PDA fae

Tag: mental health

  • Emotional flashback.. again

    I’ve been super anxious recently. My antipsychotic depot’s cause this each time so far outside of hospital, for Trauma Reasons. This weeks was better, in that I didn’t get a week of intrusion symptoms, but I did get nightmares the night before.

    I was also extra-sensitive to loneliness. I’m not entirely sure why that’s what came up. I suppose it might have been an emotional flashback. The feeling: all alone in a hostile space, post trauma.

    I emailed the PDA society, my therapist and SANEline, all of which have been good sources of support for me in the past. I also tried nightline for an immediate response, which has historically been the best helpline I’ve used (it’s by students, for students, term time in the UK). It wasn’t so helpful this time, and I should have ended the webchat much sooner – it amounted to a degree of emotional self-harm that night.

    Thankfully the email responses were a lot stronger. The PDA Society supporter urged me not to give up hope of making connections, though they edged on advising learning to mask better which I’m not 100% on board with. They talked about working with a professional and trusted family member/friend to work on mastering ‘social do’s and don’ts’. I can see some use for that, but it’d be nice to get advice on ‘here’s how PDAers meet people they can be themselves with’. I do appreciate them being able to supply recommendations for professionals that can support.

    SANEline suggested hobby groups, and offered questions for further thought. I still need to respond, it’s likely to be a validating discussion. That’s what I find SANEline are most useful for when I talk to them.

    My therapist had the best response, which is perhaps unsurprising given she knows me as an individual. She stated that perhaps humans are not the most reliable source of connection. As such, she suggested that maybe I need to spend some time at a Cat cafe to get some oxytocin. She also reminded me that I can brainspot in my own time to strengthen my brains awareness of my good qualities.

    So I put that into place after my depot injection. Headed straight to the local cat cafe. A kitty prompted clambered straight onto me and wanted to be held for hours. Definite oxytocin hit!

    Following that, I went to the local MH hub to talk to some humans that understand. Had a couple of in depth chats, some light hearted chatting, did a tiny bit of studying. As my therapist predicted, it wasn’t as secure a source of connection – but it was still valuable.

    Then, tonight I had too much demand anxiety to sleep. So, I put on my lava lamp for the first time since being here and chilled out. Over the time I: read my queer fantasy book, read up on developmental psychology to prepare for research assistant volunteering, used Finchcare, and sat and watched the lava lamp to the sound of a fire-scape video on youtube.

    That last activity made me fixate my gaze on the lava lamp, and I began to notice feeling unusually soothed. Gaze fixation is a big part of brainspotting, so I checked if there was another location where that sense of soothing increased. There wasn’t – at the angle I was sat at, my lava lamp seems to fall in my “soothe spot”. I tried it again later in a different room, and yup it’s the spot.

    So I haven’t done the exact brainspotting my therapist recommended, oddly enough – but I have done that! I also did the “injection trauma” spot before leaving my flat to get the depot injection, which does seem to help me cope.

    Now I’ve written it all out, it’s clear to me that was another layer of emotional flashback caused by depot injection. A shorter one this time. I attribute that to the process of brainspotting I’ve started on this trauma. It’s good to now have a brainspot I can use to soothe my way out of emotional flashbacks/help me through them till they end. It’s a reminder that there’s a good reason to meet the demand my therapist gave me to strengthen the neural re-wiring in my own time.

  • Brainspotting…

    …works wonders!

    I’ve been working with an Autistic/ADHD/Dyspraxic/Dyslexic therapist recently, who has a PDA kid on trauma therapy. The modality she uses with PDAers is brainspotting, which is a variant on EMDR. Personally I think it could be called ESDR or EFDR, eye stillness/fixation de-sensitisation and reprocessing therapy. It works on bilateral stimulation, focusing on bodily sensation and rating it (which makes it a somatic therapy) – I tend to picture my bodily sensations as colours – and eye fixations. During this, you think about or visualise either a positive resource, or your trauma, either increasing or decreasing the feeling respectively.

    Tbis therapy (along with lamotrigine) has helped my life hugely. I have a lot more faith in the universe, and feel more comfortable with spirituality. I will post more about this shortly. I feel able to experience enjoyment, and trust in myself. I feel better able to self-advocate, have better self esteem, and better internal communication.

    I won’t say ‘I recommend this’, all I can say is how much this has helped me. It’s really starting to turn my life around. I finally feel like there was a point to surviving.

  • Ambitions, are they possible?

    The town I’m currently in had a volunteering festival today. For me to be accepted onto the courses I’m thinking about for post-graduate study, I really need to be doing this sort of thing.

    That said, is it even going to be possible for me to undertake post graduate study?

    I am going to be able to maintain volunteering commitments?

    Will I remain well enough? Will it be too much for a demand? Will it become too difficult to reach locations, given that I can’t drive? Do I remotely have the capacity to do any of this?

    And how do I have a meaningful life if I can’t? How do I avoid sinking into depression and feeling like a failure?

    Sigh. I really hate being disabled sometimes.

  • Everything sucks a little right now.

    I’ve been experiencing a lot of very low mood recently. A lot of anhedonia – loss of pleasure in activities, and a lot of feeling like a failure of a person. A failure for not graduating from university, for never having lasted in a job, for not being able to drive, for not being in a long term relationship with a family and my own home. For not being a settled 30 something.

    We’re trialling me on lamotrigine. It’s been known to cause me severe constipation the previous two times I’ve tried it, and it can cause a lethal skin rash, so this may not go well. I have to really hope it does though, because it’s basically the only safe mood lifting drug I can try, i.e. it won’t cause me to experience mania. Don’t worry, it’s possible to intervene if a rash does start to develop.

    It makes me really nervous. We all respond differently to medications and lamotrigine may just not work for me at all. If it doesn’t, I’m really out of options and just have to tolerate the life destroying effects of the near constant low mood I experience (I believe one psychiatrist felt I had dysthymia alongside bipolar). I don’t know how I’d cope with that, and it’s going to be a long slow journey to find out, because due to the rash, lamotrigine has to be increased very slowly.

  • Delusions.

    As part of my bipolar manias, I experience psychosis. This is primarily experienced through delusions for me, though possibly I get hallucinations (if I do, I am not aware of the perceptual experience as being hallucinatory at the time). I don’t hear voices, which I am grateful for.

    The main delusions types I experience are: grandiose, paranoid and “pronoia” (which refers to delusions of being aided or helped). They centre around military intelligence and my history of trauma. During each manic episode, events going on at the present time will inform the delusions, shaping them into a narrative specific to that mania. I also find that my delusions pull in the people around me, giving them roles in a narrative they are unaware of – often thankfully so, especially when the delusion is a paranoid one!

    I often find these delusions embarrassing once I return to “consensus reality”, and have found this time that it has helped to laugh at them. After all “vampire marriage night”, without consent from the poor groom, and with the presence of vampires that looked oddly just like staff and patients is quite a creative one, I feel. They behaved well, biting no one, just getting grumpy that being on a locked ward prevented them reaching the portal back home – to hell – in the courtyard. One staff member even got the starring role of being the devil himself! I don’t usually have such a religious content to my delusions, so that’s a new aspect for this mania.

    Perhaps it feels inappropriate to laugh at such a serious psychological phenomenon, but for me, having survived it, doing so feels the best way to respond. Most of it is patently ridiculous, and it takes the edge off that which is scary, intense (usually to others) and relieves embarrassment very well. It’s been good spending time with fellow patients who experience strange beliefs, and realising that I’m not alone with these.

  • Low mood

    A big component of my neurodivergence is my bipolar disorder. Last year I had a big manic episode and became psychotic. I ended up in hospital, which is how it was identified that I needed supported accommodation.

    Now, my mood is a lot lower. It’s probably not a good thing that Taylor Swift’s Anti-hero is a trend on tiktok, because the words ‘It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me’ keep cycling through my head, because it sums up an long held self-belief. I’m trying to tell myself ‘I have problems, I’m not a problem’, but a lot of the time I just end up believing it.

    I’m finding life very mundane and dull. Things feel repetitive and that’s constraining, I feel like I’m living the same week over and over. Moving between the same few places: the school, my flat, the communal lounge, the swimming pool, my parents. It feels like there’s nothing that really adds meaning or fulfilment to my life. At the same time, I’m not sure what I could add that would make a difference to that.

    It doesn’t help that my flat has descended into a state of chaos. A support worker helped me tidy my bedroom and it feels like a little oasis. My living room is still a mess unfortunately. I find that working on it with someone else reduces the sense of demand and makes it possible to achieve. That’s not a long term solution as I won’t always have the supported accommodation, but it works for now. In the times between being able to get that support though, my flat is cluttered and untidy. It definitely isn’t good for my mental health.

    In general, depression is my usual. I get very little time in ‘normal mood’, instead I spend most of my time at some degree of low. It’s frustrating that we can’t really medicate for that, as antidepressants will make me manic. I just have to deal with it, and it really saps the enjoyment from my life.