How I Healed my PTSD

The following are the various steps I took to heal myself from PTSD, I did not go to a therapy because I couldn’t trust people so this took a lot longer than it should have. Some of this will be considered woo-woo and toxic positivity, but it all helped.

My PTSD was extravagant. I didn’t trust the ground beneath me was actually there. I freaked out that I was falling when sitting on the ground. My fear of people was so bad I couldn’t go grocery shopping unless it was 2am. I believed if a man was in reaching distance of me that he was going to kill me. I was having panic attacks in my sleep, waking up with heart issues. Some days it was bad enough I thought “this is it, I’m going to have a heart attack and die.” At first I resigned myself to my fate; no one cared, I lost the best life could have been, I obviously wasn’t worth staying alive.

Avoiding the Triggers

Yes this is not recommended, but for the beginning part of my journey it was necessary to stay away from anything that created an issue for me. Boy did I turn into a recluse, but it saved the last strand of sanity and helped my health stay balanced.

Art Therapy and Classes

First thing I did was get myself into a women’s only art support group. They did everything from supporting the creative process to allowing me to process my trauma in a protective circle. I am still with this group ten years later and am the one helping others now. I learned how to channel my feelings into some kind of medium; writing, painting, ink, etc. I did mind dumps. I even created rituals of venting the problem onto paper and burning it.

This group led me to taking classes to further my development in other areas. I met people who became good friends for a few years and ended roughly. Bad experience, but the habit of furthering myself remained.

Control the Body

I innately started to learn how to control my central nervous system (CNS), this is now incorporated into various modalities. It started with coughing and controlled breathing to get control over my heart; yes this stops a heart attack just as effectively as compressions. The body knows what to do to keep itself alive if you let it. In drum corps we learned how to ignore pain and continue performing. I performed on a broken ankle. This is not the best skill for health, ignoring the warning signs of problems. I went running with that training to train my body to not react to pain. Every time a pain flare happened, I told myself that it is not as bad as the nerves where saying. I utilized that mentality with the controlled breathing to eventually train my CNS to not hyper react to things that were going on. This is a confirmed modality to help chronic pain disorders. This also works to tell the muscles to relax. I also used various exercises to activate the parasympathetic nervous system to calm my system when activated; using one system to counter the other (again, a proven technique). All of this helps me control my body while in crisis situations.

There is a theory called the Safety Theory. It states that when the body is in unsafe conditions (mental, emotional, environmental) that the body attacks itself to down regulate and protect itself. Altering appearance, forced hibernation, infertility, depression, anxiety, etc. are all ways that the body evolved for preservation. You have to stop the cause of the “not safe” signaling to calm this down. It is often the last phase in healing autoimmune. Fix toxins, stressful living conditions, stressful jobs, deal with trauma, get away from harmful people, tell your body you love it, etc.

I attended lectures to learn about nutritional healing. I learned that amino acid therapies help with depression, anxiety, and pain. I learned all the cofactors to the aminos to augment their efficacy and the timing to take them all. I also learned various dos and don’ts of nutrition to help anxiety and depression: bone broth, organ meats, no grains, etc. Then heavy research into herbs to help: adaptogens, sedatives, etc.

I learned mindfulness techniques. I thought it was bunk at first, but the ability to stay in the present when the mind wants to stay in the past and/or project the future, was a strong tool to get through anxiety.

My whole first year was mental control over my CNS, nutritional therapy, and herbal therapy. Along side heavy prayer to my set of gods, pleading and begging for help.

Inner Work

When I felt ready, I worked in mental therapies to heal my inner self. I started with lucid dreaming techniques to counter the memories that crept up in my dreams. Instead of replaying the night I got shot and getting retraumatized, I shot my exhusband instead. When I saw my abusers and/or issues while in a dream or in a sleep paralysis episode, I made them disappear… just poof, gone, leave me alone. If they didn’t leave, I changed their form. It was in my mind, my mind can control it.

I worked through a schema therapy workbook, long given off to a former coworker who I felt needed it more than me. I went off and found a hobby to help when I got tense, I drove the canyons at night, hitting the beach from 3a-9a, then wandering around a temple garden for an hour or so. I gained a lot of clarity between the ocean and temple garden. I used various physical activities to fend off anxiety moments that crept up during the mental work: home care, tending pets, hiking, etc. Now I’m having paralysis so it is harder to do this.

This next part may sound like weirdness, but what will be mentioned is mimicked in medicine in the mind-body connection. Trauma is stored in the body like a part of you gets stuck in the moment, never able to move on, creating disease/pain/etc. The techniques I used that relate to this are soul retrieval, talking to my inner child, and talking to the guardians of those hurt areas. Each ones helped me rebuild a part of me to trust things again.

When I was ready to tackle the triggers deeper than the schema therapy. I countered the fear with flipping the script, I changed the record playing in my mind. I went into a store when it was busy. When my mind went to “I’m going to die!” I flipped the script “the family behind me is talking happily among themselves. They don’t notice me past the person in front of them in line.” Then I decided to try exposure therapy. I talked to people online again, I joined various sites where locals can connect, and even met some in person. Eventually I got comfortable enough to date again. From recluse to engaged in five years.

Advanced Work

I’m working on ridding the memories all together. I found out after an encephalitis attack that lack in memory fixed a lot of the malign feelings. I suddenly got happier after losing 20 yrs of memories. I found healing modalities that work with forgetting. The amygdala will never fully dump the “protective” negative memories but they can go dormant. I am hoping that I can fully dump all the experiences one day. Get rid of the harmful thoughts and replace them with new information.

One way to do this is to change the harmful memories, like the lucid dreaming task. What is a memory but stored data anyways? This is as hard to accomplish as epigenetic manipulation. Yes, the PTSD that gets stored in your genes can be shut off with diligence and the proper counters to those genes. Really hard to maintain cause epigenetics triggers easier than shut off.

I came across a healing modality from the Hawaiian shamanic practice that does just that. It helps to rid of the toxic data within our brains to allow our true self to show through. It is called Ho’oponopono. It is under advanced because the underlying premise is wildly against western thought (extreme accountability and mindfulness practices) and very triggering abuse survivors (for the hyper accountability aspect). It is powerful and life changing when done properly and at the right time in your life.

I no longer hate or rise to situations. I may get annoyed by something or quickly upset (then back to homeostasis), but it is nothing compared to the raging lunatic I was for many years. I wanted blood so badly I was excited by it. Now that I let a lot go I'm pretty zen. Still more work to go, I'm not as resilient as the honoured Dali Lama when it comes to having an extreme emotion then back to happy within minutes.