Finding Post-PTSD Me

As an advocate for my own mental health, I have prescribed a regular dose of dancing as my therapy.
Yes, dancing.
Square dancing.

Last August I made the shocking realization that I'm a survivor of domestic abuse. Even more surprising to me was learning that emotional abuse is just as damaging as physical abuse. It was a gigantic holy crap moment for me.

Since then, I have spent countless hours online, researching my situation and learning how I can get out of my situation and begin healing.

A few months ago I stumbled across the idea that I may have PTSD from both the ongoing abuse and the trauma from The Hell Years a few years ago. I blogged about it when I mused about the probability of having PTSD and clinical evaluation for it at "Do I Have PTSD?" The PsyD who tested me concluded that I didn't have it. Today, now that Hell has cooled off and now that I know better, I disagree with the good doctor. I believe I probably do have PTSD.

It would probably do me a world of good if I treated myself as if I have PTSD, so I can begin to heal the damage deep inside of me from 20+ years of emotional abuse and The Hell Years.

For over a year now, I have been job hunting (some temp-to-hire jobs fell through, so I've been working off and on, but nothing permanent. Yet.)
My plan had been:

1. Get a permanent job.
2. Find an apartment across town
3. Move
4. Reinvent myself
5. Start Living with a capital L.

Last week the plan has had a dramatic change. A square dance followed by a simple comment from the kids made me see that #5 and 4 are the key to me feeling happier overall, which obviously will improve my general outlook on life and my attitude. I know this will lead to my ability to make a better first impression on everyone. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if this new attitude shift helps me land a job.

My plan now is:

1. Start Living with a capital L.
2. Re-Discover myself
3. Get a permanent job.
4. Find an apartment across town
5. Move

Ok, the new #1 is a challenge, since I am broker than broke, but I found a way that costs only about $7 a pop, and if I only do it once a month, it's a start.

Here's what changed:

Since my "Do I Have PTSD?" blog post two months ago, I have been pushing myself to do things that make me happy. And allowing myself to do things that make me happy. The thoughts, "D wouldn't want to do that with me," and "I can't have fun without including D," have been completely absent from my mind. Yes, those used to be the limiting thoughts that always kept me home.

• I went to my girlfriend Claire's house for coffee and to catch up on each others' lives. 
• I took the kids out to lunch (using gifted money and a coupon.)
• The kids and I took a day trip to the mountains. 
• We even went to a square dance party (why not?) and had a blast.

For the last year, I've been job hunting and holding my breath. The old #1.

No more.

After so many years living in my little cave - my self-imposed prison - I decided I need to stop waiting for my new life to happen and start living now. Living with a capital L.The new #1 on my to-do list.

(No wonder I'm miserable, right?)

• After having coffee with Claire, I felt renewed. 
• After sushi with the kids I was feeling bright and happy (and really really full. I always eat one plate too many at track sushi bars.) 
• After running up to the mountains for the day I felt like I could finally breathe. 

I was starting to feel good. Hmm, maybe I'm on to something.

At that birthday party I danced my ass off with several partners (I didn't know any of them), and after the second dance the kids said, "Mom, you actually look really happy for once."

That was it. No more waiting. I'm going to start doing things that make me happy, NOW. I like who I am when I'm doing happy things, and it makes the kids happy to see mom happy. It's so simple it's hard to believe I didn't see it before. My old to-do list was backwards.

As much as I can afford to, I'm going to Live now in the way I had envisioned Living in the future, after I leave D. One of the biggest changes I'm making is dancing. I danced when I was growing up (on stage and in ensembles) and miss it more than I realized. Square Dancing is just $7 every Thursday night at the VFW. I'm going. It's a form of therapy I can afford (I still don't have health insurance, despite Obamacare) and I know it'll help me recover from my depression, low self esteem, abuse... and "P-PTSD." (Probable PTSD)


Today while researching PTSD so I can learn more about how to heal from PTSD on my own, I read several eye-opening posts on Michele Rosenthal's blog Heal My PTSD, and these two grabbed my complete attention:

Who Am I Outside of PTSD?
More PTSD Joy or The Night I Realized I Wanted to Learn to Partner Dance

Huh.
Looks like I'm on the right track.
Feels good to find this kind of validation for what I've just started to figure out on my own.
Thank you, Michele! ♥

The icing on the cake appeared on the homepage of Surviving a Narcissist, where Lisa E. Scott writes about healing,

 We must lighten up, relax and go easy on ourselves. Many of us find it easy to have compassion for others, but have very little for ourselves. It never occurs to us to feel it for ourselves. Living life with an unconditional love for ourselves changes everything...

By learning from the moments in life, we become more compassionate and can aspire to live in the now. We can relax and open our heart and mind to what is right in front of us in the moment. We see, feel and experience everything more vividly. This is living. Now is the time to experience enlightenment. Not some time in the future. Keep in mind, how we relate to the now creates our future.

Her last sentence popped out at me in big bold neon letters, and it's stuck in my head.

Keep in mind, how we relate to the now creates our future.

Yep. Treat myself as if I do have PTSD, enjoy life, get out of the cave, find things I want to do or be when I'm a happy single girl... and dance. And do it now to build my future.
(And it'll probably help tremendously with the job hunt.)

PS: For some reason, this blog post was really hard to write. I feel it's disjointed and hard to follow, but that's how my head feels today. Scattered. Hard to keep the flow of my thoughts together. Flighty. Over-caffeinated. Edgy. Almost low seratonin-y, like years ago before I started on Prozac. (And I have to completely revise my resume tonight for a really great job posting that just came up! Sheesh; wish me luck.) If it's hard to read and follow, I'm sorry. I don't usually write on days I feel like this, and after 2 hours of working on this, what you see is the best I can do. Bleh.

The Hell Years

Now and then I refer to The Hell Years.

The Hell Years began with a really bad freak accident about four years ago, followed by our family's ongoing physical and emotional recovery, and the devastating financial aftermath from being off work and having all the bills pile up.

We had very little emotional support, I lost all my friends who weren't able to fathom what we were going through, and I feel like I struggled alone against debilitating depression to get out of bed each day so I could care for my family and fight to prevent becoming homeless when we couldn't pay the rent.

It was really awful - the shock of what happened, the shock of seemingly normal things going very wrong, the shock of being told "We don't know if our team of surgeons can save them," and the shock of seeing more of the insides of someone's body than I ever wanted to see... and exactly one year after the accident, history repeated itself almost event by event. It was bad.

(Although one good thing about the repeat trauma is we knew what to expect. Didn't make it any easier, but we were able to call 911 sooner when things started going wrong again.)

I don't want to go into specifics in case D researches anything related to it and stumbles across this blog. Just compare it to what people in the middle ages experienced when disease or warring tribes wiped out their small village. Throw in few cases of Seppuku, and that'll be comparable to what we went through.

Do I have PTSD?

I was sent to a psychiatrist to be tested for PTSD in the middle of The Hell Years*.
He said I didn't have it.

Today, I disagree with his diagnosis.

I don't think he asked questions in a manner I understood, because in all my research about personality disorders and the abuse surrounding them, I'm starting to think I do have PTSD. I'm almost positive I had it back then.

There is an online PTSD test on several big psych websites, but after answering the 22 questions it said "Print out this list and take it to your doctor to discuss your answers." Well phooey. I'm out of printer ink, I don't have medical insurance right now (Obamacare-Schmobamacare) and I have exactly $12.42 to my name until my first payday two weeks from now, so taking that test was a glorious waste of time.

Tonight, I found the same test online with scoring at the bottom. Thank God!
Here's a link to the test I found at Heal My PTSD.
"If you have 10+ "yes" answers, you display many symptoms of PTSD," the results say.
I answered 18 out of 22 with a yes.

I think the big difference between the PsyD and the online test is my interpretation of the questions.

First of all, in the doctor's office, I was answering everything based on the medical horrors I had witnessed and managed during The Hell Years. It was a horrible time in all of our lives, but:

Did I witness or experience a traumatic event?
No. First of all, Hell wasn't an event. It was a situation that should have been routine but quickly went south, then turned into an ongoing life-threatening situation that dragged on for months. A year later we went through it all over again.
Second of all, we only discussed Hell. I wasn't aware that I'd been abused for years before Hell happened, so abuse didn't even enter the discussion. It was the farthest thing from my mind.

Do I have flashbacks of the event?
At the time I was formally tested, I think I was still in shock. My family was knee deep in the horror show and hadn't yet come up for air. I wasn't even to the point of having flashbacks yet.

(By the way, the P in PTSD means Post. It's Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, not UTYEBTSD: Up To Your Eye Balls in Trauma Stress Disorder. And also not NLATEOTTTSD: No Light At The End Of The Tunnel Traumatic Stress Disorder. Let's make sure we're clear on that.)

I also knew absolutely nothing about PTSD, so when he asked about flashbacks, I imagined Vietnam Vets having flashbacks (as demonstrated via Hollywood - my only exposure to flashbacks) and no. I didn't wake up in the middle of the night in a panic, trying to hide from or hunt the bad guys.

So I told him, "No. I don't have flashbacks."

If only he had explained what that actually meant. Now days, when I think of the abuse I endured over the past 20 years, and then the emotional isolation I felt during Hell when I had no friends to help me through it, yeah. They're not technically visual flashbacks, but the emotional pain and anguish wells up and it takes me a good hour to stop crying from thinking about it. I think I'd categorize that as a flashback. The pain is still very raw and I'm super sensitive when I think about it.

Do you have intense physical and/or emotional distress when something reminds you of the traumatic event?
Yesindeed. See above. Enough said.
Do I avoid talking about it, thinking about it, engaging in any reminders about it?
Can we change the subject?
Sometimes I wonder if that's one reason I need to get away from D. Because he reminds me of the abuse. Or if it's just because of the abuse. Maybe both, depending on how he's treating me at the time.
I don't like thinking about Hell or how horribly alone I felt during that time. I can't deal with my feelings when I do. It's too much.
Can I have a hug now?

Do you have memory gaps?
Do you have difficulty concentrating?
Are you kidding?? I lost part of my language skills during Hell. Common vocabulary words were gone. I couldn't carry on a normal conversation because too many words were missing.
"Please let the dog out," ended up sounding like, "Hey. The dog. He... wants. Uh, Dog needs... Um... potty." 

I felt like I had brain damage. I told my doctors that I felt like I had brain damage. They nodded and made notes in their laptops but didn't do anything to help, except to change my antidepressant meds. I still struggle to recall and speak certain words at times. Sometimes my conversation trails off and converts to gestures because I can't pull up the next word from the depths of my brain, but it's a lot better now than it was. Crossword puzzles helped me to regain a lot of my words.

Now that I know more about abuse and isolation and PTSD, I believe I actually did suffer some brain damage during that time.

New item for my to do list after I move out: talk to a doctor or counselor about PTSD.

-----------------------------------------------

*The Hell Years refers to the injuries from the accident (a freak accident - nobody's fault), the recovery, and the aftermath. 

It was really awful - the shock of what happened, the shock of seemingly normal things going very wrong, the shock of being told "We don't know if our team of surgeons can save them," and the shock of seeing more of the insides of someone's body than I ever wanted to see... and exactly one year after the accident, history repeated itself almost event by event. It was bad.

(Although one good thing about the repeat trauma is we knew what to expect. Didn't make it any easier, but we were able to call 911 sooner when things started going wrong again.)

I don't want to go into specifics in case D researches anything related to it and stumbles across this blog. Just compare it to what people in the middle ages experienced when disease or warring tribes wiped out their small village. Throw in few cases of Seppuku, and that'll be comparable to what we went through.