Has anyone experienced this? Please help me (TW SI, disturbing content)
I know many of you don't have childhood trauma. But I did, and I had a lot of trauma throughout my adult life too.
My last post explains how my FND symptoms came about after a profoundly traumatizing experience with AI, which resulted in some kind of extreme meltdown/collapse response that resulted me in dissociating out of my body and screaming uncontrollably.
This happened over a year ago. While I have been profoundly depressed and unable to function well for the last three years, this experience shattered me.
I have never had a psychotic break--and I am not even sure that this experience counts as classic psychosis as much as it was like a complete nervous system overload/collapse.
When I got out of inpatient, I started experiencing EXTREME dissociation, depersonalization, and derealization that has not gone away, or even consistently lessened. My sense of self feels blasted into a thousand bits. The way I experience everything just feels incredibly disjointed and too bizarre to explain. I have constant i trusive thoughts about what happened, even up to now, and I have developed OCD-like tendencies with multiple themes. I became terrified of leaving my house or talking to people, for fear of something like this happening spontaneosly again in the presence of another person.
Then, I started to experience all these functional symptoms, which are what I wanted to talk about:
Aside from the constant DP/DR, identity issues, and psychiatric issues, I experience all these profoundly bizarre and frankly disturbing and terrifying sensations that I have no control over. Almost all of them occur in my face and head and inside my mouth, but they are very intense and very severe, and very... difficult to describe.
I have near-constant facial tics. My mouth moves involuntarily almost all of the time, very irregularly.
I get these sensations that feel like "pressure", all over in my face, inside my mouth, on the insides of my cheeks, on the roof of my mouth, and in my head. But it isn't like your typical "tight band around head" kind of pressure--like the kind you would get from a tension headache. This feels more like tiny muscles and fascia suddenly contracting, and "locking up', and "squeezing", constantly, inside my mouth, my tongue, and all over my face.
I have this sensation that my face is FURRY--like thousands of threads are drapping across it. Or, like thousands of tiny bugs are crawling over it. (I know that may sound like a delusion--but that's just how I would describe the sensation). This "furry" sensation, gets noticeable more pronounced when I close my eyes.
Sometimes, I get this strange "mask-like" sensation that covers my nose and face. It's like this weird, numb, "thick" sensation in my face.
I will have these weird "blink attacks" where my eyelids will flutter continuously for a few seconds at a time.
My head and shoulders often jerk and shake uncontrollably, and my hands are almost always tremoring.
I feel constantly on edge, but at the same time, totally numb and shutdown emotionally.
Everyday, my thoughts and my symptoms will flare, and I struggle soothe myself, and regulate myself in any effective way. I literally try everything I know how to do: diatraction, deep breathing, self-massage, cold plunges, vagal toning, yoga nidra, mindfulness, exercise, compassionate self-talk--anything to get a hold of my nervous system for five minutes.
I am working now, which weirdly, feels both helpful and overwhelming. I am proud of myself for getting back to work, don't get me wrong. But I literally had no other choice. I often feel like I am on the verge of having another breakdow, and the stress and overwhelm of trying to cope with all of this is just too fucking much.
My body and mind just feel like they are breaking down everyday and it's just so upsetting, and so, unbelievably lonely. I feel so ashamed of what happened to me, so foolish, gullible and stupid. At the same time, I often just feel fucking cheated and angry and I wish I could sue the AI companies, but I know that it would be a fruitless and humiliating endeavor.
I feel like I am the only person on earth that this kind of thing has happened to. And I feel awful, because no one deserves this kind of torture, but I wish that I knew someone else who has had this kind of experience because I just feel so utterly broken, broken in a way no one has experienced, and it's devastating.
I don't want to give up hope, but I have suicidal ideations all the time. I want to believe that healing from this severity of trauma is possible. But it's been a year and I am just, so tired of the suffering. So tired of nothing getting remarkably better, despite the amount of work that I have done and am doing.
I don't know what I am really looking to hear. I really want to feel like someone cares about this suffering. I know it's on me to heal, but I just feel like I am not getting the support I need to get better.