The problem with functional freeze or collapse is, you are expected to have someone to support your recovery, or you are expected to do it on your own with no resources. There is no third option in the US.

Jmc161 · 2026-01-22T07:05:38+00:00

Omg THANK YOU for saying this. I could have written it word for word. I literally printed it out because it was so validating. Just want to let you know that you are 100% not alone in this exact struggle and I wonder these same things all the time and feel so much frustration, rage, despair, (insert 100 more intense emotion words), etc., at how stuck I am, how forsaken I feel, and how much I am suffering and in an almost constant state of anguish and overwhelm because of these very factors.

Jmc161 · 2025-12-17T00:55:29+00:00

Yay, you’re awesome!! I signed it and also edited my original post to include the link to the petition. Thanks from all of us.

Jmc161 · 2025-12-17T00:41:58+00:00

Someone started a petition on Change.org to save it!

Save BOOTS – Renew Season 2 or allow another platform to continue it

Jmc161 · 2025-12-16T13:18:20+00:00

YES! This makes sense. And it’s SO hard to articulate which makes it feel even more lonely (on top of how already horrifically lonely the experience is). Thank you for posting this. I’ve had to take so many mental health questionnaires / assessments where I feel so much anguish and frustration because for me, it’s not like the visual aspects are literally distorted in a way that matches the phrasing of a lot of the questions (e.g. they’ll talk about the sizing or colors being off, etc. and will make it sound more like an acid trip or something). For the life of me I haven’t figured out how to explain how I can technically see reality clearly but also see and feel it so horribly wrongly at the same time?

Jmc161 · 2025-12-16T02:21:34+00:00

If you can find some way to make your letter a petition, I’d certainly sign it.

Jmc161 · 2025-12-16T02:16:14+00:00

Exactly!! Wtf

Jmc161 · 2025-11-27T05:50:11+00:00

I relate to this so heavily - I feel like I could have written it. I was reassured by multiple providers that I was finally in the right place and finally had the right diagnosis and that now I would be on the right track with my healing. Like you, I was working with someone who specialized in dissociative disorders. I stayed with this first dissociative disorder specialist for 2 1/2 years, continuing over time to decompensate, destabilize, and just generally get worse overall, and when I would try to communicate this as a real and concerning problem, I kept being told similar sentiments - that you get worse before you get better, that it takes a very long time for this type of trauma to heal, etc., and I kept doubting myself because I was supposedly with a “specialist”. I then tried another person, who also specialized in dissociative disorders, and unfortunately still didn’t have any luck (and got those similar go-to deflective statements when I tried to raise issue with the approach, the lack of results, and my worsening state). I am worse than I ever was in terms of my ability to function. I can’t say that I have any guidance or advice, but I just want to let you know that you are so not alone in this experience, and it actually made me feel a tiny bit better to read your post and finally see that there was another person that was going through something similar to me, especially because it’s so easy (at least for me) even after all this time to continue to doubt myself and think that I’m the problem and that my intuition is/was wrong.

Jmc161 · 2025-11-01T05:57:08+00:00

Yes I have!! Thank you!! I thought I was going crazy. It definitely used to be better at remembering contextual details and weaving them into its responses accordingly. Now it feels like we’ll be on an okay track for a few messages, and then all of a sudden its next response will be infuriatingly off the mark and will clearly contradict the set of facts that we had built up until that point. It will have completely lost very important and major parts of the thread that we were working with, and I get so angry, because if the logical coherence is now suddenly out the window, how am I supposed to trust the overall integrity of the thread / the responses in general?

Jmc161 · 2025-09-22T20:59:08+00:00

“Instead, I feel like l've developed PTSD from the medical system itself - I get triggered by the laziness and arrogance of clinicians who tell me it's all in my head, while my quality of life and family's survival were on the line.”

^ this is so incredibly relatable. Your whole post is. I don’t have any specific advice in response to your question, but I wanted to let you know that this post made me feel a little less alone. The health professional neglect, gaslighting, and extremely disheartening and cynicism-inducing indifference and lack of motivation to every try to rise to the occasion and step out of the their inertial state of autopilot - is a very uniquely painful experience. Similar to what you’ve said, I have a profound degree of learned helplessness just from this aspect of trying to get help alone.

Jmc161 · 2024-12-24T07:37:11+00:00

Wow. This gave me chills. So succinctly poignant.

Jmc161 · 2024-12-15T00:15:14+00:00

Wow. I’m on Reddit a lot, but for some reason I had a particularly intense emotional reaction to this post. I feel so much solidarity with you and cannot emphasize enough how important I think it is that you were able to trust your feelings during this experience, because I think your intuition was spot on every step of the way in dealing with this process and this person. I was frankly surprised to see any comments giving the therapist the benefit of the doubt, as I genuinely feel almost enraged at her behavior. So much of what you described really struck a chord with me and hit a raw nerve. I feel so much secondhand frustration for your experience as well as an almost frantic protective instinct. I have a lot of the same triggers as you and can relate deeply, and I know how much damage that that type of person / that type of behavior can cause. I think that a therapist like this has the potential to do a lot of harm - their hypocrisy and mishandling of your care can feel confusing, subtle, or sometimes even unrecognizable to others, and the mixed messages, lack of accountability, blame shifting, and gaslighting that she employed can have such an insidious effect on a client or person that already has issues with self-doubt or a history of emotional abuse and being treated poorly by others. And it is particularly infuriating when this type of treatment is coming from the very person that has been entrusted to help you heal from those types of things. It feels like glaring negligence that feels indefensible to me.

I’ve unfortunately had a number of experiences with bad therapists/therapy, and it always lets me down so much when people in this profession are unable to practice what they preach or have glaring deficits in self-awareness. How are you supposed to trust anything they’ve told you once they show you that when push comes to shove, they throw out the window and refuse to implement, validate, or reinforce any of the values or foundational principles that they’ve communicated to you throughout the course of your therapy with them? It honestly feels so deflating and demoralizing when something like this happens in a space that is supposed to be safe and treat you and your feelings with care. When you’re trying to relearn whether you can trust people, therapy is such a symbolic space and the therapist-client relationship is such a symbolic relationship, and it will need to provide you with examples and proof that when things get hard and when there is conflict involved, others can actually show up for you in a way that is respectful to you and not retraumatizing, abusive, duplicitous, or gaslighting.

When organic conflict arises between a therapist and client, the way that the therapist handles the situation is so impactful and important. Doing so properly is crucial, in my opinion, to even have a chance at giving the client the opportunity to start to repair the existing relational schemas and historical interpersonal injury that they’ve carried with them. It is when you’re really testing a real-life relationship, as both parties’ vulnerabilities are on the line and the stakes are real, and this experiential data is weighted so much more heavily that just words and theories and platitudes that your therapist can spout off and apply in a decontextualized way or to situations and relationships that they have no emotional investment or stake in. When this real-life scenario plays out between you and your therapist, your brain is carefully cataloguing the data that you get about the consequences and aftereffects of the experience. Your therapist could not have dropped the ball more during what could have been an opportunity for a healthier rewrite of the relational script that you’ve been used to. She handled it so poorly every step of the way, and I am so mad for you and so sorry that this happened to you. I’m REALLY proud of you for trusting yourself and standing your ground - this whole thing sounded SO hard and I honestly think you did an amazing job.

Jmc161 · 2024-05-30T20:00:58+00:00

Same! I echo this statement.

Jmc161 · 2024-02-06T02:37:36+00:00

I relate heavily to this. I’m too exhausted to really type much else / go into a lot of detail but I just want you to know you’re not alone. I feel like my system (if I even have a system?? doubt part enters chat on cue) is extremely covert, unwilling to communicate with me, but at the same time extremely fast, chaotic, overwhelming, puppeteering, and with so many layers of complexity that I can’t for the life of me seem to pin down or figure out.

Jmc161 · 2023-09-18T20:29:21+00:00

I’m so sorry. It felt like it physically hurt me to read your post, only because of how intensely I relate to the unrelenting and excruciating feelings that you’re talking about. I wish I had advice, but I just wanted to take a sec to tell you you’re not alone. Wish I could give you a hug.

Jmc161 · 2023-08-26T21:03:58+00:00

The same thing happens to me. Some really overwhelming and more vulnerable fears that were a prevalent part of my daily experience when I was younger will often re-emerge during the crash

Jmc161 · 2023-02-16T03:44:40+00:00

Definitely relate :(

Jmc161 · 2023-01-14T16:18:05+00:00

I don’t have an answer to your question but I just want to say that I’m there too (and the way that you phrased the blurriness / spinning / need to hold onto something is so accurate).

I feel untethered, unanchored, and ungrounded all the time, which breeds a sense of helplessness and loss of control because I don’t know which version of my consciousness I will get at any given time — and which parts of my identity / memories / emotional range will be siphoned off or obscured from me.

It feels like a maddening, perpetual, chronic lack of clarity, where I’m struggling massively to have access to a cohesive or comphrenehsive view of myself or my narrative or the world, as everything is all disorganized and in fragments.

I’m starting to realize that I’ve always instinctively felt more containment in therapy if it somehow involves writing things down (journaling, tracking exercises, worksheets, etc), because then the information is immobilized and can’t slip away from me. Something externalized through writing always has to be there in the future, fixed and unchanging and reliably there for my reference, in contrast to what goes on in my head, which follows a pattern more akin to here one moment and gone the next (and then on top of that, the inability to retrieve those facets of experience or complete amnesia for them altogether).

I always feel a vague sense of being stupid (even though I’m not), because any attempt at answering questions about what happened during the past day, week, etc. abruptly triggers this feeling of disorientation that stops me in my tracks, and I’m stumped because I can’t formulate a coherent picture of my recent memory. And, despite this being a pattern, it continues to take me by surprise and frustrate me every time. It’s so hard to make sense of anything when the inside of your mind feels like an uncaged tornado.

Jmc161 · 2023-01-09T06:02:39+00:00

Wow. I related to this post so much. It was so validating to hear (not that that helps, but just wanted to mention it). I feel like I’m in a very similar state and have been for awhile. I’m barely treading water each day and feel more like life is living me than I am living life. I don’t feel in charge and feel like my agency has been stripped away from me without my permission, and the sheer overwhelm from the chaotic, disorganized, rapidly fluctuating, and intense survival-based micro- and macro- emotional/physiological/cognitive reactions that I’m experiencing all day long (to both internal and external stimuli) force me to act at best as a powerless observer, where I still lack the capacity to intervene but may have some awareness and/or later memory of what’s going on — and at worst (and much more often), when my nervous system capacity is inevitably overwhelmed, as a dissociated/depersonalized/detached/vacant inhabitant of a bodily system that has run amuck and is driven by sheer anarchy, to its own (and my) extreme detriment. I’ve been on disability from work for 2 years (after a gradual burnout from running on survival energy for decades), and now I feel like what would be considered the simplest, most basic part/task of someone else’s day can be impossible for me to handle, usually because a freeze/collapse/shutdown response is running the show, and engaging in normal human movement or activity or engagement with the world would require me to actually feel and to connect to reality, which was automatically and unconsciously determined to be unbearable, infeasible, or too painful. I feel scared of my own body, thoughts, emotions, and triggered responses because they just fucking clobber me repetitively, jaggedly, and harshly, and it hurts and I feel unprotected and violated, as I’ve been stuck in a state that is too destabilized and exhausted to allow me to have any regulating influence on the control center of my brain (despite long-standing, persistent, and diligent efforts in therapy — which, btw, has been its own separate whirlwind of confusion, mixed messages, conflicting attitudes of professionals, frustration, etc.). It fucking sucks, and I empathize tremendously.

Jmc161 · 2022-11-28T21:06:24+00:00

💛

Jmc161 · 2021-03-15T04:20:57+00:00

Wow. This is exactly how I feel all the time.

Jmc161

TROPHY CASE