Having nightmares

[Angrboda]

You don't have to go into details, but why is it that you are not interested in treating the underlying issues? As far as I know, managing night terrors means just trying not to let them bother you.

I am aware of the events and people who caused them and I have always been a person who has been somewhat proud of the things that he has accomplished by himself despite the hardships I have encountered. Therapy of such a thing always means to reencounter and go through such events in a painfull detail. I would considere that to be surrender to the people who treated me so badly.

I don't know anything about night terrors off the top of my head, but I think you're letting your imagination get ahead of you. I don't know what the treatment for night terrors is, but that you imagine it to be a process of revisitation through talk therapy, and what that experience would mean to you and feel like, is putting the cart before the horse -- you haven't even been offered that as a treatment yet, and you're concluding that whatever treatment they offer will be that, and that it will be experienced that way by you. I remember when I first presented to the hospital with psychiatric symptoms after having suffered through a couple hour long panic attack (mine were unusually long), the psychiatrist who examined me indicated that she didn't feel the need to hospitalize me. When she started to explain why (I was no danger to myself, etc) I jumped the gun and inserted something about "because it would be kinda creepy" or some such nonsense. Knowing the reality of hospitalization now, I just want to fold up and die for shame over what I'd said. Anyway, you can always stop treatment at any point. It seems silly to stop before you start because of what you "imagine it would be like." I just recently returned to therapy: group therapy for depression, individual for depression and stuff. I expect less results from individual therapy than group, and after a lifetime of depression (and stuff), I'm not anticipating great changes from group. But I am keeping myself open to the possibility. The hockey player Wayne Gretzsky once commented, "You miss 100% of the shots you never take." In a similar vein, the success rate of therapies you never try is zero. I, like my sisters and my mom, suffered migraines most of my life. By late life, I had just gotten used to being incapacitated many days of each month with headaches. I didn't really think of treating them because I was just so used to living with them. However about 10-15 years back, I started reading up on them, and found out that a medication that was used to treat mood disorders was also used to treat migraines. I figured I might kill two birds with one stone, so I had my doctor prescribe it. It was very effective. It wasn't 100%, but the days a month that I would be knocked out dwindled to a handful. I had to discontinue that medication a few years ago due to some metabolism problems. With the return of my migraines, I finally did what I should have done originally, and went to see a neurologist. He prescribed a half dose of a blood pressure medication, which I didn't even know was a treatment for migraines. I got partial relief, but my other doctor was adding blood pressure meds as well, and the combined effect eliminated them. I have been for the most part migraine free for about two years. I've become rather non-compliant, and rarely take my medications these days, but after a few weeks of not taking my medication, the migraines start to come back; so I start taking my medication again, for a while......