Dear Ian:

You asked: “Do I have to mentally re-live all the breakup events, processing each one… this doesn’t sound very safe to me”- from personal experience, being still engaged in the process of healing, it is unsafe for you to “mentally re-live all the breakup events.” Anxiety limits how much we can process at any time, therefore processing traumatic events has to be done very, very gradually, each processing step has to be taken when safe.

You wrote: “but I must do something so I can heal and not suffer such depression and anxiety again. My hands are shaking badly now having just wrote this and I have a bad headache..”-

This is indication that you must be very gentle and patient with yourself and the process. Trying to remember traumatic events when your hands are shaking is counter-productive, the wrong thing for you to do. You should relax, instead, distract yourself with calming music, aerobic exercise, and such.

In your original post you wrote that you had “3 long term (6-10 months) of therapy with a counsellor,
blaming my childhood and never getting any better”

My comment on the latter: the fact that you did not get better for blaming your childhood does not mean that your trouble didn’t originate and start in your childhood (being “primed” as your psychiatrist suggested). The fact that you didn’t get better as a result is probably because the therapy did not progress beyond the blaming. Maybe you were waiting for the therapists to validate your experience in childhood, to give your blaming an outside, reliable validity. Maybe you didn’t get that validity and this is why you didn’t get better.

I hope you post again.

anita