Feeling Lost and Needing Validation

[maggie123]

Hey you guys! I'm new to this forum, and am mostly just looking for some understanding and validation. I haven't had a specific emotional trauma occur to me, but two years ago, I developed an eating disorder, and had to be hospitalized for a year and a half. There was a lot of chaotic days in treatment, of course, but they weren't all terrible and it helped me heal and grow. Now, though, I find that the place that saved my life has also left me with a lot of fears. I can't be in rooms with locked doors, and I can't handle being in one place for more than a couple of hours before growing severely anxious, and needing to leave. I can't handle the tastes of certain foods because they remind me of hospital food. Any kind of yelling sends my body into immediate panic. When I don't have access to a car, I feel trapped, and panic. When I'm in my home all day, I convince myself that I'm a prisoner, and am unable to leave. I see the faces of my past fellow patients everywhere I go, and long to talk to them, yet they end up being strangers who look like them. I never share my emotions with anyone, with fear that I'll somehow be reported and returned to the hospital, even if they are very mild emotions with no cause for such a thing. I know these things may sound mild or irrelevant, but it intrudes into my thoughts every day. I haven't found anyone else going through something similar, and everywhere I've looked online, I've never seen anything that says that elongated hospital stays can cause Complex PTSD. But it feels like the only explanation. I feel very alone and invalidated. I'm in a healthy place thanks to treatment, but that kind of isolation had left some scars on my life that I can't seem to shake. Can anyone relate? I appreciate you all. Keep fighting. xx

[woodsgnome]

Many of the symptoms you list feel eerily familiar, even if they occurred in slightly different context from whatever the mental health people say. Any sort of institutionalized virtual imprisonment, where rigid systems control all of one's life, might be prone to results such as yours, even long after release.

Hypervigilance--e.g. being afraid to be found within locked doors, in the midst of yelling, no access to a car, etc.--seems to fit within any definition of conditions conducive to forming complex ptsd.

Reading your list made me think not just of hospital stays--long or short, but of my early schools which were more institutionalized mayhem (in the name of beating religion into me) than anything. Those experiences left me reeling in terror; even eventual physical release doesn't stop symptoms like EF's from cycling in and out for a long time.

So yes--sounds like what you've experienced definitely matches what's known about the way by which cptsd influences our lives in scary ways.

I hope you can find some relief from these aftereffects. 

[Rainagain]

I can identify with your experience Maggie.

One cause of Cptsd is being trapped in a place you can't escape from and feeling unsafe with somebody else having more control over your situation than you do, an unequal power balance.

Over time that can cause cptsd. It did for me and sounds like it did the same to you.

You mention yelling, if there was a lot of upsetting stuff going on and you could not get away then that could cause cptsd.

I felt trapped in my home, I had to live for years with alarms going off day and night as a defence against violent criminals, I was prevented from selling up and moving by my employers who were worried about corporate manslaughter charges than in looking out for me. I had numerous visits to my home by the offenders as well as being ignored by my employer.

Its not the same as your situation but if you look at it from the point of view of our amygdalas then its similar stimulus for each of us.

I don't misrecognise people as you describe, I have nightmares and am on high alert ready for attack. That is hypervigilance I think, the same as you needing to have an escape route planned out (car, unlocked door).

Your symptoms aren't mild, they are exhausting, I find mine bewildering too and if I get threatened I get very Ill indeed.

On the good side nobody is going to hospitalise you for cptsd. My experience is that Its tough enough getting a diagnosis or effective treatment.

[AphoticAtramentous]

I think a hospital stay like that is a perfectly reasonable cause for CPTSD. You were trapped, in others' 'care'/power, it must have been so exhausting...
I had to stay in the hospital for a single night, but even just that, I woke up wanting to get out and have some freedom. So I can't imagine how it must have been for you with that duration... truly mind numbing. :S

Welcome to the forum though. ^^

[Rainagain]

Maggie,
I've just read on the download section of this site about 'medical trauma'.

Its a recognised thing where medical treatments (especially as an inpatient) cause trauma, have a look.