A Peak Into A Trauma Ward

I enter this place for my third program of three months in the same clinic. There’s this distinct smell in my room that makes my heart ache with nostalgia. It’s some kind of warm, earthy smell.

I hate this place, but at the same time, I’m madly in love with it.

The schedule isn’t as filled as it was in my first two times here. Covid restrictions ask that less patients be in a room at the same time, therefore fewer people get to have some therapy sessions each week.

It doesn’t bother me, though. I feel I need a lot more time alone right now. Maybe it’s the individual therapy sessions doing their magic. My assigned therapist is the chief of the ward. She can “poke” very well. Burst open bubbles of emotion and then be there to catch me and say all these things that show me just how much she understands.

How can someone that has had such a sheltered life understand my pain so well? I don’t know much about this woman. She has a horse, always wanted one and now she does have one. Two little children who make me jealous about the fact that I can’t be her son.

We’re doing some kind of trauma exposure therapy, by writing events that marked me on a long piece of parchment that represents the timeline of my life.

Every time I came to this clinic, there was a special patient that caught a liking to me. Without these patients I would’ve never gotten out of my shell, to start integrating and getting to know the other patients.

This time, the special patient is a young woman dressed in black all the time, that has ADHD and probably, as said by her, an Autism Spectrum Disorder. We keep going out to eat Curry Wurst and McDonald’s crap. The McDonald’s is very close to the clinic, so when I got a transfer of money from my parents, I started visiting it almost every evening.

My grandma died of brain cancer my first month in the clinic. A few days after, I ordered some 1cp-LSD and took a tab one afternoon and decided to go out on a walk.

The Cycle

And so, sitting on the grass under a tree that seemed to have been calling me, I realized that everything is being born, changing, and dying, all at the same time. I finally understood the poem “Do Not Stand At My Grave And Mourn”.

When I got up from my place, I realized that my ass was stained green with either grass or the duck shit from all the ducks walking around. I pulled some jelly that was almost melting in my pocket and ate it. Automatically started giggling and feeling mischevious.

In the living room someone had corrected this sign on a door. I just nodded in approval.

It takes me a long while here to be able to open up. It felt as if… I only opened at the end of every therapy session and until the next one the week following, I would lose the trust again.

It was in this clinic that I learned how afraid I am of myself, but this one belongs in another post. I’m returning to this clinic in about four months, for yet another three months. And after that, I’ll probably come again, but I’d probably have to wait longer for a place.

I think this is the sanest psychiatric clinic I’ve ever been to. Everyone is lucid, maybe too lucid, maybe they’d like to be catatonic, living inside self-transforming dreams… At least I know that I would like that.

It’s beautiful because it’s fleeting.

About Maladaptive Daydreaming and Introduction of the Imaginary

I think everyone will ask themselves this at one point in their lives. Are you where you wish to be? Have you reached your full potential, have you become your best self.

For me, the answer is a big, juicy no. My personality is rusty, my words are crusty and my mind-set is upsetting. I wish I were someone else. Someone like Mathias or Cole or Gary, maybe.

Who are those people? They’re the ones who keep me company on lonely evenings.

I have maladaptive daydreaming. It’s not an official diagnosis in the current DSM or ICD, as it could also be an understudied symptom of another mental illness, but it’s very comforting to have a term we can all call it.

Daydreaming is not inherently bad, everybody does it, but when you start daydreaming eight hours a day, ‘miss’ classes and are more attached to fictional beings than your real friends, that’s when it becomes maladaptive.

As a little child, I told myself goodnight stories. I imagined things to soothe myself when my family was yelling, when my grandma was drunk, when my cousins molested me and when there was no one there to wipe my tears. My imaginary friends have been with me for a long, long time.

Of course, they changed throughout the years, just like people do, but their core has remained the same.

Mathias is the tougher—usually—drug addict that comes out to play when I’m in the mood for Marilyn Manson and some detective daydreaming. He has also been through a lot of abuse in his childhood,like all my other imaginaries, because I’d feel too jealous of them if they hadn’t.

Mathias usually makes me feel better about the fact that I was diagnosed with BPD (borderline personality disorder). He raises my self esteem when he is in the mood for mending into my personality.

Then there’s Gary. Gary nr. 1 is the asshole-ish, grumpy and angsty side that was born way before Gary nr. 2.

Gary 2 is docile, passive and kind of anxious and has a nice music taste. He mends into my personality when I feel wrong. An example of feeling wrong would be when Mathias has mended into my personality for too long and it feels like I’ve messed up everything.

Cole also has two sides.

Cole 1 is much less present nowadays, and when he’s present it’s usually in daydreams, not mending into my personality.

Cole 2 is a lot more insecure than 1. He suffers from Complex-PTSD (a diagnosis which I also have but without the complex part. It’s not an official diagnosis in the current ICD). He’s also a character that has the function to make me feel better about myself, my disorders and my slightly manipulative nature.

I hate being manipulative. It makes me feel evil and cruel and unworthy. The Keeper needs to be selfless, completely selfless in a constant state of ego-death. That’s what I tell myself.

And now to return at the begining.

I’m not who I want to be, but strike me dead CatGod if I’m not going to do my best to become that.

Emotional Flashbacks

In my therapy session on Tuesday, I had the strongest emotional flashback I had had in weeks, maybe months.

Crushing hopelesness, helplesness, the suffocating feeling of being trapped, of not being able to live but not being able to die. It hurt. It hurt. That’s what I told my therapist. I was crying and screaming and it wouldn’t stop.

It only stopped once it ran its course. I cried for more than half an hour, continuously. Afterwards, I felt exhausted, yet relieved and somehow… clean. I cleaned my entire room here in the clinic, wiping down the night table (which I usually never do).

I’m so grateful to have her on my side. I’m so grateful and I’ll never be able to truly express it.

The Darkness: The Heat

I can feel you.

The Darkness:

• I shall not sleep

• Where the fuck am I

• Somebody is knocking at the door of my room in the trauma clinic

• I’m at home, though

Darkness makes me feel like I don’t exist. Looking at videos and reading things online and only after finishing do I get the awareness that I exist and I realize: I disappeared during the video.

The Heat:

• My skin is sticky with sweat

• Am I suffocating?

• Too much awareness of being in a body

• Where is it that I’m stuck? My chest or my head?

The Heat and The Darkness set me into a three month limbo. At the beginning of summer, all that I wish is the end of summer. They always touched me in the summer. They always wanted me in the summer. I was always a sex object in the summer.

Do I sit on the floor with my legs spread or do I jump out the window into the light and heat?

Meds Update

What I’m on at the moment:

• Iron supplement, magnesium, Vitamin B-Complex, all in the morning

• Depakote, 300mg in the morning, 500mg in the evening

• Amioxid 90mg in the evening

• Lyrica 300mg in the evening

• Opipram as needed

Skills that help with my Borderline Personality Disorder

I have a Borderline Personality Disorder, which basically means my whole personality is an illness.

Just kidding, personality disorders are more like a cluster of learned behaviors and reactions. Reactions like wanting to kill yourself because your mom didn’t wake up to talk to you in the middle of the night.

No, it wasn’t a temper tantrum. I was thrown inside a spiral of bad memories, feeling abandoned, feeling like no one cared. In those moments, this reaction felt completely appropriate.

So what helps with something like this? I learned a bunch of coping skills along the way, while being thrown from psych ward to psych ward.

Peppermint oil bath. Yes. You fill your bathtub with cold-ish water, put some peppermint oil inside it and sit and soak. It makes my skin feel like it’s burn-freezing, really helps for those moments when I want to gut myself.

I have this little box where I keep (some of) my skills stuff.

• the little baggy has some dried chills in it for the big emotions time

• peppermint and lavendel oils

• tiger balm, spiky ring, smooth stone

• ammonia and lavendel filled vials that you break and smell

• opipramol, my emergency meds

These are the things I mainly use when I’m feeling bad. Currently, I’m in a DBT psychotherapy clinic, maybe I’ll write a post with pictures about it some of these days. Take care 💗

Meds

I was put on Abilify two weeks ago, 5mg. I think my psychiatrist is gonna increase the dosage to 10mg. Haven’t felt much, I’m just more tired.

Other than Abilify, I’m still taking Bupropion (Wellbutrin) 300mg and Pregabalin (Lyrica) 300mg. I’d say the Lyrica is working pretty well, the Wellbutrin too. My lows are not so long now, but they’re still pretty damn deep.

I also take Pipamperone as a PRN, but it makes me sick so I don’t take it as often as I need to. My body can’t stand other PRN medications except benzos and everybody knows I can’t be expected to treat benzos with responsability.

Well, I think I’ll start writing more for this blog, it’s kind of fun. Take care.

– The Keeper

Rantings of a Relapsed Piece of Shit

Do you sometimes get the urge to cut one of those fat blobs and put it in your mouth?

Talking about a relapse, huh? I was doing just fine for a few weeks, but the the bad Atmosphere came over and fucked everything up. Craving things I shouldn’t crave, grabbing at my hair and scratching at my face. My body was convulsing, it was like my head wanted to be somewhere else.

I would also like to be someplace else. Here is too loud, too “violent”, too damn red. When my stepdad screams, he sounds like a gorrila. He even takes a bit of a gorrila stance. I think you all know what I mean, that through the teeth scream? Yeah, that’s how he screams.

Yesterday night I snuck quietly downstairs, looked in my parent’s room to make sure they are asleep (my little brother was just sitting for a while, so I stood there just in case he’ll wake mom up, but he laid down quickly) and then I walked in my grandma’s room with my flash on the lowest setting to find her Lorazepam. Found it in the closet, grabbed a sheet and “ran” upstairs. When it gets too much, I take half of a 1mg tablet and I’ll be fine, even though I’ll be drunk.

I split on my therapist for a few nights. I screamed and cried because she didn’t acknowledge the traumatic memory I told her, but yesterday she told me that she was just feeling uncertain, because I’m not ready to start trauma therapy just yet, it would destabilize me even more.

I cut a couple of weeks ago and it’s still not healed, because it was an open wound and I didn get it stitched up. I’m thinking about cutting again and puttin a dead wasp in there, that’d be funny to find during surgery.

(Update: So I had the dead wasp idea even back then, in this one draft. Huh, interesting.)