I ask because like many of you hear I’ve grown up with addict parents or at the very least abusive home. I’ve learned so many things about drinking as a means to cope with a very fragile upbringing. However, the issues of PTSD range from growing up a homeless teen/adult due impart to my mother’s drug abuse and fathers misplaced priorities. I wonder if any of you find that PTSD has made substance abuse a haven. Outside of psychotherapy, how have to been able to sleep at night and stop the ruminating thoughts?
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I am a woman Afghanistan vet. I have generalized anxiety and PTSD. Add chronic pain that I self medicated for a decade with booze. RX work w/ symptoms and I am a big believer in meditation, exercise and ACBT.
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Acbt? What is that, I’ve never heard of it.
Hi WiP… Acceptance and Commitment Therapy… ACBT. Its a form of cognitive behavioral therapy that in short helps us learn that there’s an aweful lot of thoughts that speed through or heads and that we dont have to act on everything and accept that a lot of the thoughts are just “thoughts…”
wiki has a good explanation. here it is in shory…
ACT commonly employs six core principles to help clients develop psychological flexibility
Cognitive defusion: Learning methods to reduce the tendency to reify (make real) thoughts, images, emotions, and memories.
Acceptance: Allowing thoughts to come and go without struggling with them.
Contact with the present moment: Awareness of the here and now, experienced with openness, interest, and receptiveness.
Observing the self: Accessing a transcendent sense of self, a continuity of consciousness which is unchanging.
Values: Discovering what is most important to one's true self.
Committed action: Setting goals according to values and carrying them out responsibly.
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I struggle with OCD and PTSD, which is just a wonder combo. I have a bad back story, plus I’m a vet and a prior drug addict. I will say that life situations definitely influence our desire to turn to negative means of suppressing our mind. I’ve been 43 days sober off of booze, which was my last and hardest vice and it’s hard, but sobriety is so much better.
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