Overcoming Sleeping Disorder: Personal Experience

I have always had problems sleeping due to trauma and have struggled for years to help myself control my insomnia and not let it control me. Sometimes it would come in handy and I could use it to my advantage but most of the time it just ruined me, my attitude, my focus, and my ability to cope. Naps were out of the question, I would literally have to stay awake until my body and mind gave out, something had to give eventually. No matter what I did, how much I exercised, what I ate, how much caffeine I didn’t drink, what medications I tried, it all never really helped me. I was so sick of always just putting a band aid on everything and it never ever solved the underlying problem. There were a few things I had started doing in order to help resolve my issues and I had to start by delving deep into my brain in order to unearth what my subconscious was trying to tell me. When I was an adolescent, I had the most trouble with this, and one day while I was reading my mother’s psychology books I uncovered studies done by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, William Albee, and of course, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung (1936/1959). Specifically, psychoanalytic theory, the expression of repressed wished or impulses in dreams is what really stuck out to me and made my think about my own dramatic change in behavior that seemed to be triggered by unconscious motivations of which I had no awareness of; suppressed intentions. I knew as a defense mechanism, each time I experienced a traumatic situation, I would disassociate. While it helped me protect myself and avoid feelings of anxiety, shame, or guilt, it also caused me to store the memories, emotional conflicts, and repressed impulses like the proverbial dynamic unconscious, or subconscious mind. While I pushed the (authority)[part[ of the psyche that contained the repressed memories as far back in my mind as it could go, the pressure of everything began to cause cracks in the metaphorical dam of my forbidden unconscious. It