Tag: #PTSD

The Sound of Silence

The Sound of Silence

Athena DionLeave a comment

What if I were actually somebody who liked me? What if I actually believed I was a lovable person? What if I actually approved of my own reasoning for the decisions I make? What if I considered myself to be responsible and educated enough to make decent, although imperfect, decisions? What if I saw myself for the loving person that is displayed in almost all of my behaviors? Inwardly, I logically know that I’m a good enough person, I just never allow myself to inwardly feel like I’m good enough. This is the training I received in life: how to hate myself completely. That’s about the only thing I’m very certain I’m good at. Out of nowhere, I can suddenly be consumed with an overwhelming feeling that someone somewhere doesn’t like me for whatever reason. It doesn’t matter if I know them, like them, or respect them, for some reason their opinion would always matter more to me than my own opinion of me. This is the only way I knew to evaluate myself… by gauging who I am off of the opinions of others. It is my duty to maintain the status quo of my worthlessness. That has been my life’s path, up until around the beginning of this year. I promised you, guys, that I would slay the fucking lion in my very first post, and here you are watching me do just that.

The insights I’ve been having over the last six months to a year have had me making an incredible amount of positive life changes. I am handling the massive amount of responsibilities I have by using various self-care techniques, I’ve been practicing more kindness with myself, and I’ve been comforting myself during the hard moments.

This has been the pinnacle of the process of mourning the loss of my living mother.

I have finally learned how to be my own mother.

Even though she never did, I am learning to comfort myself, I am learning to tell myself when to relax and how to relax. I am the one making sure I meet the responsibilities necessary for a happy life. She never bothered to get me in therapy, even after I attempted suicide multiple times. But as an adult, though, throughout much of my life, I’ve been broke as fuck, I have never given up the search for the right therapist.

I could have given up after the first few fucked me up even worse with all the drugs they were prescribing me. They have put me on nearly every SSRI, sometimes many at the same time. They have put me on antipsychotics and even stimulants. But they would only give me an anti-anxiety pill when I was in a psych ward because they were afraid I would become addicted. Most of these doctors had known me for less than an hour before they would write at least one prescription. Guys, they are corrupt as fuck. Using state money to buy drugs to fatten the wallets of Big Pharma, while what’s wrong with me could only truly be fixed by someone talking to me long enough to learn about all of the trauma I was dealing with. I never needed any medicine. I needed human contact with a responsible and trained professional familiar with the signs of childhood trauma. I literally fell down the rabbit hole that is the mental health system for decades, spinning my wheels and wasting precious years that I can never get back…

Because no one would take to the time to see the truth about my life… to understand what I was living through, and to validate to me that I could trust my own instincts that told me there was something wrong with the way I grew up. That it all left me with some unfortunate coping mechanisms which, although they were what saved me as a child and teenager, are not acceptable adult behavior.

Meanwhile, each trial run with, not only ineffective, but worsening psychotropic treatments, was causing me tremendous interpersonal problems. When I was put on multiple SSRIs by a psychiatric clinic while attending college at age 18, I became zombie-like just before my semester finals and ended up missing at least half of the tests.

I lost my full-ride academic scholarship because of that. I was hospitalized for suicide watch, and I lost my job soon after. I had to move back in with my narcissistic Mom, who I knew secretly felt better about herself when she saw me failing. She liked feeling like she was smarter than me because I’m the reason she couldn’t finish high school.

When we were alone once, in my bedroom when I was a teenager, she asked me, “You know what I would have done if I hadn’t had you? I would’ve been a high school coach.”

You and I both know she could have become a coach while raising a child. So, how is it that my birth, or my very existence, stopped her from following any of her own dreams?

Because dreams take hard work on your own part in creating them. It was much easier for her to be lazy, and just blame me for all of her problems.

Since starting my new job in the last month or so, I have widened my social connection quite a lot. I have made friends with some new people. I have been accepted into a new circle of friends. This is such a big positive for anyone… except when you (and your son and husband) have been all but abandoned by ⅔ of your family. We’ve barely heard a word in five years… dozens of relatives. Your belief in the security of relationships becomes completely diminished. When the people you have spent nearly every holiday, wedding, graduation, and funeral with, your entire life, just suddenly drop you like a rag doll they’d been carrying, you begin to doubt whether people who don’t share your DNA can love you any better. It becomes incredibly hard to open up and trust new people. It is just too much of a risk.

Slowly, I am…

I am learning to trust others…

And I am learning to trust myself.

I am trusting that someone out there can be helped by something that I write. Even if you haven’t read this yet, I know there are at least some of you suffering the horrible plights, and I know that you feel alone. I’m here to tell you, if you are suffering silently with incredible emotional pain, even to the point that you can barely function in your daily life and responsibilities…

You are NOT ALONE.

This post inspired by The Sound of Silence (Simon + Garfunkel cover) by Disturbed.

Image by Susan Cipriano from Pixabay 

Running Up That Hill

Running Up That Hill

Athena DionLeave a comment

What is it that I’m wanting? Why do I keep doing the things I’m doing? What is the purpose or end goal of the behaviors I tend to engage in?

Why am I here, doing this, right now?

I’m searching for something. I’m trying to hang on through the hard part in order to get to something better. I am working my ass off without being able to pay my mortgage. It’s been almost a month. I am still worried about losing our home. It sucks. I hate it.

Can you imagine how much it must suck to not be able to afford even a used push mower so we can mow the damn field that our yard has become? 

You may be wondering how I have allowed my life to get to this point, but I’m telling you that every reason is related to PTSD. The self-sabotage, the self-deprecation, the feelings of overwhelm, depression, and panic. These things have run my life for almost as far back as I can remember. Early childhood trauma is something that a person just can’t ‘get over’. It helped shape who they were becoming at a time when they were still formulating their own sense of identity and beliefs about the outside world. We were impressionable, and impressions were made which were not conducive to our very development as future adult humans. Our internal growth was stunted. We are not fully developed, psychologically speaking.

Our task, the one thing standing between us and true adulthood, is to work through the trauma and finish developing. As long as the trauma consumes you, you will cease continuing to grow. As you work through it, you are able to finish whatever development was arrested at the time of the original cause of the trauma itself. That part of you has to catch up to your actual present age. You will mature that aspect of yourself, finally.

I’ve been witnessing this type of growth within myself, I’ve seen repetitions of similar situations which had led to each of the traumas. It’s almost like I subconsciously recreated the situations within my life to test myself again, and see how I might make it, now that I am a different person. That’s why I started looking for a job. Holding down a job has always been a struggle for me. I was called ‘lazy’ during my preteen years, even though I helped wash dishes, washed my own laundry, and babysat my siblings for free, whenever asked. I internalized that so much that I, for most of my adult life, have pushed myself to do as much as possible until I almost collapse from exhaustion. I never give myself credit for any of it, because I go and self-sabotage the hell out of every situation. Depression, anxiety, ADHD-like symptoms, sometimes even rage attacks out of nowhere; these have plagued me since I was 9 years old. I barely know anything different. 

So, what’s different this time? Why do I believe I can hold down a job now? First, I have been a dedicated mother for nine and a half years, and even though I’m not perfect, I have succeeded at giving him a significantly better life than the one I had as a child. Second, I have begun to finally see the error in the origins of my sense of self. I am finally able to objectively see that I wasn’t a lazy child. I was a perfectly normal child with dysfunctional parents. Throughout my adult life, I have been able to develop impressive skills and accomplish amazing things… in the short bursts I allowed before I destroyed my own efforts for the status quo.

Change is hard, guys. But… so is staying stuck in trauma.

Recommended book: No Excuses by Brian Tracy

This post inspired by Running Up That Hill (Kate Bush cover) by Meg Myers.

Image by Jana Küchler from Pixabay. 

Dog Days Are Over

Dog Days Are Over

Athena DionLeave a comment

There are people out there who are molesting children, shaking and hitting infants, cooking meth in front of children, leaving children in hot vehicles. With that in mind, how could I ever consider myself to be a bad parent? Because society has set a bar of perfectionism when it comes to childrearing. Everyone seems to act like there is this definition of what it means to be a good parent, but the fact is there is no specific definition. Sure, there are certain things like chaining your children to a bed, or hitting them hard enough to leave a mark, those things are NEVER okay. But, for those of us who truly do love our children the way our DNA and hormones were functionally made to instill within us, those of us who wholeheartedly want the best for our children (which is the majority of us), the bar has been set way too high, and judging by the trends that I’ve witnessed in social media and blogs, a majority of good parents are judging themselves very harshly. I think it’s because we all just want the best for our kids, and that judgment has us holding ourselves accountable in a way that maybe the previous generation didn’t do for us. If you were traumatized by violence in your childhood, you will not want that for your child, therefore, you will judge yourself harshly if you ever become violent at all, or even have violent thoughts, which for anyone exposed to violence previously will be at least somewhat part of the shaping of the personality in later relationships. If someone has ever been violent with you, you will have the reflex to feel compelled to respond in the way that you were responded to in the past by others. The way you were raised may always be your reflex response. It takes a tremendous amount of effort to overcome these propensities. But, it is possible, with force of will, and eventually habit, to unlearn that reflexive position and adopt a new position based on a completely different perspective. You have to unlearn the self-loathing, and learn to love yourself.

This is one of the hardest things a person will ever do in their lives. But, it is possible.

I have been processing a lot of my old suppressed feelings about things that have happened. As I process it, I find I can describe it with more and more detail. I can feel more and more of the feelings associated, and maybe even have a cathartic cry.

The tides are still turbulent, but I am weathering the storms.

This post inspired by Dog Days are Over by Florence + the Machines.

Image by Julie Snyder from Pixabay.

Best of You

Best of You

Athena DionLeave a comment

PTSD used to be known to affect mostly combat veterans. But, now it is being understood what should have been understood all along. Trauma happens to most of us. We deal with it differently. We gravitate toward our own chosen method of escapism which results in addiction. We become depressed, anxious, or develop symptoms that mimic ADHD, personality disorders, bipolar disorder, and even schizophrenia. We are fed a sampler platter of various psychotropic remedies, to no avail.

What about those of us who have survived rape, attempted murder, multiple types of childhood neglect and abuse?What about victims of domestic violence, the children who witnessed violence and crime? What about the children who suddenly and tragically lost a loved one?

Funny story about the recommended book listed below:

I actually read through most of it in just a few days’ time almost a year and a half ago, just before I started seeing my current therapist. I had checked it out from my local library at a time when it was a new addition to their branch, so it was only allowed to be checked out for two weeks at a time. As I read it, I had used small post-its to mark every part that seemed relevant. I resonated with that book so much that literally every page I read had at least three post-its. Then I began trying to ‘work’ through it, as in use it to help me with my trauma.

Guess what? It takes more than two weeks to work through trauma. So, eventually I started racking up the fines for not returning this and the other books I’d checked out the same day. This went on for six months, until I received a letter from them saying that they were about to turn me in to the local police (no, this is not an exaggeration). It took quite a long time to remove all of the post-its, but I did return it, and did not go to jail over it.

But even if I had, it would have been worth it, because that book was a first for me in understanding what was going on with me physically. I had seen two clinic doctors, who both believed the problem was psychological. I saw two chiropractors, with no ease of my pain. But, whenever I got a massage, I would go through huge emotional roller coasters that would eventually result in growth. I now understand they were allowing me to relax enough to process my pain in very small increments.

When stress from  your current life keeps you too distracted to deal with the past, it just becomes layers and layers of trapped emotions. And then add to that the frustrations with trying to get rid of the symptoms, just so you can function.

I highly recommend this book, guys. If you think there is ANY chance that you’ve been traumatized by something in your past, you may be fighting demons of which you aren’t even aware. They may be draining your energy, your patience, and your potential. And if it is true, there is NO SHAME in it. We cannot help how things affect us. Any more than we can help where and to whom we were born. Any more than we can change our DNA, and what type of personality we will have, or our physical makeup. Yes, we are responsible for all the choices that we make in response, but the fact of the matter is, things have happened to all of us that were beyond our control. And for many of us, some of those things were traumatizing. You and I are allowed to own that.

Recommended book: The Body Keeps the Score by by Bessel van der Kolk.

This post inspired by Best of You by Foo Fighters.

Image by Barbara Bonanno from Pixabay.

High and Dry

High and Dry

Athena DionLeave a comment

When do I really, actually allow myself to relax? I can’t even pinpoint a single second out of any day where my entire body feels at ease. About four years ago, when the trauma of having 2/3 of my family abandon me and my son after I stood up to my mother’s abuse really sank in, my body just became clenched and stayed that way. It was too much for my heart to really absorb at that time, so I just kind of boxed it in and never processed it. My mother got away with horrid abuses toward me, and our mutual family members have never held her accountable. They have continued their relationships with her and abandoned their relationships with me and my son because it was easier on them that way. None of them truly want to face who she is because it would disrupt the family too much. They have all watched on Facebook as I have blatently made it clear that I am HOMESCHOOLING MY AUTISTIC SON WHILE WORKING AND GOING TO COLLEGE. And I have done this with very little family support. Virtually nonexistent when you count the physical distance between me and my father and stepmother and my in-laws, who are all very loving and well intended, but live 45 minutes away. I have VERY HIGH STANDARDS for my son because it’s what I was deprived of. I wasn’t protected so I make DAMN FUCKING SURE that I protect him from the kinds of neglect and abuses that I was exposed to. I don’t let just anyone watch him. Especially because I’ve always known he is easily manipulated, which I now know is part of his autistic traits.

Guys, my kid is fucking amazing. I know a lot of parents say that about their kids, but, even if he wasn’t my kid, I would adore him upon meeting him. He is different. He is himself. I love how little he cares what other people think. I ENVY that about him. And it is a trait that he shares with his father that was part of the reason I fell in love with him. I adore people who are not afraid to be themselves, even when it’s not socially accepted. This is why I’m an advocate for gay people, or cross-dressers, or transgendered people. I may not understand what it feels like to be them, but in watching the ridicule and hate that they endure sometimes just for being honest about who they are, I believe them that that is exactly how they feel. They are just being honest, even when it’s hard. I don’t need to understand why. I’m not them. It’s not my life to live. It’s just like in the early 90s, no one believed that depression was real when I was a 12 year old girl suffering with it, now how many people are being medicated for not only depression, but anxiety, and multiple combinations of the two?

I am resentful at life in general that I am now working 3 jobs, homeschooling my autistic son in the opposite way from how I was raised. It’s like I’m scraping and mustering whatever inner strength I can muster after the decades of continuous trauma I was subjected to… I find the strength I’ve never had in order to give him all the love I never had. I want this kid to have the absolute best shot at life that he possibly can have, because so much of my life was wasted. So much of it was spent trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Society taught me to love and honor and be loyal to my mother, but my body, my body kept trying to tell me over and over again, with panic attacks, with rage attacks, with clenched, knotted muscles, with a jaw that didn’t release for nearly a decade. And now with the torso of glass. I’ve been doing yoga, stretching more, getting regular massages, and using a tennis ball to loosen the knots. I feel very, very slow progress happening. But any impatience at all on my part just slows it down even more. So, I have to be happy with the pace I am taking. I can only hope that the progress will continue.

This post inspired by High and Dry by Radiohead.

Image by Santa3 from Pixabay

Jane Says

Jane Says

Athena Dion2 Comments

Why does it feel so fucking bad when it’s exactly what I need? Because progress means change, and change FEELS TERRIBLE. At least, it does at first. Change of any kind is stressful on the body and psyche. What you have to focus on are the results. Yes, this feels shitty right now, but what might be the long-term benefits of allowing myself to feel some shittiness right now?

I’m scared to death to be suddenly working 5 days a week while homeschooling my autistic child. But, I’m not gonna give up on the homeschooling, that’s one thing I am willing to make the biggest sacrifices for, I believe that much that it’s the best thing for my son. But the thing is, homeschooling is fucking expensive. I pay taxes for the public school system, but I buy all of my books, pay for all of our online subscriptions for various educational resources, pay for all of our field trips, extracurricular activities (physical education, art, music…)…

What I’m really coming to right now is an understanding that my feelings are very often exaggerated from a normal emotional response to common situations. Because of past traumas, I am braced mentally and physically for the expectation of the worst. From other people, from situations, from whom I had believed to be god, from the universe at large, and from myself. My entire being, at some point, became overconsumed with a sense of tragedy and heartbreak. The human psyche can only take so much abuse before it alters itself to just help you get through the rest of your life without risking going through it again. You make yourself really, really, really small. You squash your own talents and intelligence so you don’t risk being brought back down. You don’t want to expose yourself to chance. Your entire life eventually becomes ‘how not to get hurt again’. And then you live in that mode.

And then there’s the other part of you. The part that wants to live. It keeps fighting with that other side, trying to find some level of freedom. You live this internal struggle that the smothering side always wins.

Even with all of the wonderful changes I’ve made lately, I still feel clenched like I have a glass torso. This tension actually runs from the top of my head to the muscles in my ankles. Something still has me blocked. I still can’t trust.

This post inspired by Jane Says by Jane’s Addiction.

Image by Steve Miller from Pixabay

Black Balloon

Black Balloon

Athena DionLeave a comment

Why don’t I have any pics of my dog on Facebook? Because I am playing out my relationship with my mother in my relationship to our dog. I know on a primal level, because I would never do it on purpose, but I was kind of ‘trained’ to be this way by my own childhood. It’s one of the many reasons I didn’t want to have another child. I was truly afraid of this carrying out with one of my son’s siblings. No human deserves to be treated that way.

It’s bad enough that my dog has to live through it. He isn’t mistreated or anything, I just don’t make it any secret that I am a cat person. I think he knows that I don’t mean it personally, in his much calmer, and wiser, dog intelligence. I think dogs instinctively know how to react helpfully to traumatized humans (this is why they are so helpful for therapy). I know that I am doing at least one step better because I have actually, on multiple occasions, cried to the dog, apologizing for the unfairness and repeatedly told him that I know he is the best dog, and that I do love him… (yes, I have literally done this).

And yet, my own mother, the woman who gave me life could not do this for me. She would rather never talk to me or my son again. She let her pride be bigger than how much we would need support when he was diagnosed with autism. She turned ⅔ of my family members against us so that it felt like we were losing them all at once at a time when we needed much more than the little support network we had.

My dog is jealous of the cats in the same way I was jealous of my half-siblings. They were so obviously favored, it was sickening. They were so much younger than me, it was more like I was their handmaid than their sister. They were close with each other, but I never became connected in the same way with them. I felt I had to hide so much of myself because my mother made it clear that she believed I was a bad influence, and that she didn’t want me affecting them in a negative way. They didn’t know why I kept getting checked into psych wards. They got the edited, censored version of it. They weren’t allowed to know when I worked at Hooters, when I started stripping. They weren’t allowed to know the real me.

I know what our dog must be feeling when he sees the cats sit on my lap and sleep in my bed because that’s what I felt when my brother went to the doctor for an ear infection while I went six months or more complaining about abdominal pain caused by an infection. He thinks in his doggie inner voice, “Hey, I’m a pet too. Why can’t I sit up there like that?”

I thought, “Hey, I’m her child too. Why can’t I be loved like that?”

 

This post inspired by Black Balloon by Goo Goo Dolls

Plush

Plush

Athena DionLeave a comment

My body can never relax because I never actually feel safe. In any given situation I will see a reason to judge myself or worry about something that may or may not ever happen. My mind will always find something terrifying about every single situation I find myself within.

There are voices of a thousand judgmental, hypocritical assholes living in my head, and I believe them as if theirs are the only true opinions that count. The tricky thing is, they are AUTOMATIC. I don’t literally hear them. In reality, I feel what they say, and react to it, without even acknowledging that a negative thought had crossed my mind.

This self-damnation happens constantly without me even realizing it. Then I wonder why I’ve felt depressed and anxious for decades, why no psychotropic medications seem to help. I am not chemically imbalanced. I am not in need of mind-numbing zombie meds. All I have needed to do is just ACKNOWLEDGE IT. I had to see my true reality clearly. I had to accept it.

This is extremely hard to do when the thing you need to accept is that your mother doesn’t love you, and that she never will. Our culture puts so much pressure on children to honor mothers. But this well-intended cultural expectancy is based on the idea that mothers are infinitely loving and giving as our hormones are built to harness within us. Yet, we all know how disgusted we are to hear about a mother killing her own children. We know there are horrendous instances where this doesn’t hold up. And a lot more of these instances involve sadistic abuse rather than outright murder, which, unfortunately, can also feel like death.

Please stop saying to people, “Yeah, but that’s your mother! She gave life to you!” Not all women who give birth are mothers. Let’s get that clear right here and now.

This post inspired by Plush by Stone Temple Pilots.

Image by andrea candraja from Pixabay

Fade Into You

Fade Into You

Athena DionLeave a comment

I still reject myself within my own mind. I still discount myself, to my core, as a ‘less than’ person. Even though, logically, I can tell I must be interesting and attractive based on the response I get from other people (mostly men). Yet when people tell me I am beautiful I still assume they must be saying it to be nice, as if they would say it to anyone just to make them feel better. I live in this dichotomy where my inner life does not match up with the outer reflection. For large portions of my life, five or more years at a time, I diminished myself into the smallest space I could fill because that’s all I thought I deserved.

The very woman who brought me into this world was the one who made me believe I never should have been in it. She did not want me to be alive. She resented me because she couldn’t finish high school, because she was forced to be connected to my dad for the rest of her life, even though she’d divorced him; because I ruined the ‘perfect family’ she was trying to portray with my stepfather and half-siblings.

I finally understand, after five years of reflection, wondering how she could have let me suffer silently with depression and suicidal tendencies, which she knew about, but disclosed to no one. She wanted me to go through with it. Maybe not consciously, but on some level she was hoping she would get to cash in on that ‘poor mom who lost her daughter’ thing, look like a fucking hero, and then get to carry on with her plans for the perfect family.

The woman never praised me unless it was over something that would make her look good. I was expected to make straight ‘A’s, meaning if I got a ‘B’, or god forbid a ‘C’, I would get scolded and accused of slacking off, but my sister and brother were praised for their mediocre report cards. She pushed me so hard, and yet never seemed interested in reading anything that I wrote until I wrote a fucking poem about her.

But the thing is, I’m actually over her. That’s, I think, what had to happen to ignite the true healing of the wound. I have actually mourned the loss of the woman I thought was my mother. The fantasy that I had of a mother who would someday connect with me, and acknowledge some of the pain she caused me, has died, and I have finished grieving the loss. I know now that she can’t. It’s not personal, it’s not by some curse put upon me by the universe. I just so happened to be given life by a narcissistic teenage mom whose father was a pedophile. I no longer see her as my mother. I see her as Ronda, the woman who raised me with less passion and love than most foster families would provide. In fact, it was much, much worse because this woman was not just indifferent to me. Not only did Ronda not love me, she actively hated me and blamed me for ruining her life.

Now that I’ve accepted that, into my bones, now that I understand how very little control I had over the circumstances of my own upbringing, I can now undo the self-sabotaging habits that this fact created through most of my life. Now I realize that, as an adult, I have the power to change. I can and will be better because I want to be, and no one can stop me but me. I have finally begun shedding the skin of my childhood.

This post inspired by “Fade Into You” by Mazzy Star

Alligator

Alligator

Athena DionLeave a comment

I had an interview today. It went really well. I think I’ll get the job!

I have fear that I shouldn’t be buzzed. I have fear that I won’t be able to handle a new job. I have fear that I’m a bad mom. I have fear that I am like characters that I read about or see on screen. I have fear that people don’t like Quarky. I have fear that I’m like Hitler or Casey Anthony. I have fear that I’m like my mother. I have fear of my power. I have fear of my pending success.

Somewhere I developed the belief that I’m a REALLY bad person, even though I have absolutely no evidence of me being this really bad person. In fact, most of the actual evidence of who I am in my life would reveal a kind, loving person who empathizes with people from all walks of life. She’s an attentive mother who wishes nothing more for her child than to be happy, healthy, and successful in his own life. She cries over other peoples’ sad situations, even some that she doesn’t even know. She wants the best for the Earth, for future generations. She truly contemplates things like the meaning of life, treating others as she would want to be treated. She cares about equality among ALL living things.She always tries to be honest with others and herself. She is sensitive and caring about the ways that she affects other people. She is quick to apologize when she believes she may have hurt someone else. Yet, inside her is a mama bear who will do whatever she must to protect her child and ensure his happiness, health, and future success.

When I couldn’t control the rages, I turned to books and therapy. When I realized it was because of the anger I held back from my mother, I unleashed it. I put space between her and anyone who insisted that I continue being around her. I hated her for the way she made me hate myself, and the way that was affecting my son. I needed to own that feeling. Even if it meant losing my sister, my brother, my stepfather, his family, and most of my mother’s side of the family. My son growing up in a home where his mother has dealt with her anger, her own past, her own family’s toxic dysfunction… that is worth all of those relationships put together

He is MY RESPONSIBILITY. What happens to him and how he will turn out, it all depends on the way I deal with him now. I know this because I know what would’ve prevented me from decades of therapy, addiction, spinning my wheels, and dating all the wrong men. A mother. That’s it. And it wouldn’t have had to be my birth mother. I could have been raised by practically any human in the world other than her, and I would have likely received more love, more praise, more acceptance, and more affection than I actually did. Most strangers in my life have shown me more kindness. The other people in my life have given me the shred of self-esteem that has kept me going through the worst of times.

Over a year with the same therapist, and she is still throwing me compliments and making sure I accept them. That’s because a year ago I didn’t believe any of them. I didn’t believe there was anything to love about me. I believed I was worthless. To my core, my entire life, I have believed that I was worthless. I did not expect anything good to happen to me. I didn’t expect to ever feel better than anxious and depressed. I felt defective. I was a mistake. That’s what I believed.

It wasn’t until I allowed myself the courage to truly begin analyzing my past, realistically, no matter how hard it may be to face the truth, that I began to see the change in myself. I had to face that my mother didn’t love me.

Small memories would surface. They weren’t repressed memories. I always remembered them, but I never realized they were bad because everything was minimized by her. To her, nothing was ever a good enough reason to lose your emotional cool.

Once I’d accepted that she didn’t love me, then I had to accept that it wasn’t the fault of the tiny child that I was. It wasn’t MY fault. It wasn’t because something was wrong with me that made me hideously unlovable. This part is way trickier.

Healing from PTSD, whether complex or not, is a big, fat irony. Normally, when you think of healing from something, you think of moving on from it, of the problem going away. But with PTSD, you may think, “I’m moving on once and for all, I’m going to live in the present, I’m going to appreciate what’s in the here and now and in my bright future.” And then one day, the old events and feelings come back to smack you in the face out of nowhere. And then, the shame of not being truly ‘over’ it, of not being grateful enough, of not being appreciative enough, of not being strong enough to let go of the past retraumatizes you. You hate yourself for allowing it to come back. You mentally punish yourself for not being free.

The only way to truly heal from this cycle is by not forcing yourself to be free of it. You must accept it. You can live in the present. You can be grateful. You can look forward to your bright future. But you must understand that that future will also have the remnants of the past in it; that you must be prepared to deal with future replays of the past, if and when they happen. To be healed with PTSD means to truly be integrated with the part of yourself that you hate, to allow that part to show its face, whenever necessary, without shame.

My therapist asked me, after I read the above paragraph to her, “Do you think you identify with the PTSD so much that you can’t let go of it?”

I thought about it and said, “If the PTSD is part of what makes me empathetic towards others’ feelings, sensitive to others needs, an attentive mother, an honest writer, full of depth, then I don’t want to get rid of it.”

At the end of the spectrum from this point of wanting to be away from it all, I feel a love that could create a million big bangs. I feel my love so powerfully that it consumes my entire body like the weight of the universe sitting on my abdomen. There are no words in any language to describe what I feel when I really think about my love for my son, my husband, our amazing pets, the various loved ones, friends, and strangers who have been there for me. I’m crying just writing about it. In a minute, I’ll probably sob for about 5-10 minutes thinking about it. There’s seriously nothing I wouldn’t do for them. I absolutely hate the time that has been wasted on me dealing with my past. It’s not fair to any of us. I wanted so badly for it to be a quick healing process, 6 months of therapy and I would be over my family’s abandonment. I mourned the loss of who I thought they all were to me, all at once.  That takes more than 6 months, unfortunately. You really can’t rush it.

But in the aftermath… there is more life left to live.

The next day…

Got a call. I start training for my new job on Monday.

This post inspired by Alligator by Of Monsters and Men.