Re: night after night after night of nighmares
Ade,
We've learnt quite a lot about nightmares recently. Just maybe our experiences of similar nightmares may be able to help you a bit.
We found nightmares only kicked in after 40 mins of sleep so by waking at 30 mins, taking a moment to come round and resettling and by doing several of those in an morning/evening it could provide enough sleep to get a break from the relentless nightmare. Usually one nightmare a night was enough to cope with, so learnt to survive on very little.
Initially there were 5-7 reoccurring nightmares that went round and round but we discovered that by using CBT techniques and really sieveing through the detail and re thinking the events from a new perspective, these could be purged and vanished. Most people find they need a therapist to help with this but in some cases where talking about events would make it worse, then it is possible we found, to go it alone with good results.
In our experiences the nightmares were real life events that presented as a series. Sleep 1 would have episode 1 , sleep 2 would have episode 1 and 2 , sleep 3 would have episodes 1-3 etc until it was over and having CBT'ed the event, the nightmare left not to return. Some took a week, some 2 months but over time there were other differences, the reliving by actions stopped, the shouting out stopped, the restlessness stopped until there was 'just' the nightmare left.
Recently suddenly, we had nearly a month of total peaceful sleep - many many hours each night. Wonderful !! It didn't last forever, it was as if the brain had been searching for the next one and finally found it, but we have increasingly high hopes that in time the breaks between nightmares will increase to become the norm for the majority of time and then permenently.
There is also EMDR available but go carefully and ask lots of questions prior to treatments if you are dealing with multiple trauma as I understand that it is far more sucessful for single event trauma than multiple.
With hospitals we have always stayed 24/7 and secured a side room. Occasionally I have had to explain why and I go straight to the senior sister and it always meets a sympathetic ear which have been translated into actions.
I do wish you all the very best in your quest to heal, it's a tremendously rough path but I do believe the hard work of memory and CBT pays off.
__________________
Meg
proactiveness, positivity, persistence, perseverance and practice = progress