SeventhFold's Journal: There Will Be Triggers

[SeventhFold]

I've just started reading Pete Walker's book, as well as another book about recovering from developmental trauma. (I think it's called Healing Developmental Trauma, but don't hold me to that.) Even reading these books is difficult; my stomach ties itself in knots, and my attention skips back and forth from past through present to future. I have to re-read every third paragraph because my mind went elsewhere during the first reading, but I will soldier on, because if I don't I will most likely die.

I read somewhere recently that the cPTSD course, if not properly treated, can ultimately lead to a state doctors refer to as "failure to thrive," where the patient is simply unable or unwilling to perform the functions of self-care that are necessary to sustain life. After most of a lifetime spent fighting crippling depression and a plethora of anxiety-related conditions, not to mention the side effects of scores of medications and other attempted treatments, I've reached this point. I just can't muster up the desire or the energy or the interest to do even the most rudimentary of tasks to keep myself alive. I eat almost nothing, and the little I do eat is junk, and I bathe as rarely as I can get away with. I have a number of health problems that will be familiar to most people with cPTSD, but I will only see a doctor when I am forced to do so (by their refusal to refill my prescriptions without a clinic visit, generally). My teeth hurt all the time--the few I have left after years of neglect--but apathy combines with a lifelong phobia of dentists to keep me from seeking help. I sometimes want to say to someone, "Please help me. I'm dying," but there's nobody there for me to tell.

I've spent my last bit of hope, poor pathetic remnant that it is, to buy these books and join up here. After all these decades (!) of therapy and drugs and soul-searching, I think this is my last chance for recovery. I'll get into my story in a future post; for now, I need to get back to my reading.

[Alice97]

So sorry to hear you are in such a bad place. I'm glad you are still trying to help yourself, I hope this community and the books you are reading can offer some support and help steer you on a path towards healing. I know it hurts too much for words when there's no one you can reach out to for help 

[SeventhFold]

Thanks, Alice97. It's nice to hear a supportive voice from "out there." I get so tired of my own voice rattling around in my head. It gets really loud in there when I start disagreeing with myself  .

[SeventhFold]

I finished Walker's book this morning, after a night spent tossing and turning and intermittently dreaming of cleaning somebody's kitchen (). I'm not sure yet what I think of the book. It was a little dense and hard to follow sometimes, and I'm sure I'll have to read it again to internalize many of its concepts. It did strike close enough to the heart of the matter, though, to throw me into full-fledged dissociative fugues at several points, and that's a good indication of the truths contained therein. The other book I have is written more for therapists than for patients, so I anticipate more difficulty relating to it. Still, I have never met a book that has not offered some sort of gain--even American Psycho taught me never to read anything described as similar to American Psycho--so I'm sure it will offer something of value.

I'm among the majority of people with cPTSD in that I thought for most of my life that because my childhood memories didn't include beatings that fractured bones or choke chains or basement dungeons I had a normal American upbringing. I was in therapy for the fourth or fifth time (that's 4 or 5 counselors, not sessions) when I told my counselor about a specific instance of corporal punishment I remembered. Her expression and exclamations of horror and sympathy were the first indications I'd ever had that everybody's family wasn't like that. Even when I'd absorbed the realization that my mother's discipline was unusually harsh, I still believed for many years that there was no way it had caused permanent damage. I read about and even personally knew people who had been treated so horribly during their childhoods that it made mine seem like one long amusement park visit. When I started to fall into the pit of despair and chronic intolerable depression that have become my entire world, I was sure it wasn't related to my mildly dysfunctional family; obviously, I was sick because of my inherent weakness and laziness and lack of character.

I once had a vibrant social life, but that was many years ago. After a devastating betrayal by a longtime romantic partner, I began to withdraw from all but my closest friends and family, and as I fell deeper into depression and started to struggle with panic disorder and agoraphobia, my close friends and family began to withdraw from me. Like a lot of people with cPTSD, I heard from some of my siblings that my childhood "wasn't as bad as she says it was." (It very well might not have been as bad for them; my family role of Scapegoat offered them some protection.) I lost my last 2 friends about 12 years ago, and my FOO has been MIA for about a year. Once they realized I could no longer perform the tasks they expected from me, they couldn't run away fast enough!

One day I hope to have just a few new friends, with maybe some activities to look forward to and some reason to go outside, but I'm working hard at starting from the base of my problems this time, from the core of abandonment and the little girl lost in that eternal twilight. I've been alone for so long now that a little more time in Solitary doesn't frighten me, as long as I have a sense that I am making even a tiny amount of forward progress.

[Alice97]

Thanks, Alice97. It's nice to hear a supportive voice from "out there." I get so tired of my own voice rattling around in my head. It gets really loud in there when I start disagreeing with myself  .

You're welcome, I'm glad I could be supportive in some way 
I completely relate to getting tired of that voice "rattling around inside my head." Those inner disagreements are exhausting.

[SeventhFold]

Feeling absolutely paralyzed and disconnected. I suppose some of that comes from starting to dredge up the debris lying fathoms deep on the floor of my psyche, and I think part of it comes from the stupid Prozac that my clueless-but-foolishly-optimistic psychiatrist started me on after his last experiment failed. I'm so tired of having to go through this routine every time I outlive another doctor. Next on the list should be Paxil. Oh joy.

Still fighting my way through Healing Developmental Trauma, but it's a tough slog. It appears, if I buy into that particular theory, that my trauma began at a point "from pre-birth to 6 months." This surprises me; I thought my mother probably liked me until I started talking. I once told my therapist, "Dr. X," that if mathematical values were assigned to all the events of my early life and you added them all up, it would add up to what I am now. In other words, it's obvious that I never had a chance to turn out any differently. If my mother's abuse started when I was an infant, I was doomed from the very start.

How does anybody hate a baby? If I still talked to my mother, I could ask her that, but she'd just plead ignorance and then remind me again that I never did anything right and my dad was a loser and yada yada yada....

I'm working hard at identifying flashbacks--is it possible my whole life is spent in a flashback?--and angering back at both/all of my critics, but I feel almost like it's a losing battle. I feel like I can't heal fast enough to even keep up with my current decompensation, let alone outpace it. To be brutally honest, I should have been hospitalized a long time ago, but people like me don't get hospitalized. I'm silent and hidden, and there's nobody around who cares enough to put me away.

Just have to keep hoping it doesn't get much worse before it gets better.

[SeventhFold]

I've spent the better part of the last 2 days sleeping. I only wish I could continue that, but it's now too hot in my bedroom, so I've been driven downstairs into the air conditioning. I'm aware now, thanks to Pete Walker's book, that I'm dissociating when I sleep so much, but I consciously choose to do this just to deal with the boredom that makes up my day. I used to have a lot of hobbies and interests, and there were always video games to fall back on, but all of those have been taken away from me.

I probably don't have to explain anhedonia to people here. It's one of the worst facets of the depression that arises from cPTSD. First, all activities start to lose all of their color and vibrancy, like photographs left too long in the sun. Then you wake up one morning and pick up your knitting or your paintbrush or your pen, and you reach for that desire and discover that there's nothing there. You're just empty, and no matter how hard you search you can't find a single thing you want to do. Sleeping lets me get away for a while from that long, empty void that makes up every day of my life.

I think I finally had some success at angering back at my inner critic last night, when I was thinking about the 25th anniversary of my marriage, which will occur in the fall of 2017 (with any luck). I was thinking that maybe we could go on a trip, spend some time reconnecting, when my IC chimed in to remind me that nothing like that would ever happen, I'd never get to go anywhere again, etc. Suddenly I let loose with a mental barrage of rage, and I imagined my anger pounding the critic with words, making it smaller with each hit until it retreated back into its cave and slammed the door.

It'll be back, of course, but I like that visualization as a tool for dealing with the IC. For once, I'm grateful for the ability to form images and run scenarios in my head. Usually I curse that ability for making it impossible for me to avoid visualizing things I read about in the news.

Well, that was a little disjointed . Ah well, I will settle for being just articulate enough.

[SeventhFold]

Ach, I forgot how difficult it can be to have my husband around the house. Today and tomorrow make up his "weekend," but he's been working another shift for the past few weeks, so our schedules haven't collided recently--until today.

My husband is a fine, decent, kind man, but he can trigger me like nobody else outside of my FOO. He's one of those people who is uncomfortable with silence, and so he carries with him an almost visible cloud of noise. Sometimes it's verbal, with unending comments on his workday, the television show we're watching, the behavior of our dogs. Other times he just makes noises, maybe by blowing air out sharply in a hiss or slapping his feet on the tile floor like some crazed flamenco dancer. For me, who spends sometimes days at a time in nearly complete silence, this tiny cacophony is jarring, distracting, and distressing. He has gone to the grocery store now, a 20-minute one-way drive, so I have about an hour of peace to think and to write.

I do a lot of my cPTSD work late at night when my husband is either asleep or at work, and for the last couple of nights my mind has returned to one particular event in my childhood. I had been sent away from home, to camp or my aunt's home in Illinois or a farm a couple of hours away from home. (I was always being sent away from home, even when I was very young and not prone to defiance; it's one of the great mysteries of my early life.) When I returned, the top of my dresser, where I always kept my little collection of 6 or 7 stuffed animals, was empty. They weren't in my closet or under the bed or anywhere else in the house. When I asked my mother about them, she told me that my room was a mess, so she had thrown them away.

I was beyond heartbroken. I was still young enough that those stuffed animals were alive to me. For months, years afterward I was tormented by imagining them cold and lonely in an alley somewhere, being dragged around by stray dogs in mud and snow, always wondering why I hadn't come to get them, to bring them home. These were my friends, each with a backstory, like the funny square bear made especially for me by a lady at a local nursing home to thank me for coming to visit her. The only stuffed animal that was left to me was a small teddy bear with scratchy mohair fur and a grumpy face that my mother had allowed me to play with, which I later learned had been given to her by a boyfriend when she was a teenager. After my other animals were taken from me, i put that bear in the back of my closet and left it there alone.

I never dared love anything after that. There were hundreds of events like that, some smaller, some larger, many more violent or more obviously reprehensible, that went into making me the empty shell of a human being I am today, but that single event is the most emblematic of the irreparable damage that can be done to a child by a single cruel act.

I cannot forgive my mother, even knowing that her own mother treated her with equal cruelty. I can only try to heal that wound enough that I can risk loving something, even if it's just that little girl who is still, many desolate years later, mourning her lost friends.

[Alice97]

SeventhFold - It's so hard being around someone that triggering all day. I hope you can have a peaceful break soon. I also  want to say I relate to your stuffed animal story a lot. I remember when I was little (and even when I was "too old") I had very real relationships with each and every one of my dozens of stuffed animals. So I can easily imagine how traumatic it must have been to come home and find them gone, especially since you never got them back.

I also do a most of my cPTSD work at night. It's when I'm alone with my thoughts, which can be a good and a bad thing.

Hang in there, I know it's tough to love yourself (I'm preaching to the choir), but I want you to know that you are so worth being loved. That little girl who is still grieving her lost friends desperately needs you. I hope that with time and healing you can learn to love and be loved again 

[SeventhFold]

Thanks, Alice97. I am sometimes ashamed about that story because it seems so silly to mourn the loss of what the world perceives as inanimate objects, so it is very reassuring to hear you say that you understand. I was also comforted by reading in one of my books recently that for infants and children there isn't a clear demarkation between reality and fantasy like there is later in life. Those animals were genuinely alive to me, so my feelings were appropriate and justified, not ridiculous and overblown like my mother said they were.

The first gift I've given to every child in my life has been a specially-chosen stuffed animal. I hope that has made up at least a little bit for the fact that they had to have my mother as a grandma or great-grandma  .

[SeventhFold]

I've been thinking about belief today--or rather, about lack of belief. I guess it's because it's spring, and in a climate like ours, spring is when we start to hear about the church picnics and vacation bible school and when the country roads bring us evangelicals in batches of twos and threes, toting their well-worn bibles and newsprint religious tracts from one farm to the next. All of the church people seem happy to be released from the church basements for a few months. Even the UU congregation gets all chirpy and full of brotherhood in the spring. It all makes me feel incredibly lonely.

I'm not a believer, not in anything. I don't believe in ghosts or sasquatches or true love, or in satan or alien abduction or psychic powers, and I believe in neither gods nor in God. I have to state at the outset that this state of unbelief isn't something I take pride in or consider shameful, and I don't consider it to be an accomplishment on my part. I also don't consider it to be any more a matter for debate than is my race or my nationality or my gender. I didn't choose not to believe in anything, and I can't choose to start believing in something. I also don't try to convince others to believe or not believe in any particular thing.

Obviously, the area of my nonbelief that has the most effect on my life is religion. Atheism that is not reactive (to disappointment in church or family, to restrictions imposed by church or family, or simply to societal expectations) is relatively rare, therefore isolating. If I do encounter another atheist (we can identify each other by the horns  ), I'm usually put off by his intolerance for people who do believe. Quite often I get to know people in my community (a fairly conservative mix of Lutherans, Methodists, and Catholics) and we get along well until the question of what church I belong to comes up, and even if I give the most inoffensive truthful answer possible, their attitude toward me will change.

I would probably have a slightly easier time if I lived back in the city where I grew up, but there's still always a point people get to where my stubborn refusal to adopt a belief system of any type is just too much for them to tolerate, and they drift away slowly, carefully, always sure never to turn their backs on me. I once had a loud argument with a good friend when she tried to force upon me a label of goddess worshipper because I admitted that some natural sights filled me with awe. She no longer speaks to me at all.

Ecch. But anyway, I started this entry to talk about how nice it would be to believe in something, whether it be a god or spirit orbs or dragons. I've read that those of us with cPTSD often don't develop this ability to believe in things, but I haven't been able to interpret that in any useful way so far. Maybe this will be a good thing to kick around inside my skull tonight while I'm trying for 4 hours to achieve my usual 3 hours of sleep.