Taking it easy

So, I came home from work and laid down to nap for  a while. Then I watched Howl’s Moving Castle and Spirited Away. It helped me calm down for a while. However, I started dissociating during the movies. I quietly did the 3 Things exercise (look around the room and find 3 things you haven’t noticed before) and it helped bring me back to reality for a while. The rest of the time I just let myself detach. I was too tired to care.

Might put in another movie. Not sure. Maybe I’ll go to bed. S’been a long day.

BPDm sent me another e-mail with a link about the shit concerning my old teacher. Ugh.

2 Weeks in New Home

Been a while since I updated. It’s been 2 weeks since I moved. I now live several thousand miles away from enDad and BPDm. I’m still kind of in a very surreal state of mind- it doesn’t quite feel real yet.

The first day was extremely hard. I was an emotional wreck, and cried for hours. I felt so scared that maybe I’d made a huge mistake and I wanted to go home.

Eventually I pulled myself together, and the next few days weren’t so bad. However, I’ve been dissociating a LOT. For some reason it’s especially bad in the grocery store, I don’t know why. Sometimes I don’t quite realize I’m dissociating until a while afterwords. It’s like, I’m present enough to know I’m out in public and usually where I am, but I can’t remember what my best friend was saying to me or what I paid if I bought anything.

I had a session over the phone with my therapist; she suspects I may be overwhelmed by my new environment. On top of moving out and away from my parents and all the guilt and old stuff that goes along with that, I moved to a completely different part of the country. Nothing here is familiar at all. It’s cold. It rains. There’s hills and mountains- you’ll be driving along and all of sudden you’re on the side of a cliff (or hill or whatever it’s called) and you’re up really high and it’s a over the edge is a straight drop down, and it’s kind of scary, and all the going up and down makes me very dizzy . Everything is green, there’s gardens everywhere, there’s trees I’ve never seen. The grocery stores are different.

It’s DIFFERENT. Unfamiliar.

It’s not bad and I’m not complaining that I don’t like it, it’s BEAUTIFUL here. But it’s different and I’m not used to it. It’s alien. And at times I think it’s too much, so my mind dissociates.

My therapist told me to try setting aside time twice a day to do a few yoga breaths and meditation, in order to help me stay grounded, since I used yoga to cope in the past. It’s familiar to me and she thought it might help. I’m doing my best to keep up with that. I usually manage at least once a day.

I’m also supposed to try just sitting outside for like 15-20 minutes a day, in order to just take in my surroundings and grow used to it. I haven’t been doing that. I suck.

Transportation was another issue that was starting to overwhelm me really bad. I was getting frustrated and scared and felt trapped, because I don’t have a car and I was used to being able to go wherever I want, whenever I want. I was having major anxiety over taking the bus- public trans is really big here-I’ve never ever taken a bus before and I was terrified of it. My best friend went with me on it one day and I feel a little better. I think I can manage better now. I’m planning to go downtown to the bus ticket center place thing, and get more route maps and stuff like that. I’m trying to gather as much information as I can, I’ll feel safer that way. I went to Barnes and Noble last week and got a map of the city.

I’ve had ups and downs.

At the end of last week, one night I had a bit of a major meltdown. I brokedown, relapsed a bit, was overwhelmed by old thought patterns, and triggers.

I’m doing better since then. I know it’s going to be like this for a while. I’m going to have ups and downs. My PTSD symptoms are going to get worse before they get better.

Things are okay, I guess.

Grounding

I already posted about therapy, but I wanted to make a separate post about this. One of the first things we addressed was the dissociative episode I had earlier this week. My therapist said there’s things we can do to handle this better so that it hopefully won’t happen again, or if it does, I can come back from it quicker.

For one, in EMDR, we’re going to have the tappers move a bit faster from now on. Just a little bit. My therapist also said we’ll do grounding exercises, stuff I can even do outside of therapy.

One of the ones she suggested is to look around the room and find 3 things you didn’t notice before. As well as focusing on what you can hear, what you are touching, etc.

Hopefully this will help if I have future dissociative episodes.

I’m trying to be less afraid of them.

I really suspect that I dissociated quite a bit in high school and when I was younger. It seems stupid that I’m so scared of it now…

I’m not sure if ‘scared’ is too strong of a word or not. What bothers me about the dissociative episodes I’ve had, is that they feel ‘weird’ to me and ‘not normal’. I find myself asking, “Why isn’t my chest feeling so tight that I can’t breathe? Why isn’t my throat closing up? Why am I not shaking? Why is my head not spinning with panicked thoughts, what if’s, and negative beliefs?”

For probably 5 years anxiety and panic attacks have been so much a part of my life that they’ve become my normal. I’m so used to being in a high state of anxiety, that it feels normal to me.

But the dissociating feels like the exact opposite of how I feel when I’m anxious. So this makes it not feel right. It feels alien, wrong, different.

I think I dissociated more when I was younger, because it was how I coped with living with my mom. I was a kid, I had no choice but to live with her and put up with the crazy. I was powerless. Helpless. The crazy went on almost every day. My mom’s bpd is almost always cycling.

Then I moved out. From what I can remember, the anxiety attacks started getting bad towards the end of high school and through college. I wasn’t living with my mom. I had breaks from the crazy. There was still trauma going on, but it was very different from the experience of living with my mom. When I think about it, it kind of makes sense. The headwrecking wasn’t constant, so I didn’t need to dissociate all the time, but I didn’t know WHEN the headwrecking was going to start up again so I became increasingly anxious.