Trouble with sleeping..

Hey guys,

I'm finding it really difficult to sleep properly at the moment. It's been a lot worse, I'm not sure exactly how long for, maybe about three weeks?

I didn't usually have trouble with actually going to sleep at a decent enough time.. I'll try and explain.

I find it difficult to keep my eyes closed for longer than a few seconds, sometimes I can, some nights are more difficult than others, I guess it depends what's going on in my head. Sometimes I think I'm going to open my eyes and there he'll be, ready to.. sexually abuse me again (I don't like saying that word). Silly, I know, he's not going to be in my bedroom, but I'm terrified.. uh, starting to cry.

I'm scared about falling to sleep because of the nightmares. When I do eventually go to sleep, nearly every night I have a bad dream. Most of the time it's about the sexual abuse, and then I wake up and feel even more scared, so a lot of the time it's very hard to get back to sleep. Sometimes I dream about my ex, the kids, they're not nightmares but I would still rather not have dreams about my ex.

So, I wait until.. you know when you're so tired that it's almost impossible to keep your eyes open? I wait until then, but now I think that I've caused myself a new routine. I go to sleep at about four-five in the morning, then the time I wake up in the morning varies but I barely get enough sleep.

I'm so tired all of the time, there's a lot of stuff I'm trying to cope with and being tired all of the time really doesn't help. I'm not going to the doctors about this, I don't want to talk about things with a stranger, I don't want more meds.

I just wondered if you guys had any tips? Do you know of any ways that could make me more relaxed, or make me get that 'almost impossible to keep my eyes open' feeling earlier? I know reading helps me to get that feeling but at the moment I'm not reading because I'm finding it hard to concentrate, and I don't want to read when I wouldn't be paying attention to the story.