Ketamine is a miracle, but it doesn’t take away the painful beliefs from my childhood

It’s been a little over 3 weeks since I started low-dose ketamine nasal spray as part of my treatment regimen for CPTSD, DID and suicidality. I have had phenomenal, life-changing results that seem entirely impossible to be true. The stability I feel just doesn’t seem believable to me, and I am still waiting for the bottom to fall out.

You can read about my initial experience here if you are interested.

At 3 weeks in, I have been able to decrease the ketamine doses. The first two weeks I did one nasal spray on Monday/Wednesday/Friday. Since I responded so positively with the first dose, and the stability seemed so solid, I decided to push it out to one spray a week for the 3rd week. I’ll keep you posted how this goes, but so far, it is holding me in a good place of stability and mental clarity.

As a side note, I am not taking the commonly recommended antidepressant to go with it as I am not a fan of of them for me, and I wonder do people really need to take the antidepressant since it wasn’t necessary for me. Anyway, I know someone else may need something different, so I recognize it may be necessary for other people. I do take a sleeping pill at night, which is the only medication I take besides the generic ketamine.

As someone who experienced severe developmental trauma, I have been living a lifetime of PTSD flashbacks, debilitating depression and anxiety, frequent thoughts of suicide and self-harm, and the unsteadiness that comes with having dissociative identity disorder. Oh, and the most difficult consequence of my awful childhood has been trying to live a decent life after being raised by a family that didn’t love me.

The traumatic patterns I learned as a kid have been extremely difficult to change as an adult.

With my new ketamine-induced stability, I have honestly been a little confused about what to do with myself. I don’t feel like myself because I am not used to this ability to regulate my emotions, deal with stressors, and not think about killing myself on-and-off throughout my days.

For me, ketamine actually accomplishes what DBT is supposed to accomplish for those of us with CPTSD.

I can’t completely say, oh, I tried ketamine and now everything in my life is perfect. It’s not. But it is 1000% better and more manageable. The difficulty with the issues I was struggling with have gone from a 10 to a 3, which has made a very significant difference in my ability to cope and live my life.

Since the ketamine also enables me to think more clearly, I have had the opportunity to think about what is still causing my life to be messy, or less than good. By no surprise to me, it’s my attachment issues. Turns out ketamine can help a lot, but it doesn’t help with the aftermath of growing up in a family that didn’t love you.

My earliest messages from my family were: you don’t deserve love; you are unlovable; you are too much so make yourself small; there is something wrong with you; everyone hates you, so shut up and stay quiet; you don’t deserve happy; you are trash and don’t deserve anything good; you should do us all a favor and kill yourself; the only thing you are good for is sex.

So, sadly, the ketamine doesn’t take away my belief that I am a terrible, no-good person who doesn’t deserve love.

Since the ketamine did take away the nonstop flashbacks of childhood abuse, I can now actually focus on these horrible beliefs that I have about myself. For once, I will be stable enough to stay focused and safe while I deal with the real pain of my childhood. I am done talking about the horrific abuse I suffered as a child because that is in my past, and I need to live in the present.

Talking about my abuse did not help me recover from my traumatic childhood. I did a lot of therapy, and it just didn’t give me the results I needed to recover from all the trauma. I do believe there is value in therapy, but I honestly do not see it alone giving most people the results they need to recover from CPTSD.

Unfortunately, in the present, I hold these really horrible beliefs about myself that I can’t seem to distance myself from like I can the memories of abuse.

Maybe this is the real work of therapy I have been waiting for. It’s so extremely painful for me that I am probably going to drive my therapist crazy with the slow pace and resistance I am going to put up to defend myself. I really can’t help it no matter how hard I try not to do it.

Ugh. I have no idea how to even begin to tackle this horrible belief system I have about myself. At this moment, even with my new found mental clarity, I can’t even intellectually believe that those things aren’t true about me. I know usually starting in an intellectual place is easiest for me, but at this point, that seems like that might be a far off accomplishment. But, I will push like hell to get there because I will not waste the miracle of what the ketamine has done for me.

Ketamine still allows me to feel the awful feelings that go along with severe trauma. The big difference is that ketamine makes it so I can mentally get myself out of a suicidal spiral as my knee-jerk response to these feelings. Instead of going right into a suicide plan, I seem to have the wherewithal to recognize my suicidality and to talk to someone about what is going on with me. It’s not alway easy to find someone to talk to about what I am feeling and thinking because I only have a few people in my life that understand it without freaking out.

Once I find someone to talk to, to just get it out, the suicidal thoughts melt away. This was definitely not possible pre-ketamine.

I am excited to see if the ketamine continues to hold me in a place of stability, and whether it quite possibly might allow me to do a level of talk-therapy that I had never done before. A level that may actually bring me healing?

But make no mistake, I do not believe talk-therapy without the ketamine would bring me closer to healing. The ketamine has been the missing ingredient to my healing, and I just wish I could get others to understand this may be the missing ingredient for a lot of other people like me.

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Learning what is different today than when I was abused as a child

My system of parts has been in a state of perpetual trigger these past few weeks. I can verbalize I am in the present moment, where I am at, and what is happening, but my body and mind is adamant that I am in the same danger as my childhood.

I have become afraid of my spouse, therapists, and all sorts of other things in my life.

Usually when this happens I am not able to verbalize that I am safe, an adult, and in 2019. So, it’s new and scary to experience both realities at the same time.

When I am overwhelmed like this, my knee-jerk reaction is to convince myself I need to commit suicide. I know I don’t want to do this to my kids, but how to figure out how to stop the pain, the fear, the confusion.

My therapist was gracious enough to do an extra-long session with me yesterday to try to help me. We both want to get me through this time of year without a psychiatric hospitalization, which has been inching closer.

My therapist wants me to dig deep.

My mind is programmed to look for similarities to my child abuse so as to protect me from more abuse. Guess what. It is easy to find a lot of similarities in my life right now.

My therapist says I need to focus on what is different (and some other things that I can’t remember), so I am trying to talk my way through the day asking myself what is different. I do this because too many parts of me do not understand that my life as an adult is different than when I was abused as a child.

I must remind myself I have power I didn’t have as a child. I have choices I didn’t have as a child. My environment is different than when I was a child. My body is stronger and my brain is smarter than when I was a child.

I am hoping and praying that by digging deep into what is different for me today that the many system insiders who are stuck in a triggered state can come out and be free to experience life as a person who doesn’t get perpetually abused.

My insiders believe our purpose in life is to fulfill the fantasies and needs of the sick and twisted on earth.

I am trying my best to imagine a life where my system doesn’t expect to be abused at every turn throughout our days. What I have learned for myself is that the abuse is such a part of my system insiders that my perpetrators get to continue the abuse even when it has actually stopped.

I am not saying that abuse doesn’t happen to adults, especially those of us who have been abused as children. It does. And it has happened to me more times than I like to think about.

Still, the brutality I experience in my mind everyday is not really happening, so I must learn to turn it off. Separate reality from distorted reality.

My system of insiders deserves peace. We deserve to live at a restful state of not feeling like we are being attacked constantly.

So, I must scan my environment and my mind and remind myself of what is different today.

The obliteration of DID walls

I usually have a somewhat manageable life, though still difficult for sure. I typically manage with a lot of amnesia and a balancing of the competing ideas and feelings from the other souls who reside in my body.

There are souls in my body who feel hopeless, hurt, and angry, and usually deal with those feelings by wanting to commit suicide.

Usually I can help our system of souls through these tough times, but lately it has become increasingly more difficult.

Having had the diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder for 30 years, I have reached a place where the system works pretty well together on most days.

We all seem to have co-consciousness as far as I can tell, and we don’t hate each other as far as I know. I explain it this way because new souls seem to appear often in therapy. In fact, I do not even try to keep track of them, and I don’t mean any disrespect to those souls, but my mind literally cannot remember it all.

As a system, there are some rules that we agree to live by. One of the most important ones is to not kill ourselves because of the damage it would do to our children (or my children, since not everyone claims them).

We also have the rule of not committing adultery since some of us are married. Some souls don’t like this, but they have agreed to it anyway in the spirit of cooperation and living a life with less chaos.

Another rule would be that younger souls, or noticeably different acting/sounding older souls, are not to interact with the outside children in our family as I believe this would cause great harm to my children.

These rules are usually followed fairly well by most everyone in the system. Sometimes a soul might be so upset that they choose to ignore the rule about no suicide or self-harm, but we have systems in place to stop those parts from acting on these feelings, or at least minimizing the expression of them. This is something we routinely have to deal with, and something we stay hyper vigilant about.

In our 20s, we had one soul in our system who decided to quietly kill ourselves. This soul was almost successful, so it is something we are always watching out for, and thankfully, haven’t had a serious attempt since then, though we have had less serious attempts.

My system has been slapped in the face with a lot of new revelations lately, namely, it is becoming crystal clear who our family was, and the awful things they have done to us.

In the past, we have always had these memories, but what is new is the ability to start putting it together in a narrative of our lives, which means a whole lot of grief is staring us down.

Our new narrative is honest, but incredibly painful to face this truth and stay planted on earth.

This new narrative has left souls scrambling to make sense of it all. To hold the truth in our hearts and not die is quite the challenge.

Our system has become quite destabilized. We find ourselves switching from one soul to the next without any control or order to it. Our memory and executive function has dropped to whatever the lowest score would be on that scale. We can barely complete a thought in conversation without switching to another soul and then back.

We have not honored the rule of not switching souls in front of my children. I have put every last piece of energy into trying to stay present for them, but have found myself “waking up” to another soul interacting with my children. This has never happened before.

I find it difficult to complete thoughts I am trying to express, and found myself borrowing the thoughts of other souls to try to complete an idea I was speaking about. This has not worked out very well as most of us are very different from one another, and many inside have some very destructive ways of thinking.

My internal world feels like it is being obliterated, which leaves a dissociative person like myself extremely confused and barely able to function. The neat and orderly walls of our system have been something manageable for the system. But suddenly those walls don’t seem to be there so much.

My therapist pointed out the possibility that the souls within my body may be “transitioning” to a place of more wholeness (or integration), which understandably has left me completely confused and overwhelmed to suddenly be experiencing their thoughts and feelings in no particular orderly process.

I’ll be honest, this last week I have had many moments where I haven’t been coherent in what I was trying to express. I have changed the way I have sounded 5 times in a ten minute period.

In this moment of rest, I would like to be happy about this possibility of integration (yes, we are in the camp who wants it), but we are also in a state of extreme suicidal ideation, planning, and acting out. I am trying my best to stay vigilant, but I also know I don’t have the skills or the strong desire for this vigilance because of the passive influence from the other souls.

I should be in a hospital given the level of chaos and difficulty in me stopping the serious suicidal feelings and plans. I just don’t have the energy or inclination to go to a hospital.

If I go into a hospital for safety, I travel out of state to one of the few places that understands DID. I can’t just go up the road to psych hospitals in my city because they will not believe in my DID, so will more than likely shoot me up with antipsychotics to “fix” me. Not willing to do that.

When I am more of a clear thinking person, I would not risk what I am risking. I keep hoping I will wake up to a better day because I know this won’t last forever. But, I also need to keep in mind the people with DID who successfully kill themselves.

This is an evolving situation. I am hoping things become more manageable again, but not at the expense of possible progress.

I will try to update you again as to where I land next. Stay tuned.