arachne8x | PTSD - elmination diet

I'm having a disturbing PTSD type reaction to starting the elimination diet, and it's really been impacting my mood for the last week. Now that I have actual restrictions it's getting worse. I've been depressed and not wanted to do anything. Aaron has noticed that I've been more clingy than usual.

I know that this diet won't be a repeat of what happened last time, because I'm not taking a supplement that is making me sick. Intellectually I know that this is the best chance I have of figuring out someway of making my gut happier. Emotionally I know none of these things.

Emotionally this is the end of happiness and wellness and it's doomed to failure. It isolates me, since I can't eat with other people easily, and (for some reason I can't shake this) it will make Aaron go away. The last is because during the last diet Aaron was in Korea for a couple weeks. I know he's not going to Korea or anywhere else, but try telling that to my emotions.

Top it all off with caffeine withdrawal and I'm just not doing well. Last night I had four chocolate hazelnuts, knowing that I was breaking the caffeine restriction but hoping beyond hope that that small amount might break the headache/funk, and surprisingly it did. I just now had a small square of chocolate hoping for the same benefit. It's still far less caffeine than I've had daily recently, so I'm still tapering off very quickly.

It's an odd thing, this sort of attachment to pain in our history. This inability to believe that what has happened before won't happen again. Recently I've been working very hard on trying to identify and mitigate my tendency towards attachment and how it becomes mania... but right now the methods I'm trying to use aren't helping.

Hopefully seeing my therapist will help. I'm going to email her and make sure she's ready to do hypnosis or something.

All I know is, being miserable about food restrictions (emotionally) could be a self-fulfilling prophecy unless I begin to rapidly feel better when I've started eating in a really restrictive fashion. I really wish this wasn't going on during a stressful work period, but the timing couldn't be helped - I need to feel better and have less flareups so that work will be more possible, so the sooner the better.