PTSD, TBI, Anxiety/Depression, Alcohol Abuse...

Pray for your enemies good things. That will help you let go of the hate.

Florian7051 said:

I've gotten this strange feeling a couple times, like an emotional descent into hell. There's no torment or suffering, just absence. It's like a realization that this connection I don't think I have with God I've actually always had, and I don't realize it until it disappears. What I'm left with is this terrible sense of isolation far beyond anything I've ever experienced, this loneliness I didn't think was even possible. It's terrifying.

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A quote I turned into a personal mantra "You are never alone, because God cannot be taken from you". I know the exact feeling you describe. It is a lie. Presumably it is from The Enemy. Or maybe it's a fact of biology. I cannot say for certain. Regardless, there's little to do other than to realize that it is, in fact, a lie. The Chosen has a lot of scenes featuring this concept with a callback to Psalm 139: 7-8 "Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to the heavens, You are there; if I make my bed in the depths, You are there." No matter where you go, the Holy Spirit is always with you and cannot be separated from you. How else could people contest their own demonic possessions and cleanse themselves of that incursion?

Florian7051 said:

I don't know why my heart is filled with such bitterness. Logically I want to forgive everyone who has wronged me, but it's like my heart holds on to the hate regardless of me wanting to let go of it. Just needed to vent. I feel lost.

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How long ago was the trauma in your life? How many days/weeks/years was it spread over? How long from trauma onset to the trauma stopping? I ask because duration determines treatments that will be most likely to be effective.

Also, can you face your trauma. Meaning, can you sit in a safe place (you feel safe there, you can scream or cry and feel safe showing emotion) and relive those past traumatic events and think through what is happening there. Like, say you were in a car that caught fire. Can you remember being in the seat, feeling the heat, without panicking. Can you go through your choices in the moment and think about what you felt and why? What options really did and did not exist, in that moment, and why? It is ok if you can't, but I do need you to be honest about whether you can do this or not. And it may be you can with some memories, and not with others. That's also ok and normal.

You probably have forgiven if you say it @Florian7051 . Just take the residual captive until it’s gone as in 2Cor 10:3-5

Florian7051 said:

Trauma was in 1998 to 2013 there were 4 significant trauma events plus the drugs.

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Ok. So, that's sufficiently long that you may very well have some of the adaptations wired into your nervous system. For me, as an example, even under a heavy dose of psychedelics (I got psychedelic therapy) I would start to laugh, and immediately stop. My nervous system had been trained to not feel joy, because joy always got taken away from me. Another example was being given a compliment, or praise, by someone I didn't deeply trust. I would feel a physical reaction to it, because I had been lied to and manipulated for so many years my nervous system would react to praise before my conscious mind had finished understanding the words.

The way you undo that sort of trauma is exposure therapy. So, I put myself in places where I can get praised and I feel that lurch and I consciously stop and go 'ok, wait. Did I earn that for real?' and I have a conversation with myself over whether or not the lurch was justified. With many hundreds of iterations it broke down to the point that I can take a compliment without feeling sick to my stomach instantly. The joy one was only recently discovered, so that's going to take a lot more work, but going out and doing things I enjoy, and literally stopping to smell the roses, then forcing myself to acknowledge that nobody is there taking it away from me, will, over time, deprogram my body.

I cannot say what lessons your own nervous system learned, I can only share my examples of damage and repair.

The reason I asked about the intensity of your trauma and whether you can face it is because, if you can't, psychedelic therapy may be the only option open to you. It should be viewed as a last resort, not a first option, because it has a lot of very severe risks. If talk therapy or something like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works for you, then do that instead. It's slower, but safer. For me...I was too far gone. Psychedelics were the only thing that was ever going to get me to start healing. They made it possible for me to start healing. I was that far gone.