One of the main points of this blog is to share activities, changes, and thinking that have helped me cope with PTSD better after counseling than before.  The huge division for me was BC before counseling and AC after counseling.  There is a reason for this.  Before counseling I didn’t know what was wrong with me.  I knew there was something not quite right about me but I always behaved with PTSD reactions so I had no before and after an event.  I was 5 years old when extreme abuse started.  But sadly I was born to a mother that loved/hated me for existing.  She wanted to love me but she hated me for taking up even a second of my Dad’s time.  In high school, I took a search for identity class, I talked to my medical doctors, I questioned my parents and friends.  I knew I didn’t react the way other teenagers reacted or behaved. I had nightmares.  I struggled forward because I didn’t ‘know’ anything else.  Then came counseling in my 40’s.  Whoooooo boy was that an eye opener.  I felt like I tumbled down a rabbit hole not knowing that counseling just showed me the hole I was already in.

Counseling turned me upside down and inside out.  If anyone ever says that counseling is the ‘easy way out,’ haven’t done it.  It exposed dark places of my soul.  It dragged up memories lost and forgotten.  Memories that controlled me on a string a demented puppet flinching and swaying.  I needed to recognize what was driving me to cut the strings from my past.  If I didn’t know what they were, how could I process my fears and nightmares?  I delved into a pass that was veiled from me.  I didn’t know what happened in my childhood, counseling dragged that oozing mess into the light of my present life.  For me, counseling was shocking, unsettling, eye opening, disturbing and all round the most difficult thing I ever did.  I am thankful I did it, because I changed my life with the guidance of my counselors.

I shared an article about the 25 things I did as an adult.  Before counseling I did 25 out of 25 of them.

https://themighty.com/2017/06/childhood-emotional-abuse-adult-habits/ 

Some of these I don’t do any more, others I reduced, some are still a work in progress.  I am thankful to my first counselor pointed out that the changes I made would be more of a zigzag path than a straight line.  I decided that for the next few posts I will share some of the things I did to change.  I am writing them in no particular order simply because the breakthroughs and changes occurred at varying times and usually not all in one chunk.  I will share as much as I can about each one.