See several therapists before you pick one--you're basically interviewing them for the job. Ask how much experience each has treating PTSD. Ask if their therapy style is supportive or confrontational--obviously, you want someone who's 100% supportive.
I don't think the treatment for civilian PTSD is necessarily the same as for military. In the military, lately, they've found that the best way to treat combat fatigue (incipient PTSD) is on the spot--you give the soldier a short break with counseling from his CO or trusted NCOs and send him back in. If you make a big deal of downchecking him and sending him back and all that, you make it worse.
That's the *early* treatment on the spot. It seems to be like preventing a stain from setting. The rough compassion from comrades in arms seems to do more positive for the soldiers than anything else. The other issue is that PTSD in combat units is contagious---one guy goes down with it and it can run through the entire unit, one after another. I know a guy whose entire unit got downchecked with it in Afghanistan---counseling, meds, the whole nine yards. He's still...jumpy isn't the best word, but it's a bit hard to describe.
Our family is friends with another family where the teen daughter has complex PTSD from some pretty horrific child abuse (not the mom and stepdad---a real life wicked stepmom who is, of course, out of the picture now).
Getting her out of the situation has helped, and compassion is helping a lot, but it's slow going. It's a lot like the years when I was recovering from rape and an abusive relationship, except I hid it more and suffered in silence.
What helped me stop shoving what happened to the back of my mind thinking it would get better that way (it doesn't) and actually recover was to talk to other people who had been through the same thing.
The hardest thing to recover from is feelings where you cooperated with or bonded with the person or people doing bad things to you, and sorting out where they were being monsters from where they weren't entirely monsters, and sorting out how to feel about or respond to the people who should have protected you and helped you but didn't.
You feel like you're the only one who feels those things, and some of those feelings make you feel like some of it (or all of it) was on some level your fault. It's hard to get through all that to understanding in your gut that *nobody* deserves to be treated like that, no matter *what* they did or didn't do.
Talking to other rape survivors helped more than any ten therapists could have.
I'm not saying you don't need a therapist or shouldn't get one if that's what you think would be most helpful next. You should definitely trust your instincts. Re-learning to trust your instincts is hard but important.
Not everything other rape victims experienced was relevant to me, but talking to them and reading their comments on talk.rape was very hard for me---but ultimately I don't think I could have healed without it.
In many ways, Fornits serves the same function. Reading the experiences of other survivors is like lancing a festering boil. Not everything is relevant to you, but being able to pick and choose for yourself what *is* relevant, in a context where the people who went through similar stuff genuingely won't judge you, lets the dark poison drain out of your emotional wounds so you can heal.
We had trolls in talk.rape who were unsympathetic bastards just like the Program Pushers are here. In their own way, the trolls in talk.rape on Usenet helped me recover, too. They were so obviously idiots that they allowed me to exorcise my fears of being judged by others. It was like looking in the closet once I was old enough to realize the thing that looked like a monster in the dark was just the sleeve of a dress or something.
The judgmental people weren't twelve feet tall and omniscient. They were just pathetic, ignorant people who were damaged and warped in their own ways.
Seeing the Program Parents and the Program Owners and Staffers and Ed Cons who come on here is priceless. Feet of clay, the emperor with no clothes, however you want to put it. They're truly pathetic idiots, and seeing them for what they are helps lay the ghosts of them.
In the Program, you couldn't help but see them as powerful people who had some sort of right to sit in judgment on you---or so the little voice that drank the kool-aid tells you. Here, you can see them as they really are---terribly dysfunctional people, many of whom probably shouldn't be trusted with the care of a goldfish, much less a kid.
Get a therapist, by all means.
But stay here, too. This is one of the best places you could be to get healing.
Julie
