Gonzo: Sertraline 50mg chaos and withdrawal

[Gonzo]

8 years ago I achieved some of my goals, I came to the truth and answered why I felt "that way", why I had those post-traumatic reactions and traumatic emotions although not why my post-traumatic crisis occurred, what really failed was the external validation and support that I never received, and coming into conflict with the hegemonic individualistic mentality and individualistic culture and society, being brutally oppressed and alienated by psychiatry, revictimized.

 

Everything orbits around individualism, all the psychiatry bullsh*t "treatments" and mainstream psychology "help", it's all about navigating in this individualistic culture in a way that don't disturb others, or about stop being annoying, about suppression, it's all individualistic "tools" to function better in this individualistic society, there is no other way when everyone is trapped in the same individualistic toxic culture and indoctrinated.

 

What psychiatry and mainstream psychology both call "help" is nothing more than learning to be "functional", which means adapting to this toxic individualistic and capitalistic culture and society in a "good" way, being a productive member of society (being "normal"), or in a bad way, being psychologically and chemically suppressed through psychotheraphy and psychiatric drugs so you are not annoying or disturbing to the rest of people (stopping being "abnormal").

[Gonzo]

What psychiatry and mainstream psychology call "dysfunctional coping strategies" and pathologize are the different individualistic coping strategies (drugs, addictions, self-isolation, etc) and (postraumatic) reactions that people have when no one helps and no one understands, everyone around being individualistic and minding their own businesses. Most psychiatric diagnoses are (postraumatic) reactions and individualistic coping strategies used to survive trapped in these individualistivualistic relational environments, being traumatized, desperate, isolated, oppressed, alienated, in despair, etc.

[Gonzo]

8 years ago I asked myself and tried to answer the question (immersed in that postraumatic/existential/meaning crisis): why do I feel "this way"? Why that anxiety, shame, guilt, sadness, anger, fear, confusion, agitation, (postraumatic) stress, terror even, paranoia, distrust, why those postraumatic reactions and emotional flashbacks, even when my personal circumstances had changed for the better, those traumatic emotions/feelings and reactions stayed. I felt like I was "bad", like if I was doing something "bad", as if there was "something" "wrong" with me. I didn't want to feel "like that", in tension, distressed, I wanted to relax, to feel calm, to feel safe, I needed too as well, to be productive, "functional", to adapt to my social environment, to move foward in my life, to progress. I can answer now that question: because I felt I didn't meet the social expectations of my social and family environment. In fact, that I felt "that way", even if it sucked hard, it was a good sign of "mental health", I was connected to my environment and felt the pressure to do something about my personal circumstance, to adapt better. I was in some ways "abnormal", and I needed to do something about it. My postraumatic reactions were also a sign of unprocessed trauma, a trauma that I felt the need to heal, and I tried to, which was very good and healthy, and I tried until I couldn't no more, being totally oppressed, controlled, alienated, coercced, in that psychiatric ward, and even after getting out of there, until I stopped taking the pills and withdrawal happened and my postraumatic reactions and traumatic emotions/feelings came back totally overwhelmed me, multiplied in intensity for each year I was drugged, this exhaustion of my inner resources and hijacking of my life by my (post)traumatic inner experiences happened specifically when that "relationship" ended traumatically. Lots of realizations and insights these days, my emotions are more manageable as well. I don't know what my life would have been and how I would have developed as a person if it wasn't by the psychiatric intervention, but I'm still young and I'm fighting to recover control of my life.

 

8 years ago I also didn't want just to be "functional", I wanted to have meaning in my life, purpose.

[Gonzo]

Since I'm rejecting/getting over the psychiatric brainwashing/indoctrination my recovery is speeding up, everything is recovering its meaning more and more.

 

I realize that while I took Sertraline I was disconnected from reality, my brain being chemically deceived, and when I stopped taking it I got overwhelmed by the reality I had been disconnected from for years, and for years as well, unable to understand it, to give meaning to the hellish emotional chaos I was experiencing, to accept it and to process it, in big part because of the psychiatric trauma that I experienced and that I wasn't aware of (because of being drugged for years and while it happened) and because of the psychiatric indoctrination/brainwashing that I got into when I searched for answers, meaning and solutions again in psychiatry shortly after my withdrawal started, in 2021 and 2022, being scammed again.

[Gonzo]

I realize I haven't been happy in my life in a long time, when I was 19-20 years old I was looking for that happiness, then my psychiatric intervention happened and I got drugged, I felt a fake "happiness" durante años, so I didn't need to search for true happiness, my brain was "happy", being chemically deceived, I was high, sedated and apathetic, that "happiness" ended when I stopped taking the pills, I was confused, shocked, the chemical deception came to an end, I could not understand what happened, I didn't even know how much Sertraline had affected me, to my perception of reality and personality, my unhapiness came back and I wanted my "happiness" back, I tried to maintain the fake Sertraline personality and reaility as long as I could, clinging to them, thinking/believing/feeling they were the true reality and my real personality, confused, or I just clung to them because I didn't want to suffer my postraumatic reactions, traumatic feelings and a postraumatic crisis again, because I had lost my tolerance for mental distress, until I couldn't cling to them no more in 2022-2023, when the legacy fake Sertraline reality and "happiness" finally collapsed under the weight of my overwhelming true emotions and true reality.

 

I want to be happy, for real, that means suffering, because suffering tells you what does NOT make you happy so what you NEED to do to be truly happy.

 

8 years ago I was searching for my happiness and self-realization, I couldn't find those, but even then, when I got out of the psychiatric ward, I told to myself that I wasn't coming back to my individualist identity, beliefs and value system and to suffer a postraumatic crisis like that, my individualism I couldn't completely let go, because I never had the external validation, understanding and support that I needed to overcome my individualistic identity and trauma, to mature as a person, trapped in an individualistic society and culture like everyone else, and I was drugged and disconnected as well from my true emotions and needs, and my postraumatic crisis never resolved, it was just frozen in time by the Sertraline chemical intervention and deception.

 

What psychiatry did to me and my life was diabolical.

[Gonzo]

After my psychiatric intervention not only did I have a poor understanding of my emotions and inner experiences, but now I feared them as well as I feared facing my trauma again, which I still needed to do to recover, psychiatry just made it much more difficult, specially when they drugged me, and I also associated those inner experiences, traumatic feelings/emotions, postraumatic reactions and facing my trauma with a risk of being arrested, locked down and brutally oppressed again, because of my psychiatric trauma, it's so twisted that due to the fact that I started taking Sertraline when I was locked down I was emotionally disconnected for years and mentally unaware of my psychiatric trauma, I only could realize my psychiatric trauma once I figured out those traumatic emotions and reactions in my trauma soup years later after stopping Sertraline intake, psychiatry and mainstream psychology is so toxic and their knowledge of emotions so primitive and perverted and almost everyone is so judgemental being indoctrinated in the toxic individualistic mindset that I had to do all this alone, rejecting all the mental health system/industry "help", all this has been so, so difficult.

 

Because of prolonged Sertraline use, the hellish emotional and mental chaos that followed its discontinuation and the psychiatric indoctrination I lost all my healthier coping skills and ability to calm down myself, I need to recover those or/and to develop new ones, I got stuck in fight-flight mode when I stopped Sertraline.

 

I couldn't understand, accept and normalize my internal experiences, my difficult and confusing traumatic emotions and postraumatic reactions, so they became more and more distressing, specially after the psychiatric intervention and indoctrination and Sertraline withdrawal.

[Gonzo]

I need to continue deprograming my mind of all the psychiatric indoctrination and bullsh*t. I still get very hyperfocused in my inner experiences and get into fight-flight mode (my heart pumps faster, I get physically tense, ready to fight, angry) when I notice what I was psychologically trained to perceive as "symptoms" of "mental illnesses" and to suppress them, when this happens it becomes almost impossible for me to relax, I get very distressed. I try to tell to myself that these are "symptoms" of syndromes and "brain diseases" that psychiatry invented not discovered, even if the experiences that they describe are real and problematic, because they have no medical evidence of disease whatsoever, it's all just an oppressive, alienating, pseudscientific, meaningless and harmful belief system.

 

With Sertraline I was aimless and I did stupid things.

 

If there are any symptoms that still persist from my withdrawal those are a very intense tinnitus in my left ear, earworms all the day, agitation and physical tension.

 

Psychiatry made me fear to rise up again from the ashes of my life, from oppression, to rise up my voice and be myself, to recover, to face my traumas and search for happiness and meaning, for fear of being arrested and treated like a criminal, of being put in a reeducation camp, it killed my soul, in brainwashed and indoctrinated me, drugged me, and while I was drugged I was psychologically incapacitated to realize any of this, I live in fear because of what happened to me, it was a nightmare.

 

I'm feeling a bit stronger this morning, the more I get over the brainwashing the better I feel, I can't believe how deeply indoctrinated I've been, I was totally blind to it, the more time I spent in the mental health system/industry the more indoctrinated I was and institutionalized I became.

[Gonzo]

I've been fearing to be arrested and sent again to the psychiatric ward all this time, because of the psychiatric trauma I experienced there. Psychiatry also made me fear my postraumatic reactions, crisis and traumatic emotions/feelings as I said in my previous posts, it was not just confusion as when I felt them and had that crisis for the first time when I was 19, it is pure distress, fear, TRAUMA, and it started happening after the psychiatric intervention, trauma and indoctrination, it made me feel much more distressed when being triggered (trauma triggers), it disturbed my metacognition, I started self-fearing, self-monitoring, self-suppressing, self-gaslighting, self-obsessing. That fear of being arrested and sent again to that awful place because of my psychiatric trauma was and is triggered whenever I get triggered for different reasons and I start feeling my traumatic emotions/feelings and having postraumatic reactions, they're associated to the psychiatric trauma. Also, because of the psychiatric indoctrination, I fear even more and feel even more distress when those traumatic emotions/feelings and postraumatic reactions are triggered because I was trained to see them as symptoms of something very dangerous, uncontrollable, imcomprehensible, unpredictable, abnormal and bad going on inside of me (as basically signs of being possesed by something evil but invisible), and together with the understandable fear of experiencing the same postraumatic crisis again (and being arrested and locked down as a result) as I did when I was 19-20, the mental distress gets very, very bad when I get triggered, it has been like this since I stopped taking Sertraline in 2020, it's overwhelming, very difficult to manage, because it's all associated to the psychiatric trauma, to the fear of being arrested, incarcelated and brutally oppressed again for feeling and behaving like that, "abnormally", like I did when I went through that postraumatic crisis. The biggest issues is that, because of the psychiatric intervention, I was never able to overcome my postraumatic crisis and my trauma remained not only unprocessed, but got aggravated, so my traumatic emotions/feelings and postraumatic reactions never got resolved, I still need to face them, to heal and move foward in my life once for all, as I needed and tried to when I was 19 before the psychiatry intervention mess. The psychiatric trauma is much deeper than I thought.

[Gonzo]

I needed and need to feel safe, I guess to do that I have to overcome my trauma, specially being in a safe place.

[Gonzo]

Psychiatry and Sertraline made me dumber, mediocre and weaker, they incapacitated me, deprived me of my real identity and personality, they blocked my capabilities, my true potential.

 

I think the psychiatric trauma together with the Sertraline chemical deception and withdrawal, when that chemical deception came to an end, is what harmed me the most, that's why I, being extremely confused and distressed during withdrawal, tried to find answers, meaning and solutions again in psychiatry, ending up being scammed and deeply brainwashed/indoctrinated as a result and much more confused and distressed than before psychiatry, this wouldn't had happened if I hadn't been so confused, disconnected, traumatized, overwhelmed and distressed.

 

When I was 20, months before being involuntarily hospitalized, I remember that I thought and told to myself "well, if at home my family ain't helping me to overcome this and don't understand me if I get hospitalized these guys (the psychiatrists and mental health "experts") can help me", how naïve and ignorant I was. I never resisted during the arrest, but it was an arrest nonetheless, without a single crime being commited, and traumatic.

 

Psychiatry made me feel even more abnormal than I already felt, pathologizing me, reinforcing my traumatic guilt and shame, it made me obsess with my post-traumatic reactions (namely "OCD") with dire consequences for my mental wellbeing.

[Gonzo]

I need to overcome my complex original trauma, postraumatic crisis, postraumatic reactions and traumatic feelings/emotions, together with the psychiatric trauma, 7 years after it happened, to finally recover and have inner peace. This is what Sertraline and the psychiatric intervention and indoctrination/brainwashing prevented me from doing: to recover, to get healthier, to mature, to develop as a person, to have a sense of self-worth.

 

Psychiatry made me afraid to try to overcome my individualism again.

[Gonzo]

During withdrawal I lost control over my life story, I stopped feeling as the main character and I stopped understanding the story, I lost my sense of agency basically, I felt I lost control over my life, which in many ways happened, everything stopped making sense, I became aimless. I'm recovering all that slowly, making sense of all what happened to me, which was a lot and very painful. I learned that blaming the brain/mental illnesses can also be a way to reject a painful reality and individual responsability, I did that when that kind of "relationship" ended traumatically, I didn't want to blame her for her abusive behaviors, I needed her, and I didn't want to blame myself for what happened, I was very confused and overwhelmed, very distressed, but at the end I blamed myself and my "OCD", later I started blaming her for everything, until I realized that even she was toxic and abusive Sertraline and withdrawal played a big role in what happened between us, causing havoc, I was also suffering a drug induced personality disorder.

 

I think by the end of 2019, even before stopping Sertraline, it had lost its effectiveness, but I was physically dependant of the drug, I didn't know tho, I had no idea how the drug had affected me, changed my personality and how distorted my reality and time perception, I didn't even remember why I took it in the first place, I didn't remember about the trauma, I was disconnected from the psychiatric trauma, that I wasn't aware of, and I forgot my original trauma because of Sertraline effectiveness, even if it was just invisible to me not gone. All this was very bad, the perfect conditions for what happened later.

 

I think what happens to me and doesn't allow me to move foward in my life is precisely the psychiatric trauma and indoctrination, this trauma specially makes me afraid of facing again my original trauma and being empowered, to take control over my life, it's the fear of being arrested and sent to that reeducation center again, to that psychiatric ward, of being put between bars, deprived of my freedom and natural rights, of being brutally oppressed and alienated and drugged against my will, because the last time I tried it's what happened to me, it seems like I commited a thought crime, for rebelling against individualism. The psychiatric indoctrination and sick mindset (which is pure toxic individualism and was forced to me, specially when I was drugged) I'm slowly getting over them, I became aware one or two months ago, the psychiatric trauma on the other hand I only realized it fully very recently. If I can't face my original trauma and overcome it I can't recover, and the psychiatric trauma doesn't allow me to do that, because that's exactly what's about, it prevents me from trying again and rising from the ashes, it's internalized oppression, an internal barrier of pure fear and painful memories that tells you don't even think about it.

 

Psychiatry forced me to disconnect, psychologically, brutally oppressing and alienating me, and chemically, with Sertraline, in other words, it forced me to come back to individualism, to being disconnected from myself and others, when in fact I was trying to reconnect, to heal my trauma, because individualism is disconnection and trauma. I was "reeducated".

[Gonzo]

I was reading some of my previous comments for months ago. Things definitely didn't go as I'd like to and expected, I haven't recovered yet.

 

I realize when I was 19-20 and going through that postraumatic crisis that psychiatry chemically interrumpted with Sertraline I did my best to not get trapped in its nightmarish reality of emotional flashbacks. Personal circumstances had changed but the emotions were the same, traumatic, and they came back, even if everything related to the trauma had changed (except for my family and residence). That was the confusion and distress that I experienced back then. It didn't "make sense", not to me when it was happening. The perfect course of actions would had been to reassure myself that the trauma was in the past and that the traumatic emotions/feelings, postraumatic reactions, emotional flashbacks, were just temporary, and receiving external validation for that and understanding, but I panicked and I tried to control them, also I didn't have external validation and understanding and I was too distressed and paranoid to directly search them. So I got trapped in my emotional flashbacks and postraumatic reactions, with my (unprocessed and complex) trauma, that hijacked my life and reality. Then psychiatry happened and I got even more trapped with the trauma, being chemically disconnected from it for years and 100% deceived feeling, thinking and believing that it was gone, when in reality it was there but just invisible to me, the same as happened with the psychiatric trauma during 2017.

 

Yeah, psychiatry interrumpted chemically my postraumatic crisis when I was 20, when I was arrested, locked down and drugged, and the interruption lasted for years, until I stopped taking the pills, when it came back again, because I had never resolved it, it was just paralized, invisible to me, my brain being chemically deceived and disconnected from it, so the confusion was huge and it felt like a retraumazation, what the hell was happening? I just had been chemically deceived, suffering a cruel lie.

 

Then, my "dysfunctional coping strategies" came back.

 

I took a "magic" pill, that it made me forget my traumas, it made feel, think, and belief that they were gone forever, finally, that I had not to worry more about that, because that pill got me high, that sedated me, numbed me down, that confused me and my brain, that made me dumber and weaker, that made me impossible to connect with reality. I had no idea, and no one told me the truth, psychiatry didn't care about my opinion, needs, or feelings. I was alone to discover it, to discover the painful truth, to face it, trapped in a maze of lies, chemical deception, oppression, dark interests, pseudoscience, corruption, perversion, alienation, toxic individualism and unprocessed traumas.

 

So yeah, my withdrawal, when I stopped taking Sertraline cold turkey, wasn't just about withdrawal but a retraumazation that happened because psychiatric deliberately ignored my trauma and never told me about withdrawal.

 

I haven't been recovering just from withdrawal since August 2020, but from a devastating retraumatizacion that both started to happen when I was going through the end of a very toxic relationship, and that finally ended traumatically in January 2021, reinforcing my already existing and complex trauma (which also had been reinforced by the additional layers of the psychiatric trauma and that I was unaware of). This traumatic relationship and breakup had been also been extremely difficult for me to understand, because of the Sertraline chemical deception and withdrawal emotional and mental chaos, I even thought it happened because of my "OCD", I blamed it for my erratic behaviors and mental and emotional unstability and reactivity, I was so confused and lost, and so overwhelmed.

Later the psychiatric indoctrination that became stronger since 2021 prevented me, together with the psychiatric trauma, from facing my original trauma, healing/overcoming it and recovering.

 

The chemical deception of Sertraline is also part of my psychiatric trauma.

[Gonzo]

Sertraline made me impossible to reconnect with reality and myself, to face reality, to adjust to reality, and disordered my personality, it made me loose my real identity.

 

Reaility is becoming less distressing the more understanding I have.

 

When I had those postraumatic reactions 8 years ago one of the reasons I panicked is because I couldn't understand them, so they became very distressing and confusing, they seemed to me disconnected from my present, they were traumatic emotions coming from my past and they made no sense to me, I couldn't see how they fit. Well, they're called postraumatic reactions for a reason, they happen after the trauma happens, when the body and mind try to reprocess what happened, the postraumatic stress, to recover, to calm down, to rest.

[Gonzo]

Becoming aware of my psychiatric trauma and Sertraline chemical deception and understanding them have been extremely difficult for me as well as start processing what happened to me, what the mental health system/industry did to me, but unavoidable to start seriously recovering.

 

Psychiatry made me afraid of (wanting to) move foward in my life, again, because of what happened the last time I tried (when I tried to do so facing the traumas and individualism that were blocking my healing and progresion), and it made me afraid of myself.

 

When I took Sertraline I definitely didn't have an intrinsic value and belief system, because I was disconnected from my real emotions and needs, instead I had an extrinsic and narcissistic value and belief system based in what others thought it was more valuable and needed, not in what I needed and really felt, because my emotions were chemically disordered, and fake, synthetic emotions, I was more compliant and passive, so the choices I made while taking Sertraline were not there choices I would normally make.

[Gonzo]

With Sertraline I forgot how to calm down myself in a healthy and efective way and I lost my tolerance to mental distress. I have to learn those things again.

 

I haven't been able to truly relax since I stopped Sertraline and I got indoctrinated by psychiatry, trapped with my trauma. It lacked the tools, I was trained to self-suppress or to ask for psychiatric drugs to self-soothe, because that's how the psychiatric paradigm works.

 

I would probably have been suffering the same issue if I had stopped Sertraline earlier and felt the psychiatric trauma before.

 

With Sertraline I was trapped with my trauma but chemically disconnected from it, deceived to feel, think and belief that it was gone. It was macabre.

[Gonzo]

Once I started undercovering my emotions and feelings and understanding them, giving them meaning, everything seems go better, I feel more in control of my emotional states, more in charge. I still have problems accepting the amount of time that has passed since I started taking Sertraline, my time perception got heavily distorted when I took it and in withdrawal.

 

The more I overcome the psychiatric indoctrination/brainwashing the less distressing and the more logical my inner experiences become, the less I self-obsess and the more in control, safe and empowered I feel.

 

What psychiatry did to me was malpractice, casuing me iatrogenic harm, and the responsible people are most likely out there, unpunished, harming others the same way I was harmed.

[Gonzo]

I did nothing wrong and still I was punished.

 

I guess all this will become one of those bad memories that people learn to live with.

 

I only started reprocessing what happened to me when I stopped Sertraline, moment when its chemical deception came to an end and I was forced to face the truth, the reality I was disconnected from and running away for years, but the reprocessing only could happen until my (traumatic neuro?)emotions  became more manageable, started making sense, etc, until I started identifying and understanding them.

 

Maybe neuro(post-)traumatic emotions is a good term to describe this hellish emotional experience.

[Gonzo]

The retraumatizacion I experienced when I stopped taking the pills was about traumas that I didn't even know about, such as the psychiatric trauma, and at the same time I experiencing a new trauma, the ending of that toxic and abusive relationship.

 

When I was 19-20 years old I reconnected with myself and with reality, I overcame individualism and trauma, but psychiatry forced me to disconnect again by imposing its toxic and psychopathological individualism on me and drugging me, the support and external validation never happened so I couldn't finish healing.

 

Listening to painful emotions and accepting them is scary, terrifying even, it means reconnecting with reality and oneself, seeing that horrible things have really happened, that reality is or/and has been horrible, overcoming traumatic guilt and shame as well as individualism (which is disconnection, trauma), healing trauma and being alone, because it's unsustainable and almost impossible to do all that trapped in a deeply individualistic society and culture, it forces you to do it all by yourself, and at the end you can't truly heal because you need others to help you finish your healing process, to finish reprocessing whatever happened to you, through external emotional validation, understanding and support, for all these reasons people are gaslighted and victim-blamed when they try to heal and react to reality, they get pathologized, oppressed and alienated, as I did, psychiatry and people overall tell them "nothing ever happened, nothing happens, it's just you, you're just crazy, there is something wrong with you, abnormal, bad, ill, something wrong in your brain, and you drugs and therapy to fix your dysfunctionality/malfunctioning, to 'help' you see reality, to adapt to it and live and be like everyone else, to be 'normal' and 'healthy'", and that's it, everybody is in denial.

 

That's what individualism is: being in denial, traumatized, disconnected, dissociation. And one of the biggest the reason why people get pathologized and systematically put on psychiatric drugs when they suffer and have issues in their lives, so carelessly that websites such as this exists, because it's happening all around the world, specially in Western societies or Western type/influenced societies.

 

The key is to overcome INDIVIDUALISM, to overcome what psychiatry discouraged me from ever trying again, traumatizing me.

[Gonzo]

So yeah, psychotheraphy, psychopathology/abnormal psychology, mainstream psychology, psychiatry and psychiatric drugs is all about reeducation/indoctrination in this toxic individualism. Individualism is to be in denial.

 

I searched for years for my individual deficiencies to correct them, to fix myself, because I was unknowingly trapped in the toxic and psychopathological individualism of the meaningless, nihilistic, oppressive and alienating meaning framework that psychiatry imposed on me, indoctrinating and brainwashing me, while I was high, drugged, sedated, and because I was deeply traumatized, blaming myself for everything bad that had happened to me, full of traumatic shame.

[Gonzo]

My emotional flashbacks 8 years ago transmitted to me the oppressive and alienating messages about individual deficiencies of this toxic individualistic society and culture, and the delf defeating messages of all the accumulated traumatic guilt and shame, postraumatic stress and the unprocessed complex trauma.

 

When I took Sertraline I was so disconnected from myself, and when I stopped taking it I reconnected too fast, it was so overwhelming that I ended up dissociating.

[Gonzo]

One thing that I'm telling to myself to overcome the psychiatric indoctrination/brainwashing is that psychiatric "diagnoses" are not real medical diagnoses because they don't uncover medical diseases, i.e. physical abnormalities, they lack medical evidence and scientific validity (psychiatric diagnoses are subjectively made following cultural and personal factors, specially Western individualism, the basis of psychopathology, and they are unreliable), they are just invented syndromes that describe real experiences (real observations), which are later pathologized and capitalized by psychiatry through psychotheraphies and psychiatric drug treatments for said mental "illnesses" and/or "disorders", the syndromes, it's the mental health industry business model.

[Gonzo]

I guess I was pretty naïve when I was 19-20 years old, but I can't be blamed for not knowing the full extent of cruelty of this world and for having the enthusiasm of a young person. I thought things could be different, better, more humane, that the mental health system could help and support me somehow if my family didn't, to go to the other side of that postraumatic crisis, to empower myself, to move foward in my life. I just got into full conflict with the individualistic culture and it crushed me like if I was an insect, through my psychiatric intervention. This society lives in denial of its own trauma, and pathologizes and oppress anyone who reacts to its problems, tries to get out of the individualistic mindset or raise the voice to tell that something better and different is possible, that things are not okay.

 

Psychiatry made me disconnected from reality and unable to (re)adjust to it. For years. Psychiatry made me loss my consciousness and critical thinking.

 

I'm recovering those things, I can feel them, and that's a good sign.

[Gonzo]

With Sertraline I forgot how to manage my intense emotions, such as anger, fear, anxiety, sadness, I lost healthier/"functional" my coping skills.

[Gonzo]

During withdrawal I definitely hit rock bottom, for different reasons, not just because of withdrawal. I need to acknowledge that, I need to rebuild my life.

 

The Internet answered a wrong question I asked myself 8 years ago: what's wrong with me? I was immersed in a postraumatic crisis, overwhelmed by postraumatic reactions and feelings. And it introduced me to the scam, oppression, alienation and madness of psychiatry.

 

I had a void in my life, of traumatic needs, specially for love, human connection, and I wanted and needed desperately to fill that void.

 

I didn't have meaning in my life either, and I tried to find that meaning that I longed.

 

I also felt "abnormal" and I desperately wanted to feel "normal", I wanted and needed a new identity, a better one than the one I had, a more "functional", "valuable", "normal", "valid" identity, I also tried to find that "better" identity.

 

Psychiatry shaped my identity and my life for next 8 years of my life.

 

I got trapped in my postraumatic reactions for these past 8 years, even when I took Sertraline, and they hijacked my life and my personality/identity, when I stopped taking Sertraline I just came into contact with them again, my freezed postraumatic crisis cam back to life from its chemical hibernation but amplified for each year I had been chemically suppressed, in fact, 8 years ago, when I felt those traumatic feelings again I panicked because I didn't want to get trapped, stuck, in that postraumatic reality/crisis/reaction, so I did everything I could to avoid that, in fact I obsessed with those traumatic feelings and postraumatic reactions.

 

I watched this video fully, it is beautiful, it's short but everything I've been saying here and many things that I went through are perfectly explained:

 

https://youtu.be/EWcaPdTQQiQ?si=9VqFzszjtuSG-AHo

[Gonzo]

I took Sertraline again in April 2020 (until August 2020) because I started feeling agitated again, I got into contact with my traumatic emotions once more, I couldn't understand what was happening to me, I just associated those emotions with my overwhelming and confusing postraumatic crisis (that I didn't overcome), (traumatic) arrest and locked down and I didn't want to go through the same thing ever again.

 

I lost myself in my postraumatic crisis and reactions, specially since my withdrawal started. At least when I was 19-20 and I was immersed in all that I tried to find myself and the truth, but in my withdrawal I was too scared to try to do it again, because of my psychiatric trauma.

 

I'm having a more peaceful night than usual, I realize how emotionally crazy and overwhelming these past 3+ years have been, since August 2020, it has been insane, and time passed incredibly fast. I guess one part of my emotional ane mental "issues" can be traced back to withdrawal and Sertraline use, the crazy intensity of these emotions (neuroemotions), that pushed me to use "dysfunctional" coping strategies to desperately calm myself and my body such as obsessive-compulsive behaviors, eating control, isolation and some addictions. But other part is just that my trauma came back to life, well, it never died anyway, and Sertraline and the psychiatric trauma multiplied its intensity like crazy.

 

This psychological experience absorbed me and hijacked my life.

 

I desperately needed to heal my trauma when I was 19-20 years old, I was going through a postraumatic crisis and desperately needed to rest, as well as to function and thus survive, for this I needed external emotional validation and support, to achieve this I had to stop my activity and I was forced to abandon my individualistic mindset, belief system and defences and focus on healing and understanding what was happening to me, to find solutions and meaning for my experiences and life, and I never got that external validation and support but quite the opposite, I was brutally oppressed and pathologized by psychiatry and drugged, as a result, I could never recover and I got stuck with my trauma, with my traumatic feelings and postraumatic reactions, trapped in my nightmarish postraumatic crisis reality, even if I was drugged and completely unconscious of all this.

 

It's incredible what happened to me, it's all subjective, because we are talking about thoughts, beliefs, feelings, emotions, etc, but the consequences have been objectively life changing. Psychiatry changed the course of my life, for the absolute worst. I definitely needed help and support, to understand and give meaning to my overwhelming postraumatic experience, to my feelings/emotional flashbacks specially, a non pathological and generic meaning, but personal and meaningful, and I needed help to reprocess my unprocessed trauma, to calm myself. And I needed to feel safe, to do all that. Neither my family environment nor the psychiatric ward were the appropiate places for such difficult task.

[Gonzo]

Difficult and painful emotions have meaning and purpose, they come from the personal experience in the environment, they are a reaction to it, and their use is to inform you. But those emotions could be coming from the past, specially when related to trauma, that's why they're postraumatic reactions, because they apear after the trauma happened, so when they do is time to notice them, to understand them, to validate them and to reprocess them, which can be difficult because when this happen they can be very overwhelming and confusing, they can hijack you and your present life, they're powerful.

 

When I had that postraumatic crisis, when I was 19-20, I didn't trust anyone, because of my unprocessed trauma, because of what happened to me, that's one of the reasons why I didn't seek help and I tried to overcome that crisis mostly on my own, I failed but I had good reasons to act like that.

 

I can say now that the moment I started fearing my postraumatic feelings/emotions, something that happened as early as when I was 16 years old, is when I slowly started getting more distressed by them until they took control of myself and my life when I was 19-20, then psychiatry happened and it made me fear even more those postraumatic emotions/feelings.

 

When I was 19-20 I obsessed with those postraumatic feelings/emotions, I wanted to understand them and to control them, to find them some meaning. Well, they definitely had meaning.

 

Later, when I was involuntary hospitalized, because of how badly I was treated there and traumatized, psychiatry really made me feel that overcoming those postraumatic feelings/emotions and reactions was completely impossible, so under coerccion and because in those circumstances it was the only way to get out of both the psychiatric, to recover my freedom, and out of my postraumatic crisis, to have some kind of emotional and mental relief being exhausted after one year and half fighting my postraumatic crisis on my own without support or understanding, I took Sertraline. I actually still wanted to face my trauma and heal after I got out of there, to do it right, until I completely forgot about my trauma because of the drug. I also didn't want to go through the same postraumatic crisis, that psychiatry made me fear deeply.

 

I was unconscious when I took Sertraline.

 

It has been all so insane, to wake up from the chemical deception of Sertraline since August 2020 only to realize a trauma, the psychiatric trauma, that I didn't know about, or hadn't felt, to put to put it in a better way, and to realize that nothing had changed, that it had been just a cruel lie, a chemical deception, to realize the painful and devastating truth, so overwhelming that it took me 3 years after stopping Sertraline to start really understanding what happened to me and reprocessing it.

 

Sertraline gave a break, but it was a chemical break, and fake. And I paid it with years of my life and a lot of suffering.

 

I've been listening and believing to these traumatic emotions and feelings for too long, specially the messages of the traumatic shame and guilt, and of the paranoia, and I've been running away from these traumatic emotions and feelings for the past 8 years psychologically and chemically, that's the truth.

[Gonzo]

I really got (self-)obssesed analyzing my postraumatic emotions, feelings and reactions and emotional flashbacks, trying to understand them and to control or to suppress them, when I was 19-20 during that crisis and during withdrawal too.

[checco]

5 hours ago, Gonzo said:

Sono diventato davvero (auto-) ossessionato dall'analisi delle mie emozioni, sentimenti, reazioni e flashback emotivi postraumatici, cercando di capirli e di controllarli o sopprimerli, quando avevo 19-20 anni durante quella crisi e anche durante l'astinenza.

What happened to you is very difficult to overcome and you have all my understanding, it is right to try to understand the causes and what happened but we cannot change the past  and it makes us angry and vengeful and tends to aggravate our situation. I know that it is difficult to change your attitude and thoughts if you can and doing so helps a lot with healing, the more we stimulate the nervous system with the past the more we will remain tied to it. This is my experience on this site where we talk about (neuroemotions) we also talk about how to change the channel when you are in this cycle of memories and ruminations, and it is very useful to do so.I'm not talking about you or your case in particular but I'm just talking about my experience, I also understood that all those who prescribed antidepressants to me were in good faith and that they couldn't do otherwise it is useless to blame them, psychiatry should be reviewed from the medical bases.

[Gonzo]

I understand what you say checco, writing all this help me to order my thoughts, feelings and beliefs and what happened to me, to recover my personality and identity as well. I can not describe how much fear, terror even, confusion and distress I have been feeling for the past three years specially, since I stopped Sertraline cold turkey. It can not. It's totally overwhelming, crazy intense emotions. That's why I said it has been retraumatizing. Writing all this helps me to feel better too, even if I know most people won't read or answer to my post, it's a kind of online journaling telling my experiences in the mental health system/industry and how I'm recovering myself, slowly, from all the hellish emotional and mental chaos and abuse that I experienced, I know some people will find usefulness in my story too. Lots of the rumination that I experience and experienced comes from the withdrawal neuroemotions, but you have to understand that when my withdrawal happened I got into psychiatry again, and it deeply brainwashed, indoctrinated and hurt me in multiple ways, even more than before the involuntary hospitalization. This brainwashing and indoctrinating also aggravated a lot my rumination, like 200%, because of the self-obsession it produced to me, it trained to me to do that, like a soldier under commands. Also a part of the rumination comes from all the unprocessed trauma, psychiatric and pre-psychiatry. So it's really complicated, complex. I just want to have some inner peace. I realized about this rumination when I had that traumatic "breakup" 3 years ago, because I obsessed with that girl and ruminated like crazy about her, for the previous reasons, I didn't know about withdrawal and I thought it was because of my "OCD" (including the whole "breakup", I blamed myself of all of it), but "OCD" treatments is all about suppressing the "symptoms", including obsessive-compulsive rumination (whatever that is precisely), so paradoxically they can become stronger, because you create inner resistance, that's what happened to me too, my rumination never got better because "OCD" wasn't my problem, but my complex trauma, everything that happened to me inside and outside the mental health system/industry, even if I forgot about it, that's the source of my crazy and nonstop ruminations, so I writte all this trying to resolve my trauma. It has been a mess, everything. 

 

I have many layers of trauma, that's probably why psychiatry, deliberately and systematically ignoring trauma, has been so damaging for me. I wasn't even aware of my psychiatric trauma, even if it was and is a thick layer of trauma.

 

About psychiatry, I don't care at this point if there are doctors who overprescribing AD and benzos doing that in good faith, it's malpractice, and their lack of critical it's harming lots of people worldwide.

 

Again, I can not explain the emotional and mental nightmare I've been experiencing since I stopped Sertraline cold turkey. But I can try. When I had that postraumatic crisis, when I was 19, I felt like all my traumatic emotions and feelings, the ones I experienced when I was being traumatized in different moments in my life, came back, to haunt me, disturbing myself and my life reality, even if my personal circumstances had changed for the better, I had a lot of unprocessed traumas. Then I did my best to control, suppress, or overcome that nightmarish reality, until my psychiatric intervention happened, I was further traumatized and drugged. So 3+ years later I stopped Sertraline and that frozen postraumatic crisis, reactions, feelings and emotions came back to my life once more. This is basically a retraumazation, it was even more confusing than when I was 19-20. So, yeah, imagine that your worst traumas come to haunt you in the present, in an emotional format, traumas that you thought you had overcome, or that you forgotten, hijacking your reality, life and personality, changing everything for you, paralizing you, then you take of these "magic" pills and it makes you have some psychological rest and they work so well that makes you forget about your traumas, making you think, feel and belief that it's all finally in the past, that it's all finally over, that your postraumatic crisis ended, so one day for whatever reason years later you decide to stop taking the pills and you do and everything comes back, all that trauma and terror. It would be insane to experience that, right? Devastating. Well. That's what happened to me.

 

I thought, felt and believed for years that my postraumatic crisis was over, until I discovered that it wasn't, it was all just a cruel chemical deception and lie, a dirty trick.

 

No one helped me to make sense of all this and going through it, because no one understood its complexity.

[Gonzo]

So yeah, my unprocessed trauma triggers my rumination, as a "dysfuntional" coping mechanism to deal with the overwhelming traumatic and painful emotions and feelings and self-soothe (desperately), my "OCD" does not cause this, "OCD" just means that I supposedly obsessive-compulsive behaviors and that that's "bad", "pathological". That's why the whole psychiatry things and the diagnosis itself has been extremely misleading and toxic for me. 

 

My traumatic circumstances changed, in that sense, my trauma was over, but my trauma remained unprocessed so my traumatic emotions and feelings remained. That's why is so confusing and distressing. No one helped me with that.

 

I have been trapped in this postraumatic crisis for the past 8+ years, and the only way out of it was through it, that means experiencing all the unprocessed emotional trauma, all the pain and distress, confusion, sadness, guilt, shame, fear, terror, anxiety, (postraumatic) stress, agitation, etc, feeling everything. Without external emotional validation, support and understanding to do that, on your own, alone, it is 100% slower.

 

Writing all this helps me to reprocess everything, to go through the trauma.

 

Going and navigating through the trauma can be extremely difficult, confusing and distressing, we're not supposed to do it alone being social creatures, we can get lost in the postraumatic reactions, lost ourselves, lost touch with the present reality if we got overwhelmed by said postraumatic reactions and we get stuck in them for too long. I got lost, and I lost myself. Psychiatry is not your friend when going through this, because psychiatry is all about changing and suppressing individuals and their reactions, both pathologized by psychiatry. Psychiatry is not a tool to find purpose and meaning in these experiences, for healing, to mature, to develop as a person, to find yourself again, to get stronger, just to stop being disturbing and/or annoying to others and to suppress your painful, confusing, overwhelming and difficult inner experiences, which can give you a fake inner peace, when drugged, but don't resolve your traumas and inner tension, they stay forever until you face them, and certainly the psychiatric knowledge about how to overcome and deal with difficult, distressing, confusing, overwhelming and painful emotions is below poor, it's all about suppressing them as I said.

 

I never overcame/healed my complex trauma, I tried to when I was 19-20, to reprocess it, but because of the psychiatric intervention and brainwashing/indoctrination that healing process remained unfinished, frozen, I got stuck in it, and it wasn't until I stopped taking Sertraline when I resumed it, but being even more traumatized, confused and lost, so recovery was even more difficult than before. I tried to heal my trauma finding validation, support, meaning, the natural way, until I couldn't no more and Sertraline was forced to me. I tried to heal to during withdrawal but withdrawal follows its own process so it blocked and delayed my trauma recovery.

[Gonzo]

Withdrawal is its own thing, is a different process with many ups and downs, regressions, relapses, and its own timeline and recovery/healing process... In my case withdrawal was and is interconnected with my complex trauma, psychiatric trauma and pre-psychiatry/original trauma that psychiatry aggravated, so it delayed, complicated and blocked my trauma reprocessing/recovery/healing, as Sertraline and the psychiatric indoctrination/brainwashing did. My withdrawal also involved what I described as basically a retraumazation, when all my chemically suppressed and unprocessed traumatic emotions came back roaring.

 

I really just needed to rest, specially in a safe place, to relax, to release my stored postraumatic stress. But my family environment, psychiatric intervention and trauma, its brainwashing, indoctrination, and the Sertraline chemical deception, withdrawal and its retraumatizacion made it impossible for me, no matter how much I wanted to and tried to, I just couldn't, trapped with all these overwhelming neuro(post-)traumatic emotions, with all this fear, anxiety, terror, sadness, agitation, paranoia, anger, suspiciousness, confusion, shame, guilt, (postraumatic) stress, distrust... How to deal with all that? As I said, they weren't just withdrawal neuroemotions, but traumatic emotions as well (neurotraumatic emotions, I'd say), it's different. Well, no one did, no one understood, so no one really could help me.

 

We are supposed to go to therapy or to a psychiatrist when dealing with these issues, because of how our society rejects and pathologizes these distressing human inner experiences, but: ( A ) mainstream psychology and therapy is a copy paste of the toxic, meaningless and hopeless psychiatric psychopathological meaning framework, so it's all about suppressing "symptoms" through psychological means, i.e. "reeducating" the individual's mind (brainwashing), and ( B ) psychiatry is not even trauma informed, so it doesn't even acknowledge the trauma, it deliberately and systematically ignores it and pathologizes people reactions to traumatic experiences, circumstances and environments.

 

I got stuck trying to heal my trauma on my own, trapped with it, in a nightmarish psychological reality, being unable to find validation and understanding and to move foward in my life because of these reasons.

 

So what would have helped me? I think realizing that I was going through a temporary, normal, understandable and logical postraumatic crisis and acknowledging that the (post-)traumatic emotions and feelings (emotional flashbacks) that I felt were coming from the past, that they didn't describe the present reality, that it was related to unprocessed trauma, trauma coming from the past, and receiving external emotional validation, understanding and support for that, having people telling me exactly that, that would have made the whole experience much less distressing and would had speed up my recovery, I would had been able to become "functional" again and become stronger, instead of having people around acting as if there was something intrinsecally wrong with me, as if a "chronic disease"/"mental illnness" without "cure" had been uncovered by my "pathological" and "abnormal" reactions, behaviors, thoughts, feelings, etc, instead of being arrested and locked down as if I had commited a crime, as if I was a criminal or dangerous person, as if I what I was experiencing had no meaning, was illogical, incomprehensible, etc, as if I was insane, instead of being blamed, punished and shamed. I was weakened by the "treatments" I received, seriously harmed. I did my best to cope with that postraumatic crisis and people around me never realized how much of my soul I put in trying to control and/or overcome it, I gave everything I had.

[Gonzo]

The more you fear your inner experiences, specially overwhelmingly intense, confusing and difficult to understand postraumatic reactions, such as flashbacks, traumatic feelings and emotions, etc, the more distressed you are when they are triggered, and the more you try to control them, to suppress them, to run away from them, because the more scary they become, to the point that it feels like if you became possesed by an unknown evil force, imcomprehensible, unpredictable, diabolical, incontrolable, like if there was something wrong, bad, inside of you. This is a toxic metacognition, you become your own worst enemy, and this is exactly what toxic psychiatry and individualism does to people. Because of individualism, you, as an individual, feel and are seen as the first suspect, then toxic psychiatry, following the same toxic individualism, confirm that in fact you're the one to blame, you as a person and/or your brain, and that there is no cure for that so you are doomed and you get trapped in that toxic mindset, becoming your own nemesis. This is what happened to me.

 

So the more you try to resist to these traumatic emotions and feelings and postraumatic reactions/crises, because of fear, confusion or lack of understanding or external support, the more inner resistance you create, the more distressing they become and the more time they stay with you, you create inner and invisible psychological barriers for them and don't let them go, you block the natural trauma reprocessing and postraumatic stress release. This is in my opinion one big reason why people don't recover from many "mental illnesses" that then become "chronic" (as well as chronic and "treatment resistant" patients), to cure a disease is to get rid of that disease, to erradicate its symptoms, so in psychiatry that means that if for example you're "mentally ill" with deppression to cure you need to get rid of sadness among other "symptoms" of deppression. This means creating additional inner resistance for the sadness and not letting it go.

 

If you are stuck with a toxic metacognition like I did and still do at some level, recovery is simply impossible even if you quit the drugs.

 

If your inner experiences, even if difficult, overwhelmingly intense, confusing, have meaning and purpose, why would you want to get rid of them? For this reason, if society wouldn't be so individualistic, emotionally blind and stupid and so deeply traumatized and traumatizing, psychiatry, in case that it would have place in an "utopic" society like this, wouldn't try to suppress anyone feelings, reactions, emotions, etc.

 

Emotions come and go, but if the source of the emotion never changes (unprocessed trauma, a traumatic environment) the emotions stays longer. And psychiatry through itx toxic psychological and drug treatments makes them stay, it blocks them, because it's all about trying to suppress them, so what it says becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when it says that the "mental illnesses" have no cure: the trauma, traumatic environments, feelings and emotions all remain unchanged.

[Gonzo]

To start healing my pre-psychiatry and original traumas I first needed to identify my psychiatric trauma and psychiatric indoctrination/brainwashing that was making impossible for me to get into that healing process again, blocking my natural recovery.

 

Feelings and emotions come and go, they're temporary. (E-motion, energy in movement)

 

Psychiatry is increasingly pathologizing and medicatizating the human condition so more and more inner experiences, behaviors, thoughts, feelings, reactions, emotions, etc, are becoming "symptoms" of "abnormality" and "mental illnesses/disorders", metacognition is becoming toxic all around the world thanks for the psychiatric corruption, incompetence, ignorance, lack of critical thinking and malpractice and more and more people are getting unnecessarily drugged and later suffering its harming side and adverse effects and withdrawals.

 

Overcoming the individualism and psychiatric indoctrination/brainwashing is developing/recovering a healthy metacognition, a metacognition that doesn't involve self-obsessing, self-monitoring, self-suppressing, etc.

[checco]

Gonzo Writing a diary is therapeutic and you do a great job of doing it, as far as what you wrote I agree with everything I just wanted to say don't seek healing at any cost  also try to take a break and do something that gives you pleasure whatever helps to see things more clearly.

[Gonzo]

Yes, checco, the issue is that since I had that postraumatic crisis when I 19-20 and when my withdrawal happened and even before it happened, I'd say even when I was drugged but much less than during withdrawal, I couldn't find pleasure in things and relax, I still can't, because when I enjoy something and relax I feel guilty and ashamed and I become hypervigilant, I can't lower down my guard. This is because of these traumatic feelings and emotions and postraumatic reactions that I never overcame, they overwhelm me, so I mostly just try engage in "dysfunctional" coping strategies. The way out of this mess is closer now though.

 

I tried to desperately escape from the nightmarish reality of my postraumatic reactions, feelings and emotions, since I was 19-20, when I had that postraumatic crisis maybe even earlier, but when my withdrawal happened and brought back my frozen postraumatic crisis, after the Sertraline fake break, I tried to escape from my postraumatic reactions and nightmarish reality again, desperately, not accepting them and not acknowledging their transient nature, rejecting all that pain and distress. And for that reason I ended up trapped in that postraumatic nightmarish reality, because of my inner resistance, I ended up being stuck with my trauma, with my postraumatic reactions and feelings, even if my circumstances had changed, and unable to move foward with my life and to develop further as a person.