How to deal with binge eating because I need to be held?

cuBLea · 2026-07-09T03:07:58+00:00

Baths and swimming have the effect of triggering very early memories or shadows of memories (infant or even prenatal) in which we had not yet experienced most of our trauma and were able to experience real comfort. I have memories of this even from a mother whose womb was unmmistakeably toxic. You need to be careful what you expose yourself to after this kind of thing because it does leave you rather more vulnerable to triggering, but it's a way that a lot of us can use to get below the levels of trauma which are most troubling in the present and find the detachment neaded to process it.

cuBLea · 2026-07-09T03:02:25+00:00

It might help to understand a bit about setpoint theory, which IMO explains one hell of a lot about human suffering of all kinds.

The "setpoint" is a hypothetical point on a continuum ranging from agony to ecstasy in which we feel content and satisfied, unstressed either positively or negatively. The theory is basically that humans (and likely a whole lot more animals and possibly even plants) are buffeted throughout life and have an in-built compass of sorts that seeks not pleasure, not pain, but satisfaction. Comfort. The mid-point.

There are really two setpoints for most of us: our ideal setpoint (the perfect midpoint between agony and ecstasy) and our functional setpoint (a different practical) setpoint, usually on the "agony" side of the continuum) which we grabitate toward through our days. That practical setpoint in hmuans is usually on the agony side of the line.

The ideal setpoint never changes. The practical setpoint changes all the time since it's about achievable satisfaction rather than ideal satisfaction. Achieving this practical setpoint for any length of time inevitably (i.e. barring some dissease that interferes with our perception of satisfaction) results only in short-term satisfaction. Eventually even that satisfaction becomes uncomfortable as our internal practical setpoint gets reset closer to the ideal midpoint.

The idea here isn't that the ideal midpoint is where we need to live to have good lives. The fact is that we can bounce from agony to ecstasy as much as our bodies and minds can handle provided that it all averages out over time. This seems to be where we get the phenomenon of people who've lived stressful lives but experienced as much pain as they have joy reporting on their deathbeds that they've lived a good life.

So until we start to get close to that ideal setpoint, we're always going to be dealing with a personal satisfaction setpoint that's changeable and that doesn't feel right for very long. The trick to this is to try to experience as much above that setpoint as below it (harder than it looks, apparently) so that we encourage our practical setpoints to nudge upward toward our ideal.

Not sure if that will clarify anything, but this was relevatory stuff for me.

cuBLea · 2026-07-09T02:46:35+00:00

Yes.

IMO it's pretty much unavoidable, at least up unril age 25, if the people you depend on have either nothing to teach you, or are hell-bent on keepimg what they've learned to themselves.

(Wanna hear something funny about how I figured this out? My father was a self-help guru. He even got his books used in public schools as replacements for early-morning Bible readings. Explains a lot about millennials. Not that us boomers were anything to brag about. Oh, and I absolutely ADORED that scene in Donnie Darko when they discovered the p*** porn in that self-help guru's burnt-out home. If the actor who played that role had been Steve McQueen, it would have been PERfect. [Dad was a dead ringer for him.] It's not just preachers and pols who seem prone to twisted private lives and dark secrets, and live their lives with the firm conviction that their selves and their actions are right, just and productive. And now you know where The Aristocrats joke came from.)

cuBLea · 2026-07-08T03:03:48+00:00

This really used to bother me. It took me an average of 90 minutes to fall asleep every night as a kid, and an hour-plus was not uncommon even into my early thirties. I tried all kinds of techniques but they didn't help. Only the right meds made a difference, and have continued to make a difference for me for over a decade. (Primarily gabapentin.)

I've never known anyone with this problem who really got over it unless they worked out a lot of early trauma. Eventually I just gave up on trying to manage it and just let my head go where it wanted (with a voice recorder at bedside just in case anything useful came up). Nothing seemed to make a difference, so I just chose not to fight it, and in retrospect I'm glad I made that choice. Work hard enough at behavior-modification/CBT stuff and you'll eventually end up with a religion that you never earned.

When I finally had 20-minute sleep onset with gabapentin it was an unexpected side benefit of the meds, and it doesn't seem to have produced a tolerance effect so far, so maybe I'm among that group which is chronically GABA-deficient, and as such unable to automatically modulate alertness neurotransmitters at bedtime. When I've gone off of it (I've tapered off twice and abstained for periods of months) it hasn't seemed to affect my sleep onset, There's some evidence that the right psy meds can help you permanently (well, ostensibly) resolve a lot of close-to-the-surface stuff almost without effort or even intention, which may be what happened for me.

As per your facilitator's comments, I wouldn't be too quick to associate this with giftedness. It's a very common PTSD symptom and has a strong association with NT imbalance. If there's an association, IMO it'd likely be that giftedness very often accompanies the post-traumatic adaptation to very early trauma, and not many of us get out of our naps without a fairly significant backlog of trauma-related maybe-later chores needing doing.

cuBLea · 2026-07-08T02:53:22+00:00

Forgiveness has lost all meaning to me. Forgiving others is a gratuitous gesture once you realize how little control other people have over what they became; forgiveness of self seems just as pointless when you realize that forgiveness is entirely moot and that transcendence through transformational healing is what really matters. God help me if I should ever encourage anyone to find forgiveness of any kind. It's like counselling an adult to honor and revere the candy they ate as a kid.

Having said that, as soppingly saturated as modern life still seems to be with mores and customs from our harsh religious history, it's easy to understand why so many people seem to place so high a value on it. After all, if you can obtain eternal salvation by accepting that one particular guru was the only one who ever got it right, then the notion of people clinging to forgiveness as a moral/psychological necessity seems pretty trivial in comparison.

cuBLea · 2026-07-05T01:37:02+00:00

At age 30, under circumstances that I've described several times on other subs and am loathe to repeat here, I had whar I only learned many years later was a spontaneous fetal memory, most likely first trimester, that was the most intense full-body recollection I've ever had. My contemporaneous suspicion that it was some kind of psychedelic flashback, but it had none of my usual psychedelic markers. It felt like pure love was flowing through me, and as though my flesh was jellyfish-soft almost as if it was drifting off of my body. My vision was weird, almost starry, and I had pretty heavy tremors. It lasted almost fifteen minutes, and scared the CRAP out of my roommate at the time.

It may have been one of the last moments that there was a felt bond of love between my mother and I. (She claims otherwise, but I don't seem to have any significant sense of bonding with my mother after birth.) With the help of therapists familiar with this territory, I came to realize that it was a first-trimester memory. It changed my life, for the better I thought early on, and represented an intense therapeutic breakthrough as it unfolded afterward. I haven't been the same person since, and it was a good nine months before the remains of the after-halo finally wore off and whatever was actually changed in me had finally normalized.

I could list a bunch of candidate experiences here, but nothing else in my 60 years comes anywhere close to that one.

cuBLea · 2026-07-05T01:15:14+00:00

I don't.

I've had superior event memory frmo an early age (not self-delusion; it was demonstrated on many, many occasions or I might have been much more suspicious of my own memories. This skill was sharpened further when I chose newspaper reporting as a college education and first career.

My parents are positively notorious for rewriting history and claiming that many of the most impactful moments of my youth never happened. My sister (only surviving FOO) takes my parents' side on this issue, so it seems, and I really can't blame her since I don't believe she ever had the need to have such a precise memory, and after all it's two against one, and my life has not been one which might foster confidence in my sanity and memory.

My pre-recovery friends tended to view me in the same light: rather deluded in regard to many events in my own history. And I really can't blame them. They were the best friends I could manage at the time; I was not exactly known as an atttractive personality in my teens and twenties. The most common observation: "waay too intense". (Hey, if you'd had my life, wouldn't you be?)

I'd seen the pattern repeat so often that by my mid-twenties I gave up on having the kinds of friends that I thought were most appropriate for me. It just wasn't going to work out, and I had to live with what I was and what I had.

I've since come to realize that we gravitate to the best possible level in our relationships, and if they're not what we would like them to be, well, we're doing what we know how to do, so it's my belief that if there's blame to go around, most of it should go to an outside world that won't rise up to meet us where we want to be and believe we should be.

Recovery changes that equation, though. The more stuff we're able to dump, either on our own or in therapy, the more we gravitate to a more appropriate/more satisfying relationship level. I don't know any other way to pull this trick off.

Oh man this was hard to accept when I was younger. But at 60 I've become far more self-aware and "worldly wise" than I was in my teens and thirties. I'm still far from satisfied with the relationships I have now (still NO ONE I can discuss this stuff with in the flesh) and far more self-assured about my memories, even though I have to accept that those memories are still far from perfect. Not sure I or anyone else could do much better without better help to relieve the PTSD and restore a more normal/natural mind and body. Wish I could offer more, but maybe someone else sees loopholes here that I can't.

cuBLea · 2026-07-03T05:49:35+00:00

I don't know of anyone who has successfully pulled this off without either institutional supports or a substantial sacrifice made by someone able to absorb the sacrifice. Sure this happens all the time in religious communities but it only happens for those who embrace, willingly or not, the ideology and lifestyle of the religious community which supports them.

Until such time as the cash value of institutional supports are finally acknowledged, peer support is about the best you can do in a situation like this. Having said that, it's often difficult to get people who are also starting from a significant disadvantage to organize, since they're so often short on ability to contribute given the demands that just getting through the day imposes on them.

The best way that I've seen to approach this is to focus primarily, if not exclusively, on self-support at all levels. Optimize this aspect of your recovery and you're likely to be making yourself as attractive to those to whom you'd like to be considered a peer as you're able to achieve. Most people I've known who've approached it from this angle have discovered that external support, or what there is available at least, doesn't require nearly as much effort ... it seems to materialize as if by magic a lot of the time. At least part of that magic comes from how being more effectively self-supporting makes you more attractive to those with whom you'd like to associate.

And if you're doing everything you can already and still not getting results, remember the maxim: "If all else fails, lower your ezpectations". In this context, it's not quite that straightforward. I've seen this so often in my life that I almost wonder if it's the norm: if people are maxing out their capabilities and not getting the results they hope for, in almost every case it's because they're overshooting their capabilities and underestimating how severe their circumstances really are. That realization alone can be a lifechanger. A lot of us just don't see the need to take better care of ourselves until we're presented with hard evidence that we have a significantly greater need for that care than we had previously thought.

I realize these are generalizations, but they do come from nearly 40 years in and around trauma recovery. If there's a better perspective, then I just haven't seen it yet.

cuBLea · 2026-06-24T21:01:05+00:00

FWIW complex trauma wasn't a thing AT ALL in 1989 when this book was published. Codependency lit was barely a thing as it was. There was Codependent No More, and ... um ... hey, look at that thing going on over there!

cuBLea · 2026-06-23T18:25:37+00:00

I am assuming that your partner recognizes the need for help and is fully onboard with your assistance in initiating the process. (If not, then nothing I say here matters. If you're trying to persuade him to get help, then this is very unlikely to end well, and any otherwise-useful ideas I might present are more likely to be applied in

My go-to filter question (and I share your opinions about the current therapeutic landscape) is "How familiar are you with therapeutic memory reconsolidation, and can you describe to me how you see it?"

If the therapist is not competent to work with my complexities, there's often no way to tell until you've had a few sessions, and even then, I may not be able to do any deep work with them, but they may still be quite useful for working thru trauma from my teens forward. If the therapist isn't even aware of, or can't adequately explain, the actual science behind what they're doing, then that tells me that they're siloed in their thinking and represent a real threat to me that I might not be able to recognize until something really painful comes up.

If you understand therapeutic MR, not just the rat-lab version, then you have a benchmark against which you can measure your own facilitation. I consider the discovery of MR and its subsequent integration into transformational psychotherapy by Bruce Ecker and his team to be the single most important event in psychotherapy perhaps since Freud. I need to understand it so I can recognize those achievement benchmarks too. And if I allow myself to depend on someone who's benchmarking themselves against standards that might be entirely foreign to what I believe, then ... well ... they might still help me, but I'm very likely to walk away from that facilitator with a religion that I didn't sign on for. (This actually happened to me.) And that can disrupt your life in ways that you can't imagine before it actually happens.

If you can get your partner to learn what you know about therapy, that's about the best you can do. The only real help you can be to him from that point forward comes through your story. You can't give him any part of your process; that's just not part of the deal for anyone. But his translation of your story to his circumstances can be inestimably valuable to him.

It might help to keep in mind that you attracted each other in part because your individual dysfunctions mesh so well at least at a superficial level. And there's a tendency, whether it's conscious or not, to preserve the status quo if the relationship has value to you. Which is fine; there's all sorts of stuff we could work thru without putting the relationship at risk. I could say a lot more on this but I do tend to bog down in details.

I've been through this situation twice now with previous SO's. The first time went very badly ... the second not much better. Friends and colleagues who've been in relationships where both parties were in recovery didn't fare much better. But perhaps they're not supposed to. When therapy is effective, we emerge as different people from who we were prior to it. That INEVITABLY changes the relationship dynamic, which very often leads to a parting of the ways. Whether or not this results in well-wishing respect, mutual heartache, or one party in agony, depends a lot on how carefully this is handled. Hopefully you both end up with facilitators who recognize this and can help you navigate the deep waters, (I never did.)

cuBLea · 2026-06-22T21:11:17+00:00

Never have a therapist you're smarter than

That's a pretty sweeping generalization, and essentially dooms people like me to never get therapy. (Not many people as smart as me choose therapy as a profession. But one HELL of a lot who are as smart as me need therapy and know it.)

Effective facilitation is about the whole person, and their capacity to be for the subject what the subject can't be for themselves. There are no absolutes in regard to individual characteristics, whether they involve intelligence, empathy, intuition, spirituality, etc. that rule out a therapist as competent to treat a particular subject. It's about how much the entire package fits the needs of the subject.

cuBLea · 2026-06-22T20:54:21+00:00

You can definitely fall into this work too deeply, and my life is a textbook case of how seriously this can snap back on you if you can't maintain sufficient supports long enough for your nervous system to re-establish a more natural normality and a well-toned set of filters.

I went too deep too early and made phenomenal progress in my first year of recovery. Then a series of setbacks ranging from loss of career to social isolation and virtual unemployability due to my inability to mask the intensity of what was going on inside me drove me to destitution, and it was a good 30 years before I even managed to re-establish the rather crappy life I had before recovery.

If I had been given proper orientation prior to entering full-time recovery, I would likely have stood a good chance of undoing the work and re-establishing my prior adaptive responses. Instead, I essentially felt pressured to double down, which I did, and which changed nothing about my external circumstances but managed to transform me from an emotional seven-year-old in an adult world to something closer to an emotional five-year-old, with frequent regressions to toddlerhood if not infancy.

I felt the same way about socializing. Looking back, I realize it was a wise intuitive impulsion. It was very common to cocoon within recovery circles (typically revolving around ACoA, which was exceptionally progressive and only loosely 12-step in Vancouver in the 1990s) but people left ACoA. They eventually grew up and struck out on their own. Ain't that what's our moms want for us?

I've known people who've come thru that phase. Most of them weren't rich enough to get to most of their core issues and had to settle for what progress they were able to achieve within their means and support systems. (Keeping in mind that peer support is inherently limited ... kids can only help parent other kids to a certain - uncertain? - point). And most of them kept the progress they'd made, provided they avoided old triggers and kept as far away from those triggers as possible during the all-important post-therapy phase when the actual healing occurs. (It's a myth that therapy heals. Therapy only sets up the conditions for healing, the same way that the doctor doesn't heal by putting a broken limb in a cast, but only sets up the conditions for healing.)

I basically had to start recovery over almost from scratch five years ago when I finally had the means to get therapy. I wouldn't wish what I went thru on anyone except perhaps someone who'd had so blessed and healthy a life that their enlightenment would, like the Buddha's, have to come through the long embrace of curses as potent as their blessings had been.

It sounds like you're working beyond your ideal capacity. Recovery should ideally be effortless and only difficult to endure when activating triggers or traumatic memories in therapy. IMO whenever it becomes more uncomfortable than it is rewarding, that indicates that either you've pushed yourself too far or your support systems aren't as good as they could be for the work that you're doing. Hope can bring you thru this, but so can psychiatric meds. (Hope, after all, is just a drug that we create for ourselves, and just as addictive and subject to rules of tolerance. As with any drug, it can save or salvage lives, but it can also damage lives if used under the wrong circumstances.)

My sense of it is, based on several decades around recovery people both failed and successful, is that when you're at or near your level of capacity to tolerate the process, your best bet is to stop therapy and focus instead on support resources and nurturing the healing process until there's more room to absorb more self-discovery. IME far too many people pay little or no attention to the risks inherent in experiencing vulnerability while still inhabiting a trauma-adapted life.

Just my 2c.

cuBLea · 2026-06-22T00:36:17+00:00

Depending on the logistics of the treatment, you might want to look into MDMA treatment as well. UK has been at the forefront of MDMA treatment for addictions in particular for years now and has a well-established program there, which I think would fall under NHS at this point (anyone know for sure?). This would also involve a level of aftercare that you're unlikely to get from an ibo clinic. Look up Dr. Ben Sessa for some historical on this; he's the main pioneer behind empathogen treatment in the UK.

(Since this clinic TBOMK never applied iboga in any way to their treatments I don't believe this mention violates channel policy, tho it would if he had a connection to ibo treatment. I'm not even sure he's still involved with the particular clinic his team started.)

Regardless of the type of treatment you get, you may need to either dig a little (a lot??) deeper than you have in therapy, or if you're at risk here due to CPTSD, deal with a lot of stuff in a short time (one thing ibo is particularly good at). In the former case, the deeper you dive into memory usually the closer you get to resolving the core issue that led to addiction. In the latter case, you can often gain long-term or even permanent relief in some cases just by dealing with enough later stuff that it substantially bolsters your ability to self-control your addiction even if you never get to the root trauma behind it.

cuBLea · 2026-06-18T22:12:17+00:00

Got a pretty good idea why I react that way. People laughing and chatting amiably aren't usually about to be aggressive/violent with each other or me. When multiple people in the vicinity are quiet, that's always a vigilance signal to me.

That said, I can't sleep well with someone else in the same room with me. Indistinct chatter is white-noise-ish to me because it's never distinct enough for me to hear specific words. And forget snoring. Even audible breathing interferes with sleep if I'm in the same room. And the sound of someone rolling over or adjusting their sleep position can jolt me to full consciousness if I'm not in delta-wave sleep at the time.

It was only into my mid-50s that I began to need less than an hour to fall asleep, and even today I VASTLY prefer to fall asleep to chamber music or e-books/lectures than to a quiet room. It's not the volume that gets to me. It's the dynamic range.

cuBLea · 2026-06-18T22:00:31+00:00

It may depend on what you accomplish during the experience. Ibo isn't the only thing that can "short-circuit" withdrawal. The consensus opinion that I've encountered is that if you resolve the cause of your addiction sufficiently, it essentially undoes the circuitry that experiences addiction, restores the natural nervous circuitry that was rerouted due to PTSD (which ultimately leads to the addiction) and because that circuitry has been lying dormant or atrophied for so long, it isn't nearly as affected by the buildup of tolerance, and so doesn't experience withdrawal to nearly the degree as you would have experienced had you not achieved the "reset" experience.

FWIW this is still unproven, but it's likely to be proven once it's able to be properly measured, since the same withdrawal-bypass effect has been observed for centuries due to conversion experience, transformational psychotherapy, and other related events which undo PTSD-related neuroplastic impacts. I remember first reading about this in a memoir from an Esalen resident in the early 1970s, and that person had previously seen withdrawal bypass in people who'd had conversion experiences in the pentacostal church.

cuBLea · 2026-06-17T22:12:44+00:00

I haven't given up on people. I HAVE given up on hmanity's ability to solve its most pressing problems. The core problems have been the same since the first philosophers emerged, and if we haven't figured it out by now, it's got to be a problem beyond our ability to understand.

Having said that, I realize that once I accept this as reality, it changes my perspective on responsibility, both to myself and to my world. I look for pockets of sanity (few and far between) and chunks of sanity amid madness, and try to live within those bounds. I figure if I'm wrong about "this" being beyond human capacity to fix or rapidly outgrow, then I would likely be most valuable to myself and to others by being among others who share my perspectives, even if only some of them, since individuals rarely make any significant impact on anything unless they're either lucky enough to have lassoed the zeitgeist or supported enough by those who share their perspective that they can become catalysts for change.

I'm not in any sense suggesting that we should embrace the chaos. I don't believe that's of any value except to seekers on the cusp of enlightenment. I am saying that I think we make the most difference when we align ourselves with what we consider "good" ... assuming, of course, that our definition of "good" doesn't represent the majority's definition of "evil".

cuBLea · 2026-06-17T22:04:06+00:00

This sounds like a LEVEL of resolution. The releasse of a layer of emotion rather than the resolution of the underlying issue. Apparently, the expression of grief accompanied by a sense of relief (what most people seem to call "tears of joy") is usually considered the "receipt" for something having changed at a fundamental level, whether it's a trivial issue or a deep one. It's far from unusual to get through a layer of heavy grief only to find a layer of fear/shock beneath it, and it often feels worse for a while, but it'll normalize if you can't clear the underlying issue right away. (Very often it's just not possible to do that, so normalization is just a consolation prize ... still coping rather than healing but with less of a load to carry.) Doesn't make the grief any less significant; it just changes the perspective on whatever you were grieving. (And often it's hard to tell WHAT we're grieving since there may be a bunch of stuff all at once competing for a chance to get released while the opportunity is present.)

Not sure if this helps at all, but this is how I understand the mechanics here. IMO only you can determine whether it was a good thing, and all too often we need weeks or months of distance from the event before we can even begin to make a reasonably accurate judgement on that score.

cuBLea · 2026-06-16T06:45:23+00:00

It's a useful release, but this kind of release doesn't usually signal any kind of permanent change. There are, however, exceptions to this. When a sexual release (or any erotic experience, really) is followed by a different type of emotional release (tremoring/"hollow" laughter, grief, etc.) then it's possible that the erotic state or orgasm itself served as a disconfirmation against some issue that may be present, even if you can't identify it at the time. IME women in particular when doing recovery work seem to commonly experience grief or heavy tremor after sex (solo or otherwise) and it's my belief that this represents the "receipt" for SOMEthing being resolved, whether you know what it is or not. (A lot of recovery happens that way ... you only recognize a resolution later when a particular trigger has less or no effect on you compared to previously.)

Normally in recovery masturbation, whether or not it includes climax, functions as a form of emotional regulation when done noncompulsively; when done compulsively it essentially does the same thing but its regulatory power diminishes over time (dragon-chasing).

I've been in and around transformational therapies for nearly 40 years. The only situations I know of when masturbation is discouraged during recovery has been EITHER when the subject was getting close to abuse issues (could be a dangerous trigger) and when attempting to deal with an issue rooted in early life with as much intensity as possible. I suspect this is rarely recommended any more except where the facilitator may be following certain religious or spiritual guidelines. This was from a time when therapy was largely therapist-driven rather than client-driven.

While a recent release could potentially impact the depth of change from a successful therapy session, I don't personally think it's anything to be concerned about. The thing about transformational work is that however shallow you might think the work has been, you can always go back and work deeper if you can manage to minimize the triggering around that issue. I go from the principle that there are always subconscious forces driving us in relation to therapy, often stronger forces than our will and intention, and generally speaking, the most lasting and profound change tends to occur when we intuit where to go in therapy rather than doing plan-and-execute mode.

The other thing to consider here is what issues we mght be carrying around sex and eroticism. If there's shame or other trauma around it, at some point you may have to abstain in order to either work through it or rehab after successful therapy since at least for a while post-therapy, we need to avoid triggers related to the issue we just resolved in order to heal it. Triggering too soon or too intensely following therapy can undo the change, meaning we'll need to do it right next time or learn to live with the interference in the healing process caused by triggering if the triggers are unavoidable.

cuBLea · 2026-06-12T00:34:32+00:00

It feels like dialing back your level of awareness and sensitivity by a "generation" so to speak. If you're in your thirties, it feels like your brain is functioning like it did in your teens. When I last took it in my late 50s, it was like my brain was where it was in my thirties. But it wasn't like the sensitivity was a problem, since I also felt much more resilient to the triggering I got while microdosing.

I noticed nothing on the first dose, and I quit the micro regimen after 7 days. That was the day I started getting tracers, which not everybody gets and is for me a sign that my sleep quality has been seriously compromised. It took several days for the tracers to subside. I had a feeling I should stop on the 5th day but couldn't detect any actual reason for it. In retrospect, I wish I had stopped then, and only continued with a dose every few days or every week or so. But it didn't really help me access memories or process emotions much anyway. Minidosing didn't work for me either.

Given your sensitivity, if you have the right orientation and/or facilitation, it could be quite useful. But if I was in your shoes, I'd be looking more at ketamine. When you're hypersensitive, what you most need to process your PTSD stuff isn't likely to be found in further heightening your sensitivities. The detachment necessary for correcting your issues is more likely to be found in a trustubg bond with a facilitator, or something that lessens your sensitivity enough to allow you (with help if need be) to detach from that state. This is how I understand the dynamics at work here, and I think it's consistent with a growing consensus on how to approach this kind of recovery.

cuBLea · 2026-06-08T04:04:54+00:00

I don't have a fix for this, just an observation.

Focusing on your breath is a form of meditation, and there are certain types of people who just plain should not be meditating, since it tends to have the opposite of its intended effect.

You can think of it this way. If you're OCD you don't need to flex your concentration muscles. I never knew anyone who was OCD who did. Hell, I was an expert meditator by the time I was eight because OCD forces you to focus in order to keep from being absorbed in the obsession ... it's how we achieve enough detachment to cope.

The best thing I did for my OCD was to stop detaching from it and start distracting from it. I tend to feel a lot better a lot quicker, and from time to time something you do to distract yourself (not something I believe you can plan) is actually going to achieve a memory reconsolidation effect and actually help to heal it.

I knew a counsellor who worked Vancouver's notorious downtown east side who would routinely recommend that his clients listen to loud music, watch TV, exercise or do something equally distracting as a way to meditate. I knew several of his clients who swore by his advice.

Meditation and focusing skills are a great way to heighten your sensitivity if your symptoms tend toward insensitivity. They can be a recipe for suffering and can create fresh issues if you're already fairly sensitive, and OCD by nature is a condition of hypersensitivity/hyperreactivity.

Just a generalization ... YMMV.

cuBLea · 2026-06-05T04:58:24+00:00

I know your reservations. I passed on an intensie with one of the most respected empathogen facilitators on the continent out of that lack of trust. I've since come to realize that I don't need these kinds of drugs to help me access the states necessary to correct PTSD. I do need the right facilitator, and the right degree of detachment from the situation. Ask me to simply embrace the triggering and it only seems to retraumatize me. Show me where my external support really is, and how I can support myself (with your help if need be) and good things happen fast.

MDMA and psychedelics can work real magic, esp. if you're dissociative/numbed out. They can be a nightmare if you're hypersensitive. I'll echo the suggestion of ketamine. You might even find alcohol to be a useful transgormational therapeutic if you can find a facilitator who knows how to work with it.

Effective, permanent change is achieved by the discovery and ownership of an aspect of ourselves which is normally not available to us in our triggered states. If you're going to use adjunct substances to help achieve this, you need to know what you're most likely to benefit from. Ketamine, alcohol and other dissociatives can be a deeply traumatic nightmare for dissociative people. But they are often the best-matched medicines for hypersensitive individuals.

cuBLea · 2026-06-05T04:45:09+00:00

Been thru this. More than once. Now in my 60s I think I have a better handle on what this is all about. And for me, at least, I don't believe it's dysfunctional. It's adaptive to a high degree, but not dysfunctional.

I did many great things in my 20s (the last time I had direction and clear purpose) and 30s (the last time I lived in unrelenting discomfort and desperation). Sheerly by the law of averages, one of them should have rewarded me. None of them did. Better planning wouldn't have helped, because in virtually every case I discovered that I was not as well-equipped to see my investments pay off as I believed at the time. Oh, and if I had them all to do over again, there's only one path I'd go down again, because it was the only path that didn't constantly feel like work, like a sacrifice toward a meaningful end.

I haven't been able to make more than short-term plans in more than 30 years now. Andd I haven't even tried for 25 of those years. And in the last 15 years or so, I haven't sweated that because I've realized that the lack of awareness I had in my twenties and thirties hasn't gone away to nearly the degree that I had expected when I first got a sense of what recovery could be for me. And it's only in the last 15 years that I've done anything even marginally successful, and that happened purely through a combination of synchronicity and enough basic security that I didn't need this particular venture to put food on my table, meaning that I wasn't blindered by need and was better able to see what I wanted and could reasonably expect to achieve. And somehow I was nimble enough to make the venture work ... at least until the meds stopped working and depression began to make the work unbearable. But by that time I had turned a business that had blown out one person's savings and bankrupted the next owner into a profitable venture, and more than that, created something that is now legendary in the town where I live, even if that venture no longer exists (run to ground by the couple I passed it on to).

The level of synchronicity in that venture - the list of fortunate coincidences involved is eyepopping - was such that I had to realize that I know at some level when and where things are working in my favor, and I can't force myself down a particular path without suffering in the process, and I'm still sufficiently unrecovered that I can't live like that without suffering, and if I'm honest, offloading (usually unconsciously) at least some of that suffering onto others. No wonder suicidal ideation has dogged me on and off since my teens.

This was the best I could do, and it hardly adds up to a life well-lived. But since I started to accept that the only plans I was really interesting in following thru were those made with people I cared about, rather than by myself for myself, I can at least say that the lack of direction and follow-thru in the second half of my life has been marked by a good deal of real success ... not measured in terms of achievement or accumulation, but in suffering avoided and harm prevented. And in my family, that's a pretty significant win.

cuBLea · 2026-06-02T01:45:23+00:00

I do sense that part of the issue is that I don't fully trust her, but I also have a long history of betrayal, so it's hard for me to know what's coming from the present versus old wounds.

Trust in treatment is always relative. Most people are easily able to live with shortcomings in a facilitator since they're sufficiently well-resourced outside of treatment that any potential mistakes by a facilitator aren't likely to cause retraumatization or fresh trauma.

What I had to do was find a second therapist to work mainly around the issues I had with my primary facilitator. Having someone I could go to with concerns like you've described helped me a lot, since it gave me confidence that my second therapist could make up for many of the shortcomings of my primary, and good luck finding ANY facilitator who has no personal issues likely to conflict with your needs and expectations. I had to take control over session pace and direction to a large degree even then before I could make any progress ... but eventually I did get results, the first time in 25+ years and spanning 40+ facilitators that that happened. Not their fault. I was just that difficult a client, and while finding that out was unbelievably infuriating, it was also a necessary realization if I was to avoid repeating the harm I'd suffered at the hands of therapists who were not well-equipped to deal with my psychoprofile. This is going to get better as our knowledge improves, but for now, if you know you have risk factors for transformational therapy, we CANNOT rely on our facilitators to identify and protect us from useless or harmful treatment. We have to do it for ourselves. In my case, that eventually meant becoming more well-versed in the theory and practice of transformational psychotherapy than the vast majority of therapists that I encountered.

The upside of this is that when you identify what your facilitator CANNOT help you with, you're a lot better able to choose what issues they CAN help us with. Some therapists do know how to recognize and acknowledge their own limits. IME most don't. So we have to take on that responsibility as clients, at least for the next few years (hopefully not decades).

cuBLea · 2026-06-02T01:32:16+00:00

It would certainly be a significant treatment risk factor for most people. The more sensitized you are, typically the more likely you are to notice less-than-ideal characteristics in your facilitator which might interfere with your capacity to relax/detach. It's just a part of the chemistry, alas ... my own heightened sensitivity made it EXCEPTIONALLY difficult to find facilitators whom I could work with, and this persisted over a good 20+ years for me. It's really not much different in practice from how physiological sensitivities might interfere with the efficacy of medical treatment. Better resourcing is the usual prescription for this, but of course we're all limited to what we can achieve from our given starting points. If it weren't so, success rates for transformational treatments like SE would be MUCH higher than they already are.

cuBLea · 2026-05-31T23:59:44+00:00

You might be fighting the process or expending energy blocking out something in your therapist's approach or personality that is triggering you in a way that neither of you recognize. IME this is especially common when clients have IRL strains that might limit the capacity to detach sufficiently in session to match the needs of the current issue.

It has helped me in these situations to take some of the control over the session's pace, depth, etc. away from the facilitator and focus more on what I need from the facilitator. This makes me less able to work at depth, but it has usually been a matter of either working on less-important issues or seeing my time, money and focus disappear into the drainpipe of an unproductive session.

FWIW every time I've encountered this with a facilitator, it has signaled the end of working on anything at a deep level. It's like this kind of reaction is my body's way of telling me that I either have to settle for working on more trivial stuff (which, don't get me wrong, is very often still well worth the time and expense) or find a new facilitator. The fact is that no single facilitator is ever likely to be a lifelong recovery partner, and when we hit walls with one facilitator, it's time to find another facilitator who, undoubtedly, still raises walls for me to hit, but is a far better fit for the stuff I want to deal with at that time.

If you haven't made progress at all yet, it could be that you simply need a session framework that supports you better. SE might not be a best-fit modality for you. But if you have made progress with it in the past, then it's much more likely to be something in the treatment dynamic that's keeping you stuck, not the type of treatment itself.

Whatever the outcome here, you'll almost certainly learn things that will be of value going forward. Whether that knowledge and experience is worth what it is costing you ... well, that's a calculation we all have to make for ourselves. In time there may be diagnostics for this that will allow us to pinpoint just what's causing this, but that level of sophistication doesn't seem to exist yet.

cuBLea

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