For over twenty years, my PTSD symptoms were sufficiently controlled by medication such that I could sleep at night, keep a job, and live a relatively pain-free life. It was also a life of isolation, alienation, dissociation, hypervigilance and despair, but you can’t have everything. I was in talk-therapy with psychiatrists during this period also.
In my late-forties, the meds slowly but surely stopped working, and every symptom I experienced in my twenties returned — from insomnia to severe physical pain without organic cause to unpredictable cycling between hyperarousal and dissociation. The trauma energy that flooded me in childhood, when I could neither fight nor flee, remained within.
I was prepared to do just about anything to release that buried energy since it came to manifest in physical pain so severe, it sometimes left me gasping for breath. I had to take action, and inexpensive action at that, since I’d been on a limited budget after losing my job in the recession of 2008.
I’ve written here of my adventures in pursuit of healing my PTSD with non-traditional medicine as well as general thoughts on related issues. Also included are fifty additional pages — a guest essay and two previously published short-reads: Startle: A True Story of PTSD and the Paranormal and Ghostsmeller: Adventures of a Low-Status Medium. Total: 46,713 words
