Gonzo: Sertraline 50mg chaos and withdrawal

[Gonzo]

It's becoming more clear to me that when I took Sertraline I experienced a fake reality, fake emotions, and that my indentity/personality was disordered because of the drug, abnormal, that I was disconnected, unable to adjust to reality, to satisfy my real needs and that I was not myself.

 

I always have been an emotionally intense person, in fact, I always had difficulties understanding and managing my emotional intensity and emotions overall, so when I got into psychiatry all that started being pathologized, my identity, my intensity, got pathologized, I started to develop the toxic metacognition I talked about before, so I started becoming my own nemesis, and I started seeing my own emotions and emotional intensity as something bad and dangerous that I needed to suppress, to get rid of, I started self-monitoring and self-suppressing.

[checco]

1 hour ago, Gonzo said:

Ma ora la via d’uscita da questo pasticcio è più vicina.

This is very encouraging.

[Gonzo]

Yeah @checco, my mind is definitely in a better place compared to a year or two or three ago. I still have many ups and downs and engage a lot in "dysfuntional" coping strategies, sign that my emotions are still very overwhelming, but the amount of knowledge and understanding that I have now regarding my inner experiences, trauma and everything else that I've been talking about is next level. As I said in my previous posts, it has been a very, very complicated meaning-making process, because the kind of withdrawals we experienced do not happen, following the psychiatric official stance, so, if it these experiences don't exist, what the hell have we been experiencing? Not only that, when everything is mixed up with trauma, and you have spent too much time in the mental health system/industry (which is not trauma informed at all but 100% into the neurological reductionism and toxic and nihilistic biomedical model of psychiatry) to the point of almost if not fully becoming institucionalized, receiving diagnoses that don't acknowledge trauma, or traumatic environments, or just traumatic, painful or difficult emotions and feelings in a healthy way, when you're on your own to do all this and discover and accept the ugly truth, lacking people's emotional validation and understanding, support, recovering is greatly delayed or even blocked, which doesn't mean that is impossible, just that it becomes very, very difficult.

 

I need to stop resisting my inner experiences and start seeing them as transient events happening inside of me, something that goes against everything I've been doing by myself and trained to do by psychiatry, its indoctrination/brainwashing and my psychiatric trauma. This is fundamental to purge my intoxicated metacogntion, that doesn't allow me to relax, to recover, to rest, to develop as a person, etc. When your metacognition get intoxicated by ideas and beliefs like these, you are gonna have a bad time with your own company, being yourself, feeling your own feelings and emotions, perceptions, etc, you are at war with yourself, you stop trusting yourself, you loose self-confidence.

 

I just needed some validation for my traumatic feelings, when I was 19-20 and I had that postraumatic crisis, someone to tell me that they were normal, logical and transient, that everything was okay, that made me feel safe, understood, so I could let those emotions them go. It was a crisis and crises are transient, temporary. Instead the mental health system/industry, psychiatry, tells you stupid ****, label you, pathologize you, so the feelings get stuck, you get trapped with them, they never go away, instead of being transient as they're supposed to be and naturally are they become chronic, and your postraumatic become chronic as well, so as a consequence you become "mentally ill" forever, because of the oppression and alienating bullsh*t that they tell and the drugs they give that suppress those feelings, emotions and reactions. They know nothing about how to deal with difficult and painful emotions, the only thing they know about is how to suppress them, they really are experts in that, in suppressing individuals and their reactions and in "discovering" individual "deficiencies" and "abnormalities".

[checco]

Gonzo What you wrote I could have written and so similar to my situation they recognize me in the ups and downs in the strong emotions that resurface.  

[Gonzo]

Difficult and painful emotions tell us messages, sometimes they come from the past, from unprocessed traumas, if they're postraumatic reactions (traumatic feelings and emotions), maybe traumas that we don't even know about or that we totally forgot about, that's why they can be so overwhelmingly intense, confusing, distressing and powerful, they can hijack our lives. If we listened to those emotions, we would see that the reality we experienced or/and we are currently experiencing is really ugly, and accepting that can be very ***** up, very painful and hard as well, it could change our whole perceptions.

 

I had more or less inner stability in my life before that psychiatric intervention and the madness that followed it, it all went away it. The postraumatic crisis that I experienced would have been just a crisis and I would had overcame if I had had the external emotional validation and support that I needed. I lost all my inner stability because of that psychiatric intervention, Sertraline and its withdrawal and retraumatization, the psychiatric indoctrination/brainwashing and the toxic metacognition that I developed as a result.

 

To be honest, now that I remember, Sertraline really gave me stability, it's just that it was artificial and I didn't know it was artificial, fake, so when I stopped the pills my postraumatic reactions and feelings surprised and overwhelmed me.

 

@checcoyou're right about the rumination issue, I spend a lot of time thinking about my past, dwelling in it, I think it's because of these traumatic emotions, because I don't accept them and I try to control them, so they never go away and the rumination keeps on and on. Let's see how I end this week, overall I think I made good progress.

[Gonzo]

I think my biggest fear for the past 8 years have been reexperiencing the postraumatic crisis I went through when I was 19-20 and being arrested and locked down, drugged against my will, oppressed, alienated... So that fear is mostly my psychiatric trauma, I was just unaware of its existence until I started sorting out my emotions and realizing what really had happened to me after I stopped Sertraline.

 

We're supposed to feel our feelings, they come, they stay, we listen to them, we receive their messages no matter if they come from the present or the past, and then, after they achieved their objective they go away, they disappear, they're transient, temporary experiences. If we try to suppress them, to resist them, or run away from them, they become stronger, more intense, more overwhelming, more resistant, they scream louder to be heard, they persist.

 

Emotions and feelings are messengers, they give info, from reality, if you ignore or reject them you reject and ignore reality and they become louder.

 

So that's what I did 8 years ago, start listening to my emotions, to find the truth.

[Gonzo]

I'm just remembering when I was locked down 7 years ago, trying to desperately find validation, telling my story even to the staff there, not just to my psychiatrist but to multiple people, and to the family members that visited me too, I tried so hard to keep my story coherently and ordered, being so overwhelmed by my postraumatic crisis and reactions, it was such a mental effort the one I did in order to tell my story in a coherent way, trying to prevent be labelled with something serious like a psychotic disorder or something even worse, the effort was so intense to the point I started stuttering for the first time in my life as an adult. I was mentally and emotionally depleted. Truth is I was going to be labelled, pathologized and drugged with something one way or another, because, first of all, I had already been morally judged as defective, "dysfunctional", "abnormal", just because I was there, and second, they need a psychiatric label to justify my stay there, to justify their "treatments" and to let me go, they needed to label me to do their job. I think I was lucky that I was labelled "just" with "OCD" and not with something worse, or maybe just my effort really paid off. I tried until the very end to overcome that postraumatic crisis the natural way, with external emotional validation and support, and for that reason even when I was locked down I tried to do that, rejecting my individualistic mindset and defences, to be able to connect with others, to receive that validation that I desperately needed to heal my traumas and be "functional" again, "normal". I thought that if I was "perfect", if I told my story in a "perfect" way I was gonna be understood and validated and not labelled as crazy, oppressed and alienated. I was just emotionally overwhelmed, desperate and naïve, and I was psychologically destroyed, crushed by the cold and heartless mental health system/industry, even if I didn't realize because I was drugged, deeply traumatized and dissociated. I started taking Sertraline there, while the traumatization was happening in real time, and I chemically disconnected (my real emotions, where the real info is, being chemically suppressed) from all that that happened to me at that horrible place for the next 3+ years, until I finally stopped taking the pills and the truth slaped hit me in the face with the force of a heavyweight world champion puncher, it knocked me out. It's so twisted.

 

I also stopped my life to heal my trauma once for all when I was 19, but when I did and I stopped being "functional" all my unprocessed traumatic shame and guilt really kicked in and overwhelmed me, reinforced later by the psychiatric intervention, abuse and trauma.

 

I never wanted to take Sertraline or any other kind of drug, psychiatric forced me to take it, in multiple ways.

 

People manage to be functional and deeply traumatized at the same time taking psychiatric drugs or other kind of drugs for suppressing or altering their brain parts related to the emotional pain and suffering, that's how people manage to survive and keep working in a ***** up oppresive and alienating society like this, and I never wanted to be one of those people, I just was so brainwashed, indoctrinated and traumatized by the mental health system/industry, institutionalized even.

 

It's all very traumatic, I left the mental health system/industry at the end of 2022, but the consequences persist more than a year later, I have been institutionalized.

[Gonzo]

Psychiatry built psychological and chemical invisible barriers inside of me that prevented me from facing my traumas, healing them and recovering, it made me fear and obssesively to monitor, trying to control and suppress my feelings, emotions, thoughts, reactions and "dysfuntional" coping strategies, it put me in a mental prison.

 

Psychiatry turns the reactions to problems (the original and true problems, like trauma and traumatic, oppresive and alienating relational environments, etc) into new, false and unnecessary problems (diseases, disorders, conditions), so while you're busy fighting against your own reactions, self-absorbed and self-suppressing, the original and true problems remain the same, unchanged and never addressed, and so their reactions last forever.

 

There were good and logical reasons for each and every one of my behaviors, thoughts, feelings, emotions and reactions but I forgot all of them, because of psychiatry, and it made me impossible to recover them, until now, even if very slowly.

[Gonzo]

8 years ago I realized that everyone was different in their own way, "neurodivergent", that the problem is that society (and the culture) is oppressive, alienating, intolerant, individualistic, that the problem is incompatibility with the relational environment, that was why I suffered and felt "like that" and had had that postraumatic crisis, and the further towards the extremes of the Gauss bell of "neurodivergence", the greater the problems of incompatibility with the relational environment, the harder to FIT and to be "normal", the more intense the suffering, the bigger the oppression, alienation, pathologization, the worse the RELATIONAL TRAUMA and the more overwhelming the reactions to such relational environment (such as obsessive-compulsive behaviors, "dysfuntional" coping behaviors, addictions, self-isolation, etc), and the solution lies in change the environment and individual mindset and metacognition. Metacognition is the individual mindset. Psychiatry made me obsess over my post-traumatic reactions and ignore my trauma and personal circumstances, INDOCTRINED me and BRAINWASHED me. My reactions are not the problem. It's not all in my head and not everything is my fault, everything has a meaning, a purpose and an end, a LOGIC, and it's interconnected, but you only are able to see all that when adopting a perspective, mentality and meaning framework that is non-individualistic (just what psychiatry erased from my mind). In the hospital, locked down, 7 years ago, and during the year and a half that I was isolated before that, I gave everything I had trying to keep my pre-post-traumatic crisis reality alive and not get trapped in my post-traumatic reactions, to not get paralized and to be able to move foward in my life, to progress, to enjoy life a little, but at the end, psychiatry sabotaged everything I tried and needed to do and get stuck in my post-traumatic crisis nightmarish reality and reactions for the next 7 years of my life, drugged, suffering withdrawal, confused, deceived, overwhelmed, lost, I really got lost, I lost myself. Even when I got out of the hospital I still tried for the next 3 years to find the validation I needed to heal my trauma, but the more time I was drugged the more disconnected I was from my real emotions and needs and the more I forgot why I was doing what I was doing. In that hospital I was brutally oppressed, alienated, gaslighted, stigmatized, and infantilized. All this is the insane psychiatric trauma.

[Gonzo]

If you listen to your emotions you go crazy because they tell you the ******* and ugly truth and then you see clear as day how bad everything is, and the others see you and treat you like a crazy person because you see what they can't see, living ignorantly and/or in denial, they can't understand you and connect with you, even if you can understand them and connect with them, and what they achieve is that you never want to see anything again, not even try, hell, not even think about it.

 

That's what happened to me, I started listening to my emotions, trying to find the truth, and because that's what they tell, specially when they're painful, traumatic, difficult, I discovered how ***** up society is and that it's not the individual's fault, even if the individuals are the ones blamed and shamed for everything, I discovered that we need to change our mentality and metacognition, our perspective, so society doesn't crush us psychologically, and to (be able to) change the relational environment, where the real problem is located. But I was victimized for doing all this and I became terrified of ever trying again.

 

I think I already posted it but it's worth doing it again:

 

 

"If you can't fix what is broken you'll go insane". Spot on.

 

[Gonzo]

So at the end people are oppressed, alienated, gaslighted, pathologized, stigmatized, based on how well they socially fit in their relational environments, based on how "normal" or "abnormal" they are ane behave. It's not about them, it doesn't matter who they are, what they do, what's their identity, the issues in the relational environment, culture and society, that is oppressive, alienating, individualistic, etc.

[Gonzo]

My post-traumatic crisis made me renounce my protective individualism and seek validation in the wrong people and in impossible, sterile places, out of DESPAIR, EMOTIONALLY and MENTALLY OVERWHELMED by my EMOTIONS and POST-TRAUMATIC REACTIONS and CONFUSED, trying to heal my TRAUMA, to get out of that crisis and become "FUNCTIONAL" again, to SURVIVE, with the opposite result, being invalidated, stigmatized, abused, oppressed, alienated, infantilized, ridiculed, etc., losing my dignity in the process, my personal integrity, and being even more TRAUMATIZED, REVICTIMIZED. I studied and listened to my emotions 8 years ago, and they led me to the ugly truth. At 19-20 years old I just I tried to do is reconnect, with myself, with reality, to overcome the dissociation, TRAUMA and INDIVIDUALISM, and I did it by investigating and listening to my emotions, which led me to the truth, but psychiatry only made me DISSOCIATE still more by arresting me, locking me down and forcing me to taking drugs. Overcoming INDIVIDUALISM, DISSOCIATION and TRAUMA is overcoming GRIEF. Painful and difficult emotions tell the painful and difficult truth, no matter if the come from the present or the past, and sometimes we just don't want to hear it, to feel the feelings, so we try to suppress them, to ignore them or to run away from them. When I was 19-20 I was very disconnected because I had a lot of unprocessed trauma among other reasons and I just wanted to feel better, to improve my life, so I needed to reconnect.

 

I need to trust and listen to my difficult and painful emotions and feelings again, just what psychiatry prevented me from doing, it made me afraid of my own inner experiences, of myself.

 

[Gonzo]

The past 3+ years, since my withdrawal started, it's like I woke up from a psychological coma or hibernation, but the reality was so overwhelming that I dissociated again, so I disconnected once more. It's so painful.

[Gonzo]

I have good news.

 

My inner experiences (feelings, thoughts, emotions, reactions, etc) are becoming less distressing and overwhelming and more manageable lately, which I see as a sign of recovery, because I'm purging my intoxicated metacogntion, they don't last as much time.

 

I try to tell to myself that my emotions and feelings make sense, that they are normal, meaningless, valuable and logical and that they're transient experiences, temporary, that they will go away, that they may come from the past or from the present but no matter what they're natural, I listen to them, to their messages.

 

It seems to work so I can relax a bit.

 

The first half to heal from my traumatic experiences in the mental health system/industry is getting out of it, the other half is purging my intoxicated metacogntion, overcoming all the psychiatric indoctrination/brainwashing.

[Gonzo]

This insanity in my life is coming to an end.

 

I've been trying so hard to find closure for my trauma, since I was 19, and for the past 3 years, too hard I'd say, you can't force others to give you validation, to understand you, specially in an deeply individualistic society and culture, and I didn't trust people and always tried to control everything, to not depend on others, to do everything on my own, maybe that's one of the reasons why I got so deeply into psychiatry, specially since January 2021.

 

The retraumatizing withdrawal, Sertraline and psychiatry made me lose years of progress in my life and regress deeply in every way, to go backwards.

[Gonzo]

I still self-gaslight myself and try to suppress myself, my emotions, feelings, reactions, thoughts, etc, it's what I was trained to do for years. But it's less intense now. So I can say I'm going in the right direction. I also have a mental clarity that I haven't had in years. I feel like I'm finally outsmarting my psychiatric indoctrination/brainwashing. I'm also remembering things from my pre-psychiatry life, for example, why I was so paranoid in 2015, just before I got into psychiatry bullsh*t, when I started listening to my feelings and emotions, investigating them and searching for answers, understanding, meaning and solutions for my emotional flashbacks/postraumatic reactions/crisis. I was very tense, I had a lot of inner tension, I couldn't relax, at all, specially around people, so I became very suspicious, paranoid, I became aware of all that, mainly because it was a problem when I commenced the academic year and I was in class with my classmates, I couldn't concentrate, pay attention to the lessons, be efective, productive, to study, I was very hypervigilant. I also realized that I was loosing my personality/identity, that it was being hijacked by these overwhelming (traumatic) emotions, I identified them as coming from my past traumas, tho, which was a good thing. I became aware of the need to calm myself, to relax, to rest, to recover, to be able to "function" and progress in my life. These emotions were very confusing because I couldn't accept or really understand them, I hadn't accepted these feelings since I was 16 or so, so they had became very powerful, after so much time suppressing them, until they hijacked my life, 3 years later. I actually have a lot of reppressed anger, and a lot hate.

 

8 years ago I wanted to find my calling in life and make a living from it.

[Gonzo]

It really has been like being trapped in a living nightmare, I was trapped with his own trauma, drugged and brainwashed/indoctrinated, unable to face it, to even just identify it, to overcome and heal it.

 

We are indoctrinated to feel bad when we stop the activity, to shame ourselves as society shame us, when not being active, productive, functional, etc, we are not allowed to rest. This is the capitalistic indoctrination. That's one of the reasons why I couldn't just stop, reprocess my unprocessed trauma and rest when I was 19, even if I desperately needed it.

 

I really think I lost my identity, personality, personal values and beliefs when I took Sertraline and during my withdrawal retraumatizacion shock. I'm feeling pretty connected lately.

[Gonzo]

I'm remembering during that postraumatic crisis that I had when I was 19 years old and that resumed when I stopped the pills, it really felt as if my trauma was happening all over again, which of course was not possible because the traumatic circumstances were over. That's why it was so confusing and distressing and why those postraumatic emotions and feelings developed into a postraumatic crisis (and further into an existencial/meaning crisis). They also were very intense, overwhelming, they hijacked my mind and my life, because I had been fearing and suppressing them (psychologically) for years. I needed to someone to help me come back to the present reality. The only way I had out of that postraumatic crisis was through Sertraline, a psychiatric drug, because of psychiatry, because it was incredibly oppresive, invalidating, alienating, harmful, and it was just an artificial/synthetic break, not even real.

 

Something really bad happened when I stopped taking Sertraline, it was a retraumazation, no doubt about it, when my frozen postraumatic crisis resumed and I was not prepared at all for that. Started feeling again my postraumatic feelings and emotions and they were telling me a story I didn't want to hear about, that I was terrified of. All this happened during that traumatic "breakup". I took refuge in my "OCD" "diagnosis" I guess, desperate, confused, overwhelmed, destabilized, I was in despair, and lost. I just had no idea what was happening to me and how to deal with it. My mind went to a very ugly place, getting trapped there for years, disconnected from reality, absolutely overwhelmed, confused, unable to understand and (re)process anything. It was madness.

 

When I was 20 and hospitalized I put my heart and mind to the point of exhaustion trying to tell my experience, all those crazy intense and confusing postraumatic reactions, feelings and emotions (emotional flashbacks), they were real because I was definitely experiencing them, but they made no sense to me at that moment of my life and context, and they were driving my crazy, because I couldn't understand and accept them, why the hell was I feeling and suffering all that again in a moment when my life finally starting looking brighter? It was a very powerful postraumatic crisis that happened because of all my unprocessed trauma, and I just needed to have SOMEONE, just ONE SINGLE PERSON, to tell me "I see what you're going through, I understand you, you're not crazy, defective, insane, it's normal, logical, understandable, it makes sense, it's happening because it's a postraumatic reaction, it happens when the traumatic event ended and if the trauma remains unprocessed, so the mind and body tries to make sense of the traumatic event and experience and tries to heal, to find balance, meaning, etc, to release all the stored postraumatic stress, this is just a crisis and it won't last forever, it's temporary and those overwhelming feelings and emotions no matter how distressing and confusing they are they will go away if you don't resist to them, if you don't try to control them, suppress them or to run away from them, if you accept them, they're transient experiences, everything it's okay", or something like that, I needed desperately to be validated, to feel safe, connected, understood, supported, and to get out of that crisis the natural way, to overcome it, to heal my trauma and to be "functional" again, and NOT to be invalidated, gaslighted, oppressed, alienated, arrested, incarcelated, pathologized, stigmatized, drugged under coerccion, etc. That validation could have done wonders for me, I made a huge psychological effort to have it, to deserve it I'd say, even if I was being hijacked by my overwhelming postraumatic reactions, feelings and emotions and incarcelated. I tried until the very end to find it, I did everything I could, I told my story "perfectly" in the hope of receiving that validation but when I finished telling it to multiple people it was for nothing because the validation I desperately needed never came no matter how much effort I put. I even realized that it was related to past trauma, because I told my assigned psychiatrist in the hospital that I thought I had PTS"D", even if the bastard decided to just ignore me and suppress my reactions, thoughts, feelings and behaviors forcing me to take Sertraline and to stupid "therapeutic" activities locked down in that horrible place. I tried my best to go through all that, to cope with my overwhelming postraumatic experience, to make sense of it, to heal, whatever. I put my soul in it. But people around me failed to me. At the end, I was not only not helped to heal my trauma, but they severely aggravated it, adding more painful thick layers to it, and they made impossible for me to recover from my trauma, because of Sertraline, its retraumatizating withdrawal and the psychiatric indoctrination/brainwashing and trauma.

[Gonzo]

That postraumatic crisis was not wrong or bad, it was actually healthy and necessary, I needed to go through that experience to heal my unprocessed trauma and to find balance again in my life, meaning and purpose, to mature, to develop as a person, to move foward in my life, to eliminate psychological barriers. I think it actually happened because things were going better in my life so I calmed down a bit, I lowered down my guard and relaxed my inner and external psychological defences, and when I did years of suppressed an unprocessed trauma got released, and it overwhelmed me, hijacked my mind and my life, I didn't know how to react to it, what to do, etc, I couldn't understand, I was very confused and overwhelmed. They were postraumatic reactions, feelings and emotions, and they happen after the traumatic event has happened, they were logical, understandable and meaningful, but also very difficult, distressing, confusing and painful experiences and we are not supposed to go through them alone because we can loose ourselves in them and going insane. We are also not supposed to interrupt those experiences, through drugs or whatever, because if we do so they can last forever, frozen, unresolved. I definitely got trapped in that postraumatic crisis because of toxic psychiatry.

 

When I was 19 I couldn't be efective, productive, functional, and study, because I was overwhelmed by my postraumatic feelings and emotions, that developed into a postraumatic crisis, and I realized that.

 

I was so desperate for validation, so overwhelmed by my postraumatic feelings and emotions, that I totally rejected, abandoned or neglected the individualism that helped me to survive in this world and to not be revictimized, and I tried to find that validation in people that didn't understood me or didn't give a **** about me, in sterile places, etc, I became careless and stupid, immersed in that postraumatic crisis.

 

I've been trying to remember what happened to me for the past 8 years to make sense of everything, I did that already, and it was extremely difficult, exhausting and painful, now I need to remember the good things too that happened in my whole life, to recover my lost true self.

[Gonzo]

At the hospital I made a final, desperate and huge psychological effort to receive validation, just for nothing. It was like a final push, I gave everything I had left after one year and half resisting my postraumatic reactions, feelings and emotions, immersed in that postraumatic crisis, trying to keep my sanity, but I was drugged, labelled, stigmatized, oppressed, alienated, gaslighted, humiliated, pathologized, etc, anyway, it didn't matter what I did. I thought I could get help there, to overcome my crisis, that's why I tried so hard to tell my story in such a way that I thought was gonna help me to be validated and to overcome that crisis, to heal, and be "functional" again, I was so naïve and ignorant. That postraumatic crisis was actually about trauma reprocessing and a healing process and psychiatry stunted it for years.

[Gonzo]

I think I've been suppressing my emotions for too long, even before psychiatry. Postraumatic emotions. I never could understand them. They always confused me, distressed me, overwhelmed me, they always were very intense emotions. I never could understand that they appear after the postraumatic event ended, so I tried to suppress them, to control them, to run away fron them, instead of letting them be, stay and flow, so they became stronger and stronger, and by the time I was 19-20 they hijacked my mind and my life, and I tried my best to get out of that mental and emotional state, resisting and desperately trying to find validation, understanding and support of what I was experiencing, without success because of psychiatry. Sertraline freezed all those overwhelming postraumatic emotions, feelings and reactions, they were now not only psychologically suppressed but chemically as well, this happened because of medical malpractice.

[Gonzo]

The need and search for validation is a weakness in a deeply individualistic, traumatized, traumatizing and disconnected, dissociated, oppressive and alienating society, because feeling your emotions and feelings is reconnecting with reality and with yourself. At the same time you need others to do reality checking, especially during overwhelming personal and meaning/existential crisises as I suffered, to return to "normality", to a state of rest, to feel safe, to reconnect, to feel safe, to return to the "shared reality" with others. 8 years ago I needed help for a reality check, immersed in my post-traumatic crisis, overwhelmed and confused by my post-traumatic emotions and feelings, and I tried until the very end in the hospital, until psychological exhaustion, until I finished telling my story ("perfectly") in hopes of finding validation, to get out of that overwhelming mental state, to overcome it, to come back to the present time "reality", to the "shared reality", I needed people to tell me that even if I was feeling all that everything was normal and okay and that it was not going to last forever, that it was a temporary experience, that there was nothing wrong with me, that it was just a crisis, and then, at my lowest moment, of greatest vulnerability and completely exhausted, depleted, physically (after not eating well for a year and half) and psychologically (after resisting those emotions and feelings and emotional flashbacks for that same time), with the least defenses, when I most needed the help, support, validation and understanding, is when I was brutally pathologized, labelled, blamed, invalidated, stigmatized, oppressed and alienated, that was their "reality check", the bastards, and I got trapped in that postraumatic crisis for the next 7 years, they destroyed my psyche. We need to realize that "normal" and "functional"≠healthy. My personal development has been stunted because all of this, I couldn't grow. When I was taking Sertraline I was disconnected from my real emotions and needs, chemically deceived, living in a fake reality, and when I stopped taking it my natural and real emotions came back and started telling my a totally different story that I couldn't comprehend nor accept, their description of reality was overwhelming. Now I can understand that my natural, difficult, painful, traumatic and real emotions told me and tell me the real story, what really happened to me and happen, unaltered emotions tell the truth, they describe the true reality.

[Gonzo]

I think the only closure I'm going to have  for what happened to me is accepting it even if it's painful and letting my emotions come and go as they need without resisting or clinging to them, because no one in the mental health system/industry is going to apologize for what they did to me and validate my experience, that is not gonna happen, and is unforgiveable anyway.

 

Sadly, all this happened because my trauma was ignored by everyone and my postraumatic reactions pathologized by the people that were supposed to help me.

 

My feelings have been screaming me the painful truth since I stopped taking Sertraline, but it was too terrifying and I didn't want to listen to them, it was a terrifying reality and I didn't want to see it, I was in denial, I rejected it, the horrible things that happened to me.

 

Also, the reality that me true emotions and feelings have been telling me since I stopped taking Sertraline didn't fit with the (fake) reality I had been experiencing when I took it, they didn't match, it was extremely confusing, it didn't make sense, and I guess I preferred to believe and think that my Sertraline (fake) reality was the real one because it was more confortable to me, less distressing and painful, and I tried to keep my Sertraline (fake) reality alive as long as I could clinging to it, I rejected the true reality until my Sertraline (fake) reality finally collapsed in 2022-2023, after 2 years resisting. Trauma is terror basically, and I was terrifying because I was feeling my trauma again but I couldn't make sane of anything.

 

Of course I didn't know the reality I experienced when taking Sertraline was fake, that my emotions and feeling were synthetic and not real, they they were chemically disordered and my real ones chemically suppressed, I didn't know I was being deceived by the drug, that is the medical spellbinding, and no one told me anything about all this either.

 

I also remember 8 years ago, when I was immersed in that postraumatic crisis, I was feeling all those unprocessed postraumatic emotions and they didn't match with my reality, but they were real too and they were describing a very different, painful and overwhelming reality and I asked to myself which reality is the real one then? My postraumatic crisis reality felt so real.

 

That's why I needed people to help me do a reality check, to validate my postraumatic experience but to help me come back to the present as well.

[Gonzo]

8 years ago I needed help to not get trapped in my postraumatic crisis nightmarish reality, postraumatic reactions and emotional flashbacks, to recover my mind and my life. I was suffering greatly. That help never arrived, just the opposite, so I got trapped with my trauma, in my postraumatic crisis and reactions. That mismatch between the nightmarish reality that my postraumatic crisis described me and my present reality was insane, it almost drove me insane, because my postraumatic crisis nightmarish reality FELT real, even if it didn't match with my present reality, that was what was making me crazy, why the hell was I feeling "like that" again and was suffering the same pain if my traumatic circumstances had ended, if my life had changed and my trauma was now in the past? My present reality in fact looked promising for the first time in many years, it looked brighter. The contrast was crazy-making, it didn't make sense to me, I was feeling two mismatched realities at the same time, one was telling me good things were happening and that I was worthy, the other, through the overwhelming messages of my postraumatic feelings, was telling me that I was in total danger and a wortheless person and a total mess, and the second one was winning and hijacking my mind and my life. That's why I needed help to reality check, validation, to get out of that postraumatic crisis, to recover myself and my life. No one understood me, what I was going through, how overwhelming, confusing and distressing it was, no one validated my experience, no matter how hard and perfectly I tried to explain it to others, to keep my sanity, trapped between those two opposite realities. And psychiatry made the nightmarish reality of my postraumatic crisis be the dominant one for the next 7 years, until now. My postraumatic feelings and emotions, coming from my traumatic past and unprocessed trauma, they were not wrong or bad, I just needed to reprocess all that, to face it and to heal. It was the mismatched realities that I was feeling at once, they were driving me insane, the confusion and emotional intensity.

[Gonzo]

It all made sense, but it didn't to me back then.

 

Because my postraumatic crisis nightmarish reality won, because of the psychiatric intervention, I haven't been able to relax since then, feeling chronically in danger.

 

I tried my best to understand what was happening to me, to control that experience, to overcome it, and I did it alone, I was not wrong in wanting to do it all by myself, because when I tried to find help I was oppressed, gaslighted, pathologized, alienated, invalidated, stigmatized, etc. I tried to all this even after the hospitalization, for years, without success, because I was drugged and disconnected or overwhelmed by my withdrawal.

 

What I now can see and understand is that both realities were right at the same time even if they didn't fit and were opposite, mismatched realities, it was like the Schrödinger's cat, a paradox, illogical but logical, impossible but possible.

[Gonzo]

I have been trying to find validation to recover from this postraumatic crisis and get out of it nightmarish reality for the past 8 years.

 

My OC reactions and behaviors were only to try to control my post-traumatic crisis and keep myself sane, anchored to the present, to reality, and the less the validation the stronger they became and become, because they're coping behaviors.

 

I isolated myself to control my postraumatic crisis and reactions, but the more I isolated and the more I tried to control them the stronger they became and they finally hijacked my life and my mind, until I made that final effort in the psychiatric ward, to find validation, to the point of exhaustion.

[Gonzo]

I ended up believing the messages of my post-traumatic emotions and feelings, and those of psychiatry, and I started becoming my own worst enemy, I started being at war with myself.

[Gonzo]

I couldn't accept, adjust and adapt to reality while I was immersed in that postraumatic crisis, overwhelmed, taking Sertraline and and disconnected and during withdrawal, confused. Let's see what happens from now on. I have 10000% more mental clarity now.

 

I ran away as long as I could from my (post-)traumatic reality, for years, that was what I lived for in many ways, to run away from that nightmarish reality, to protect myself from it.

[Gonzo]

I think overall things are definitely better in my mind, there much less inner chaos, but I still have like a memory whole about the last 7 years of my life, specially between my psychiatric intervention in 2017 and late 2019.

 

I've been afraid for the last 8 years of recovering the control of my life because of what happened to me the last time I tried.

[Gonzo]

8 years ago I wanted to live a life free of TRAUMA, GUILT and SHAME, to live FULLY, so I started listening to my emotions, following them, researching them, trying to understand them, to uncover their meaning, and they guided me to the truth. I asked to myself why I feel "this way"? What's the meaning of all this? Why I'm suffering those painful emotions all over again even if my traumatic circumstances ended had changed? I was trying to find out who I really was, searching for my own worth, for my personal value, but I was mostly looking for closure, for my trauma, to live a better life, and I found the truth I was looking for, the meaning, but because of psychiatry I was never able to find closure, as any normal personal does I needed and need other's validation to find closure for the trauma, I needed help, because to heal you need 50% of your own personal work and 50% of external help and validation, so because of psychiatry and the psychiatric trauma and indoctrination I was never able to find that closure and validation and I got stuck in that healing process for the next 7 years. It all started with those overwhelmingly intense postraumatic reactions, feelings and emotions, that I couldn't understand, accept, tolerate, I couldn't find their meaning, they were illogical in my mind, I was very confused by them, so because all that it developed into a postraumatic crisis and an existencial/meaning crisis that I managed the best I could on my own, knowing or feeling that no one was going to understand what I was experiencing and going through, but that I was going to be invalidated, stigmatized, oppressed, alienated, gaslighted, stigmatized, etc, in that's exactly what happened at the end when my postraumatic crisis hijacked my life and mind and I had no other option than to abandon my individualism in to be able to search for others validation, understanding and support to overcome it, to heal my trauma, recover and be "functional" again. What I didn't know back then is that I was going to be drugged as well. I was in a dead end, I was very vulnerable, because of the amount of unprocessed and suppressed trauma that I had, in this oppressive, alienating, traumatizing, traumatized and individualistic society and culture.

[Gonzo]

... I was trying to be fully functional, what you need to do to have a good live in this capitalistic society.

 

And I wanted to feel safe, secure.

 

But when I disconnected from my trauma, because of psychiatry, everything lost its meaning, purpose and stopped making sense.

 

After the involuntary hospitalization for years I desperately looked for external emotional validation and other's understanding to find closure and finish my trauma healing process, because I was still overwhelmed by my postraumatic reactions, without success for the most part, being chemically disconnected and not knowing it. I felt like it was what I needed to do, but when the withdrawal started, I had that traumatic breakup and I became indoctrinated and brainwashed by psychiatry, believing in my "OCD" "diagnosis", it became very difficult to finish my healing process and recover, if not impossible.

 

I see it clearly now: my OC behaviors were a direct reaction to my TRAUMA and post-traumatic crisis and they will continue to exist as long as I remain immersed in that postraumatic crisis, experiencing and suffering unprocessed trauma, unaddressed, etc. So they're meaningful, useful and logical, understandable, just the opposite of what psychiatry says, but that doesn't mean that they're not problematic in some cases/circumstances, as it happens with other "dysfuntional" coping strategies and defense mechanisms. OC behaviors are just a coping mechanism, "dysfunctional", and a defense mechanism, as many others that exist and that I had. And without acknowledging the trauma, postraumatic stress, emotions, feelings and postraumatic crises, without the context, nothing makes sense.

 

I obsessed with the "why" of these postraumatic reactions and overwhelming traumatic feelings and emotions twice: when I was 19-20 and when I was 24.

 

I gave everything I had 8 years ago to heal my trauma, to overcome it, to free myself of its never ending emotional suffering and dominance, just to be completely ignored and brutally abused by psychiatry.

 

No one understood the effort I made to heal my trauma for a year and half, physically and mentally, it exhausted me.

[Gonzo]

I gave everything I had when I was 19 to heal my trauma, everything, physically and mentally. I faced my demons. And it exhausted me. But at the end psychiatry sabotaged me, everything I tried ro achieve and needed to do, and destroyed my psyche, and it locked me with those same demons, with my trauma, for years, at the same time that it made those demons invisible for me when they previously were crystal clear for me. It's so ******* twisted, terrible.

 

Sertraline made it impossible and unnecessary for me to face my trauma, until I stopped taking it and it came back suddenly and roaring.

 

Without making sense of what happened to me finding peace is impossible. I guess that's why now I feel more stable and at peace, because I recovered most of my lost meaning.

 

With Sertraline I didn't value time, at all, now, years after I stopped taking it, now that I'm able to reprocess most of what happened to me and I mostly recovered meaning I'm realizing how much value time has.

[Gonzo]

8 years ago I resisted my overwhelming postraumatic emotions and feelings, because of how much internalized oppression and unprocessed trauma I had, so much traumatic shame and guilt, and that created a hellish mental and emotional chaos in my mind that devastated my life and myself. Also, psychiatry created even more inner resistance when it brutally oppressed me, pathologized me, gaslighted me, shamed and blamed me and deeply traumatized me, severely aggravating all those issues, at the same time it drugged me and that created a chemical barrier that further isolated me with my already complex trauma, chemically deceiving and suppressing me. For all this I could never recover and find peace.

[Gonzo]

My postraumatic feelings and emotions were dominated by an overwhelming shame and guilt that were screaming me "there is something wrong with you, abnormal, bad", and because they were so intense, screamed so loud and were making me feel so bad I started believing them. Obviously I didn't to suffer all those painful emotions and feelings, to feel so bad, so I asked myself "why?", why all those overwhelmingly intense and painful emotions and feelings, what was their reason, their logic, their cause, I didn't want to feel them, I didn't want to suffer them, I wanted to understand them, to understand myself, what was happening to me, to find answers, meaning and solutions for that suffering. Then I got into the Internet and I started doing all that, searching, getting into mainstream psychology and by extension into psychiatry (because mainstream psychology is a copypaste of psychiatry), and I started learning about all those bullsh*t disorders, illnesses, getting indoctrinated, even if I tried to be careful and no not think that I found the ultimate truth and reason behind everything, behind all my suffering. I started getting indoctrinated because I thought that (mainstream) psychology was science, that it was serious, and because of that I took it seriously. I was scammed and going through the wrong path, believing that all that pseudoscientific, scientificism bullsh*t was real and valid scientific knowledge. This happens and happened to millions worldwide.

 

 

That's when I started going downhill for real. That postraumatic crisis developed into an existencial, meaning and identity crisis, that I coped with the best I knew and could, totally immersed in it and overwhelmed by what I was experiencing. Then my psychiatric intervention happened and my postraumatic crisis and trauma were totally ignored, and my postraumatic reactions, behaviors, thoughts, feelings, emotions and identity /belief system/meaning framework pathologized, so for the next 7 years, until now, nothing made sense, because without acknowledging my postraumatic crisis and trauma, what I went through, nothing could make sense, it was impossible. That's what psychiatry does, pure gaslighting, oppression, indoctrination, alienation, social control, etc.

[Gonzo]

This what I'm doing here and I've been doing since I got into antipsychiatry in late 2022 and into the withdrawal community in mid 2023 is just about fixing the psychological mess and trauma that psychiatry caused to me.

[Gonzo]

My whole thread here is about overcoming and healing my original trauma, the psychiatric trauma and the psychiatric brainwashing and indoctrinating, all the psychological intoxication that was laying behind the Sertraline chemical deception. And about finding meaning again in my life.

 

8 years ago I wanted to know the source of my suffering, to understanding it, and how to resolve it.

 

This is also a reprocessing of all my unprocessed trauma and a readjusting to a reality that I wasn't allowed to adjust and adapt.