Pure Raw Fear

Life is confusing for me. I feel vulnerable in every social situation. It isn't because I don't like being out and about its just the uncertainty that comes with it. Every day things like of grocery shopping, seeing friends, calling the post office over a lost package just seem so difficult to me. With everyone in my past not knowing who the person on the phone or behind me in line makes all my senses go into overdrive. I know it is from the PTSD, from a trauma I am not ready to talk about just yet, and there is no way to make it stop. There is only coping mechanisms to prevent a panic...the thing is most of the methods that have worked for nine years aren't working as well. From last October till now each attack has been progressively worse in public. The triggers aren't the same and sometimes there doesn't even seem to be a trigger. The most recent started at a concert and for the next two nights and three days every time I tried to sleep the flashbacks came in nightmares. I wasn't able to wake up and make them stop and each time I woke up more physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted than I had been before. I finally gave in and started taking my anxiety medication...which has let me get a phenomenal five hours of sleep. Based on the fact it is a quarter till three AM and I am wide awake and anxious again I doubt I will get anymore for a while. I have been to trauma councilors off and on for years yet couldn't seem to mesh well enough with them to get anything out of the experience. I am calling yet another one Monday and hopefully it will work out better this time around. I just know right now that this panic is overwhelming. The attacks don't last long but they feel like an eternity. The flashbacks are like nothing else in this world; what I see morphs into what I saw years ago, each nerve screams the same signals to my mind and I physically and visually relive the same few minutes over and over until I can't take anymore and end in a complete panic. A feeling where the fear is so intense I feel like I have stopped living, air feels like fire in my lungs, all thought and reasoning cease, and the world around me feels like a blurry darkness. Complete and utter helplessness. There has to be a better way of coping than this...