wow i leave the country for a few weeks and the family all come out
of the wood work!!! ( i am currently on a trip to africa until
1/5/05)

first welcome to the family sam and crystal, I am Amy and i am the
founder here, i made this club (now a group) several years ago as a
way for me to find other like me who just wanted a place to go to be
accepted. feel free to vent yell scream cry or just say hi. I have
found that the more i tell my story the more i learned what my
triggers where and how to prevent them from causing my attacks. I
agree very much with reggie that keeping a diary helps. each day
write down everything you can remember seeing or doing, then when you
have a panic attack or flash back write that in too, i found it
helpful to write in red ink or fold down the corner of the page where
there was a bad attack, then i would go back and read the events that
lead up to the attacks and a pattern started to come out it helped me
see what sights, places, smells, sounds, events...lead to my attacks.

I am not 100% better but i would say i am 90% of the way there, i
still panic when i cants find someone or something i percieve to be
important, like the other day i could not find my ATM card and i
freaked.

Next topic, thank you doug, debbie and reggie for stepping up while i
am out of the country and making our new member(s) feel welcome.

As you may notice, after speaking it over with our other moderator
Barb, I granted Reggie moderator privlidges in order to allow her to
remove spammers and rude people while i am gone, as Barb has been
very busy with work and school. Thank you Reggie for removing that
psycho-poster.

FYI - if you see a rude comment like that PLEASE do not hit reply and
address them, that will cause thier message to be carried over in
your message and others will still be able to read their message.
Instead please simply email/IM/PM one of the moderators and we will
come remove the author leaving no trace of thier rude comments.

Now as i am paying for my phone access by the minute i must sign off
before i run out of time and the phone hangs up on me (it is a prepay
phone card system here)

remember there are pictures on my web site for everyone to see
www.geocities.com/iiovelife

Amy