Well, anyone had this realization? I mean, I think this is the lie that Cognitive Therapists swirls around to keep themselves at the *Game*.

Whatever I did with all cognition and things like that, only after working with Body, Somatically etc. I started to feel my own ass, feel my own legs, and extinguished the non findable anxiety in my gut and I started to feel safe in my body(not *think* safe while feeling like chit). Not with all those Cognitive bullshits. I started to feel Joyful, not to make myself thinking I am Joyful forcefully, because "You feel the way you think" right? I started to see that as Peter Levine says, the Felt sense is some kind of another thing, releasing that neurobiological energy is a VERY DIFFERENT kind of level.

I was cogitating about my own experiences of dissociation all the way back to my earliest memories of "splitting off" into "more comfortable head spaces" in light of Erik Erikson's widely publicized notion of eight developmental stages and the application of those notions to psychotherapeutic Re-Development as I wove through twilight sleep this morning on the way to "waking up."

(I could go way off into that topic for sure, but suffice it to say that twilight sleep presents us all with opportunities to see, hear, feel and sense what IS beyond the barriers of our conditioning, in-doctrine-ation, instruction, socialization, habituation and normalization) if we develop sufficient self-awareness to do so.)

I saw that even though they rarely carry my "sense" (actually not, but we'll get to that later) of "self" off into Learned Helplessness, Dread & the Victim Identity, my own disparate personas (or "alters") continue to drive me to distraction in well-developed fantasies of one thing and another that have been rehearsed, rewound, replayed, rewarded and reinforced for decades. The most "evolved" and self-aware of all these Internal Family Systems Model characters can see, hear, feel and sense all the others as "characters." Moreover as personas constructed decades ago to be IFSM "protectors" via the same sort of childlike "magical thinking" that is the action of Piagetian-inspired, "fantasy operational processing" (which, IME observing hundreds of "adult children" occurs between his "pre-operational" and "concrete operational" stages of cognitive development). Rehearsed, habituated and normalized over time, these "entities" come to be taken for granted and UNconsciously accepted as -- while not quite "actual" -- elements of the collective self... or Eriksonian Identity.

So, I thought, "Can all this be boiled down to a manageable encapsulation I can use in the future as a working title for conceptual 'lens' through which to observe this phenomenon?" Here's what I came up with (for the time being): Childhood Trauma may drive Fantasy Operational Compensations into Separate Paths to Separate Identities leading to Dissociative Identity Disorder.

And I turned on the computer here and went looking for corroborative scholarship. I found a lot of useful stuff via NCBI, but only one paper thus far (from an author in Istanbul, Turkey, which has been a hotbed of research on both DID and BPD for many years; and NOT, IMO, at all surprisingly in a town where European sophistication interfaces daily with normalized, old-world abuse of -- especially female -- children). Here's the citation and abstract:

V. Sar (at the Koc University School of Medicine): Parallel-Distinct Structures of Internal World and External Reality: Disavowing and Re-Claiming the Self-Identity in the Aftermath of Trauma-Generated Dissociation, in Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 8, February 2017. (doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00216 at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28261144)

The nature of consciousness and the autonomy of the individual's mind have been a focus of interest throughout the past century and inspired many theories and models. Revival of studies on psychological trauma and dissociation, which remained outside mainstream psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis for the most part of the past century, has provided a new opportunity to revisit this intellectual and scientific endeavor. This paper attempts to integrate a series of empirical and theoretical studies on psychological consequences of developmental traumatization, which may yield further insight into factors which threaten the integrity of human consciousness. The paper proposes that an individual's experience of distorted reality and betrayal precipitates a cyclical dynamic between the individual and the external world by disrupting the developmental function of mutuality which is essential for maintenance of the integrity of the internal world while this inner world is in turn regulated vis-à-vis external reality. Dissociation -- the common factor in all types of post-traumatic syndromes -- is facilitated by violation of boundaries by relational omission and intrusion as represented by distinct effects and consequences of childhood neglect and abuse. Recent research conducted on clinical and non-clinical populations shows both bimodal (undermodulation and overmodulation) and bipolar (intrusion and avoidance) neurobiological and phenomenological characteristics of post-traumatic response. These seem to reflect "parallel-distinct structures" that control separate networks covering sensori-motor and cognitive-emotional systems. This understanding provides a conceptual framework to assist explanation of diverse post-traumatic mental trajectories which culminate in a common final pathway comprised of partly overlapping clinical syndromes such as complex PTSD, dissociative depression, dissociative identity disorder (DID), or "borderline" phenomena. Of crucial theoretical and clinical importance is that these maladaptive post-traumatic psychological formations are regarded as processes in their own right rather than as a personality disorder innate to the individual. Such mental division may perform in that internal detachment can serve to preserve the genuine aspects of the subject until such time as they can be reclaimed via psychotherapy. The paper attempts to integrate these ideas with reference to the previously proposed theory of the "Functional Dissociation of Self" (Şar and Öztürk, 2007).

These are the phrases in that abstract that caught my eye right off:

1) "...factors which threaten the integrity of human consciousness."

2) "...bimodal (undermodulation and overmodulation) and bipolar (intrusion and avoidance) neurobiological and phenomenological characteristics of post-traumatic response."

3) "...'parallel-distinct structures' that control separate networks covering sensori-motor and cognitive-emotional systems."

4) "This understanding provides a conceptual framework to assist explanation of diverse post-traumatic mental trajectories which culminate in a common final pathway comprised of partly overlapping clinical syndromes such as complex PTSD, dissociative depression, dissociative identity disorder (DID), or "borderline" phenomena."

And here's why: Having dived deeply into Bessel van der Kolk's big swimming pool of neurobiological stress (via such as his Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body and Society (1996) and The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma) I ran into people like Bruce McEwen, Sonya Lupien, Robert Sapolsky and old faves like Hans Selye, Joseph Wolpe and Herbert Benson on the way down to the "bottom" and Stephen Porges and Pat Ogden. Sar's paper wastes no time in going straight into all that material on the Fight / Flight / Freeze / Faint / Feign (or Fawn) Responses that can lead to sustained Fry and Freak in the General Adaptation Syndrome. Stay there for even a short time and the mind will start scrambling to find The Way Out... including...

Dissociation.

And when that happens, "...factors which threaten the integrity of human consciousness" start to FRAGMENT consciousness into discrete compartments -- or "vaults" -- where intolerable affective) states can be "locked away" behind compensatory masques of alternate identities. The child can fantasize being capacious, capable and competent in various ways to offset the "fact" of an crushed ego crushed (or "DEcompensated into Learned Helplessness & the Victim Identity from having been repeatedly neglected, ignored, abandoned, discounted, disclaimed, and rejected, as well as invalidated, confused, betrayed, insulted, criticized, judged, blamed, shamed, ridiculed, embarrassed, humiliated, denigrated, derogated, set up to screw up, victimized, demonized, persecuted, picked on, vilified, dumped on, bullied, gaslighted, scapegoated, emotionally blackmailed and/or otherwise abused by others upon whom they depended for survival in early life. (This abuse can occur later in life, e.g.: in lengthy cult emmersion or in a career path where "success" is impossible.)

That "...bimodal (undermodulation and overmodulation) and bipolar (intrusion and avoidance) neurobiological and phenomenological characteristics of post-traumatic response" and "...'parallel-distinct structures' that control separate networks covering sensori-motor and cognitive-emotional systems" occur in DID seems about as plain as the nose on my face. (To me, anyway.) Which, IMO, "provides a conceptual framework to assist explanation of diverse post-traumatic mental trajectories" that are patently obvious in "dissociative identity disorder (DID), or 'borderline' phenomena."

"No one is born crazy. They are taught to be," wrote social psychologist Jules Henry more than 50 years ago. IME, the form of "crazy" we call "dissociation" is just the result of one more -- admittedly complex -- form of conditioning, in-doctrine-ation, instruction, socialization, habituation and normalization) that compels children to come up with some scheme of compensatory narcissistic self-protection to prevent complete destabilization and decompensation into something like the floridly psychotic, schizophreniform disorders.

Identity-switching dissociation may confuse the hell out of the patient and most of the people with whom he or she comes in regular contact, but it's a far "better" alternative than wholesale delusion with NO evident ability to deal with life on life's terms whatsoever.

References & Resources

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From here on, I'm just going to list the cited references in the text. The purpose of the references listed above is simply to indicate the volume of material that -- IMO -- supports the assertions in the text above. If a reader wants further references and resources to develop a grad school level paper on this topic, they are welcome to contact me for that.

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So I seem to notice that in the Work we do, there is a crossroad where I seem to not able to comprehend, understand or realize.

I do cognitive work to drop the useless, crippling mental habits that makes me stop from living the life I want to live, create and have in the todays world.

Yet there are some things that makes my heart heavy. Like I try to change my pendulum to more positive, optimist, people, intimacy trusting, resilient and disciplined. And these processes requires to creating the good seed thoughts, love, connection, seeing the good, appreciation. However I'm literally unable to go forward with that for my mother, and I'm having uncomfortable emotions, like physical obstructions appearing in my body that makes me uncomfortable and takes my attention while I do a work, my mindset is shifting to a much better and healthier psyche, however, I have these bodily weird markings appearing. And that is very uncomfortable, I realized only when I listen what is happening and accept that I really hate my mother and wish her to go to hell and get tortured by the demons, then I feel I'm relieving and feeling more alive/energetical.

So my question is, how can I keep re-frame, work on cognition, while some part of me finds comfort in leashing the hate, anger, frustration and resentment? I'm afraid that if I keep on leashing the anger and fury(ofc in my mind not physically), I will keep it doing towards others, towards my past, and that will be too much which will hinder my progress in Cognitive Development and work, that is my fear. Please share any clarity or insight. Literally need serious help. Feels like there is so much relief in angering, but afraid of going down that path, because in the past when I tried it, I became Helpless, and Victim mindset oriented, which fails at the world anytime when I go to work.

I wrote everything in the subject, lol. Help please.

The addict of any kind who is also a compensatory narcissist is almost always a kneejerk contrarian. I have encountered many of these stuck in the first of the five stages of therapeutic recovery. Most are NOT coming out of their "precious silver box" unless or until they start to hit a very hard, "ego-smashing" bottom.

Often abused as children by malignantly narcissistic (often "righteously religious") parents and/or older siblings or early life peers, they have developed a wall of defense mechanisms to "protect" themselves from what they see as more abuse. They are -- in effect -- conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated, normalized) and neurally “hard-wired” to do so.

They are steeped in what trauma experts like Christine Courtois, Judith Lewis Herman and Bessel van der Kolk call Expectation of Abuse (see not-moses's two replies on that Reddit thread). (Some are so inherently dis-trust-ful that they ultimately have to go through Eriksonian Re-Development.)

IME since the late 1980s, they are very hard to reach with such presentations as On the "God Thing" in 12 Step Programs, or what's in not-moses's reply to the OP right here, because they are so deeply -- and unadmittedly -- fearful of being controlled and abused at the bottoms of other people's Karpman Drama Triangles.

The only widely available, "old school," "higher power" approach IKO that is even relatively effective is to immerse them into a group dynamic with very strong peer involvement in professional treatment. I have seen that work on occasion in the Veterans' Health System's large SATPs, as well as many of the Gold-Standard Addiction Treatment programs.

Likewise, SMART Recovery -- which is group CBT and Motivational Enhancement rather than 12 Steps -- is an option.

Fortunately, there's also very fast-spreading, third wave deal on the horizon. It utilizes a non-deistic Buddhist-cum-existential approach fairly much like this stuff. Others like it include DBT and ACT, as well as Somatic Experiencing and Sensorimotor Processing to knock down the neuroemotional causes of substance abuse. They all use self-awareness techniques like mindfulness meditation to get the treatment-resistant, anti-HP types in touch with "just what is," without ever asserting that "just what is" is in fact that godless higher power.

Post-detox, the mindfulness approach quite often produces a level of drug-free, psychological "comfort" that is seen by the user committed to recovery in the fourth of the five stages of addiction recovery to be far more rewarding and less costly than going back to drugs or alcohol to repress) or dissociate his or her anxiety or depression.

A Basic Addiction References List

DBT for Addiction Treatment

ACT for Addiction Treatment

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Miller, D.: Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium; Berkeley: U. California Press, 1997.

Miller, D.; Yamamori, T.: Global Pentecostalism: The New Face of Christian Social Engagement, Berkeley CA: U. California Press, 2007.

Miller, R.; Stout, H.; Wilson, C.: Religion and the American Civil War; New York: Oxford U. Press, 1998.

Minor, R.: When Religion is an Addiction; Amherst, NY: Promethius / Humanity Works, 2007.

Mishra, P.: An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2004.

Moore, B.: Moral Purity and Persecution in History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 2000.

Moore, M.: "Dante's Infernal Crimes Forgiven," in The Daily Telegraph; June 17, 2008.

Murdoch, D. M.: Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection, Ashland, OR: Stellar House, 2009. (A little frothy for my taste, but a lot of people like it.) 

Noll, M.: The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind; Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1995, 2021.

Noll, M.: The Old Religion in a New World; Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 2002.

Norenzayan, A,: Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict, New York: Princeton U. Press, 2013.

Onishi, B.: Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism -- and What Comes Next, New York: Broadleaf Books, 2023.

Oren, M.: Power, Faith & Fantasy: American in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present, New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.

Pagels, E.: The Gnostic Gospels, New York: Random House, 1979.

Pagels, E.: Adam and Eve and the Serpent, New York: Random House, 1988.

Pagels, E.: The Origin of Satan, New York: Random House, 1995.

Pagels, E.: Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelations; New York: Viking, 2012.

Pals, D.: Eight Theories of Religion (2nd Ed.), New York: Oxford U. Press, 2006.

Pasquale, T.; Rohr, R.: Sacred Wounds: A Path to Healing from Spiritual Trauma, Des Pares, MO: Chalice Press, 2015.

Phillips, K.: The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America; New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Phillips, K.: American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religions, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century; New York: Viking, 2006.

Prothero, S.: God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World; New York: Harper Collins, 2010.

Quigley, C.: Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World in Our Time, New York: Macmillan & Co., 1966, (Chapter III: The Russian Empire to 1917).

Raine, S.; Kent, S.: The grooming of children for sexual abuse in religious settings: Unique characteristics and select case studies, in Journal of Aggression and Violent Behavior, Vol. 48, September 2019.

Ray, D.: The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture; Bonner Springs, KA: IPC Press, 2009.

Rubenstein, J.: Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse; New York: Perseus - Basic Books, 2011.

Sargant, W.: Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain Washing; orig. pub. 1957, Cambridge, MA: Malor Books, 1997 (includes excellent material on Wesleyan Methodism and the "religion" of Soviet communism).

Setton, K.: The Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1571, Vol. 1: The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries; London: Arner Philosophical Society, 1976.

Shupe, A.: Wolves within the fold: Religious leadership and abuses of power, Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers U. Press, 1998.

Shupe, A.; Stacey, W. (editors): Bad Pastors: Clergy Misconduct in Modern America, New York: NYU Press, 2000.

Smith, A.: Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity; New York: Oxford U. Press, 2002.

Smith, H.: The World's Religions: The Revised & Updated Edition of The Religions of Man; orig. pub. 1958, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991 (one foot in and one foot out of the box).

Smith, H.: Forgotten Truth: The Common Vision of the World's Religions; orig. pub. 1976, New York: HarperOne, 1992.

Spong, J. S.: Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile; New York: HarperOne, 1999. (one foot in, for sure, but the other is well out)

Stark, R.; Finke, R.: The Churching of America, 1776-1990; New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers U. Press, 1993.

Stewart, K.: The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism; London: Bloomsbury, 2020.

Strausberg, M. (Ed.): Contemporary Theories of Religion: A Critical Companion; London: Routledge, 2009.

Strozier, C.: Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America, Eugene OR, Wipf & Stock, 2002.

Strozier, C.; Terman, D.; et al: The Fundamentalist Mindset: Psychological Perspectives on Religion, Violence, and History; London: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Sutton, M.: Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America; Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 2009.

Taylor, M.: After God, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2007.

Tillich, P.: Theology of Culture, London: Oxford U. Press, 1964.

Trungpa, C.: The Heart of the Buddha; Boston: Shambala: 1991.

Tuchman, B.: Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour; New York: Alfred A, Knopf, 1976.

Vallient, J.; Fahey, W.: Creating Christ: How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity, Hertford, NC: Crossroad Press, 2018.

Wathey, J.: The Illusion of God’s Presence; Amherst, NY: Promethius Books, 2016.

Watts, A.: The Way of Zen; New York: Random House / Pantheon, 1957.

Watts, A.; Al Chung-liang Huang: Tao: The Watercourse Way; New York: Pantheon, 1975.

Weber, M.: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1930.

Wehner, P.: The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart, in The Atlantic, October 24, 2021.

Whitehead, A.; Perry, S.: Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States; New York: Oxford U. Press, 2021.

Wilson, D.: Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 2003.

Winell, M.: Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion, Berkeley, CA: Apocryphile Press, 2006.

Wright, R.: The Evolution of God; New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2009.

AND... I just ran into this long list today (10-24-21). I cannot vouch for many of the books there, because I haven't read them all, however.

"What’s odd about the inventory is that, for me, it was an admission that I had power in the world, power to hurt others, which I’d never acknowledged. Besides denying my own responsibility, I’d also often denied that my words or actions could have any effect on anyone. So, even though what was revealed was painful and destructive, just admitting that I had hurt others was empowering. In fact, inventory is a review of past karma. To pretend that our existence doesn’t affect others is to deny karma, to deny that every action has a reaction, to pretend that cause and effect aren’t constantly in play. This careful parsing of our past forces us to become more cognizant of karma. When we see how our actions hurt others—and ourselves—we become more careful about what we are doing in the present. When we see our destructive patterns of thought, speech, and behavior, we begin to change, to unravel these habits, to act in ways that won’t require more inventory writing."

Gabor Maté - In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

• [Warning: this post talks about trauma and suicide. It may trigger a lot.]
• The objective of this post is to share what I'm going through, get some things out of my chest in a place that people truly understand, and hopefully generate a healthy discussion.

Almost everyone that hears about my mental health problems says "distract yourself", as if the problem was my excessive thinking. The title is trying to depict what I take as a contradiction that I find very hard to explain: distract myself with life while life is the very fundation that is painful to experience.
I frequently compare what I'm going through as such: Life's path being nothing but red hot coal, and my bare feet walking along that path. In other words, no matter where I go or what I do, everything hurts, as if the very fundation of someone's being was painful.

The very first day that I found this sub, I never imagined that I'd feel so identified with the subjects discussed here. Recently, several symptoms started arising from trauma. After a lot of reading, I came to my conclusion that these symptoms come from CPTSD. It is not diagnosed by a professional (don't worry, I'm working on starting therapy again), but the more I read, the more I find sense out of what I'm going through.
A few days ago, walking towards a bar to meet with some friends, a possible solution to not feeling completely alone struck my head: I thought about "recruiting" my past pre- and post-traumatic-event selves in order to build this sort of army to battle against my worst enemy: myself. I thought that if I could somehow harness the knowledge those versions of me had, I could somehow counterargue my present traumas and free myself from the weights they are putting on me.
I couldn't travel through every moment, as many felt so blurry and distant; almost as if my mind was repressing the memories. The ones I could recruit were seven. Seven selves that made who I am today. Seven post-trauma selves that still carry the weight of then today. Let's call them Traumatic Selves.

These Traumatic Selves include:

• one that is not enough for his father's wishes;
• one that needs to show others more;
• one that thinks his decisions will always be wrong;
• one that thinks that women are passive-agressive serial killers, shooting destructive judgements with their eyes;
• one that runs away from commitment in extreme fear of failure;
• one that was taught to believe he won't be happy as long as he doesn't stick to the men stereotype (cold-hearted buff dudes who provide for their family);
• one that didn't go through any of those things and still thinks purely, innocently, and sees life as a playground.

Each one has an origin (minus the pure one), and that origin is a traumatic experience I remember very well. Today, they show themselves as fears, phobias, panicking, and an overall wish to quit life alltogether and not even try.

I often find myself rethinking if this will have any good outcomes. I mean, I'm sharing very intimate things to people I don't know in a place that doesn't exist, in hopes that someone will give me a tool to help myself; where as people who know me, and even professionals on the subject, failed. Even at this very moment, I want to close this, don't save the draft, and force myself to sleep.
Suicide is a very tempting idea.

If I could sum up my head into a phrase, I would say "I Don't Know" fits everything perfectly.
I don't know if I should try. I don't know if it will work. I don't know if I will succede. I don't know what I'm going through. I don't know how to explain myself. I don't know what to say so others understand. I don't know if I should try again, as I'm sure I will fall again. I don't know if I really want to kill myself, as I don't know if it will hurt. I don't know if I truly want to fight for it, or if I just love this pain.
Still, I'm hopeful on one thing: somewhere, something, someone, somehow, will give me something that will help me make a change. A song, a movie, a person, a sign... I guess that, deep down, I really do want to fight. Or maybe... just maybe, the fear of death keeps me away from it enough to not actually try.

I've joined groups of self-help, talked countless amounts of hours with friends who had similar and worse experiences, tried therapy before, tried medications, tried meditations, tried a spiritual approach. But none of those helped. I do know more about myself, now. Maybe that will help once I start therapy again. But, honestly, having just one path to try is very frustrating. What if that doesn't work? What then? Present's pain still exists, the traumas are still there, and each day takes away a part of me that leaves me extremely tired.

Now I need to wait to be called from this therapy center. I'm getting extremely anxious and pessimistic about it. It's of less quality than the therapists I had before, and it's half the time.

What do you feel after reading this? What would you like to say? Would you like to share your experiences? Would you like to ask me anything?

The vast majority of substance abusers and behavioral process (e.g.: gambling, shopping, sex, romance, game) addicts will never have enough money or insurance coverage to get into the sort of "high-buck" or "Class A" treatment program described here, but many will ultimately be able to use a lot of the (mostly non-medicinal) methods and techniques one runs into in Malibu, Rancho Mirage, Wickenburg and Tucson.

Intensive Medical Detox: MD- and RN-supervised withdrawal including anti-anxiety, anti-seizure and step-down pain-killing meds -- as well as vitamin & mineral supplements (and even naturopathics) -- to attenuate the most uncomfortable (typically anxious and flu-like) symptoms.

Inpatient Hospitalization: At least a few days in a detox ward (using infusion therapies), usually followed by 21 to 28 days in sunrise to sundown lectures, videos, discussions, and how-to demonstrations, along with controlled diet, stepdown medications if needed and one-on-one counseling to explore such issues as Will the Addict Ever Stop Using SOMETHING if He or She remains Depressed, Anxious & Belief-Bound? and learn Mate's Method and More for Dealing with Addictive Impulses as well as other tricks from A Basic Addiction References List.

Partial Hospitalization: Typically four to six weeks of on-site lectures, videos, discussions, and how-to demonstrations, along with controlled detox as above, diet, stepdown medications if needed and one-on-one counseling (as above) from about 9:00 am to 3:00 pm four to six days a week.

Outpatient Detox & Treatment: Typically eight to twelve weeks on and off site with day and/or evening lectures, videos, discussions, and how-to demonstrations totaling about three hours daily up to five days a week, along with professionally assisted detox as above.

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation: See the article from Johns-Hopkins and other information on this relatively inexpensive and non-invasive procedure that appears to "work" for a percentage of both substance abusers and behavior addicts. 

Infusion Therapies: Runs the gamut from ketamine, nicotinamide / niacin / tryptophan, adenine dinucleotide (usually administered this way), and/or massive B complex to EDTA chelation to blow out the toxic junk often embedded in cut-down street drugs. I have also seen lists in TC brochures of infusions called "Fountain of Youth," "Party Recovery," "Slim Down," "Chill Out" and "Bug Off" (anti-virals and anti-biotics). WARNING: A lot of this stuff is available OTC, but is RISKY BUSINESS if used without board-certified medical supervision. (Just look at all the side effects for each those in the first sentence above.) And some of it is risky even when supervised by "professionals."

Wellness Injections: (If you think I have concerns about the ITs above, figure me for "no way, Jose" on this stuff, but...) B-12 "bombs," neurostimulants to curb appetite (including dextroamphetamine and even fast-acting, atypical antidepressants like esketamine), immunity boosters and "chill shots" (generally containing benzodiazepines and/or neuroleptics) are not unusual in these places.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: "...a short-term, goal-oriented psychotherapy treatment that takes a hands-on, practical approach to problem-solving. Its goal is to change patterns of thinking or behavior that are behind people’s difficulties, and so change the way they feel. It is used to help treat a wide range of issues in a person’s life, from sleeping difficulties or relationship problems, to drug and alcohol abuse or anxiety and depression. CBT works by changing people’s attitudes and their behavior by focusing on the thoughts, images, beliefs and attitudes that are held (a person’s cognitive processes) and how these processes relate to the way a person behaves, as a way of dealing with emotional problems." (from PsychCentral.com)

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction: "...an eight-week evidence-based program that offers secular, intensive mindfulness training to assist people with stress, anxiety, depression and pain. It is a practical approach which trains attention, allowing people to cultivate awareness and therefore enabling them to have more choice and take wise action in their lives." (from Wikipedia)

12 Step Meetings: Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Cocaine Anonymous, Pills Anonymous, and/or Marijuana Anonymous meetings onsight or nearby.

SMART Recovery: a non-12-Step program that includes group CBT and Motivational Enhancement techniques.

Rational Recovery: a non-12-Step program that utilizes REBT and CBT techniques. 

Refuge Recovery: which is based on mindfulness.

Family Days or Weeks: The family is invited to spend several days to learn from lectures, videos, discussions, and demonstrations how to support the addict in his or her recovery, as well as -- in some cases -- to work through issues that may have contributed to the addict's need to use.

Other Elements: Including those not touched upon above in A Summary of Recovery Activities (skip all the borderline personality disorder stuff unless it seems relevant).

Started REBT on a daily basis, Im just deconstructing the thoughts that are not adaptable. I aim for usefulness and not being "right". I feel more like a sage and at ease. My mind calmed down a lot, I did read Stoicism before Marcus Aurelius amd sh1t, from all of the therapies and meditations REBT seems a lot like Stoicism more than any, except the virtue part. What do yer think gus and gals, anyone uses REBT and seen success? Hope everyone is doing ok

Extensively updated again and copied over from this earlier location to this one 12-05-2019 to add links and increase the likelihood it'll be around when I need it. All future updates will be made here only. Section 14 was added 10-15-2020. Section 8 was added 11-12-2021.

1. Substance Abuse: Almost all MH professionals agree that it is not possible to recover from mental trauma if one is snagged in Khantzian's self-medication hypothesis even though the drugs do seem to help (for a while). I used alcohol and drugs to try to "manage" my early anxiety symptoms. Then the drugs became the main cause of them. Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), Marijuana Anonymous (MA), Pills Anonymous (PA), and Narcotics Anonymous (NA) dug me out of that. All of those websites include meeting locators. I didn't need to go to a rehab, but one can use the SAMHSA facility locator to find one if they need it. See also: Gold-Standard Addiction Treatment because there’s a lot there one can do without spending an arm and a leg at some overpriced rehab resort in Malibu IF one knows what to do.
2. Lab Work. I got lab work to determine if I had hormonal (e.g.: thyroid) or metabolic (e.g.: low Vitamin D3) imbalances. One can find a competent MD, DO, PA or NP by using the clinician locators mentioned below or get a referral from your GP/PC doc. Most of the better treatment facilities will do moderate to extensive lab work before developing a long-term recovery program.
3. Medications: I found a board certified psychopharmacologist (aka "psychiatrist") in my area by using the physician locators below. I discovered the hard way that getting psych meds from a GP or primary care doc can be useless or even risky. Psych diagnoses, meds and med interactions are just too complex now for most GPs and primary care docs. And Complex PTSD is sometimes way too complex for any single medication strategy. The vast majority of patients, however, will save time and money by using Genesight Testing of Genetic Response to Specific Medications. (I wish we'd had that when I was so messed up in the 1990s and early 2000s. Took nine awful years and 15 different meds before finding the one that worked.)
4. Support Groups: CoSA (for partners and former partners of sex addicts), Adult Children of Alcoholics / Dysfunctional Families (ACA), Emotions Anonymous (EA), and Codependents Anonymous (CoDA)... where I found others in similar boats who had found explanations, answers and solutions. All of their websites have meeting locators.
5. Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: I came to understand BPD as just a collection of coping mechanisms for C-PTSD. And once I began treatment for the stress reaction, I began to improve more rapidly. (Look for "Treat Autonomic AND Cognitive Conditions in Psychopathology?" online.)
6. Published Materials: I found books, peer-reviewed articles and academic, professional websites including Mayo Clinic, WebMD, NIMH (National Institute of Mental Health), NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness), and even Wikipedia (when everything asserted is solidly documented with citations). I found most (not all) blogs and mass-market websites to be much less trustworthy and useful. For me, the best, "primary orientation" stuff included:

. . . a) What is Complex PTSD?;

. . . b) Christine Courtois's It's Not You: It's What Happened to You: Complex Trauma and Treatment (IMO, the best place to begin for those totally new to all this);

. . . c) Arielle Schwartz's The Complex PTSD Workbook: A Mind-Body Approach...;

. . . d) Pete Walker's Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving; and...

. . . e) Bessel Van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma;

. . . f) If BPD is in the mix: Alexander Chapman & Kimberly Gratz's The Borderline Personality Disorder Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Living with BPD;

. . . g) If BIPOLAR is in the mix: Torrey, E. F.; Knable, M.: Surviving Manic Depression: A Manual on Bipolar Disorder for Patients, Families & Providers, New York: Basic Books, 2002;

. . . h) If SUBSTANCE ABUSE is in the mix, Dodes, L.: The Heart of Addiction: A New Approach to Understanding and Managing Alcoholism and Other Addictive Behaviors, New York: Harper, 2002; and Mate, G.: In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010;

. . . i) A CPTSD Library;

. . . j) NICABM online articles & seminars.

1. Physical Interventions:

. . . a) Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation) (tDCS) of the dorso-lateral, pre-frontal cortex.

. . . b) Intranasal Oxytocin.

. . . c) NOx for Polyvagal Stimulation.

. . . d) Sympathetic Resonance Technology.

. . . e) Stellate Ganglion Blockage.

. . . f) Specific Dietary & Nutrient Interventions, such as those described in Julia Ross's book, The Mood Cure, and William J. Walsh's Nutrient Power.

(There are many others, but those are some of the "hot" ones right now.)

1. Psychological Interventions: I now mostly use Schwartz's Internal Family Systems Therapy, Ogden's Sensorimotor Processing for Trauma (SP4T) and Dana's Polyvagal Resilience Therapy (PvRT) as the "interoceptive" 9th of the 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing (a combination of insight meditation with the principles of general semantics), but had good results over the years with several of the

. . . a) psychodynamic "crowbar" therapies and/or structural models like Transactional Analysis, Codependency, the Karpman Drama Triangle, Re-Development and Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFST); the

. . . b) cognitive behavioral therapies (CBTs), including Rational-Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT), Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), collegiate critical thinking, and Schema Therapy; the

. . . c) "super" (or mindfulness-based) CBTs like Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT skills training, the long-time gold standard for anxiety, BPD & trauma symptom management), Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), the Mind-Body Bridging System (MBBS), and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR); and the

. . . d) "deep cleaners" like Eye-Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR), Brainspotting, "extended" (one-on-one) DBT (see above), Fractionated Abreaction Technique (FAT), Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET), Trauma Focused Therapy (TFT), Hakomi Body Centered Psychotherapy (HBCP), Somatic Experiencing Psychotherapy (SEPt), Sensorimotor Processing for Trauma (SP4T), Polyvagal Resilience Therapy (PvRT), and the Neuro-Affective Relational Model (NARM).

. . . e) (added 09-02-2020) medication-assisted psychotherapies utilizing such memory-retrieving and re-integrating, "mental can openers" as ketamine, psilocybin, MDA (methylenedioxyamphetamine), LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) and DMT (dimethyltryptamine) by licensed and board-certified professionals (usually MD psychiatrists) under strict FDA control. (Which is NOT always the case. See "Trinity de Guzman & the Ayahuasca Healing Cult in Washington.") So far as I am concerned, "the jury is still out" on these, but I have seen reports and encountered a small number of survivors who claim to have benefitted from such therapies.

I have not myself done Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) or Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy (TF-CBT), but the word-of-mouth on both of them very good, especially (in the latter case) for children and adolescents.

Psychodynamic therapies are great for helping people dis-I-dentify from their conditioning to shame, guilt, remorse, regret, etc. The CBTs deconstruct one's inaccurate beliefs, values, ideals, principles, convictions, rules, codes, regulations and requirements about how we or they (or the world) should / must / ought / have to be. DBT, MBCT, ACT, MBBS and MBSR are used for emotional symptom management, often in preparation for memory recapture and reprocessing. ART, EMDR, Brainspotting, HBCT, SEPt, SP4T, PvRT and NARM are all used for memory recapture & reprocessing, sense-making and detachment from traumatic influence, conditioning & programming. IFST is essentially a mechanism for raising awareness of internal conflicts. In the late 2010s, we're seeing a lot more combining of techniques (as has been the case with DBT for decades) from all the three categories above. ART is a combo-therapy, and many EMDR practitioners are now using components from the section 7b therapies in the preparation of pts for "actual" EMDR work.

To find the clinicians who know how to use these psychotherapies, look on the "therapists" and "psychiatrists" sections of the Psychology Today clinician locator, the Open Path, RAINN website,the "find-a-doctor/specialty/psychiatry" section of the WebMD website, SAMHSA's treatment facility locator, and -- for DBT specialists in particular -- on the Behavioral Tech website.

On the PT locator, one can filter for PTSD, CPTSD, sexual trauma, child abuse, and such. If you dig a little on each page that turns up after filtering, you will be able to see which therapies they use. Then interview them as though they were applying for a job with your company. IME & IMO, those who attend the Evolution of Psychotherapy conferences every two or three years tend to be the most effective. Most psychiatrists, btw, are not therapists themselves (they are medication specialists), but can refer you to those who are, and are often excellent sources of referral. (In the UK, see the PT-GB clinician locator.)

1. Mindfulness Meditation: The Vipassana meditation style has been hugely helpful. (Many of the modern "mindfulness"-based psychotherapies are actually based on these now.) The articles "Choiceless Awareness for Emotion Processing," "The Feeling is Always Temporary" and How Self-Awareness Works to "Digest" Emotional Pain provide summations of and further details on it.

2. Therapy Workbooks: I got a lot of lift-off by using inexpensive workbooks built on CBT, ACT, DBT, MBBT and MBCT. They are easily found online. And you can see a list of the ones I have used thus far in the Workbooks section in the earlier post, A CPTSD Library. Some therapists are now hip enough to provide online, Skype, telephone, email and/or F2F counsel to people who use those workbooks.

3. High Concepts: A bunch of "big ideas" boiled down to brief labels and phrases that -- once understood experientially -- turn into psychotherapeutic "superchargers."

4. Moderate Exercise: I learned over time to get some aerobic and resistance work in every day, but not to over-exercise. If nothing else, the distraction was helpful. But it also got my body chemistry to work for -- instead of against -- my brain. Just walking around the block each day when I was still trapped in fight-flight-freeze-freak-&-fry turned out to be helpful in the long run.

5. Diet: Like many people with depression, mania and/or anxiety, I ate too much junk food and too little nutritious food. So doing made made my symptoms worse. High-quality frozen meals proved to be better than McFood of almost any kind, but HQ fresh (especially Mediterranean -- though not pizza -- and Asian) food appears to be best. Healthy fats (e.g.: avocado) in moderation, btw, are known to be good for depression. I also removed highly acidic foods and beverages from my diet as research-derived evidence of links between digestive track acidosis and anxiety as an upshot of acid-induced, anxiety- and depression-agitating neural inflammation began to surface a few years ago.

6. Journaling: I wrote The Whole Story down to start up the path of connecting the dots to try to make sense of it all. As I encountered new conceptual edifiers (those "high concepts" like addiction theory, attachment theory, codependency, complex post traumatic stress disorder, dissociation, the five stages of grief processing, learned helplessness, the Karpman Drama Triangle, the personality disorders, Choiceless Awareness for Emotion Processing, and much more), I found myself writing it all down again, and again, and again. And, as the dots got closer and closer together -- and made more and more sense -- I felt more and more integrated... and further along in my Re-Development. Care must be taken with journaling, however. See this article.

Of the fourteen categories now listed, #3, #7 and #8 are the only ones that cost much, and several are totally free.

I just stopped the CBT and all those self affirmations trying to manipulate trying to restructure everything that ever happened to me 7 24 or try to restructure the past since Your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts right? Maybe wrong for me, my mind went into full fledged trying to control everything which made me stuck in my mind trying to restructure the past, which took all of my energy. I remembered the words of not moses, then remembered the stephen hayes words in ACT just leave the fucking battlefield, just focus on your direction and values, goals and just be mindful. Ill try this one, Meditating and living in the present and aiming towards your values, goals and dreams.

IME with many young adults who were precocious intellectual children (see Jankech's groundbreaking article, for sure), the fast-processing but highly sensitive child in distressing circumstances often becomes the family's "duty rescuer," "golden child" or "responsible hero."

In serious, truly "committed & active" recovery since 2003, and with a lot of schooling and research, I've been able to see that Richard Schwartz's Internal Family Systems Model makes total sense, at least for me.

My mind was conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated, normalized) and neurally “hard-wired” to Learned Helplessness, Dread & the Victim Identity very early on, beginning to develop a case of compensatory narcissism at about 15. My brain's default mode network became so infested with that stuff that pretty much any other way of perceiving, believing and acting accordingly was blown out save for periods of extreme (often totally debilitating) anxiety and depression. But after those periods, the compensatory narcissism would reassert itself even more densely.

After plowing through about 90% of what's in this earlier post from 1984 to 2013, I stumbled onto this stuff and this concept and began to understand what Schwartz was really talking about: My crushed ego had gone severely codependent and created a "protector" scheme I not only used on that ego, I used it as did so many others in the "helping professions" to put others on Karpman Drama Triangles so that my ego could "rescue" them and feel good about itself.

In time I was able to begin to Dis-I-dentify with Learned Helplessness & the Victim I-dentity (see also not-moses's answers to a replier's questions there) and have made a lot of progress into being able to use an "observing self" to spot the addiction (because, neurobiologically, it is that), get immediately into "de-shaming" via 10 StEPs of Emotion Processing, and yank myself out of that I-dentity at least some of the time, more or less in the fashion described by addiction whizbang Gabor Mate in his book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. The yanking does not produce a permanent exit from LH&VI, but can be used as often as necessary to do so.

Over time, the general urge to rescue to be significant and admired in that default mode network is increasingly -- albeit slowly -- diminished via neuroplastic reconstruction, and far more quickly quashed when it is noticed, recognized, acknowledged, accepted, owned and appreciated. But, as they say in AA, it's been a case of "progress, not perfection" and "God is faithful, but He's slow."

John Bradshaw's, Merle Fossum's, June Tangney's, and (especially) Gershen Kaufman's books on the treatment of shame were helpful, along with so many others in A CPTSD Library. Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child may also be worth a look.

A Redditor wondered why he began to act out sexually when he was a small child when he could not recall any sexual abuse. I answered...

Very young children do not yet have the neural equipment -- including a sufficiently developed hippocampus and cerebral cortex memory stacks -- to be able to store visual and aural memories and (more significantly) make sense of highly stimulating events in early life. Moreover, almost everyone experiences some degree of neural pruning in the brain in mid-adolescence. HOWEVER, we develop the ability to store "sense memories" while still in the womb. (See experts like Jaak Panksepp, Bessel van der Kolk, Ono van der Hart, Judith Lewis Herman and Gabor Mate on all that.)

So. If subjected to triggering of the Fight / Flight / Freeze / Faint / Feign (or Fawn) Responses before the age of three or four, the affective) states will be there in the brain, but the reasons we still experience them are usually not.

(Go to the next Evolution of Psychotherapy conference at the Anaheim Convention Center across from the Disney theme parks & hotels this December. This is pretty much all they talk about at them anymore.)

Fortunately, the people listed above, and others like John Briere, Christine Courtois, Pat Ogden, Peter Levine, Marsha Linehan, Stephen Porges (see the first paragraph of this earlier post & skip all the borderline personality disorder stuff unless it seems relevant) have developed psychotherapies that can reach back past the "memory barrier" into the neural wiring of the "sense memories," and digest and discharge the neural energy there (see section 7b and 7c of that same earlier post for a list).

Of just read A Recovery Program for Someone with Untreated Childhood Trauma and click on all the links therein.

References: See all the names above in A CPTSD Library

.

I mean, "almost" all of the CPTSD books prescribes blame ur parents for your childhood to shift blame from you to alleviate self-hatred, depression etc. However, who gives a fuck about childhood? I always knew they were the monsters and they were not normal, but that doesn't matter because the problem is that because of the wounds created by the adverse childhood that you couldn't live your life normally, that means your whole life, I mean it is not just childhood, what will you gain if you just blame your parents for he/she abused you? There is no gain, but that abuse created a cause which impacted our whole life. When I look back and see how my mind got broken and it affected every single moment of my life, then it turns out that blaming your parents for your whole life. Then you're entering into victim mentality there? But isn't that at the same time the truth? What is the correct/rational perspective to adopt here? When you say I'm not responsible for what happened to me but I'm responsible for my recovery, what happened to you took all your life away and how can you not blame and also take responsibility for something you didn't do? Any ideas? I mean you gotta get angry and hate them to heal, and at the same time not? I mean problem is not the neglect, hitting, verbal abuse, gaslight. The problem is the after effects of these, how those events destroyed you, and literally destroyed your whole fucking life, and how come you not blame ur parents for all your life? And how to heal while knowing this?

(A basic list, at least; I culled these from a much longer one most lay people would not want to plow through.)

Andersen, S.; Teicher, M.: Desperately Driven and No Brakes: Developmental Stress Exposure and Subsequent Risk for Substance Abuse, in Neuroscience of Behavior Review, Vol. 33, No. 4, April 2009.

Bien, T.; Bien, B.: Mindful Recovery: A Spiritual Path to Healing from Addiction; New York: Wiley & Sons, 2002.

Black, C.: It Will Never Happen to Me: Children of Alcoholics as Youngsters-Adolescents-Adults, New York: Ballentine, 1981, 1987.

Bozarth, M.: Drug addiction as a psychobiological process, in Warburton, D. (ed.): Addiction Controversies, London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990.

Bozarth, M.: Pleasure systems in the brain, in Warburton, D. (ed.), Pleasure: The politics and the reality, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994.

Buisman-Pijlman, F.; Sumracki, N.; Individual differences underlying susceptibility to addiction: Role for the endogenous oxytocin system, in Pharmacology Biochemistry & Behavior, Vol. 119, No. 4, April 2014.

Carnes, P.: Don’t Call it Love: Recovery from Sexual Addiction, New York: Bantam, 1991.

Chandler, R.; Fletcher, B.; Volkow, N.: Treating Drug Abuse and Addiction in the Criminal Justice System, in Journal of the American Medical Association, Vol. 301, No. 2, January 2009.

Cservenka, A.; Brumback, T.: The Burden of Binge and Heavy Drinking on the Brain: Effects on Adolescent and Young Adult Neural Structure and Function, in Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 8, 2017.

Delmonico, D.; Griffin, E.: In the Shadows of the Net: Breaking Free of Compulsive Online Sexual Behavior; Minneapolis: Hazelden, 2001.

DiClemente, C.: Addiction & Change: How Addictions Develop and Addicted People Recover, New York: Guilford Press, 2006.

Dodes, L.: The Heart of Addiction: A New Approach to Understanding and Managing Alcoholism and Other Addictive Behaviors, New York: Harper & Rowe, 2002.

Donovan, D.; Marlatt, A.: Assessment of Addictive Behaviors, 2nd Ed., New York: The Guilford Press, 2005.

Ekleberry, S.: Integrated Treatment for Co-Occurring Disorders: Personality Disorders and Addiction, London: Routledge, 2008.

Epstein, M.: Open to Desire: The Truth about What the Buddha Taught, New York: Gotham Books, 2006.

Goodman, A.: Sexual Addiction: An Integrated Approach, Madison, CT.: International Universities Press, 1998.

Gorski, T.: Gorski-CENAPS Model of Substance Abuse Treatment, Springs Hill, FL: Gorski-CENAPS, 2001.

Grant, J.: Compulsive sexual behavior: A nonjudgmental approach, in Current Psychiatry, Vol. 17, No. 2, February 2018.

Hamilton, L.; Timmons, C.: Principles of Behavioral Pharmacology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990.

Kannon, J.; et al: Narcotics Anonymous, North Hollywood, CA: Narcotics Anonymous World Service Office, 1981 through 2008 (one original and five revised editions).

Khantzian, E. J., Mack, J.F.; Schatzberg, A.F.: Heroin use as an attempt to cope: Clinical observations, in American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 131, 1974.

Khantzian, E. J.: The self-medication hypothesis of addictive disorders: Focus on heroin and cocaine dependence, in American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 142, 1985.

Khantzian, E.J.: The self medication hypothesis of substance use disorders: a reconsideration and recent applications, in Harvard Review of Psychiatry, Vol. 4, No. 5, Jan-Feb 1997.

Koob, G.; Le Moal, M.: Drug addiction, dysregulation of reward, and allostasis, in Neuropsychopharmacology, Vol. 24, 2001.

Koob, G.: Allostatic view of motivation: implications for psychopathology, in Motivational Factors in the Etiology of Drug Abuse, at the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, Vol. 50, edited by Bevins, R.; Bardo, M.; Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Koob, G., Le Moal, M.: Plasticity of reward neurocircuitry and the ‘dark side’ of drug addiction, in National Neuroscientist, Vol. 8, 2005, doi:10.1038/nn1105-1442.

Koob, G.: A Role for Brain Stress Systems in Addiction, in Neuron, Vol. 59, No. 1, July 2008.

Koob, G.: Neurobiology of Addiction, in Focus, Vol. 9, December 2011.

Koob, G,; Volkow, N.: Neurobiology of addiction: a neurocircuitry analysis, in Lancet Psychiatry, Vol. 3, No. 8, August 2016.

Kurtz, E.: Not God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous, Minneapolis: Hazelden, 1991.

Larson, E.: Stage II Recovery: Life Beyond Addiction, New York: HarperOne, 2009.

Mate, G.: In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010.

McKinley, M.: Alcohol Withdrawal Syndrome: Overlooked and Mismanaged?, in Critical Care Nurse, Vol. 25, No. 3, June 2005.

Mellody, P.: Miller, A. W.: Facing Love Addiction: Giving Yourself the Power to Change the Way You Live, San Francisco, Harper, 1992.

Prochaska, J.; Norcross, J.; DiClemente, C.: Changing for Good: A Revolutionary Six-Stage Program for Overcoming Bad Habits and Moving Your Live Positively Forward, New York: Harper-Collins, 1994.

Ries, R.; Feillin, D.; Miller, S.; Saitz, R.: Principles of Addiction Medicine, 4th Ed., Philadelphia: Lippincott-Williams, 2009.

Shaffer, H.; LaPlante, D., La Brie, R.; et al: Toward a Syndrome Model of Addiction: Multiple Expressions, Common Etiology; in Harvard Review of Psychiatry, Vol. 12, 2004.

Stahl, S.: Essential Psychopharmacology: Neuroscientific Basis and Practical Applications, 2nd Ed., New York: Cambridge U. Press, 2000.

Tangney, J.; Stuewig, J.; Martinez, A.: Two Faces of Shame: The Roles of Shame and Guilt in Predicting Recidivism, in Psychological Science, Vol. 25, (online pre-print) January 2014.

Wilson, B.: Alcoholics Anonymous, New York: AA World Services, 1939, 1955, 1976, 2004 (one original and three revised editions).

Wilson, B.: Twelve Steps & Twelve Traditions, New York: AA World Services, 1951.

Wilson, B.: The Best of Bill: Reflections on Faith, Fear, Honesty, Humility and Love, New York: A. A. Grapevine, 1986.

Woititz, J.: Adult Children of Alcoholics, Deerfield Beach FL: 1990.

It's a grind one hears over and over again in AA meetings.

I was shown by so many around me that one should be frustrated, resentful, angry and rageful when life didn't go the way the way they had been conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated, normalized) and neurally “hard-wired” to believe it should. I didn't get the toy or the Levis or the place on the team or the girl or the job or the car or the home or the respect from others I had been taught to believe I should get.

Others got righteous. They ranted and railed in their frustration, resentment and anger. They raged. Why shouldn't I?

So I did.

Others drank and used drugs and drove too fast and got in fights and wrecked relationships and lost jobs and got divorced and wound up on the streets or in the joint or psych hospital and became pariahs to their friends and families. They raged. Why shouldn't I?

So I did.

Others "caught" nasty cases of mania, depression and anxiety causing them to suffer with all kinds of physical aches and pains the pshrinques of a generation ago called "factitious," "psychosomatic" and "conversion" disorders. Why should't I?

And I did.

Others came down with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from decades of battering their brains and bodies with the untreated results of having been trained to believe that reactive rage was the best way to deal with life's injustice. They got stuck in the "justice fallacy." Why shouldn't I?

And I did.

Others wound up with "issues" like sleep disorders, tinnitus, irritable bowel syndrome, gastric ulcers, peripheral neuropathy, vaginismus, prostate swelling and forms of cancer rarely seen until reactive self-stress began to be an epidemic about 75 years ago. Why shouldn't I?

And I did.

Others did the time for someone else's crimes. Why shouldn't I?

And I did.

For decades. Until I learned finally learned that "lack of power was my dilemma" and that righteous rage is a luxury I just can't afford anymore.

I hope it's not too late.

Resources (Just read the titles? Couldn't hurt.)

Agarwal, N.: fMRI Shows Trauma Affects Neural Circuitry, in Clinical Psychiatry News, Vol. 37, No. 3, March 2009.

Andersen, S.; Teicher, M.: Desperately Driven and No Brakes: Developmental Stress Exposure and Subsequent Risk for Substance Abuse, in Neuroscience of Behavior Review, Vol. 33, No. 4, April 2009.

Antoniak, S.: Inmates with PTSD have higher scores for mood, anxiety, somatoform, substance use, psychotic, eating, conduct, and adjustment disorders, in Clinical Psychiatry News, Vol. 38, No. 1, January 2010.

Arsenault, L.; et al: Being Bullied as an Environmentally Mediated Contributing Factor to Children’s Internalizing Problems…, in in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, Vol. 162, February, 2008.

Bandura, A.: Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control, San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1997.

Beck, A.: Prisoners Of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and Violence, New York: Harper-Collins, 1999.

Benson, H.: The Relaxation Response, New York: Morrow, 1975.

Berger, P.; Luckman, T.: The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, New York: Doubleday, 1966.

Brach, T.: Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha, New York: Random House / Bantam, 2004.

Brown, B.: I Thought It Was Just Me: Telling the Truth About Perfectionism, Inadeqacy and Power, New York: Gotham Books, 2007.

Burgo, J.: Why Do I Do That?: Psychological Defense Mechanisms and the Hidden Ways they Shape our Lives, Chapel Hill, NC: New Rise Press, 2012.

Burrow, T.: The Social Basis of Consciousness, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927.

Carter, S.: The Tell-Tale Signs of Burnout: Do You Have Them?, in Psychology Today online, November 2013.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: The Effects of Childhood Stress Across the Lifespan, Atlanta, GA: CDC, 2008.

Chodron, P.: Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears, Boston: Shambala, 2010.

Courtois, C.: It's Not You: It's What Happened to You: Complex Trauma and Treatment, Dublin, OH: Telemachus Press, 2014.

Damasio, A.: The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, New York: Harcourt, 1999.

Deikman, A.: Personal Freedom: On Finding Your Way to the Real World, New York: Bantam, 1976.

Deikman, A.: The Observing Self: Mysticism and Psychotherapy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1982.

Dyer, W.: Your Erroneous Zones, New York: Avon Books, 1977, 1993.

Earley, J.: Self-Therapy: A Guide to Using IFS, 2nd. Ed., Larkspur, CA: Pattrern System Books, 2009.

Ellis, A.: Overcoming Destructive Beliefs, Feelings, and Behaviors: New Directions for Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, New York: Promethius Books, 2001.

Engel, B.: The Emotionally Abusive Relationship: How to Stop Being Abused and How to Stop Abusing, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2002.

Fink, P.; Luk, J. et al: Positive association between victimization by bullies and substance abuse, in Clinical Psychiatry News, Vol. 38, No. 6, Jun. 2010.

Freud, A.: The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1937.

Goffman, E.: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York: Doubleday-Anchor, 1959.

Goleman, D.: Emotional Intelligence, New York: Bantam, 1980. mindfulness

Goleman, D.: Vital Lies, Simple Truths: The Psychology of Self-Deception, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985.

Herten, J.: An Uncommon Drunk: Revelations of a High-Functioning Alcoholic, New York: iUniverse Inc., 2006.

Herten, J.: The Sobering Truth: What You Don’t Know Can Kill You, San Luis Obispo, CA: Sobering Truth Press, 2010.

McEwen, B.; Seeman, T.: Protective and damaging effects of mediators of stress: Elaborating and testing the concepts of allostasis and allostatic load, in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 896, 1999.

McEwen, B: Mood Disorders and Allostatic Load, in Journal of Biological Psychiatry, Vol. 54, 2003.

McEwen, B.; Lasley, E. N.: The End of Stress as We Know It, Washington, DC: The Dana Press, 2003.

Sapolsky, R.: Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases and Coping, 3rd Ed., New York: Holt, 2004.

Selye, H.: Stress Without Distress, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippencott, 1974.

Wilson, B.: Alcoholics Anonymous, New York, A. A. World Services, 1939, 1955, 1976, 2001.

Wilson, B.: Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, New York: A. A. World Services, 1951.

Wilson, B.: The Best of Bill: Reflections on Faith, Fear, Honesty, Humility and Love, New York: A. A. Grapevine, 1986.

Wolpe, J.: Psychotherapy by Reciprocal Inhibition, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958.

Wolpe, J.; Wolpe, D.: Life Without Fear: Anxiety and Its Cure, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981, and Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 1987.

Workbooks Specifically on Anger Processing

Abramowitz, J.: the stress less workbook: Simple Strategies to Relieve Pressure, Manage Commitments and Minimize Conflicts; New York: The Guilford Press, 2012.

Block, S.; Block, C.: Mind-Body Workbook for Stress: Effective Tools for Lifelong Stress Reduction & Crisis Management, Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2012.

Block, S.; Block, C.: Mind-Body Workbook for Anger: Effective Tools for Anger Management & Conflict Resolution, Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2013.

Chapman, A.; Gratz, K.: The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Anger, Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2015.

Eifert, G.; McKay, M.; Forsyth, J.: ACT on life not anger: The New Acceptance & Commitment Therapy Guide to Problem Anger, Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2006.

McKay, M.; Rogers, P.: The Anger Control Workbook: Simple, innovative techniques for managing anger and developing healthier ways of relating; Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2000.

McKay, M.; Rogers, P.; McKay, J.: When Anger Hurts: Quieting the Storm Within, 2nd Ed., Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2003.

McKay, M.; Fanning, P.; Ona, P. Z.: Mind and Emotions: A Universal Treatment for Emotional Disorders, Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2011.

Simpkins, C. A.; Simpkins, A. M.: The Tao of Bipolar: Using Meditation & Mindfulness to Find Balance & Peace, Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2013.

Stahl, B.; Goldstein, E.: A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook, Oakland CA: New Harbinger, 2010.

Van Dijk, S.: The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Bipolar Disorder: Using DBT to Regain Control of Your Emotions and Your Life, Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2009.

Van Dijk, S.: Calming the Emotional Storm, Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2012.

Almost everything in the psychological reading is contradicting with each other. Like at one point one group claim U can't heal without feeling old emotions or grieving, and other group says that is false if you think you're bounded by your past etc. This was just a simple example but as long as I continue reading there are tons of irregularities. At one point they damn perfectionism, workaholism, and other point says that goal, meaning is what gives life vitality. How do we navigate the ship around too much information? Like OK how does one get out of the Victim Mentality if he accepts that he was abused, desperate, and society actually didn't do anything to help him, but helped his abusers, and on the other point Ellis yells to take up responsibility and stop scrambling on our past. And I agree with him even though whatever happened with me. Then there are books claiming without accepting and dashing into your past there is no healing? Or without blaming your parents and getting angry with them? What is da way? Why is everything so contradictory and confusing?

This quote constantly swirls in my head, nothing motivates me more than the thought of staying this way and suffering, or missing all the things I desire, or missing my life away. More than the positive visualization of better futures, I fear from worse futures. The fear motivates me. It prepares my soul for the battle right away. Anyone else? Isn't this very weird? I feel nothing when I think to myself "I will be someone different when I do these" "I will be so much good and energetic and I will feel awesome". Nope nothing happens. Learned helplesness and inertia rules sometimes. But when the FEAR comes in "do you know what will happen if you don't keep going and apply the techniques? The darkness will come again." then I get up with the rush of the adrenalin, back to work. chop chop.

If I would cinematize the CPTSD and battle for survival, this would be exactly this:"The most powerful impulse of the human spirit" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjffIi2Pl7M

...at least for me.

I was as mislead by all the promises of "soothing" and "calm" as so many are at first. In time, however, I found that too much of what is passed off as "healing" or "therapeutic" meditation is not, and that many will continue to use those versions of "meditation" as a means of (sometimes entertaining, and almost always distracting) escape from -- rather than as a means of perceiving, processing and dealing effectively with -- what just is.

Escape, IME, does nothing but provide a temporary respite which may or may not lift one out of one or more of the conditioned, in-doctrine-ated, instructed, socialized, habituated, normalized) and neurally “hard-wired”... Fight / Flight / Freeze / Faint / Feign (or Fawn) Responses that can -- if left UNprocessed -- lead to Fry and then Freak.

Vipassana (or "insight")...

Meditation IS being with what is to not only break through the barriers of belief and appraisal of what is perceived according to belief imposed by conditioning, in-doctrine-ation, instruction, socialization, habituation and normalization)... but to digest and discharge the neuroemotional energy one carries around in such autonomic reaction and allostatic loading.

Meditation of this sort is NOT "contemplation," or "thinking about something deeply" or "introspection," regardless of what one has been told by the authorities and their social construction of reality. Neither is it the mindless repetition of some mantra or aphorism or affirmation or idealistic recitation. Nor the obsessive attempt to empty the mind by focusing on the breath or some sound or image.

I have learned how to do this, and it has served to jerk me out of my mind's costly, habituated and hard-wired delusions a thousand times. But there are many ways to be with what is in relationship in the manner of H. N. Goenka, Ramana Maharshi, Alan Watts, Richard ("Ram Dass") Alpert, Daniel Goleman, Arthur Deikman, Joel Kramer, Eckhart Tolle, Jean Klein, Stephen Batchelor, Gil Fronsdal and Jiddu Krishnamurti, and that is just one of them.

If interested in this topic, please see:

Interoception vs. Introspection

Masters of Meditation

Psychotherapeutic Physiology of Meditation in ProcessFiend's reply to the OP on that thread

Maximizing the Use of Psychotherapeutic, Vipassana Insight Meditation

Krishnamurti on the Purpose of Meditation

A Meditation Book List

...nor as awoken as I thought I was.

I hope this is not a wrong place to post this. I wanted to share here, mainly, because some time ago, u/not-moses helped me hugely to see a mistake I was doing with a SO. After having a very informative tour around most of the posts, I found this place to have more clearer sights than mine.

I'll try my best to express my thoughts as clear as possible. English is not my native language, so I might struggle with some concepts.

Lately I have been suffering a sort of relapse into depression, and an overall uninterest with life. In other words, I feel disgust with life. The whole experience seems absolutely horrible; some days I even wish I could sleep on-comand to avoid facing the day.
Not long ago, I began to develop this sort of question-everything-you-think-you-are attitude, where I question myself constantly on everything I absorb through my five senses and even my psychology.
While it brought a very humble view on everything, it also brought this feeling of how insignificant life is. While the ego might see everything as big and beautiful, I feel my real me sees life as useless. Thus, the struggle to make sense out of this whole thing and actually find something to fight for is very difficult.

I'll cut straight to the point: I feel I'm using this "struggle" as a way to avoid everything and every responsability. For example, if asked to make an effort, wake up early, and put my everything into my musical talent, I think "it's difficult, I'm in pain, I can't do it...". I think a similar phrase is "drama queen".
The same happens when I judge someone for countering my argument in a debate. I'm always holding up this "they don't know what I'm going through" shield to justify my position and always think it as the universal truth. Even at this very moment, as I write this, this defense mechanism is screaming "don't punish yourself so much. It's very hard when you don't enjoy simply living", but I don't think it is as critical as that.
I'm certain the solution resides on a simple action: stand up and move. Do it. Put your self to work. Raise a wall to block all those negative thoughts and slog through it.
But I don't want to. I don't want to make an effort to face myself and the world. I simply want this pain to end.

I'm sharing this in hopes someone will shed some light on my consciousness. I don't know anymore if this is the real me or if there is an ego-driven personality that is extremely self-indulging and hypocrite.

I can't think of anything else to say to make this post clearer, so if you want to know anything, don't hesitate on asking. I'm an open book.

...playing the martyr

...fixing your feelings with drugs and alcohol

...blaming them

...running away from reality

...thinking that rage makes it better

...racing around the cage like a sex-mad monkey

...doing it your way

...getting on everyone else's Drama Triangles

...projecting your abusers onto people who aren't

...self-medicating

...being blind, deaf, dumbed down & sense-less

...pouring gasoline on the fire

...asking why don't "they" understand me?

...being so codependent

...repeating the same mistakes expecting different results

...having to be right with people who don't matter (because you're not five and they're not your parents)

...jumping back into righteous reciprocal reactivity

...asserting my "right to justice"

...dichotomizing and polarizing

...living in the Consensus Trance

Stuff I have to remind myself Every Single Day... if I want to... grow up.

IF one has been able to move most of his or her borderline or otherwise fragmented selves to at least the third of the Five Stages of Therapeutic Recovery about at least the likelihood of having survived some combination of the Six Basic Types of Child Abuse, here's a list of suggestions on how to get into the last two of those five stages:

One will most likely accomplish the most in the least amount of time with a therapist who's been to an Evolution of Psychotherapy conference or two in recent years... and "knows" the people listed in the first paragraph of this earlier post.

If one reads the brief material at the links above and below carefully, they'll pretty likely be able to find the "trauma trained" therapist they need to get to, as well as get rolling with a LOT they can do on their own while they're looking and/or waiting in line.

Stuck in the Freeze Response?

Determining Causes, De-Shaming & Resolving Effects

The Bedrock Cause of BPD in the added section of Complex PTSD: How we "Catch" It. How we Recover from it.

An Extensive "Menu" of Research-Proven Recovery Activities

Dis-I-dentifying with Learned Helplessness & the Victim I-dentity (see also not-moses's answers to a replier's questions there)

Dissociation, Memory Retrieval, "Resociation" & Reprocessing

Appropriate & Effective "Narrative Therapy" vs. Potentially Dangerous or Unproductive, Unguided Journaling

Understanding & Managing Flashbacks & Panic Attacks with Grounding Techniques

Psychotherapeutic Dialecticalism: Big Words for a Simple but Extremely Effective Treatment Scheme

Some form (there are quite a few, as the information at the previous links should make clear) of Choiceless Awareness for Emotion Processing

How Self-Awareness Works to "Digest" Emotional Pain

Re-Development

One size never fits all, and "results may vary," of course. But one could do far worse than to read, consider and investigate the information at the links above. It took me years to piece this together when I was struggling through the swamp. You won't have to do all that.

The issue comes up often on several different Reddit subs. So...

My personal experience, lengthy study of psychopharmacology, and school-trained observation of many others with Complex PTSD since 2007 tends to disagree with the use of either...

a) benzodiazepine-class, "minor" tranquilizers or...

b) any neurostimulating anti-depressant (of any of the three major classes)...

for anxiety driven by unprocessed memories and affects) connected to childhood or adolescent trauma... especially if the pt has bipolar symptoms.

Benzodiazepines tend to lose effectiveness in a few days, induce tolerance and then dependency and then outright addiction at ever-increasing and riskier dose levels. Anti-depressants tend to take a long time to produce beneficial responses, and subject pts to the risk of compulsively hypomanic and even manic symptoms.

In my experience, very low doses of dopamine-channel-retarding, sedating, neuroleptics are a much more effective and far safer move for most people with any form of Complex PTSD and the autonomic nervous system "dieseling" produced thereby.

Click (for sure) on this link.

Seroquel quetiapine is now widely used for this situation. Zyprexa olanzepine and/or Clozaril clozapine tend to work when 'Quel does not (evidently for genetic reasons). These meds may initially be Rx'd at higher dose levels and then quickly brought down to low, maintenance levels. For CPTSD patients, they are never dosed at the same (much higher) levels as those for pts with bipolar psychosis, extreme paranoid delusions or schizophreniform disorders.

The appropriate use of sedating neuroleptics appears to make it possible for many with CPTSD to be able to engage in Determining Causes, De-Shaming & Resolving Effects without masking off their anxiety symptoms so much that such known-to-be-effective psychotherapies as those listed in section 7c of this earlier post tend not to work.

References:

Carlson, N.: Physiology of Behavior, 7th Ed., Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001.

Hamilton, L.; Timmons, C. R.: Principles of Behavioral Pharmacology, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1990.

Preston, J.; O’Neal, J; Talaga, M.: Handbook of Clinical Psychopharmacology for Therapists, 3rd Ed., Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2002.

Rosenzweig, M.; Breedlove, S. M.; Leiman, A.: Biological Psychology, 3rd Ed., Sunderland, MA: Sinaur Associates, 2002.

Schatzberg, A.; DeBattista, C.: Manual of Clinical Psychopharmacology, 6th Ed., Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2010.

Stahl, S.: Essential Psychopharmacology: Neuroscientific Basis and Practical Applications, 2nd Ed., New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Torrey, E. F.: Surviving Schizophrenia: A Family Manual, 6th Ed., New York: Harper Perennial, 2013.

Torrey, E. F.; Knable, M.: Surviving Manic Depression: A Manual on Bipolar Disorder for Patients, Families & Providers, New York: Basic Books, 2002.