ptsd
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; The storm after the storm.
The Veil Of Mental Health
As much as I wanted to explain personal experiences in the segment, it is also my intent to hopefully help someone that is unsure of their own well being. I have 40 plus years of hands on life experience that I am willing to share and open up about it. The years have gone by in a stale desensitized state for about 30 years. My descentisized state was of the mind with a constant barrage of medications. Hospitalization was the start of this haphazard medley of misunderstandings with mixed communications and perceptions of reality from what was expected from a youth in the 1980s. The type of youth that was raised by Christian parents, that never talked of Christianity or even life for that matter. My sibling is younger by 5 years so any actions by an older brother was watched, scrutinized and put in the memory for future recall, at least that is what I believe now. Marijuana was big, so was hash back in the 1980s in the city I lived. Until I found LSD. Yup, chemical shit, not to too mention mushrooms also. Shit went sideways for a long fucking time. Even to this day it can be hard to fathom why I'm still here after the countless adventures, and close calls even with the cops at the the time. Hindsight now is actually a reality check. The best way to provide context for all the above sentences would be, I did this and caused my delusional path. The delusional path is also a good path from where I am today. What Iran is that mental health in the ,80s was bad, not as bad as even earlier as depicted in tv shows, but actually similar in the sense that you are always going to be looked upon as a person mental health afflictions. I accept it now because I can. I would like to clarify that even though this was started by my own hand, the help I received was not, and it was much more diabolical, dark and unforgiving. Adults involved in my best interest were not as one may have expected. Medications only, no talk therapy, do as I say and shut down my own personal voice and wishes for myself. I do remember talking with someone or even myself when shit went downhill. I was making delusional deals with myself. These deals are now traumas I'm dealing with almost daily. I honestly don't feel as bad as I had years back and maybe, maybe it's because I'm writing. My journals are a bloody mess of my own psychobabble and butchered poetry and fragmented documentations of my journey. This platform is where I experimented, with poetry and short stories. Not all was here, most is still iny logs. I will continue to write in psyche in hopes that someone may benefit from this. I by no means am encouraging or discouraging, just showing what comes to pen and paper. The help of today is better I feel, but also needs to improved upon greatly. I say this because age is something of a state of mind, not a course of treatment, and everyone's neurological structure is different because of their insurance to trauma, fight or flight and even rest and digest. Please accept my apologies for broken sentence structures, punctuation and train of thought as I write this. Be well. Talk to you soon.
By Vinn Blackabout a year ago in Psyche
I Was the Strong One Until It Broke Me
For as long as I can remember, people have seen me as “the strong one.” The dependable friend. The sibling who always listens. The co-worker who steps up when things fall apart. I carried that title like a badge of honor, proud that others trusted me, proud that I could be the one who held everyone together.
By Nadeem Shah about a year ago in Psyche
The Girl Who Slept On A Newspaper
Anxious attachment is a thing we hear a lot about these days. Attachment theory is a buzzword bingo selection. Like narcissism and gaslighting. But the story of how I learned to chase avoidant men like a defective compass needle that only pointed toward storm systems is one in a million. And yet, the dynamic may be the most common model of all relationship issues today.
By Suburban_Disturbanceabout a year ago in Psyche
Good Luck Understanding This. Content Warning.
I thought I knew myself pretty well. I mean, I had spent years in my own head, which should count for something, even if the place is badly managed. I knew how I got when things started slipping. I was already so used to doubting myself that I thought I would notice if someone else started joining in. Well, safe to say - I didn’t. I was nineteen when we met, twenty when the relationship started, and twenty-one when I left, which feels worth mentioning because apparently that still made me old enough to be blamed for not immediately understanding a man fifteen years older than me. I was not as impossible to influence as I wanted to believe. Being with him made that obvious in ways I only really understood after I got out. At the time, though, I mistook having opinions for having boundaries. I knew what made me uncomfortable; I was just remarkably easy to convince that the discomfort was my problem. With no real experience to compare it to, whatever happened often became “normal” simply because he said it was. Normal was him treating anything I objected to as proof that I was insecure, then presenting his own behaviour as some universal truth about men I was apparently too inexperienced to grasp. Normal was him asking why I’d lost interest while telling me my boobs would be sagging to my knees by the age I’m forty, then defending himself by pointing out that I had mentioned wanting a breast lift first, as though vulnerability came with a waiver. Normal was my body being discussed like an inconvenience whenever it failed to make him feel wanted, attractive, or in control. Normal was being presented with a small jury of friends and relatives I had never spoken to, all somehow agreeing that I was the problem. Normal was him expecting reassurance from me while I was still trying to recover from whatever he had just said. Normal was all of that and more, and it left me stunned at the casualness of cruelty, wondering how someone could make your life feel like a set of examples in a lesson you didn’t ask to attend. The hardest part wasn’t realising I’d been manipulated - it was how slowly it had happened. Nothing arrived all at once, no neon sign lit up “this is bad,” at least from where I was standing. It came as little comments, jokes I supposedly took the wrong way, “honesty” that somehow always landed on my body or my character, and conversations where every disagreement ended the same way: he was experienced, I was naive; he was rational, I was crazy. To nobody’s surprise, other people saw what was happening to me before I did. The massive age gap was obvious, and so was the imbalance that came with it. Stress has never done especially elegant things to my grip on reality. During the relationship, I started having hallucinations I could still recognise as hallucinations, which sounds almost reassuring until you are sitting there fully aware that something is not real and still terrified of it anyway. A remarkably useless distinction. That was when the fear changed. I wasn’t just having a hard time anymore. I could feel my mind getting less reliable, and I knew enough about my own diagnosis to understand where that could lead. The fear of becoming more unwell and slipping further along the schizophrenia spectrum didn’t feel dramatic - it felt uncomfortably realistic. Somehow, even my illness became part of the cover story. The worse I got, the easier it was to point at my diagnosis instead of the relationship making me deteriorate. It’s a very convenient little trick: make someone less stable, then use the instability as proof that nothing they say can be trusted. By that point, I was barely holding myself together, and my brother’s addiction was pulling at whatever was left. I wish I could say I responded to it with endless patience and concern, but I didn’t. Addiction in a family is not some noble exercise in empathy. It’s watching someone you love keep making life worse for everyone around them, and then feeling guilty because apparently saying that out loud makes you the cruel one. My brother and I have never had some clean, sweet bond. It’s very complex. I resent the lies, the apologies nobody really believes anymore, and the same promises being wheeled out every time like this time is somehow going to be different. Then he makes another stupid decision, and the rest of us get stuck with the fallout. Suddenly everyone’s on the phone, plans are ruined, nobody sleeps, and the whole family is dragged into figuring out what the hell he’s done now. I love him, but I hate what his addiction has done to us, and sometimes I hate him for it too. That sounds awful because it is awful. None of this is noble or clean, and I’m not interested in making any of this easier to swallow for people who have never had to live through it. That is exactly why I wanted to keep it private. Not because I was ashamed - but because privacy is not the same as stigma. It was none of anyone else’s damn business. It was my brother’s life, my family’s damage and my own grief, and I had no interest in handing any of it over so somebody else could isolate the least flattering parts of how I coped and use them to make himself easier to sympathise with. On my brother’s birthday, I went to visit him because, no matter how angry I can be with him, I still loved him enough to go. He was in the worst state I had ever seen him in, and I had a panic attack and left. Before I had even processed any of it, I was expected to explain when I was coming back and reassure someone who had somehow found a way to need comforting too. Of course, once you remove the brother, the birthday, the addiction, the panic attack and the fact that I had gone because I loved him, I suppose what remains afterwards can be arranged into a fairly tidy story about my selfishness. Context is wonderfully cooperative when you cut away enough of it. It takes a remarkable amount of confidence to pass moral judgement on the uglier parts of loving an addict when addiction has never even entered your own family and demanded anything from you, but confidence was never exactly in short supply, I guess. By then, I was exhausted in a way that made everything very quiet. Not peaceful, just empty. I had put an embarrassing amount of effort into being fair to someone who treated fairness as an opening bid and my worst moments as future reference material. Every explanation became another surface for him to argue with. Every boundary became proof that I was cold, irrational, ungrateful, argumentative, or whatever word made him innocent that day. At some point, you end up leaving not because you are angry. You leave because there’s nothing left to hand over. No more context, no more patience, no more translating yourself into simpler and simpler language for someone who understood perfectly well when it benefited him. So it ended like a memo: packed my things, typed the text the next day, and sent it. A ridiculously long, overexplained text, because obviously it takes a novel to make someone hear what you’ve been saying for months. Leaving did not make me instantly free. That would’ve been ideal, obviously, but not realistic, unfortunately. It was over, but I wasn’t magically fine. I would wake up from nightmares unable to catch my breath and then lie there replaying everything. I kept thinking of when I should’ve said no, walked out, refused to let him make me feel ashamed for falling apart after being pushed that far. The more I remembered, the more I hated myself. I hated that I had stayed long enough to learn how to apologise while crying. I hated that I had become grateful when an argument finally ended, even if it ended with me agreeing that I was the problem. I hated how familiar it all became. I knew how every conversation would go and still kept thinking there had to be one where he would finally hear me properly. There never was. For the longest time, I kept judging myself in his voice without realising I was doing it. I thought the relationship had simply exposed what I had always been: difficult, unstable, unattractive, and impossible to love. I was also made to believe, at some point, that I would never find better - which is hilarious in hindsight. The belief had very little to do with his actual desirability and quite a lot to do with the extraordinary talent for mistaking his opinion of himself for a widely shared one. Life has been rather educational since, I must say. I can laugh at the arrogance now. I could not laugh at what believing him had done to me. Hearing my psychiatrist call it trauma was the first time I understood that the state I was in was not proof of my character. I was struggling because I had been hurt, not because he had finally uncovered some terrible truth about me. This was especially interesting because, during the relationship, he had already begun treating my psychiatrist as a suspicious influence. Once therapy started helping me notice things he preferred I did not notice, the explanation was apparently that my psychiatrist was manipulating and brainwashing me. It seems my illness could be invoked whenever I disagreed with him, but the treatment for it became untrustworthy as soon as it gave me a little perspective. So yes, therapy mattered. Shocking development: the place where I wasn’t being cross-examined turned out to be useful. It gave me somewhere to bring the whole mess without first preparing a defence, a timeline and several supporting documents. The nightmares still come back sometimes, and so does the shame. The difference is that I don’t believe the shame as easily now. Somewhere in all of it, I found enough clarity to understand that the damage was not proof I deserved it. I feel proud I gave myself time to get there.
By Suzanne B.about a year ago in Psyche
7 Signs You Were the Family Scapegoat (& How to Reclaim Your Story)
The Unseen Wound: 7 Signs You Were the Family Scapegoat In many dysfunctional families, there are unspoken roles assigned to each child. But while some roles come with praise, one is created to carry all the family’s burdens: the family scapegoat. This is the child who is cast as the “problem,” the “troublemaker,” or the source of all conflict.
By Sunshine Firecracker™about a year ago in Psyche
Original nightmares: The birth of dread
The first time I’ve ever felt real fear, I was on the ground looking up at military helicopters flying above. The sounds it made were unlike anything I’ve heard before. The vibrations felt chilling, I could feel it all over my body. At the time it was like the whole world was against me. It felt lonely, cold and dark. You couldn’t have told me that I wasn’t stuck in a cemented room with barely any light. The only light was from the small hole drilled above me. I felt trapped, with nowhere to go.
By Tendresse NKabout a year ago in Psyche
