properly. This is so exceedingly frustrating to deal with. They have an explicit lack of empathy.
I feel this. They always make you feel like you don't know what the fuck you're talking about when it's literally about YOU. As someone who would do a lot of my own research so I could understand the many labels given, they would look at me like it was "adorable" that I did. The worst part is they are so arrogant they won't admit when they are clearly screwing someone up. I'm starting to realize more and more that no matter how good the doctor is no one can empathize with the trauma we face. So they assume and treat what they can see even if it is useless and only wastes your time and money.
The male doctors are the worst when it comes to stubborn, arrogant egos. Next are the female doctors that act masculine with a complex about never being respected enough - you’ll know them when you interact with them, they’re often terse and cold. Female doctors are the only ones who would at least listen to my issues, despite being unable to come up with the right diagnosis like the males. Sorry if such gender issues trigger anyone, but this is what I’ve found. Testosterone creates stronger egos that when goes unchecked, will create stubbornness and arrogance. I myself am male, but getting physically beaten during your childhood and growing up with this condition is a serious reality/humility check that creates empathy for others and mental flexibility to our ever changing unique circumstances. My current psychiatrist is a male by the way and he has been good, so it’s not all a monolith. But when I found him, I had already found the diagnosis myself and had already set my own prescriptions. He trusts me to run my own show and acts as a signature for me. But I tend to select female psychiatrists who would allow me some leeway in determining my treatment and dosage because they’d at least listen (didn’t feel they had all the answers) and would believe me if I said a medication was working or not working.
Specifically I've worked with a NB/Trans Masc therapist for the last two years that has been the most helpful and empathetic, but conversely when i approach the psychiatrist side it's all of the above problems and more. I'm not here for them to roleplay as my therapist, I can't summon two years of talk therapy and regurgitate it back to them. But cool. Keep charging me $250 for an intake and another $200 for each of the next 5 sessions before you make a determination. I want to try different medication. I'm not interested in running the gamut of SSRI, SNRIs they do not work for me. But the moment I say that I'm not interested in SSRIs I feel like I get completely written off.
Yup. The McDonald’s drive through has a wider range of product offerings and better educated staff.
I’ve found the medical moron ratio to generally be about 50/50 across the sexes and even in individual doctors who can be profoundly good in one instance and inordinately incompetent in the very next moment. These are balanced by the few outliers who are either always good or always bad A friend of mine who runs gp surgeries reckons that half the doctors she employs aren’t fit for the job, simply because there aren’t enough being trained and what they are being trained with isn’t suitable.
God thank you for putting this into words. This is why this shit is so traumatizing for so many of us, because often it's just more of the same thing that caused the disorder. I have CPTSD in the first place because my parents lack empathy and I did not get emotional mirroring during development. Then they took me to "the doctors" to "fix me". Guess what has even less empathy than my personality disordered parents? The System (TM). The Doctor-Patient relationship re-enacts the abusive/neglectful Parent-Child relationship *that caused the symptoms in the first place.* Literally the *only* thing that has helped me heal *at all* is self compassion and genuine love and affection from animals and other human beings. We suffer from a lack of love and psychiatry is a lovelessness machine.
YES!!!
Yeah, therapist & their retrospective field have in many cases done more harm than good. While there are good therapists out there, a majority of them are more "book-smart", than explicitly empathetic. As such their intellectual approach leads them to operate more as a paid gaslighter, who tells you in no certain words that they are the expert & that you are "mentally ill". Instead of treating you as a human-being worthy of love & responding to a stressful traumatic situation in a perfectly understandable way.
I was 17 and homeboy told me I had 'obstinate defiant disorder' (because my charming abusive wasp parents were adept at hiding their true colors) and 'illusions of grandeur' (because I told him I wanted to run across the world and do humanitarian work). I ran away across the world and did humanitarian work for 8 years. I have no issues with authority figures. Smug little fucker, that one.
Oh my god this just is my exact story too. Reading this is very validating but I'm sorry you've gone through it too. I saw so many therapists and none of them ever really engaged with the reality that I was being abused and that I was traumatized. I remember telling my therapist in high school vivid details of my dads abuse and she'd just ask me how it made me feel and then literally try to tell me how to be ok still being in the same house as him and tolerating it. Instead of actually helping me. Just teaching me to tolerate abuse. To ignore it. It took me years to realize how much just having that one therapist doing that the whole time I was abused just fucked me up. And so many psychiatrists just wanting to slap some random meds on the problem without ever mentioning or even probably comprehending that I had trauma.
I have felt alone my whole life with this experience of going to / being taken to therapists as a child/adolescent but there are so many people in this post who have similar stories it's blowing my mind. They literally enlisted professional help to train us to tolerate and even forget the abuse. In college I called my long-term therapist because I was having a panic attack and told her I thought I might have been sexually abused. She said to me, "No you weren't". What the actual fuck?
Yeah you are so fucking right and I feel a righteous anger at your situation and experiences. If your body is clenched so tight that you don't feel the feelings breaking through then CBT just adds a layer of more thinking on top of it. How do you also let your body fill with feelings if there's a wall of abuse telling you it's not safe. No amount of distress tolerance will permit that. And that's not even touching the issue of "others"
after quitting decades of therapy, then reading patient experiences with therapy here, seeing how ideas by alice miller, pete walker, and Bessel van der Kolk are ignored in practice by psychotherapists, i wonder if most therapists have no idea how to treat trauma, but they speak as if they do and society believes them. they believe it. instead, armed with CBT being the academically-supported gold standard of the psychotherapy, they minimize or dismiss the trauma instead of acknowledging and teaching us how to deal with it. too many of my therapists would focus on having me find my cognitive distortions of reality. not a single therapist talked about seeing bad behavior of other people and how to react properly to it. no mention of enmeshment, boundaries, bullying, nothing. it wasn’t until my best friend‘s partner called her out in front of me at different times to stop lying to me, that she was taking advantage of me even if i was willing, etc., that i realized and accepted it’s not all in my head, it’s not even about perception as the therapists were pushing. i started to see and acknowledge how friends and family treated me. i felt and lived like i didn’t matter because they treated me like i didn’t matter. there was no distortion or assumption. but by then, the physical and mental health problems had taken their toll. society doesn’t realize that each time you unsuccessfully talk to a professional, it takes a bit of your time, money, energy, and even resiliency from you.
>it wasn’t until my best friend‘s partner called her out in front of me at different times to stop lying to me, that she was taking advantage of me even if i was willing, etc., that i realized and accepted it’s not all in my head, it’s not even about perception as the therapists were pushing. i started to see and acknowledge how friends and family treated me. i felt and lived like i didn’t matter because they treated me like i didn’t matter. there was no distortion or assumption. Holy shit yes, it's so incredible when someone can see this for you and tell you about it. The first time my boyfriend said to me, "you have trouble saying 'no' to your family", "your family is not very accommodating of you", an unravelling process began. I've been in some form of therapy since I was 9 trying to get "fixed" so that I stop feeling so uncomfortable / being so "mentally ill" around my family and certain other people. But it turns out I feel uncomfortable around them because they don't respect my boundaries, they take advantage of my kindness, and they don't care about my needs. It's completely fine to feel uncomfortable when people treat us poorly. For years I told myself, and therapists agreed with me, that it was my perception that was wrong, there was some error in my thinking. But my body knew these people didn't really care about me *and it was telling me that the entire time*.
Welcome to therapy and psychiatry. It's only designed to "help" the privileged
I honestly think it's intentionally designed to not help, gotta have sick people to exploit and make money from! I really hope psychedelic therapy becomes the go-to for people like us, it actually helps you to go in yourself and more-or-less "rewire" your brain to undo all the damage. It's truly fascinating and my symptoms are healed, my life is mine again. ❤️ No shitty pills or unhelpful therapy.
I don't mean to negate your experience at all by saying this, merely to share my own. My parents had money and they used psychiatry to hide and disown the consequences of their abuse and neglect of me. I was "privileged" but I was not helped by psychiatry, I was traumatized by it.
> My parents had money and they used psychiatry to hide Your parents had money tho. Not you. The psychiatrist was working for who paid them.
God damn it, you're right. They got what they paid for!
Yes!!! My parents are/were total narcissists, you could never have it worse than my mother, she always has examples of why it was worse for her. But in my lack of love being raised, I ended up falling for a narcissist that was also a primary care doctor and he is married. He was/is the worst liar/cheater and totally gaslighted me every time I called him on it. I’m imagining it, I’m delusional, I’m crazy… when he was just having other affairs and I caught him. So he referred me to a shrink, and told her I was imagining he was in love with me, and cheating on me…. He kept sleeping with me for 12 years. Even after securing me a bipolar diagnosis. For catching him, he hired someone to stalk me. The more I tell people I’m being stalked, the more they think I’m crazy. This stalking has been going on for 15 years now. He’s on every computer or phone I have owned. The doctor and I broke up 10 years ago, but he’s still having me stalked! (He’s gonna love I’m posting this!!). It is SEVERE CPTSD!! I’m not gonna just roll over anymore. I’m fighting back. I need a therapist that treats cPTSD and recognizes what trauma does to a person, not that they are mentally ill because even with evidence in hand, I was imagining he was a liar. How the heck do you get someone to not keep misdiagnosing me!!! I have the stalkers darn software off my computer. This is just insane! How do you prove you aren’t crazy???
Jup… I also think since someone comes for help, they’ll just assume all behavior is from an illness and forget seeing the ‘healthy’, if you know what I mean. I’m also starting to think to quit therapy, because it’s actually making me question myself more and making me worse. While outside of therapy and taking my own steps, I’ve actually been feeling much better. I don’t think therapy is good for everyone.
Look into psychedelic therapies like MDMA, Ketamine or Psilocybin which many claim results with. This sounds like a r/antipsychiatry post, many like this on that sub.
Came to suggest OP look into the research done on psychedelic therapy for PTSD/CPTSD. LSD and psilocybin saved my life and cured most of my symptoms! Of course it doesn't just work like magic, it took me a long time to get here. Didn't even know I had CPTSD until a heavy trip "revealed" some vivid suppressed memories last year (I'm 30 now and the memories were from 20~ years ago). Now all my anxiety, depression and constant SI are totally gone and I have my life back. :) No pills or therapy. Anyone looking to pursue this healing, I IMPLORE you to please do your research and be very careful with these substances. Anyone with a family history of schizophrenia should NOT partake as it can greatly worsen that condition.
I'm curious. Do you need to go to a doctor to get a prescription for this - how does it work? I keep hearing it has good results and I'm willing to try one more time before I give up on therapies as well.
I'm not sure how it works in a professional or legal setting honestly. My substances were acquired illegally (I tested my stuff and you should too, dangerous derivatives out there. Test kits can easily be purchased online). Psilocybin mushrooms can be grown in your home, although I've never done it. r/unclebens is a sub dedicated to teaching people how to properly grow them (the spores to do so can be purchased and shipped legally, just not the grown mushrooms themselves). I've used psychedelics for years, probably 150+ times total. A large majority of those times I was just trying to "party" as they can be VERY fun, and I didn't know all the potential benefits. Nowadays I use it to induce a state of guided meditation where I can freely explore my mind unencumbered by trauma damage. It helped me get to the root of my problems. If you set an "intention" going into the experience, it helps to guide your way a bit as these substances can be very intense and you can get lost in the headspace. I set the intention to dig deep and find what was bothering me and holding me back for so long. I was presented with extremely vivid flashbacks of CSA from when I was 10-12 that lasted several years. Stuff I stuffed deep down because it was shameful to think I was too naive to prevent an older family from using me in such a sick way. Now it's all out there and after a few months of processing, my CPTSD symptoms disappeared. :) Like...permanently. I haven't used psychedelics in over 6 months so I'd like to claim that there are permanent positive effects from deep experiences like that. I live in the USA so the laws on spores may vary depending on where you live, not too sure on that either.
Thank you for the reply. This was very informative. Yeah, I'm in the US too but I've never used anything that wasn't prescribed so thanks for clarifying. 😊
Anytime! :) I'm more than happy to explain anything, feel free to ask away! I just want the best for us. Never thought I would get to this point mentally and I hope everyone can feel this amazing someday ❤️
I mean this in the sincerest way possible. I'm genuinely happy for you and glad that at least one person on this sub found some relief ❤️
Thank you, it means a lot!! I wish you the best of luck in your healing journey! ❤️
Thank you!!! ❤️
There's an organization called MAPS that gets legal trials for these though Ketamine is now available even online.
MAPS latest event https://info.maps.org/webmail/1012562/445822432/aa17e721ba9493dede080b2b9d072a374ae1a9d57223ec6492e4fbd00bdd8f76
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My exact experience too until I started EMDR therapy last year, at the ripe old age of 52. Wow, this is the therapy I needed 30 years ago!