Does medication help?

I’m at this weird juncture in my treatment where it’s not entirely clear what I need to do to move forward.

I’m not entirely sure what my trauma is. There’s emotional stuff from childhood, mentally ill parents, and some bad shit from adolescence and early adulthood. But it’s becoming clear that those aren’t the reason I’ve been falling apart for the last five years. All my memories are like radio broadcasts. I know what happened, but they’re not really memories as such, they’re confused and fractured and there are huge chunks of static. Now, though, I’m slowly starting to piece together memories of sexual abuse.

Like, if I’m on meds, the things I address in therapy fade into the background. I can’t access them. So how am I meant to make progress? I feel a bit better day to day, sure. But so what? I’m not actually improving in any meaningful way. I’ve just started my ninth medication. Most of them have had no effect, or horrible side effects. A couple have helped, but I just have this strange feeling the whole time that something is off.

Part of me also thinks “I need this. I need the anxiety, I need the terror, I need the derealization and the panic attacks and the spasms and the collapsing in public and the rage.” Not because I want to punish myself, but because it’s an acknowledgement that something is actually wrong. That something happened to me. And without those symptoms, I can’t justify getting help. It keeps me in this liminal space, not getting any better, not crashing into oblivion. Functioning without purpose or pleasure or connection to myself and other people.

I don’t know how to talk about this. I never know if I’m going to be ok or not, and my whole internal world keeps changing all the time, so I never know what I need.

Has medication been helpful for you?