Hannah

So after four more months of dizziness, neck, head, tension and sleep problems, I went back to EMDR. So I spoke to a trauma specialist, who explained that I’d essentially given myself new strength and headspace to deal with unprocessed trauma and told me to look into body work – and that’s where my research started. The Body Keeps the Score for months on and off (there’s a heck of a lot of info to take in, but very good) and in the book there’s a whole section about yoga. He diagnosed hypnopompic hallucinations which I won’t go into too much here because there’s a lot and it’ll be a separate post I imagine but the gist of it is that I wake up in the night, see horrid things and go back to sleep.

Anyway, I looked into different options based on results from health websites and the recommendations of others like reiki, going to a sleep clinic, waiting to see if more therapy helped, but the same thing kept cropping up time and time again: CBD. n’t make me immediately sleepy as you might expect, I just go to bed when I feel ready as I did before) and I started to dream the same sort of thing I always dream when I’m having a night terror (there is a common theme with mine, and you know it’s not a nightmare What happened when I gave it more time Within a week I could tell that my morning dose of CBD was wearing off sort of early afternoon time, my fuzzy tension head and difficulty focusing would be back just like before, but I was also aware that I needed to use it consistently and for a few weeks to feel the true benefits, so I adjusted it very slightly to start with, by reducing my morning and evening doses a little and adding another one in the middle (not taking any more, just spreading it out). After trying this out for a bit I figured that my current CBD intake was successfully preventing my night terrors and taking an edge off of day-to-day shitness, but there was still a definite awareness of stress and tension, my hands would still subtly shake sometimes (as opposed to like, ALL the time, so this is still an improvement) brain fog creeping in a bit more often than

It was the first treatment out of three that I found effective, it made me feel brave enough to leave a job I wasn’t right for, I was blogging a lot and getting really stuck in to writing about mental health and being a part of Twitter’s mental health community, it was Winter, and towards the end of my treatment I started feeling really, really strong. , I’m finally starting the degree I should’ve signed up for like five years ago I’ve still dealt with all of the things I have and I’m still managing a lot of this thanks to things I learned in therapy as well as the actual EMDR itself. I’m trying to look at this as simply a new phase of my recovery: I’ve dealt with the rest of the super problematic, overwhelming stuff and it made way for this.

Often PTSD is understood and represented to cause physical flashbacks in your body – the same physical sensation or experience that your trauma gave you. Some people don’t get physical flashbacks often, but they are emotionally tormented by the replaying of their experiences – for example, let’s say that the trauma is a car crash, someone might not experience their flashbacks as feeling the physical pain they experienced at the time as a result of an injury, but they relive it all emotionally. ‘PTSD nightmares’ are often shown in films or TV programs, the war veteran waking up out of breath, in a sweat, but you never see what actually happens for a lot of people: the shouting or screaming, the sleep walking or physically ‘running away’. the author talks a lot about what happens in the brain as a result of PTSD and the brain scans that he has seen over his career, showing that PTSD brains are literally different –