Well, my last day of ketamine was Friday of last week. I think I underestimated how hard it was going to be after it was all over. I did sign up for the Edinburg Center in large part to be a replacement support, and they have indeed been supportive. Unfortunately, the problem is that for whatever reason, my brain responds to painful emotions by having flashbacks to times of other painful emotions. Right now, it’s mostly going back to physical abuse as a kid. I’ve written a bit about that here, but I’m going to blog the details because there’s nobody else that I can fully talk about this with and I need to get it out.
Trigger Warning
So, first of all, it started young. My mother said that the pastor of our church started “spanking” his kids before they’d left the labor & delivery unit. Mom is a pathological liar, but I notice a pattern that often when she talks about “other people” in her life, she’s talking about herself. Anyway, I can’t prove that I personally was beaten in my first days of life, but it certainly started happening before I was old enough to remember. It also happened very often; like several times a day. I only remember it being triggered by two things: either I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to do whatever I had done, or I had done something that had triggered a chain reaction and caused an unforseen reaction. It was never that I was doing something wrong and just hoped I wouldn’t be caught. I lived my life in a state of constant terror that I would be assaulted. One time, Mom mentioned that if I was doing something and I heard her coming, I would freeze until I could hear her walking away again, and then I would go back to whatever I was doing. The church enforced very strict social pressure that “spanking” had to be happening several times a day at least, so I suspect that the rules were intentionally confusing in order to create more opportunities to discipline. One time we were at the store and my mom saw this huge spatula. She bought it and was thrilled saying how we definitely wouldn’t be acting up now that she had a huge spatula to beat us with. Dad was totally out of control of his emotions and would fly into a seething rage. The goal was to inflict as much pain and terror as possible without there being police involvement. So I was instructed not to scream or the neighbors would hear and the social workers would take us away. I tried not to scream, but at some point my body just did it on its own. Even still, Dad took it as defiance and just beat me that much harder. He would sieze me, rip off my clothes, throw me on the ground, and just start whaling on me until he’d gotten his anger out, which usually took quite some time. I remember that my cry would change during the process. At first I would be trying to hold my breath or do whatever it took for my body not to make a sound. Then I would be shrieking in terror, before finally the sound changed to exhausted sobs of utter defeat. The shrieks were more high-pitched, and the sobs were low and drawn-out. And this happened constantly, with little to no positive interactions with adults in between. This is why my parents had to homeschool and avoid taking us to the doctor.
But, for whatever reason, that’s not specifically what the flashbacks mostly center around. Problem is, this happened so often that when my dad started raging, I knew what was coming and panicked. In order for him to be able to beat me, first he had to subdue me. Usually this involved grabbing me by my upper arms. Then he would either press me down against the brown carpet, or in a sitting position back against the wall. So I always feel pain in my upper arms, and it feels like I’m either on my back being pressed against the ground, or sitting on the floor being pressed backward against the wall. I’m painfully soft spoken and never raise my voice, but my body feels like it’s screaming from the deepest parts of my soul. It’s hard to get up and move around and do things, because my brain thinks my body is being pinned down. I feel the pain mostly in my upper arms, but also between my shoulder blades and in my eyes. My eyebrows are constantly raised and my eyes feel like they’re bulging out more than they should be. And down through my sternum is this constant, profound desire to scream.
Scream?
So, I’ve been looking into whether screaming actually would give me some relief. I found this YouTube video on the subject:
Driven 2 Thrive Broadcast. (2025, June 27). Yell Your Stress Away The Power of Primal Scream Therapy [YouTube video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/shorts/43gGahuLiLM
The only problem is that I really, really don’t want the cops called on me. So that eliminates the possibility of screaming in my apartment. I thought about going out into the woods, but just my luck somebody would still hear me and think I was being murdered. The only option I’ve really found that seems feasible would be paying to go to a “rage room.” However I’m more terrified than angry, and have no desire to break anything. One time, I did go to a rage room, broke exactly one object, then spent the rest of the time sitting on the bench in my jumpsuit and crying. However, I found an option where I think you don’t have to pay for breakable objects:
https://letzrage.com/ragenow/ola/services/byos
So, it’s an option. I’d have to call ahead and ask if you’re allowed to scream without anyone “checking on you.” The big drawback (other than the $35 price tag) is that I don’t know if I would actually be physically able to scream. I think I would be so afraid of someone hearing me that I would chicken out once I got there.
So, I have no idea what to do. This feels like flashbacks because they’re super vivid, but I’m also aware that they’re technically not happening in the moment. So maybe flashbacks lite? Somebody suggested that they could be body memories. The drawback is that they seem to be going on like 60% of the time for the past four days. It’s very painful physically, and it makes it hard to do things that I want to be doing. And since I can’t scream, it’s hard to resist the urge to fantasize about being able to scream. Like what if there were some freak situation where I could scream and it would be safe to do so. But, alas, that’s not real life. Maybe over the weekend if I drove somewhere really remote I could scream in my car? But the reality is, there’s always going to be some risk of well-intentioned first responders coming to the scene. Then I would have to explain that I was safe, it’s just my crippling anxiety, and there’d be the risk of being committed to an insane asylum. Which, I think I’ve blogged enough about HBM in Worcester, but the point is: much like my parents, I also don’t want police involvement.
Potential Remedies
So, I’m leaning into supports. I went to my TMS consult, but they said I didn’t score high enough for depression on their screeners for insurance to pay for it, so I should come back if my symptoms got worse. That was on Monday. I called today (Wednesday) and left a message asking how long they’d have to be worse. Besides, I think TMS is mostly for depression more than anxiety. And I should have asked what their hours were because I’d have to work around day treatment.
Even if TMS doesn’t pan out, day treatment is helping. In one group, we were given a journal prompt: “If your life were a book, what chapter would you be in right now?” I thought it was a depressing question, since I try to avoid looking back on my painful life story. But I made a Table of Contents and it confirmed that most of the chapters were painful. Which reminded me of a conversation I blogged about shortly after moving out of the group home. Basically, the P in PTSD refers to the fact that you feel it after the trauma. So if you’re in active combat and being shelled, you probably don’t feel anxiety in the moment, because if you did you’d be dead and so would everyone around you. But when you come home and it’s safe, you have to then feel the backlog of anxiety. You can’t actually block out emotions; you can only postpone them. What I wrote about in the previous entry was that living in the group home involved a chronically-increased risk of violent death, so when I got out, I didn’t understand why I was struggling so much. And the nice lady from VF came and told me that it was because I was newly safe that I was struggling so much. I think this may be what’s happening now with trauma. I’m going to be 37 next month and most of it has been painful. Ketamine jump-started a positive series of events and now I have my True Love and things are actually good. So suddenly my brain is safe enough to try to feel the 37-year backlog of emotions. But in theory, if I push through, it should be good.
Meanwhile, it was the doctor in the ketamine clinic who told me early this year that I should maybe try talking to social supports when having a hard time. This was a novel concept and I balked the idea, but I liked Dr 🦊 so I tried it. And what do you know… it helped! Now, my default urge is still to isolate when thing are hard. As a kid, obviously there was absolutely nobody going to 🤬-ing “comfort” me if I had an emotion, and they threatened to physically assault me if I couldn’t make my body stop crying. So I learned to just go as far away from everyone else as possible and wait until my body wasn’t making noise anymore. As an adult, well-intentioned clinicians advised me over and over again to not share my struggles with social supports because “nobody likes a debbie downer” and “just talk to professional people” about those things. Now there’s this hip new wave of clinicians who have cutting-edge ideas about telling people in your life what’s going on with you, and it’s a learning curve. So that will probably be my homework for myself for the next few days.
Grieving Ketamine
It is really hard that Ketamine is done. Spravato is supposed to be for treatment-resistant depression, but for me it was a huge help for religious trauma. When I was at the long hospitalization with Dr X, I remember that a recurring source of pain was that I was somehow always remembering this song called “Stricken, Smitten and Afflicted.” People tried to make light of it because the title was somewhat ridiculous, and they’d call it things like “That Stricken Chicken Song,” but the deepest parts of my soul still were tied to it. Years later, “Dr N” who first set me up with Spravato encouraged me to listen to deeply-meaningful religious music during treatment. At first, I just listened to songs I remembered that were uplifting. But with time, I would listen to more and more questionable music that I’d been singing since I was old enough to read (which was pretty young because my parents were morons and I was forced to grow up fast). So one time I brought “Stricken Smitten and Afflicted” and the Ketamine nudged that maybe technically I was quite literally stricken, smitten, and afflicted. This totally changed my relationship to the song and memories of it suddenly became a comfort. And it was like this with mostly anything I listened to. It was as though the Spravato somehow took the core memory attached to each song, pulled out the manilla folder it was stored in, and re-filed it in a totally different part of my brain. Songs that had caused so much pain for so long became a source of strength.
Problem is, there were a lot of songs and I never got through them all. On Saturday, the day after my last Spravato treatment, I had the “bright idea” to get out the old hymnal that I have in my inventory and pluck out all the familiar songs and make a playlist. I already had a Ketamine playlist of mostly church music, but it was incomplete. So I spent a few hours compiling this playlist:
This may not have been the best idea because it just overwhelmingly made me wish I could listen to the songs with Spravato and redirect their power. I thought that maybe I could do it by myself without the drug, and it’s working to a point. But I wish I’d had more time. And I wish it had occurred to me to maybe tell the ketamine clinic why the treatment was working so well for religious trauma. Because as far as they’re aware, ketamine is for depression only. Anyway, we all have regrets I guess. My plan is to give it a month, and try everything in the meantime (day treatment, TMS, social supports, etc) to make it through. If I’m still falling apart after a month, I’ll send an impassioned plea to Dr 🦊 to take me back. I wanted it to end on a happy note, not with me freaking out that it was over. And I want to trust that they know what they’re doing. So I’m going to really, really try to make it through the psychological withdrawal period.
Putting It All Together
So, I’m a bit below baseline because I’m grieving Spravato and trying to find new ways of dealing with trauma, much of which was exacerbated by a childhood full of constantly singing hymns about self-loathing. Flashbacks are a serious problem and I don’t have much in terms of “coping skills” to get through it. The biggest challenge with day treatment is that I’m afraid I’m going to fail it like I failed the Hill Center in 2023. So I didn’t know that you could ask to change groups, or leave group to go to the bathroom, etc. And, much like with my professional pursuits, I usually overachieve in the beginning and then have a mental breakdown and then can’t keep it together and then I fail the endeavor and can never go back. So I’m still sussing out how much I can share my internal experience at day treatment without it being too much. If I share nothing, then I’ll probably hit a breaking point and explode. But if I share too much, I risk looking difficult. The good news is that it seems like a very good program overall, so hopefully they can get me past this hump.
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