Two things before I dive in: first, this will likely be lengthy and honestly might be too much for me to try and sort through in one chunk; second, I am an expert only in my experience, and so what I am saying with regards to certain topics might be not completely correct/not fully understood (and there will be statements that I'll put in italics that I don't have sources for and that may or may not actually be clinically true, but they have been relevant and/or helpful).
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I started therapy through BetterHelp on October 29th, 2020. I'm starting here because my brain really wants to just make a timeline but I think for ease of understanding I need to go through things as I have been discovering them, and the timeline fits in where it will.
I started therapy because I observed my relationships crumbling, because I was waking up with the thought of "I can't do this anymore" in all its various iterations, and that thought stuck with me the entire morning, day, and night, because I felt isolated but also realized that I was isolating myself.
And so in early December, I started to learn about PTSD, and that unlocked a new world of understanding for me.
PTSD has four parts to it: re-experience (of trauma), arousal (of fear and/or anxiety), avoidance, and withdrawal (both escape tactics). Often we think of it with regards to war experiences, and those triggers of loud noises or large crowds or tight spaces or whatever might trigger a person back to the feeling of something that happened in war. But PTSD can stem from any traumatic event, where physical or psychological harm occurred, and not every traumatic event causes PTSD. (And as an extra nugget to remember, there's a Complex PTSD that adds in a dissociative aspect where there is disturbance of self-organization that leads to affective dysregulation, disturbance in relationships, and negative self-concept)
Arousal looks like a flight or fight response, and a few of the possible feelings include feeling keyed up/on edge, having trouble sleeping, becoming suddenly angry or irritable, and rouble concentrating. Anger is sadness that had nowhere to go for a very long time. Reexperience can be caused by a trigger (a visual, a sound, a smell even), a memory, a nightmare, a flashback. Avoidance may start as avoiding situations, conversations, anything closely related to the trauma, but eventually is turns into avoiding all people and things that make you anxious, and is considered PTSD when the avoidance coping becomes a lifestyle. Numbing is a disconnection from people and activities that used to be enjoyable. It also comes with increased sensitivity to feeling negative emotions like guilt, fear, anger, or shame. These can cycle into overworking, isolation, pushing people away, high risk behaviors, substance overuse. Numbing tells you that you can't get hurt by something that you aren't connected to or feeling about to begin with.
Numbing tells you that you can't get hurt by something that you aren't connected to or feeling about to begin with.
That sentence was the first clear bell in this journey for me. I wrote back in August a post that I deleted soon after posting. I won't post it all here but two excerpts are revealing:
"I have reached capacity in rejection. . . now there's a yo-yo that is distractingly hard to keep up with, and the next step is to move to the side, put both the negative and positive experience into the same box that is labeled "there things don't matter" so that they won't affect you strongly.
But really the problem basically is that I'd rather live with my problems than deal with another rejection. Because seriously, who I am and what I deal with in a given moment is not more important than what I can do for someone in both short and long term, and I am not in a place to open up without a grand fear of continued rejection because who knows what happens next."
The really interesting part is back at the end of August I said something about the PTSD of shutdown being like bone marrow transplant land, but I didn't know how close to the nail I was hitting because we use mental health terms so flippantly in our culture.
So going back to diagnosing what happens with PTSD, the chronic avoidance deprives you of opportunities to process the event, to relearn that triggers may not be as dangerous as they were during the trauma, and eventually leads to depression and poor quality of life as you begin to cut things/people out of your life. There are several different "personalities" in how these things happen- for me this is what stuck out:
Displacer: Takes expression emotion and displaces the feeling in other people or areas of their life. (stresses out at work, chronically agitated, upset at minor events.)
Minimizer: Person who is aware of their emotions, but when felt, works to dull the emotions and avoid them at all cost.
Somaticizer: Converts emotion into physical symptoms as a way to express and channel emotion.
And trauma impacts the places where we feel most vulnerable- again, this is what stuck out for me:
Esteem-I deserve to have bad things happen to me; if I don’t protect myself I am a weak person
Intimacy- I am unlovable because of my past; if I let other get close to me, I'll get hurt again.
Future oriented thinking and recovery feel vulnerable as it pushes us to the unknowns of our lives.
Fear of the future, life after trauma, causes guilt ("I made a mistake, I feel bad")/shame ("I am a mistake, I am bad")/self-sabotage (you subconsciously make sure you don’t get it; you push people away to hurt yourself; or accept only the love you feel you deserve) to be triggered when we are most afraid of repeating the past, and leads you to believe you’re undeserving of love.
Undeserving of love.
Now. That's a lot of information, and I feel like I'm only scratching the surface, but all I can say is that all of those things above have resonated in ways I can't being to describe with regards to the past few months. So this is the tl;dr- all of it boils down to this fear of abandonment.
PTSD from being isolated and alone because of what having a bone marrow transplant means.
PTSD from losing close friendships in the first few months/couple years after Cam died.
PTSD from losing Cam. It's weird to think of that as abandonment because it's not like there was a choice. But the emotional response is still feeling abandoned.
I've done things the past few months that I can't explain, and others that I don't even remember. "Your feelings are valid" does not necessarily mean "your reaction is an appropriate response to what just happened." But having a name of what's been going on in my brain has been very helpful in trying to stop doing it.
There's still some missing parts of the structure, as much as I want to have it figured out and be in a new normal. Treatment is a marathon, not a sprint. And there's so much more that I want to say but my brain is turning in to mush at the moment.
But this is a signpost for me, and maybe for someone else who is struggling. Whether it's PTSD or depression or anxiety or whatever, you don't have to live with it. And the American Christian world is good about shoving off mental illness as just a sin problem. There is some truth, but it's not a complete picture. And the flip side of therapy is that anything that does not align with what's in the Bible is worth throwing away. And that's what I really want to get in to, but it will have to be a different day. Maybe tomorrow afternoon. But the past few weeks I've been working really hard and have been having better days and better relationships than I was the several months leading up to making these discoveries.
So if you take anything away from reading this- don't feel like you have to live with your problems and your pain.
