New Member Here

Hello!

I have seen a psychiatrist once, when I was about 8 or 9 years old. She showed me bunch of ink-blot pictures and asked me what they remind me of and also asked me whether I love my mother ...

That was supposed to tell her, I guess, how badly off I was at the time. Well, she told my mom I was perfectly fine. She was absolutely wrong.

I grew up with no psychiatric help, terrible inferiority complex, low self-esteem, feelings of guilt ... gah, all of those things. I lived what I now think was a severe case of PTSD that I think I still suffer from. I've never looked for help because I had no health insurance and also ... I simply didn't want to face the horrors that were hiding in my past - after all, I worked so hard on FORGETTING about them - sometimes nearly succeeding.

Now, I'm mostly fine. However, I have a number of issues ... a whole bag of them, actually. I still suffer with very low self-esteem that prevents me from attaining happiness. Then there are the dark days ... I have flashbacks, keep 'seeing' things in my mind that I DON'T WANT TO SEE ... nightmares ... Ah, it's CLEAR, I've so much work to do and I will have to seek professional help at some point.

Life hasn't been easy, but I have to say - I've been strong, very strong and dealt with and got (nearly) over a lot of things.

I have to keep believing that I'm a strong person and that whatever happened to me doesn't define me.

I'm having one of those dark days today ... just got (unbeknownst to anyone around me) through a minor anxiety attack and I just really really need to talk to someone. I want to be heard. I don't want to be pitied. I'm over the victim mentality. I just want HELP ... I want the dark days to stop forever. I just want to be happy. I have so much to be happy about. I'm so blessed.

So yeah, this is me ... hitting bottom. I spring right back up though. I'm already feeling so much better.

Thank you for reading this brain-diarrhea.

D.

Hello D and welcome to the forum.

I hope you don't mind, I split your post off from the other thread and separated it so that your introduction doesn't get skipped over in the really long other thread. You've said a lot of really personal stuff here and I really felt that you deserved your own thread to deal with these issues you have. I'm so sorry to hear you are "hitting bottom". I think it can help a lot to talk about things here so I would encourage you to do so as much as possible as there is a lot of relief to be found in spilling the pain out in writing...

Have you checked out the PTSD part of the forum yet? post-traumatic-stress/
You may find it helpful to write a little of your own story there too.

I'm so sorry to hear that you are struggling with flashbacks and that you haven't got any professional help at the moment. I think it would be very worth your while to find a mental health professional to help you. PTSD is very treatable and has good outcomes for improvement if you get some help.

I can relate to the problems you expressed with flashbacks etc. I have Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) which is caused by extreme childhood abuse and hence I have some PTSD symptoms relating to those traumatic experiences. I can relate a lot to what you said about working hard to forget the traumatic experiences, I did that too, but eventually there comes a time where you need to work through the trauma in order to process it and become healthy again. That requires facing those traumas in therapy in a controlled way so as not to be retraumatized. "Forgetting" doesn't work long term because it takes a lot of energy to repress the memory in that way and also means that you have internalized the bad feelings and messages you received during the traumatic experiences, those need to be remembered and released in order to heal.

What type of trauma did you experience? You don't have to go into specifics if you don't want to... I was just wondering if it was an abusive experience in your home etc seeing as these problems date back to before you were 8 or 9?