Revelations About PTSD
Aug. 26th, 2012 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altarflameI definitely unraveled a bit over the course of yesterday, being a mostly useless lump desperately wanting to go to sleep or at least hide under a blanket while Grant and all the children put shutters up, brought things inside, cleaned off the deck and porch and so on...until, late last night with the kids in bed, I was crying and being irritable with Grant and it all sort of clicked into place. Like, "OOooooooh......fuck."
Because, you know, I'd been up all day from 5am and then all night (til dawn), with Jake at the hospital in a freakin' mini surgery session that featured arguing with a guy in scrubs, and then we came home to hurricane prep, and it did some kind of time warp horseshit to me that made it feel just like when Jake was born - severe sleep deprivation, hospital, hurricane after hurricane. Walking through my house with my internal time clock all messed up, with shutters blocking the sun and the grill and benches and big plants on stands and discharge papers all cluttering the place up.
In case you don't know, what PTSD is, on a neurological level, is (bad) long term memories stuck in the short term memory part of your brain. When "triggers" set you off, and you call upon those memories, your brain and body act as though you're still stuck in the actual situation, often resulting in a fight or flight adrenaline rush - but it can be all kinds of different responsive feelings... I was walking around with phantom smells of Grant Sr's house and the crampy-sharp displaced shoulder pain I always get after surgery, hating everything, with this huge heavy irrational sadness crushing down on my chest as it did with Jake in the NICU miles away while storms raged outside. Jerking and twitching when anything touched my back where the hematoma was. Ugh.
In case it has ever not been clear, it is Jake's birth (October '05) that I have PTSD from. It was compounded and complicated in many ways, by the things that happened in 2007. But what actually gave me some kind of fucked up mental disorder that makes me feel crazy, was that whole 3-days-straight-of-hard-labor that ended with this awful hospital I've had dozens of caricature nightmares about. I think my brain - my whole self - was especially vulnerable to long term trauma because of the intense sleep deprivation and prolonged high pain levels, before I even arrived at Jackson. So being accused of terrible things at a yell by the staff, separated from Grant, threatened with everything from mortality to legality as people tried to physically force me to do things - having it be DIRTY with cops and CPS officers everywhere in a dangerous neighborhood, my baby catching penicillin-resistant staph from their facility and my previously 4 inch wide pencil line scar being this long, crooked, unrolling thing with my muscles hanging askew in front of my pelvis - the hematoma and talk of re-opening my back, the major hurricanes passing through that I had to be separate from my newborn for...even the half-dark hospital in that surreal dark Miami, with no working elevators after Katrina (or Rita or Wilma) with just 5 flights of stairs to get to my baby when it was hard to even lift my leg...
And... I'm fucking crying, sitting here all but 7 years later.
I continue to be vaguely ashamed of having PTSD, as I've always felt I have a higher mental/emotional constitution than PTSD tends to imply. I mean I've been through a lot of shit, and I haven't gotten PTSD from most of it...whatever. It is what it is, and perhaps I'll go get more emdr therapy sometime.
I'm leading up to something, here. I talked recently about how different I am, pre- and post-sepsis, you know? That's all a blur in some ways to me, "back there", between Jake being born and Elise being born - I have a lot of clear and distinct memories, and some of it was really good, but getting pregnant before Jake was a year old threw me for a fucking loop, and it's this trauma situation with his birth that made me PANIC when I got pregnant with Elise, you know? PTSD drove me to Boston to avoid anything similar as much as anything else, I just could not repeat that situation. In some weird ways Elise's birth was healing because although it was HORRIBLE in totally different ways, the staff of the hospital we were at were so respectful and caring, and that whole place was so clean and good, and I felt all along that they were truly helping us -
Although yeah obviously they also left a sponge in me. Life is complex, right?
I promise I am gradually circling my way back around to the point of this entry.
Last night I was in the bathroom, all wigging out, and I caught a scent - maybe real from packaging in my bathroom or maybe phantom, I have no idea, it could have been from the trash can I opened - of LUSH bath bombs. And it was SO GOOD, like, not just "wow LUSH smells good," it was this comforting thing to cling to like it could save me from my shuttered up bathroom where I couldn't lean back against the toilet seat or else it would push on my spine.
Because LUSH came so far after all of that, for me, and has NO ties to any of it. It's part of a whole different phase of my life where I don't get pregnant or have babies anymore.
That started me on this huge landslide of realizations. One really good friend of mine who read that entry I recently wrote, about being a different person before and after a trauma, was not cool with it, because her husband tried to tell her the same thing - that he was not the same person anymore after his Iraq war traumas. It's part of what broke up their family, and part of his justification for having affairs. And I remember her telling me how he listened to totally different music and went out with friends to bars for the first time in his life and I was like... yes. This makes perfect sense!
If you can be triggered into remembering things that completely fuck up your day, physically and emotionally - maybe your week or your months - by anything from a certain time period, you are going to try to find new shit to surround yourself with. You are going to naturally gravitate towards things you have no previous experiences with.
I was sitting on my bed, indian style, explaining this to Grant - walking around South Beach. Falling asleep on the beach. Rum. Florence and the Machine, LUSH, going to Key West alone just the two of us, preschool, Izzy babysitting - it's all like YES. Get me as far away from that shit as possible. I am a totally different person. Think about my nose ring and my publisher and tumblr, I have an IUD, ok.
Earlier in the evening, when he'd wanted to be all affectionate, I was just...grossed out. I don't even know how to explain this. It fucking felt like when we were having this close/intense awesome sex when Jake was in the NICU, this sex where foreplay was crying and we were really too tired, but, we needed something. So I was thinking, no. I'm not even jealous anymore, I like it when he goes on roadtrips now because I need some space and he wants to travel. He was in Maryland and we were skyping and it's NOTHING like when we were teenagers at his father's house, think about texting pictures back and forth and walking through the sex store browsing toys and watching True Blood together and Ok, there, now I'm turned on. THis can work, we bought this bed at Rooms to Go, this song wasn't even out back then, this is a whole other part of my life.
I think it's fairly common knowledge that PTSD can make marriages and family life difficult a lot of the time - especially with war vets - but (I think?) people are usually connecting that with violent or hostile behaviors, an inability to really connect or be intimate, just general "PTSD symptoms" that add up to something along the lines of extreme moodiness. But this is not just that - what I'm talking about is this very urgent need to distance yourself from things that take you back and, thus, will make you hurt badly. I'm 100% sure this factors into how trapped I felt in my marriage a year and a half ago, and how overwhelmed with motherhood I get sometimes in the past couple of years.
It's like these people that I love are tying me down to this traumatic response, and I can't dig myself completely out of it and be safe, as long as my life is intimately wrapped up with theirs and they keep unwittingly sending me back, mentally.
In that vein, I found myself thinking, "Oh yes we should DEFINITELY move to Maryland, I do not ever want to prepare for another hurricane again, I mean NEVER."
I get so pissed, about being sad about this shit AGAIN. Like, wtf, really? This? AGAIN? I hate the work of unravelling that it is in fact this, again, that I have to do before I even realize it, and that I need to realize before I can move on and stop acting like a crackhead. I think this is the second big PTSD "episode" I've had this year, both having been brought on after multiple trips to the hospital as well as various repetitive environmental factors (unexpected ER/OR scenes on shows, people forwarding me news stories about traumatic birth and birth intervention statistics, pregnant friends planning their births online and IRL, etc). Enough of it piles up and it buries me, until I have to dig myself back out again. The other time...I feel like it was around March. I get little trigger-y uncomfortable stuff here or there more regularly but it doesn't impact my life or relationships.
I like that it's been almost 7 years in a certain potentially therapeutic way. Maybe I can sit around meditating on how every 7 years we are completely new organisms, as far as cell regeneration goes, and how credit/debts are forgiven on that time line. Or maybe that's all ridiculous. But I need to get down to some kind of new age, affirmations-on-the-mirror business because I am so over this and don't want to fall down this hole over and over for the rest of my life.
On that note, I am going to clean the hell out of this messy bedroom until it is one part of my house that is not cluttered or hurricane-y.
Did I mention it isn't even RAINING?!
Because, you know, I'd been up all day from 5am and then all night (til dawn), with Jake at the hospital in a freakin' mini surgery session that featured arguing with a guy in scrubs, and then we came home to hurricane prep, and it did some kind of time warp horseshit to me that made it feel just like when Jake was born - severe sleep deprivation, hospital, hurricane after hurricane. Walking through my house with my internal time clock all messed up, with shutters blocking the sun and the grill and benches and big plants on stands and discharge papers all cluttering the place up.
In case you don't know, what PTSD is, on a neurological level, is (bad) long term memories stuck in the short term memory part of your brain. When "triggers" set you off, and you call upon those memories, your brain and body act as though you're still stuck in the actual situation, often resulting in a fight or flight adrenaline rush - but it can be all kinds of different responsive feelings... I was walking around with phantom smells of Grant Sr's house and the crampy-sharp displaced shoulder pain I always get after surgery, hating everything, with this huge heavy irrational sadness crushing down on my chest as it did with Jake in the NICU miles away while storms raged outside. Jerking and twitching when anything touched my back where the hematoma was. Ugh.
In case it has ever not been clear, it is Jake's birth (October '05) that I have PTSD from. It was compounded and complicated in many ways, by the things that happened in 2007. But what actually gave me some kind of fucked up mental disorder that makes me feel crazy, was that whole 3-days-straight-of-hard-labor that ended with this awful hospital I've had dozens of caricature nightmares about. I think my brain - my whole self - was especially vulnerable to long term trauma because of the intense sleep deprivation and prolonged high pain levels, before I even arrived at Jackson. So being accused of terrible things at a yell by the staff, separated from Grant, threatened with everything from mortality to legality as people tried to physically force me to do things - having it be DIRTY with cops and CPS officers everywhere in a dangerous neighborhood, my baby catching penicillin-resistant staph from their facility and my previously 4 inch wide pencil line scar being this long, crooked, unrolling thing with my muscles hanging askew in front of my pelvis - the hematoma and talk of re-opening my back, the major hurricanes passing through that I had to be separate from my newborn for...even the half-dark hospital in that surreal dark Miami, with no working elevators after Katrina (or Rita or Wilma) with just 5 flights of stairs to get to my baby when it was hard to even lift my leg...
And... I'm fucking crying, sitting here all but 7 years later.
I continue to be vaguely ashamed of having PTSD, as I've always felt I have a higher mental/emotional constitution than PTSD tends to imply. I mean I've been through a lot of shit, and I haven't gotten PTSD from most of it...whatever. It is what it is, and perhaps I'll go get more emdr therapy sometime.
I'm leading up to something, here. I talked recently about how different I am, pre- and post-sepsis, you know? That's all a blur in some ways to me, "back there", between Jake being born and Elise being born - I have a lot of clear and distinct memories, and some of it was really good, but getting pregnant before Jake was a year old threw me for a fucking loop, and it's this trauma situation with his birth that made me PANIC when I got pregnant with Elise, you know? PTSD drove me to Boston to avoid anything similar as much as anything else, I just could not repeat that situation. In some weird ways Elise's birth was healing because although it was HORRIBLE in totally different ways, the staff of the hospital we were at were so respectful and caring, and that whole place was so clean and good, and I felt all along that they were truly helping us -
Although yeah obviously they also left a sponge in me. Life is complex, right?
I promise I am gradually circling my way back around to the point of this entry.
Last night I was in the bathroom, all wigging out, and I caught a scent - maybe real from packaging in my bathroom or maybe phantom, I have no idea, it could have been from the trash can I opened - of LUSH bath bombs. And it was SO GOOD, like, not just "wow LUSH smells good," it was this comforting thing to cling to like it could save me from my shuttered up bathroom where I couldn't lean back against the toilet seat or else it would push on my spine.
Because LUSH came so far after all of that, for me, and has NO ties to any of it. It's part of a whole different phase of my life where I don't get pregnant or have babies anymore.
That started me on this huge landslide of realizations. One really good friend of mine who read that entry I recently wrote, about being a different person before and after a trauma, was not cool with it, because her husband tried to tell her the same thing - that he was not the same person anymore after his Iraq war traumas. It's part of what broke up their family, and part of his justification for having affairs. And I remember her telling me how he listened to totally different music and went out with friends to bars for the first time in his life and I was like... yes. This makes perfect sense!
If you can be triggered into remembering things that completely fuck up your day, physically and emotionally - maybe your week or your months - by anything from a certain time period, you are going to try to find new shit to surround yourself with. You are going to naturally gravitate towards things you have no previous experiences with.
I was sitting on my bed, indian style, explaining this to Grant - walking around South Beach. Falling asleep on the beach. Rum. Florence and the Machine, LUSH, going to Key West alone just the two of us, preschool, Izzy babysitting - it's all like YES. Get me as far away from that shit as possible. I am a totally different person. Think about my nose ring and my publisher and tumblr, I have an IUD, ok.
Earlier in the evening, when he'd wanted to be all affectionate, I was just...grossed out. I don't even know how to explain this. It fucking felt like when we were having this close/intense awesome sex when Jake was in the NICU, this sex where foreplay was crying and we were really too tired, but, we needed something. So I was thinking, no. I'm not even jealous anymore, I like it when he goes on roadtrips now because I need some space and he wants to travel. He was in Maryland and we were skyping and it's NOTHING like when we were teenagers at his father's house, think about texting pictures back and forth and walking through the sex store browsing toys and watching True Blood together and Ok, there, now I'm turned on. THis can work, we bought this bed at Rooms to Go, this song wasn't even out back then, this is a whole other part of my life.
I think it's fairly common knowledge that PTSD can make marriages and family life difficult a lot of the time - especially with war vets - but (I think?) people are usually connecting that with violent or hostile behaviors, an inability to really connect or be intimate, just general "PTSD symptoms" that add up to something along the lines of extreme moodiness. But this is not just that - what I'm talking about is this very urgent need to distance yourself from things that take you back and, thus, will make you hurt badly. I'm 100% sure this factors into how trapped I felt in my marriage a year and a half ago, and how overwhelmed with motherhood I get sometimes in the past couple of years.
It's like these people that I love are tying me down to this traumatic response, and I can't dig myself completely out of it and be safe, as long as my life is intimately wrapped up with theirs and they keep unwittingly sending me back, mentally.
In that vein, I found myself thinking, "Oh yes we should DEFINITELY move to Maryland, I do not ever want to prepare for another hurricane again, I mean NEVER."
I get so pissed, about being sad about this shit AGAIN. Like, wtf, really? This? AGAIN? I hate the work of unravelling that it is in fact this, again, that I have to do before I even realize it, and that I need to realize before I can move on and stop acting like a crackhead. I think this is the second big PTSD "episode" I've had this year, both having been brought on after multiple trips to the hospital as well as various repetitive environmental factors (unexpected ER/OR scenes on shows, people forwarding me news stories about traumatic birth and birth intervention statistics, pregnant friends planning their births online and IRL, etc). Enough of it piles up and it buries me, until I have to dig myself back out again. The other time...I feel like it was around March. I get little trigger-y uncomfortable stuff here or there more regularly but it doesn't impact my life or relationships.
I like that it's been almost 7 years in a certain potentially therapeutic way. Maybe I can sit around meditating on how every 7 years we are completely new organisms, as far as cell regeneration goes, and how credit/debts are forgiven on that time line. Or maybe that's all ridiculous. But I need to get down to some kind of new age, affirmations-on-the-mirror business because I am so over this and don't want to fall down this hole over and over for the rest of my life.
On that note, I am going to clean the hell out of this messy bedroom until it is one part of my house that is not cluttered or hurricane-y.
Did I mention it isn't even RAINING?!
