Precisely as I was in 1994 at 10 years of AA & NA sobriety but nothing beyond that (as Bill Wilson himself called it) “spiritual kindergarten” save some smug, “sound good” (but no depth) bits & pieces I’d picked up from Werner Erhard and Nathaniel Branden in the '70s. A particular (status) toy was taken from me in front of the assembled, formerly envious, knife wielders where I’d been a propped up big fish in a small pond for seven years.
I crumbled into the first of five (for me, probably no worse than for you) =horrendous= and excruciating trips through the “terror tunnel.” A bipolar crash into panic-stricken, autonomic dieseling that made getting the ship upright impossible for the next eight months, followed by several more “trips” of similar length and ever-more gawdawful freak and fry.
The docs could not put Humpty Dumpty back together again until by fortunate chance I was rerouted while in the ambulance to a different ER and psych lockup… where the attending psychiatrist was a youngish – and churlish – southern Asian female. I was initially dismayed, but when she listened carefully to my rant and then said, “Oh. You’ve got PTSD under all that other junk (wonder why the VA didn’t spot that?).” (And what I now understand – see why below – is that PTSD is the trigger mechanism that sets off and makes sz, sza, szt, and the bipolars get worse and worse.)
She summariily put the kybosh on the wrong meds and dosed me with my fist batch of Seroquel quetiapine. Two weeks later, It Was All Over except the upshots.
The upshots, however, included rage against the (VA) machine that had (from my p.o.v. at the time) made me suffer for no good reason. Fast forward: I received a nice settlement, went back to school, and learned everything I could cram into my skull about the operation of the human brain. By the late 2000s, I had training and experience with more than 30 different psychotherapies, including one I developed in school, and had begun to settle on several that worked well enough to not only handle the occasional mania, panic and rage attacks that still came up, as well as enough of the psychotic bipolar to get me down to a very low dose of 'Quel.
Those therapies are already listed in a previous post on this thread, BUT, I have to make it clear that they work well for me in no small part because I have acquired a very deep understanding of the operation of the limbic emotion regulation system (see Limbic system - Wikipedia) and the autonomic nervous system (see Autonomic nervous system - Wikipedia). That understanding makes it possible to utilize the psychotherapies I continue to depend upon with a very clear awareness of exactly what they do to change the neural tracks in the ANS and LERS previously mentioned.
So did I at first. So I did exactly what was suggested to me:
Just do as much as you can when you can.
And little by little… bit by bit… I was able to move from being someone who had been locked away in a horrible storage tank Bedlam in August 2002 to someone who can function well enough now to be of service now and again.