Please, please pray

Over the last few weeks Dr. Mind has been talking more about my sleeping issues being related to PTSD.  When the improvement was only partial after the huge stress of SSDI went away he seems to have decided that is the issue.  I'm not entirely sure where the rest of this comes from and have to wait until next week to ask.  At first he told me he's going to a PTSD conference soon and hopes to add to the things he still knows to do.  It sounds like I am stretching his knowledge.  Then he talked about maybe having me do EMDR (I only partially understand this; google it) but I am not sure that I believe in it (it seems bizarre) or that I can do it because you have to follow eye movement patterns and one of my eyes believes in doing it's own thing, which makes me laugh because it is a really weird feeling (I can feel it slip out of the movement I was doing and am aware during the movement that my vision is really strange.  It lasts a second but it's still strange; I never had my lazy eye treated so I am used to the decreased depth perception (this is part of why I'm so clumsy) and that without a specific correction my eyes don't work together, but when I do feel it it is noticeable.  And then today he talked a little more, vaguely about having me see someone else once a week and him once a week.  I'm not sure why and I am opposed.  I have many reasons for opposition and I hope to win.  My guess is that he is thinking a female therapist may get more of the memories I'm blocking out but I've never succeeded in trauma therapy with a female.  And there's trust and the confusion of having 2 people treating me and various other no's.

We talked a lot today about feeling safe, places that are safe, and how to increase my safety.  I'm supposed to just plan to sleep on the couch for a while.  I already have been sleeping with a light on for a couple weeks since discovering that my usual need for total darkness has become feeling safer with light on.  We focused a lot on why I don't feel safe in bed as that seems to be the heart of the not-sleeping thing.  And there is both old stuff and new stuff related to that.  I had plenty of trauma already and then the weeks or months I spent staring at a bottle of pills trying to decide to take them did not help, especially once I started dreaming about hurting myself.  That's when I was hospitalized but those thoughts still scare me.  That was so close that I honestly am not sure that I could survive the same thing again.  Probably not going to happen since I doubt that either dr. will ever not be aware of this when things are bad (statistically I am likely to go back to that place although hopefully less drastically).

And after my session because I was complaining about my tire pressure light coming on all the time Dr. Mind actually walked to my car, checked my tires, found a place a screw is missing from my repair work last year and looked through the car's manual for directions to turn off the sensor.  This is the comfort level.  I don't want to change that.

So I am trying to do what I can to help him know as much about trauma, sleep, and beds as I can remember.  This is where prayers would be greatly appreciated over the next few days as this will be painful.  So far I've learned that while I can't just start doing this at bedtime of course trying is enough to make me go into shut-down mode and sleep 2 hours.  Now to just go back to sleep.  And to get warm.  I am freezing, no clue why.


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