Also asking the partners of people with PTSD who also have children, what's your take? How has raising children with someone who has PTSD changed things for you and would you choose to do it again?
I'm in therapy and have been taking medication consistently for years. But I feel like my progress and my ability to manage my symptoms have plateaued. I mean that I've been having consistent flashbacks once or twice a week for quite a while now, and they haven't been getting better.
Before my symptoms started, I could easily sleep through the night. Now I'm lucky if I get more than four hours of sleep without waking up in a hyper-alert state. The lack of sleep has eroded my executive functioning to some degree, and I do need help making decisions sometimes. It doesn't seem to be improving.
I've gotten very good at recognizing when I'm in a flashback and not taking it out on other people. But that does mean I sometimes have to withdraw for most of the day. On very rare occasions, it can take me multiple days to recover from a particularly bad flashback. My flashbacks mainly involve feeling intensely abandoned and terrified. When I recognize that it's happening, I know not to make any major decisions or mistake my feelings for reality. But I worry that this might make me incapable of being a good parent.
My childhood sucked. I did have a physically and emotionally abusive parent, but I'm still happy to be alive. I know I could do far, far better than what was done to me, but is that enough? I've never been violent in any way, though I have been known to get really snappy when I've had very little sleep.
Is it insane for me to still want to have children?
I'm asking because I've met someone who wants children. I'm in my early 40s, and this might be my last opportunity to have kids at a reasonable age with someone I think could be a really good partner and parent.
I've wanted kids since my late twenties and have dreamed about being a parent for a long time. I know that sounds unusual to some people these days. But I daydream about the kinds of lessons I'd want to teach them, and I've studied parenting methods for many years. Before my symptoms, I even volunteered to babysit for friends with children because I love kids so much. I also took childhood development classes at a university simply because I wanted to prepare myself to be a better parent when the time came.
I love seeing the world through children's eyes and watching them learn. I think that on my good days I could be a really good parent. But on my bad days, I would basically be absent, at best.
When my symptoms started a few years ago after severe trauma, I mourned because I thought it meant there was no way any reasonable person would ever want to have children with me. But this person does, and they're like me. They've also been preparing to have kids for decades.
I would love to hear from people who have children while actively managing symptoms like these.
Has anyone had similar issues? I've manually downloaded just the most updated mods and deleted the rest, and it still crashes during the intro star loading screen.
I've been living with PTSD for six years now, and it's destroyed my life. I can barely safely use an oven because I get so dissociated and forgetful, which got me fired from the dream job I'd been working toward for over 10 years. My inability to maintain an income, along with the fawning and freezing, pushed away all of my friends and my fiancée, who thought I was being lazy and manipulative, even though they were there and knew the trauma I had gone through.
So I've been "housing insecure" since then, mostly living out of my car and pet sitting. I've tried to reach out for help several times, despite how difficult it was to trust after being abandoned by the people who called me family. So far, over the last 4 years, someone lets me stay at their place, then it turns out they're abusing their kids, or they thought I could be their live in house slave and expected me to be capable of way more than I was. Then twice in a row I got stuck in sexually coercive housing situations with people who said they also had PTSD and could help and instead used me like a toy.
This most recent time has really fucked me up, and I think it's changed my relationship with people and I am done taking offers to live with someone.
But this seems to have also changed my relationship with weed. The only way I've been able to consistently get to sleep is by smoking or ingesting THC, and I've never had a problem with that until recently. I took a two week break from weed while I was trying gabapentin for a second time, and at this new higher dose it took some of the edge off my hypervigilance and I think made it slightly more difficult for me to go into flashbacks, but it wasn't strong enough to consistently get me to sleep, and it made me dumber and slow, so I started smoking before bed again.
I've only smoked three times since, and each time I've gone into really severe flashbacks as soon as the effects hit. Three times is a pattern, so something is different. And now I'm afraid to smoke, but I have nothing else to help me get to sleep now, and that makes it easier to get triggered too.
I guess this isn't just a venting thread. I would like some advice if anyone has gone through something similar and has suggestions for alternatives to help with sleep or to make pot work again
Used ai for grammar and spelling cuz my brain is mush, sorry