Give me some advice and hope about a particular stage of CPTSD treatment

Post date: 2024-03-22 02:08:40

Help me not give up just as things are getting better.

I've been in some flavour of therapy for >10 years after leaving an emotionally abusive household. This has gotten much more effective in the last couple of years after discovering therapies that explicitly target trauma, and slowly being able to accept that I have CPTSD. For the first time I'm noticing that I'm actually responding in a significant way to therapeutic exercises, which is such a relief. That said, it's been so. much. work. It just feels like I've been working on this forever at this point, and as usual it's easy to have doubts about the whole process.

I feel like I keep experiencing 'it gets worse before it gets better' over and over but the current flavour of that is that I'm doing less minimising and disassociating and distracting myself from my feelings, but hurting a lot more. And I've dismantled a bunch of coping mechanisms but don't really have new ones to replace them with. I feel like every day I'm functioning less and less which for a person who previously coped by overfunctioning is pretty vulnerable.

I'm fairly sure now that I'm getting support from therapy that works for me and practicing the right things, so intellectually I know to keep on with what I'm doing. I guess I'm just looking for strength to keep doing that -- hope that I'm moving towards some good outcome, rather than just towards things being bad in new different ways over and over. Any stories of things getting significantly better for people or reassurance that I'm on the right track or any other advice for this stage would be really helpful. And thanks, MeFi, your advice already has helped me with making it this far.

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