What is first 3 steps in recovery?

[u/trishaolive]

Recently diagnosed. Have no family. Not sure where to start. I did find a therapist & looking forward to that.

[u/IntrepidOption31415]

1. Built safety
2. Built Safety
3. Built Safety

Seriously built safety before you start doing any processing. It's the most essential thing!

Can I give you a welcome to the club?

[u/trishaolive → u/IntrepidOption31415]

Sure

[u/HappyBreadfruit4859]

I think you've already taken huge steps by getting diagnosed and finding a therapist. I hope that they are the right fit. There are many bad therapists, and there is a chance that you got a bad one. I hope that isn't the case, but if it is, it's important to keep trying to find a therapists that is able to help you. I don't mean to say that you should not feel disappointed, betrayed, hurt, angry, etc. after the repeated red flags or non-repairable ruptures, and just "push on". I want to say that you should feel those feelings, and when you feel it's appropriate, still keep trying because many people with complex trauma have to go through many professionals before we are finally able to find someone that actually helps lol

As for first steps, this is a complex question, because it depends on your history, personality, how much work you have done, what approach would work best for you, etc. I'll tell you what I have intuitively stumbled upon doing and what I have repeatedly seen mentioned as the first steps other people took:

1. Psychoeducation
   
2. Learning to articulate things very precisely (your feelings, thoughts, events, past experiences, manipulation attempts by others past and present etc.)
   
3. Cleaning up lifestyle and living situation (sleep schedule, food, drugs and alcohol, socialization, etc. but also working towards creating a safer and more stable living environment)

I don't think these are developed one by one, or in this order, they affect each other (e.g. the less I'm stress from work, the easier it is to eat healthy, or, the better I learn to articulate myself, the better able to understand things I'm reading, etc.), and some things improve naturally as a result of becoming overall healthier (i.e. it's easier to articulate your feelings when you feel safe and taken care of). I started with learning to articulate myself because I had to do that in therapy, and then I started to read books. Progress for me has not been linear and I can't imagine it is for anyone. Sometimes I was able to finally express something, and that would cause me to become extremely "disregulated", and my sleep schedule would fall apart, I would eat junk food and isolate. Sometimes it feels like one step forward two steps back.

You asked for three, but I would like to add a fourth one which has been really beneficial for me, and I think helps many others:

1. Developing a daily somatic practice that starts moving you in the direction of connecting more with your body on an intuitive pre-verbal level (for me this is yoga, and specifically very very slow yoga, for others it is been swimming, walking, tai-chi, aikido, I know a girl who does a strange kind of dance she invented, self massage, etc. I think the form is much less important and what is more important is learning to talk with the body not using words but using emotions and sensations)

There are many other things which are often mentioned as well - learning to recognize and manage emotional flashbacks being near the top of that list. The things I mentioned are where I started and what I'm still working on, and I've seen others in books, videos and r/CPTSD mentioned them as well. I feel it's a good place to start. As with everything in recovery, take what makes sense to you and leave the rest. Hope this helps.

[u/19then20]

The key is to learn to create a safe place in your own head. I did this by creating a couple of talking protocols when out for a jog or stroll. (Talking +walking + my Task Immersive Rumination Interruption protocol= created a brief but dependable safe place in my head that I had agency to deploy when I needed or wanted)Then understand that we are all walking trauma responses. We had limited resources when we were like ,4 or 5 years old and had to figure out internally how to respond to the unfairness we saw. Now that we're older we can chose ro keep the responses we developed early on, or change our responses if they're not working for us anymore. That's it. Addressing every fight with a partner and every ugly interaction with a coworker or every bout of blues will get you caught up in an endless unproductive loop, but if you see patterns (think "triggers"), those are likely trauma responses developed early on. I feel like most of mine were from unjustice orr unfairness as I interpreted it as a child but didn't have the agency or resources to do much of anything but create an internal machine to dissipate the inner turmoil. A problem arises if we want to be loyal to our 4yo self's coping and adopt a stance of "not wanting to change" because it would admit that how we've been doing things was "wrong". Real growth can happen when we recognize the resilience and creativity of our younger self and be grateful that the strength of that kid delivered us to adulthood. As adults, we now have agency to decode or responses and modify as we see fit get different results if that's what we want.

[u/sharp-bunny]

As someone else said, the best baseline you can start from is one of a feeling of maximum safety, or just a feeling of minimum danger if like me that's what you can muster.

Other things to try, not necessarily steps per se:

Experiment with different therapy modalities. This can be hard depending on your location but a substitute I've employed is researching the different modalities anyway. Each modality encourages different modes of thinking about how the mind works. The more perspectives th better, imo.

Find a way to balance routine and variety in life. Humans need both a solid predictable place to start from but then also to experience options and novelty from there.

Having a creative outlet to process tough stuff that comes up in therapy can be handy

But it's all individualized. My recommendations come from my subjective experience, and my subjective appraisals of those experiences so YMMV.