PTSD

It took me 510 days to write this next instillation of this story.

The thing about PTSD is that it never fully goes away. In a sense, it’s in the name. From the first moment after It happens, your life will be post trauma. The impact of that Trauma, the reaching, twisted fingers that scratch and twist your experiences, can be bound but the scars it leaves behind are permanent. And, like skin, scars, when flexed, will forever be stressed – better with time and never the same. And so, it follows that the expected order of life will be disrupted in uncountable ways, large and small. It’s unfair. It’s maddening. It’s terrifying. Without any guidance, regaining control of life is insurmountable. Ezra Koenig put it best, “I don’t want to live like this but I don’t want to die.”

In the common discussion of wrestling with one’s life, an often used phrase is “it will [BLANK] if you let it.” Your job will wear you down if you let it. The stress will pull you under if you let it. Your dream will carry you away if you let it. PTSD doesn’t need your permission or cooperation. You don’t let it take over your whole life, because the source of trauma isn’t something you had power over in the first place. It isn’t something you did, something you were responsible for, something you let happen. It simply, rudely fucked everything up and left you hurt. To get control back of your life you have to fight for it. Wrest, rage, weed.

Alright. Cool. Thanks. How do I do this impossible thing then?

PTSD can happen when a traumatic event twists the way you perceive the world and/or yourself. Things you may have taken for granted before are suddenly in question. A person will go their whole life feeling confident when walking out and about but a random act of violence or a mugging can cut that perspective and leave a scar that whispers “I’m no longer safe in public.” This is called a Stuck Point.

After writing my trauma account, Lance helped me identify three stuck points that the trauma had left me with.

I didn’t do enough to help Jas
I have no inherent value and my only purpose is to avoid causing anyone strife
I’m a weak person for not wanting to have dirty hands.

Once identified, the goal is to peel back the layers of each stuck point to get at the heart of them. The negative emotions that stuck points inflict have positive traits behind them. In a sense, they’re as if the volume of the positive traits is turned up too high so that they become distorted and overwhelming.

To use one of mine as an example: a person whom I cherished more than nearly all others died young and horribly while I watched. I couldn’t help her feel better or even peaceful in her final moments, something I had been able to do up until that point. And even afterwards, I could do nothing to ease the pain of my family. The only thing I could think to do was, at the very least, make sure I didn’t cause any further sadness. The second scar meant “I care about those I love” became “I prioritise others before myself” became “other people’s needs must always come before mine” became “I have no inherent value and my only purpose is to avoid causing anyone strife.”

This left me in a constant state of fear. Not for myself, but for the impact the loss of me might have on my family. Sickness terrified me. I felt unsafe in public. I distanced myself from everyone. I was not allowed to come to harm, not because I cared if my body was healthy, but because my family had already dealt with enough grief.

And, of course, in harmony to this was the guilt of wanting to feel better. I cared so much and the loss hurt so badly that the idea of wanting to have improved mental health felt like a betrayal. Shouldn’t this loss affect me as harshly as possible? If I allowed it to lessen, would that mean I never truly cared about Jas?

The answer is no.

Working on stuck points did not mean I was letting go of all of my feelings about Jas. I still love her, miss her, regret some of the choices I’ve made, appreciate the time I had, cherish her memory, etc. Those are all positive emotions that were hidden behind the deafening noise of trauma. My goal was to reduce the distortion of high volume and be left with peaceful sorrow for the loss of my sister and best friend. In that, I could better live my life. The way Jas would want me to. It took me a long, long, time to come to terms with this and even longer to uncover the first two stuck points. I thought I was being sensible in working on them in order of hardest point to “easiest.”

I was incorrect. The problem of my hands was so so much bigger than I realised. But that’s for next time.

–

If you sympathise with any of this, I urge you to talk to a doctor or a clinical psychologist about your experiences. I'm absolutely not an authority on mental health diagnoses. There are many different types of treatment for PTSD and what worked for me may not be the best approach for you. Only a qualified medical professional can say for certain whether or not you have PTSD and what the best path forward may be.

I underwent a year of treatment to get a better understanding of Anxiety. How it affected my life, how to wrest control back, how to ground myself and focus on what was actually happening. My mind had spent so long fixating on imagined futures that the present moment was almost foreign. I felt vulnerable. A large part of my anxiety centred around being prepared for anything that might happen, especially things that I couldn’t anticipate. Stay constantly alert, vigilant, ready to act because when this impossible-to-predict awful thing happens, I’d be the one best positioned to react and keep myself or my loved ones safe. I had to learn to base my worries on my experience not my imagination. This didn’t stop me from worrying, it didn’t remove my lizard brain survival instincts, but that was never the goal. It merely allowed me to control the fear tap more and reduce the flow. Even turn it off for the first time in my adult life.

There was only one problem with all of this. Basing myself in my experiences meant facing my experiences. I didn’t fancy doing that. Despite my therapist being aware that I had lost Jas to cancer, the topic of trauma was never properly brought up. I was happy to leave it and thought my work on Anxiety was enough. I did feel much better. The nightly panic attacks were mostly gone, I wasn’t tense 100% of the time I was in public, and my relationship with myself graduated from vitriolic hatred to “he’s alright I guess”.

And then my therapist left the practice, and I was forced to look for support from someone else. Cool.

In my mind, finding another therapist was purely about finding someone to check in with. I thought I had completed my journey but having a regular therapist would be just as important as having a GP (I still hold to this actually). So, I googled nearby psychologists and found Lance. He was local to me at the time, came recommended, and had a free slot for new patients. Perfect. I attended my first appointment, let him know what I was after, and gave him a brief summary of my journey so far. He asked me a bit more about what happened with Jas and I offered a few more details. He sat quiet for a moment then hit me with

“I think you might have some unresolved trauma around the loss of your sister. Have you ever talked to anyone about PTSD?”

My heart and my stomach switched places. This man had the audacity to pull to the light this secret that my mind had worked so diligently to hide from me. The secret that I was absolutely, unequivocally, still not ok.

Lance told me he would very much like to help me deal with this and he had a lot of tools we could use to make the process as easy as possible (see: super fuckin’ difficult). So I accepted. If there truly were unresolved issues, I was keen to work on them. A week later I was tasked with writing down what had happened and it was then that I realised that I hadn’t ever truly thought about it, not actively. It took me several days to finish my account. I presented it at the following appointment, shaken to my core by reliving the worst day of my entire life yet proud of what I had accomplished. He agreed. He was impressed by how I had thrown myself headlong into it, despite the horror I had to face. Then he made me write it again.

“This time, add in the details you left out.”

My dear reader, please know that I’m not exaggerating when I say that I had never be so afraid. Because he was right. I had left the worst parts out. I hadn’t even meant to. Lance described trauma as a cupboard stuffed with glass then hastily closed. As soon as you even nudge the cupboard door, it will all come spilling out and shatter on the floor. So, you avoid it. You may even forget about it. Sure, you can function just fine without it but it’s a big cupboard and you have other precious things stored inside. The lost space and missing items will eventually have to be addressed. Life will get better if you open the cupboard. But man. It’s scary.

It took me weeks to finally do it. When I did, I wept for hours. The pages of my journal are warped from it. Ink is smeared. But I did it. The account you can read at the start of this page is that same one. Only with this in hand could my treatment begin, for hidden within it were the anchors of my disorder.

Fellow Writer

Fear

Unresolved