Confronting CPTSD

Trigger Warning // mental health, depression, self-harm/suicide, substance abuse, psychedelics.

It’s been a minute since I’ve written and I honestly don’t know how much I will get around to it this year. These last few years brought about several major shifts in my life. I left a toxic relationship or two, got clean (again), blocked abusers, got laid off from several start ups (c’est la vie), and am actively preparing to leave Texas, all whilst the world is on fire.

During the heat of my recovery, I struggled to vocalize just how each form of therapy helped and contributed to one another. Some were easier than others, like discussing compounding grief (something I only learned about last year) and disordered eating. However, when it came to discussing elements of EMDR and Ketamine therapy, I would often falter or stumble when trying to explain the ways they helped.

To some extent, I figured it was going to be really hard to describe. Ketamine is literally a dissociative drug and is often used for surgeries over traditional anesthesia so it stands to reason that describing such an experience is difficult. At the same time, it bothers me that a good number of people’s only experience with Ketamine Therapy is Elon Musk. What’s more infuriating is being unable to write about it at the time. Not due to the position that I was in, but rather lacking the language required to be able to effectively communicate my experience.

Treatment resistant depression

In May 2024, I sought help for treatment-resistant depression. I remember speaking to my psychiatrist about how nothing I did seemed to help. Medications worked but had huge drawbacks and didn’t address the underlying issues. For years, I had been on and off Zoloft. I’d take them, after a month or so, I’d stop because they were numbing me out too much. When things were bad, I appreciated the over-suppression but it also made it really hard to enjoy life. I would quite often describe the feeling to my doctors and therapists as just feeling “flat”. No highs. No lows. Just, flat. And. I. Hated. It.

She recommended two treatments, EMDR and Ketamine Therapy. At first, I was hesitant about starting something like Ketamine therapy since I had a friend who passed on it. Despite knowing that this was a very different situation, I expressed my hesitancy to my psychiatrist who assured me that everything would be OK. Two weeks later, we would start my inoculation phase.

Ketamine Therapy

June was… chaotic to say the least. Not just from a scheduling stand point, but from an interpersonal standpoint as well. The inoculation phase of ketamine therapy requires treatments 2 to 3 times per week. During the train rides to and from the session, I would journal about my intentions (high level things I’d want to explore deeper) and help get myself in the right headspace for the session.

Treatment days can be very disorienting, especially when you’re trying to find your dosage during the inoculation period. Once the facility finds your dose, they work to dial back frequency from the inoculation phase down to a maintenance dose which varies from person to person. For me, once every other month has been stable. For the most part, I take the day off to ensure I have the proper space needed to recover. Since they don’t want us operating machinery after treatment, I’ve also taken to not making any important decisions on those days either.

Two months after starting treatment, I was able to begin tapering my way off of my antidepressant medication. By the beginning of August, I was off Zoloft completely. By October, I was confident that Ketamine therapy in conjunction with the other therapies I was pursuing would be an effective means to treating my depression. While it provides mood stabilizing effects to combat the treatment-resistant depression, Ketamine therapy also promotes neuroplasticity which is essential when dealing with Complex PTSD.

EMDR

Eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing (or EMDR) is a therapy that is designed to treat PTSD (and CPTSD) through the reprocessing of traumatic events while engaging in bilateral stimulation (like moving your eyes side to side, alternating tapping of your feet/fingers, etc. On the surface, it appears rather kooky but decades of research and peer reviewed studies have validated the practice for treating PTSD.

In these sessions, my therapist and I focused on my relationships with my abusers and the environment I was in. We would pick one event, go down the details of what happened, things I remember feeling, internal dialog, external dialog, all of it. One thing I really appreciated about our session was that she had a “mood chart” which was really helpful for pinpointing emotions.

In the course of all of this, the feeling would eventually trigger and she would bring us into the core of the treatment where she would turn on the machine and ask me to alternate tapping my feet. There were a number of times where she had me do multiple forms of stimulation at once because of how intense the emotions were, even going so far as to have me use different rhythms for the different stimuli.

Something that caught me off-guard about EMDR is the number of people who have gone through the practice. During DevOps Days Austin 2025, the Open Space surrounding mental health spun up around the table where a former colleague and I were discussing the different treatments and therapies that we had tried and which ones had been a success. To my surprise a good number of people not only reported having success with the treatment, but many of those who hadn’t were interested in it.

Complex PTSD

As I underwent these treatments, I wasn’t entirely sure what we were treating, only that what I had been doing wasn’t working. Earlier in 2024, I had reached out to my first therapist because I wasn’t happy about the one I was seeing at the time and wanted some advice from an individual I trusted previously. After our conversation, she actually recommended the book Complex PTSD by Pete Walker to me. It wasn’t until later that year that I would finally get around to reading it, only to have so much of it click.

Growing up, I learned to shrink myself small and not take up space. I learned to read the emotions of others better than I learned to read my own. I learned to fawn because fighting, fleeing, and freezing weren’t an option. While this kept me safe for a long time, it’s only gotten in the way for me as an adult. Recently, I made a comment to my therapist about feeling broken and being curious about what else remains. At the time it felt like it was a negative. In writing this article, I’m not only reminded of Trevor Noah’s perspective on the art of Kintsugi, but also a lyric from Teddy Swims.

So. While I may not be perfect, I happily embrace my flaws. I strive to improve what I can, but recognize I shouldn’t lose myself in the process. For too long, I’ve shrunk and diminished myself for the comfort of others (both parents and partners). I allowed partners (both men and women) to treat me the way they did, because I didn’t know any better and had been conditioned to accept whatever “love” I was given. No more. Until next time. ~ Ciao bella!