I read a very good post about PTSD a few minutes ago. Me being me, I have to respond.
My PTSD does not look like his. It has very little in common with his. Mine is different for a lot of reasons connected to longevity of trauma.
When your brain is under stress it reverts to the most basic training you have had in your life. For me the most significant, impactful early training of my life involved seeking out painful sexual contact and learning to be silent through it. I was moved rapidly through a series of homes, cities, and states. I was put in a variety of incredibly unsafe circumstances and left alone with pedophiles and rapists.
My PTSD is different. My PTSD isn’t about bombs. My PTSD is about believing that if someone near me can make their life better by causing me pain they will do so in a heart beat. My PTSD is about not knowing how to feel not afraid. My body does not know how to calm down. I have been afraid for too long.
For me PTSD is about knowing that when other children were loved and cared for I was spat on and called names. I believe that is what I deserve in life. I was taught to expect that. I was taught that when I expected or asked for anything else I would be punished, severely.
I have almost no memory of being in a room with my father without sexual abuse happening. It was constant before my parents split up. My mom just didn’t notice. After the divorce she just wasn’t there. I was always alone.
For me, PTSD manifests as the physical toll of years and years of adrenaline and malnutrition. I have terrible vertigo and tinnitus frequently. I have stomach pain from anxiety that I can’t make go away. If I try to go unmedicated I experience horrible pain when I try to eat. If I don’t eat often enough I vomit. I have the standard terrible headaches and back pain that go along with being an early childhood sexual assault survivor. Apparently almost all of us have that.
For me, PTSD is about believing that there is something that is lovable in other people that I simply lack. I do not deserve, stimulate, engender love. I am simply a black hole into which pain should be thrown.
I truly wish this was whiny hyperbole. I’ve had a bad life. I even wrote a book about it.
For me PTSD means that cutting myself produces enough pain for my psyche to calm down–now I know that reality is as it should be. I am supposed to be in pain. If I am not in pain I need to hurry up and cause pain before I do something stupid like believe it is ok for me to speak in front of people. No one wants to fucking hear what I have to fucking say.
I know that I am a stupid, worthless whore. That is what PTSD has given me. Well, that and living amongst the kyriarchy.
I agree with him that PTSD is about a world view. I will never be able to see the world as a safe place. It has never been for me. Security is a lie. There will always be monsters in the closets.
I liked it too. I thought about you when I tweeted the link. (Sometimes, I am delighted the twitter prevents me from saying why I think something is worth reading. This was not that.) Usually when people talk about their mental health status, it’s a really personal thing that I can’t really empathize with. I can hear their pain and acknowledge that it is awful, but that’s different. When I read it, I thought: yes! that!, even though I have absolutely no exposure to the day to day of military life.
I have a history of being abused, and bits of what he said popped out at me:
“It was never the snap trauma, the quick moment of action that breaks a person. PTSD is the wages of a life spent in crisis, the slow, thematic build that gradually changes the way the sufferer sees the world. You get boiled by heating the water one degree each hour. By the time you finally succumb, you realize you had no idea it was getting hotter.”
I’m lucky. I can avoid the things that remind me of who lives in my core. Not everybody can. This was a reminder of how grateful I am of the place where my abused past lives.