A few words to my readers about some upcoming changes . . .

1. Blog Posts--In the next few weeks you will find more posts on this blog because I am going to stop posting to my Word Press blog and add the early WP posts to this one.  I'll label the WP posts by dating them so that you can tell they are not recent. 

2. Blog topics--Since my inner life seems more peaceful now that I've made progress in my healing, I plan to use your search terms more often as inspiration for my posts.  

3. Healing--A sign of healing that I omitted from my recent posts is that I no longer am plagued by auditory flashbacks in addition to the "regular" flashbacks.  I just realized this morning (January 31st, 2013) that when my environment is quiet, my head is also quiet.  Peace--it's wonderful!  Peace comes through healing.  Never forget:  You CAN heal from Complex PTSD! 

Here is an ancient Celtic blessing for your daily journey:

If God sends you down a stony path,
may he give you strong shoes.

                                

Flashbacks--Decades Later

Today, January 30th, 2013, when I checked my stats, I discovered that somebody had found my site by typing "Complex PTSD flashbacks decades later . . . "  I would like to address this search term because I can imagine that the person who typed it must have been in some distress.   Unfortunately, I am not educated in the technical or scientific aspects of neurology related to flashbacks or trauma energy.  I can, however, share my own experience related to the search term in hopes of alleviating some of the anxiety that the searcher may have been experiencing when he or she did the Internet search.

Flashbacks related to old trauma experiences can wreak internal havoc and cause a person who may be living a fairly ordinary life to question her sanity.  That's what happened to me one day late in 2009.  That flashback, in fact, motivated me to find my present therapist and do some healing.  No way did I want to risk continuing to have flashbacks like that one!  So I was desperate.

The day began as an ordinary autumn day in Portland, Oregon.  I had taken public transportation, including the local above-ground light rail system, to my appointment at The Grotto, a Roman Catholic facility that provides spiritual support for people who need or want it.  I had met with a spiritual director who also had credentials as a social worker.  Although I had been a lifelong Episcopalian, I had recently converted to Catholicism and had a lot of questions regarding the Church. 

During my session with the spiritual director this time, for some reason she pounded me with questions, and by the time I walked out the door, I felt spacy.  However, I managed to find my way back to the light rail station and caught my train heading for downtown Portland where I would catch my bus.  I didn't understand the reason for the spacy feeling, but I wrote the feeling off as low blood sugar, since I had not eaten for six hours.

As I sat on the train, however, the spacy feeling intensified, and suddenly I was nine years old and back in the kitchen of my childhood.  I must have done something I should not have done because my father, in a rage, was roaring at me.  I was on the floor, and he was towering over me, roaring.  And then he did the unspeakable: In order to drive home his rage at me, he picked my favorite cat up by the tail and flung her against the kitchen wall. 

As I sat on the train hurtling into town, I tried to claw my way from the past into the present, but I couldn't.  I remained age nine, lying on the kitchen floor, shutting my eyes and trying to cover my ears so as to block out the cries of my cat and the thud of her body on the kitchen wall as my father flung her.  Gradually, the flashback faded, and I looked around me to see if anyone near me had noticed what had happened.  Nobody had. 

When I got home, I lay down and reviewed the experience.  I was about 70 years old.  Why had my mind locked itself into an experience I'd had at age nine?  I was able to understand that I'd had a flashback.  I'd read about flashbacks and had even experienced flashbacks at times when I was under extreme stress during my twenty-year abusive marriage.  But why today?  And why that particular flashback? 

To this day, I cannot explain to myself why, exactly, I had that particular flashback.  However, my guess is that my flashback was triggered by the manner in which the spiritual director had questioned me.  She pounded her questions at me, unrelentingly, so it seemed to me.  I had felt frightened and powerless under her questioning, yet I continued to reply, which caused her to continue her questioning.  If I had asked her to stop, she would have stopped, but I was too terrified to ask--just as at age nine I had been too terrified to ask my father to stop his raging and stop abusing my cat. 

I did not return to The Grotto for spiritual direction.  Instead, I found a therapist and began unraveling the tightly-woven tapestry of C-PTSD.  I've come a long way in my journey of healing, a journey inspired by that flashback I had at age 70 that was based upon a traumatic event that occurred in the 1940s. 

Thus, if you are experiencing flashbacks arising from traumatic events of your distant past, your mind may be telling you that it's time to begin to heal.  Listen to your mind, and heed its message.  Find a qualified trauma therapist that you are comfortable with and begin to heal.  Based upon my own healing experience, I can assure you that the journey is worth the effort. 

Jean, Age 9

Taking That First Step Toward Healing

Today I found a search phrase that I have never seen on my statistics page before: "hate my life complex-ptsd." 

I will address this search term as well as I can, considering that I am not a mental health professional but merely a retired community college remedial writing instructor who happens to be afflicted with C-PTSD.  However, having the disorder and having about six years of good-quality therapy behind me probably give me some credibility.  You will have your own opinion on that, I'm sure.  I will take the liberty in this post of using the feminine pronouns so that I don't get stuck in the mire of he/she, him/her, etc. 

Taking That First Step Toward Healing

From this search phrase, I can only guess that the searcher is trying to find out how to NOT hate her life, and her life is complicated by C-PTSD.  She does not like having C-PTSD and the accompanying nasty symptoms and psychic discomfort that go along with the problem.  This is just my guess as to the meaning behind the searcher's words.

I can understand very well why somebody with C-PTSD might hate the life she has.  C-PTSD takes a lot of enjoyment from life because the problem makes life a lot more difficult and more stressful than it would be otherwise.  C-PTSD affects one's behavior negatively, for one thing.  Sometimes, no matter how aware one is and how hard one works to respond "normally" in a social situation, something happens that will trigger a PTSD response, and the person with C-PTSD will respond inappropriately and cause hurt to somebody else and extreme misery to herself. 

For example, about fifteen years ago I stayed after church one Sunday morning for the coffee hour.  I was relaxed and was talking to another woman when the husband of a very dear friend came up behind me and put his hand on  my shoulder.  I "forgot myself" and cursed at him loudly and angrily.  His unexpected touch triggered my PTSD before I could think, and I was right back in my memory of being the victim of my former husband's controlling and abusive touches.  Of course, I apologized profusely that day in church, but as they say, "life was never the same again."  So, yes, I understand why the searcher might hate her life if she has C-PTSD.  At that moment, I certainly did not like my life very much!

So, what to do?  Well, based on my own experience, what I can say is that avoiding social situations is not the way to cure the problem.  After the coffee-hour incident, that's what I did, and I missed a lot of good times.  Now, however, after working for a couple of years with a therapist skilled in helping people with C-PTSD heal, I don't have those times when I respond inappropriately in a social situation.  For one thing, I am more aware now of the triggers, and I am better able to keep myself in the present moment and not slip unawares back into the pit of trauma memories.  Being aware and being in the present moment makes a huge difference in the quality of my life!

To return to the search term "hate my life complex ptsd," I can honestly say that my life is a whole lot more enjoyable since I've been able to ride public transportation and be in large gatherings without experiencing flashbacks and the other symptoms I experienced for most of my life.  The more I experience healing, the more I enjoy my life.  It's that simple--but it's NOT simple!  We know that.  Healing takes a huge commitment of energy, time, and money.  But the payoff is worth it! 

So--what can you do if you hate living with C-PTSD?  As I've said many, many times, C-PTSD is one of the mental health issues that can be healed, often without medication.  If you hate your life WITH this problem, then minimize the problem and you will find that you most likely will NOT hate your life.  Healing will make a huge difference in your outlook on life.  But healing takes effort, and making the effort requires being motivated to do so. 

Are you angry enough at the people who laid the C-PTSD trip on you to make the effort to begin healing?  Well, when you get fed up enough with the miserable symptoms of PTSD and become angry enough at the people who abused you and otherwise caused the C-PTSD to build up, then you will very possibly be motivated to take the first step toward healing.  Of course, you could also take my word and the words of others, believe that you can heal, find a competent and skilled therapist, and take those first steps without waiting until you become desperate. 

Remember: If you start healing now, you will have more life to live without the "downer" of C-PTSD. 

Take that first step . . .

"The Verbally Abusive Relationship": What I Have Learned

This holiday season has been a rough one for me.  For some reason, I've felt December 30th more than I normally do. December 30th, 1961, was my wedding date. If I had stayed married, I would have been married for 51 years, approximately. As it was, my marriage lasted just 20 years.  But why has this particular anniversary date been worse than the others?

The answer to that question, I believe, lies in the fact that I finally understand that what went wrong in my marital relationship was not my fault and, in fact, had nothing to do with me.  Until I read the book The Verbally Abusive Relationship by Patricia Evans, I had assumed that the responsibility for the failure of my marriage rested at least in part squarely on my shoulders.  In fact, I believed that most of the responsibility lay on my shoulders.  Somehow, I had failed to maintain my part of the relationship, somehow . . .   But try as I might at the time, I never could figure out what I was doing wrong, and, therefore, I could not figure out what I needed to do to fix the situation. Obviously, there was something wrong with  my head.  If I had only been smart enough, I could have changed in a way that would have pleased him, would have made him happy, and would have led to a rosy future for our entire family.  My spouse and I would have aged together, taken trips, and faded into the sunset together. But that's not what happened.

What really happened was that I didn't know back in 1961 that I was marrying a man whose reality was entirely different from mine, and at the time, I was blind to the little warning clues, the indications that his view of life and mine were totally incompatible.  What was his reality? Patricia Evans calls his reality the Power Over reality.  Life was a game in which intimacy and closeness were for weaklings, and power and control were all-important. To a person whose reality is the Power Over reality, relationships are of no value unless they feed the voracious need for self-aggrandizement.  Relationships are never mutual; relationships exist only to serve the control needs of the person with the Power Over mentality.

Unfortunately, the people who dwell in this reality are often highly intelligent and clever enough to know how to hide their reality from those people who live in the reality of close relationships, mutuality, equality, acceptances of differences, and intimacy.  The author of the book calls this second type of reality the reality of Personal Power.  This is the reality in which I have dwelled all my life and the reality in which I assumed everyone, including my husband, dwelled.  After all, why would a person not want the experience of closeness, personal acceptance, intimacy, and love?  Because I was totally unaware of the Power Over reality, it never crossed my mind that my husband did not want what I wanted in our relationship.  So there we were, my husband living in one reality, the Power Over reality, while I lived in my reality, the reality Ms. Evans calls the Personal Power reality. 

I may have been ignorant regarding the nature of my husband's reality, but I was highly aware that our relationship was not working for the two of us and also for our family.  Because I was raised to believe that I was inherently flawed and stupid, I found myself constantly trying to fix myself, to measure up, to "get it right" whenever he shouted at me, threw a tantrum, belittled me, jeered at me, made nasty remarks about me and the few friends I had, sneered at my religious beliefs, and let me know that I was incapable of logical thought.  When he raged at the children and I intervened, he would later "put me in my place" and let me know that he was boss.  I learned to keep the kids out of his way if at all possible.  By the time I had been married for sixteen years, I fully believed that he knew best and that he was always right and I was always wrong.  I discovered the error of that assumption, of course, the day I caught him sexually abusing our daughter and reported him to the police.  Even then, though, I did not understand that his reality was different from mine. I simply could not comprehend why a father would do what he did!

Now I realize, of course, that loving his daughter in the way a father living in my reality would love his daughter was not part of my former husband's reality.  And after reading Ms. Evans' book, I understand that he had no wish to have a mutual, loving relationship with any member of our family. I understand now that he would go to any extreme to avoid the feeling of being powerless, and every time he threw a temper tantrum and scared the rest of us in the family into submission, he felt powerful.  Now I understand that he was, in fact, addicted to his anger and actually got a high every time he used his anger successfully to scare us. The kids and I were merely objects, things he could manipulate and use to serve his own need for control and power.

A lot makes sense to me now that didn't make sense before I read Ms. Evans' book.  You see, I had tucked certain things into the file of my mind stamped "Inactive but Important." This mental file contained some of the things he said that I could not make sense of at the time but that I knew I might make sense of in the future.  For example, shortly after I reported him to the police in 1981, I asked him why he stepped up the violence against me during the last three years of our marriage.  I paid careful attention to his reply and can recall it word for word: "Because I wanted to know if there was somebody in your body." My reply to him at the time was "But if you had wanted to connect with me, didn't you imagine that the way to do that was through gentleness and kindness?"  His reply:  silence. 

Now that I have read the book, I understand that he did not want connection; he wanted to find me so he could control me.  I had taught myself to dissociate, to simply leave my body when he became violent with me.  He could sense my absence and knew that even though my body was present to him, the rest of me was not. I was beyond his control, and he was going to force me to return by stepping up the violence. In his thinking, through sheer force and violence, he could make me available to him so he could exert power and control.  He tried, but he failed.  

In addition, he said to me shortly after we had separated, "It's a good thing that you stopped the whole process because if you hadn't, one of us would be dead."  I tucked that one, also, into my "Inactive but Important" file because I hoped that one day I would be able to make sense of it.  Now, in the light of what Patricia Evans has written, I understand that if I had allowed the process of abuse to continue, his final, ultimate act of control could have been murder or possibly murder/suicide.  Thinking back on the cases I've read about in the newspaper where husbands with a history of being abusive have murdered their wives and sometimes their entire families and also sometimes themselves, I feel fortunate that my children and I are alive today.  We had a close call!

Finally, when we worked out the details of his visitation with our daughter, he wanted unrestrained and uncontrolled access; what he got was supervised visitation.  He visited a few times and then appeared to lose interest.  At the time, I didn't understand that, for I thought he genuinely wanted to maintain a relationship with our daughter.  Now I understand: he could not control the situation, so he wasn't interested.  Even after going through the legal process and being convicted of a class C felony, indecent liberties, he had not lost the desire to control my daughter and me.  That control and Power Over were his driving motives was brought to my attention ten years later, in 1991, when my daughter, living on her own in an apartment, complained to me that her father was visiting her uninvited, insinuating himself into her apartment, and then wanting her to engage in sexual behavior with him.  By then, she was of legal age, so the law did not offer her the protection she had as a minor, and her father, well aware of that fact, tried to take advantage of her vulnerability.  Through connections, my son and I convinced him to stop the behavior.

I understand now that my former husband cared nothing for our love or for intimacy or closeness. In fact, he was incapable of intimacy because in order to be intimate, he would have had to relax his perceived control over us.  If only I had understood his reality before I married him and had known that eventually our kids and I would be objects for him to use in service of himself, I would not have married him.  Of course, I would not have married him! 

Ten years into my marriage, I began waking up in the middle of the night in cold sweats and with racing heartbeat.  My intuition told me that I needed to take the kids and leave, but I didn't.  Why not?  I can only answer that question with another question: Who would have believed me when I described our life together?  The kids and I didn't bear marks of abuse on our bodies, and the marks on our souls were invisible to others.  In a courtroom, it would have been my word against his, and he was a male, a worker in a respected position with the state--in the conservative county in which we lived, who would have believed me?

I stayed in my marriage so our kids would have an intact family and not be part of a fragmented family as is so often the case these days. Now, after reading the book and learning about my former husband's reality, I know I made a mistake by not leaving him.  If I had left him in the early 1970s, I could have spared my daughter the horror of sexual abuse and could have spared my children and me a lot of suffering.  But at the time, I did what I could to smooth things over and lived in a fog of uncertainty.  I could not have foreseen the future and the escalation of abuse, so at the time, I chose to stay with him.  I did not know then that no matter how hard I tried, I would never be able to bring about peace because he and I were living in two different realities with two sets of rules, and his reality and his rules were totally unknown to me.  Had I understood this, I would have left him, of course.

The year is now 2013, and I have been single since 1981, about thirty years.  I've accomplished a lot since ending my marriage.  I finished raising our daughter, earned two graduate degrees, had a career I enjoyed as a writing instructor in a community college, and now I've been retired since 2003.  Life is good.  When I look back at my twenty-year marriage, I'm amazed that I survived--but I did.  And it's been only recently, since reading Patricia Evans' book, in fact, that I clearly understand the damage I suffered during those years.  Now that I understand what needs to be healed, I can do the work of healing.  If you have been involved in a situation similar to mine and similar to the situations described in The Verbally Abusive Relationship, please find a competent therapist who can help you heal.  You deserve that!  And please read the book if you are in a position to do that. 

A word of caution:  If you are now the victim of an abuser, I would suggest reading the book at a friend's house, not mentioning the book to your abuser, and quietly finding help for yourself.  Be sure that your counselor or therapist knows the dynamics of verbal abuse, and if the person you see tells you to "go home and be a better wife and your husband will stop the abuse"--run like hell!  It might be a good idea to begin your search for a therapist by talking to a counselor at a shelter for battered women.  I wish you the best!  Namaste . . .

In Response to "How long does complex PTSD last?"

Today somebody found my blog by typing "How long does complex ptsd last?" into the Google search engine.  I'd like to address that question briefly--

From what I have learned through my own experience and by asking mental health professionals, I believe that C-PTSD lasts until the person who has the condition decides to commit to healing and then does the necessary work to bring healing about.  

For those of us who have the condition, C-PTSD, the good news is that the condition can be dealt with and healing can take place.  Through our own efforts, WE can heal ourselves--with the help of a gentle, trained, and understanding therapist.  C-PTSD is NOT an incurable disease, and it is NOT a condition that is cured passively through medication.  If one wants to recover from C-PTSD, one needs to commit to putting forth the effort to do the necessary work with a specially trained therapist.  

So the answer to the question of how long C-PTSD lasts is this: "The amount of time C-PTSD lasts is controlled/determined by the client and the therapy/healing process of the client."   A person with the condition can choose to do nothing about his or her C-PTSD, and the condition will remain unchanged or worsen.  On the other hand, if a person is determined and committed to his or her healing, then with diligence and competent help, that person will heal.  

The reality I have accepted is that at age 73, I will probably never be completely free from all aspects of my C-PTSD, but I'm doing my best--and succeeding!--to heal as much as I can in the years I have left.  Any amount of healing I do improves the quality of my inner life.  So at least I can tell myself that if I hang in there, my inner life will continue to improve.  For me, continuous improvement is good enough.  If I were a lot younger, I might not settle for "good enough," but in my case, "good enough" is good enough.  

If I were, say, in my thirties or forties, I might consider entering into a permanent relationship, a mutually satisfying relationship, mature and balanced--healthy, in other words.  If that were the case, and if that were what I wanted in life, I would perhaps become more determined to "finish" healing--if anyone really finishes healing. But at my present age, I just want to be more peaceful inside myself and enjoy my last years of life.  At my age now, I'm not sure that I have the energy to put into making a full-time relationship with a partner work.  I have too many projects that I want to finish before I "fall off my perch"--a euphemism I learned from a distant relative in Scotland.  Energy that I would put into a relationship would be energy I would not have to finish up the projects I want to finish.  So, as I said, in my case, "good enough" is good enough.

The above, then, is my attempt to answer the question appearing in the title of this post.  I hope this helps!  Jean