Living with C-PTSD lends to a lot of coping strategies that help one to survive, but also can be detrimental to relationships and emotional health. I want to share some of mine.

DEFENSIVENESS and DISSOCIATION

As an OT, I have a pretty good understanding of sensory defensiveness. I think maybe one of the reasons I was drawn to the field was due to my own struggles with defensiveness.  With C~PTSD, one of the ways sensory defensiveness shows itself is through body memory flashbacks. I am a very touch oriented person when it comes to showing love to friends and family and in daily interactions with women and kids. Intimacy, well that’s something else entirely. I have spent a lot of my life fighting a battle in my head and with my tactile receptors every time I’m touched with an attracted energy behind it. It usually results in a fight or flight response that ends in my body saying one thing and my mouth saying another. For a long time I depended on straight willpower to lock up those feelings that say “RUN” and tried to appear ok.  I wasn’t very good at it, no one is because once in fight or flight mode the rational logical part of your brain shuts down.  I had scripted phrases that I could say, but they were just that, ‘scripted.’ I wasn’t ever present and sometimes I felt I was betraying myself and other times the shame would overpower me causing me to hate my body for not being able to truly embrace what God intended for good. Most of my relational interactions were with my mind trying to overpower the tears that were surfacing.  Then I got more and more able to continue in spite of the conflict going on inside me, this is called dissociation. It’s the only way to continue on and not run. You are physically there but not really mentally or emotionally present. I had a spouse that I should have felt safe with, and the guilt of hiding the truth of my defensiveness and dissociation was too much.  I started sharing pieces of the fear (at least what I understood of it at the time) but immediately followed those conversations consumed with guilt and usually making promises about the future that I knew I couldn’t keep.  That is until now, I have a new peace gained through truly processing all that I had endured and breaking free from its power. Now the devil no longer has the power over my physical relationship with my husband. I picture pissing him off with every experience that I enjoy without even having the slightest urge to dissociate.  Healing is possible!

TROUBLE APOLOGIZING

This was a big issue for me that was based in the screwed up concept of worthiness (see previous post.)  I could not allow myself to admit imperfection because of the intense shame that followed. Luckily I’m a fairly intuitive person and highly verbal. For years I ran circles around people verbally until they eventually truly felt whatever it was that had happened needed an apology from them NOT me. NOT GOOD. Marriage soon highlighted this and it was one of the first major breakthroughs in my journey. Now I view owning my mistakes as symbols that I am winning in the battle for my emotional health and truly gateful for forgiveness.

HYPERVIGILANCE

This is where I lived for so long. My heart rate, my mind, and my body were always at mock 90. I was analyzing all things around me, always on guard waiting for something bad to happen. My mind was always so active that I often just chalked it up to ADHD. Well I am hyperactive, but hypervigilance was also present. Hypervigilance leads to exhaustion.  When my father was able bodied and able to drive, I had put controls in to protect myself.  I changed locks, made sure I was never alone completely, wore clothes with firm boundaries to any unwanted touch, made sure my girls were safe and that they were in pants not dresses.  I was aware of the cars on the road. I made sure teachers were very aware of who could and could not pick up my kids. I was ambiguous about their schedule and mine when talking with or around him. It was a years before he was accidentally made aware of where they went to school. Then the hypervigilance went overboard. Once he started showing up at our church it was awful.  I made sure I knew where he was at all times so that he wouldn’t take my kids out of their Sunday school classes. But the hypervigilance didn’t just happen about him, it bled unknowingly into other areas of my life and especially when I felt stressed for any reason. It becomes an automatic response to an increase in cortisol. Through my dads death, knowing the threat was gone for good, and with lots of therapy I finally have a quiet mind. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever known and it’s amazing. Each minute feels as if it has lengthened. The days feel longer in a good way. It’s like I’m on a leisurely walk through life taking in all God’s beauty and His quiet voice is finally something I can focus on now that the chaos of hypervigilance is not there.  I’m starting to take smaller conflicts, mistakes, and hardships in stride and have a more logic based barometer for what is truly something to freak out about.

One of the important parts of healing is discovering who you are without the coping mechanisms that have both kept you alive and stolen your opportunity for peace.  Once the need for them is gone, finding life without them is an amazingly freeing experience. It’s like once you really convince yourself you don’t need them anymore the feeling of freedom that comes is almost addicting.

ºWHO AM I???

One of the main reasons I hesitated in blogging my story was that others would see me as “the girl who has this traumatic story.” That is not who I am, nor do I plan to live my life with that shadow over me.

I am a CHILD OF GOD, His loved child. There are many stories that make up who I am, stories of great love, wonderful memories with my mother and siblings, beautiful friendships, college experiences that shaped who I am, dating and marriage memories with my husband, experiencing motherhood for the first and second time, and loving relationships with clients and their families.   What’s awesome about my healing journey is that I can clearly see those things now and they overshadow all the other negative, traumatic stories with such brightness that I don’t even see the trauma.  That is why the joy I feel now is so strong. Opening up and truly working through my traumatic experiences has released my ability to feel again.

What happens when you are numbing emotions out of self protection is that you can’t only numb the bad emotions, you have no option but to numb them all. (Brene Brown’s research exposed this truth to me.) The sucky thing about being numb is you don’t realize that you are not present and this makes it hard to recall memories. You are literally missing out in your life. That is another cool thing about healing. I am able to be truly present. No longer lost in the self-sabatoging cyclical thinking that causes the numbing escape.

Worthiness. Such a powerful word and concept.  God through Jesus satisfied the question of our worthiness. I have learned now that basing my worthiness on performance and perfection is like someone giving you a gift that you don’t return but you choose not to use, even when they are present. It looks a lot like wastefulness, or unappreciative self-centered egocentric thinking bordering on narsisism. That might sound like quite the jump, but I don’t think it is.  I now think of it as if God gave me the most amazing gift and my refusal to embrace it not only brings Him sadness, but says something about my pride. Do I really think that I’m capable of perfection, am I saying that my expectation of perfection is achievable? If my measurement of worthiness is perfection then yes on some level I think Christ-like perfection is possible for me.  And even further, if I expect it of myself, but not of others what does that say? That is CRAZY, but it took this journey to figure out how prideful and arrogant that is.

In my position of leadership at work, this has been a HUGE lesson that has tremendously changed my leadership style. I now purposely expose my mistakes, my struggles, and my inadequacies. Not in a ‘let me say negative things about myself so that you will praise me’ kind of way. Just a true transparency that reminds me and others that I’m human-your human and we all need grace.  Modeling grace and love does a lot more for a work environment than modeling this false image of perfection.

It’s like now I think oops, sorry Jesus, I need that mercy or grace card now, ask for forgiveness from all involved parties and then I move on. It’s such a freeing thing. What’s really bizarre is that doing that now brings me joy from knowing that the devil no longer controls my thoughts or worthiness with the lie of perfectionism.

Worthiness and parenting, shew that’s a hard one to swallow when you realize what you have modeled to your children in the from of performance based worthiness. You are either saying be like me and earn your worthiness or no worries honey that performance based worthiness is only for me, you aren’t capable of achieving that.  Ouch!

So needless to say the transparency has carried over on the parenting front as well. The change i saw in my oldest, the perfectionist, was almost immediate.  What’s cool is kids can implement change without much effort because they model our behavior.  So as soon as I changed, she changed. My youngest didn’t get the perfectionist thing to begin with, so she somewhere in her soul knew worthiness was a gift from the beginning.

It’s working so well that my great example of imperfection came up in conversation with my 11 year old, going on 16.  She asked if she could get her driver’s license early, because if she got it at 15 that would be less than 4 years away. Scary thought! I said, “no honey that is called a hardship license and you don’t have a hardship.” She said, “yes I do, Mom. You are my hardship.” (Referring to the many times I am super late to pick her up or just completely forget to get her at all due to losing track of time at work.) That has now become one of my favorite stories to tell. It reminds me that imperfection can also bring us laughter when we aren’t taking ourselves too seriously.

This worthiness lesson was one of my first HUGE breakthroughs and what a difference it has made in every area of my life. Old habits die hard, so the journey to fully internalizing this was long but so worth it!

I never really had a desire to blog before now.  I am not computer savvy and prefer paper and pencil expressing myself by drawing, but today I felt a pull to go public with all I am learning.  The past 2 years have been like none other for many reasons, but the personal growth that I have experienced has been life altering.

So where to start???   It is hard to decide where to start, but how about a summary of my childhood as I remembered it prior to the last few years.

I was blessed with an amazing mother, a warrior of a woman with an ability to survive an unbelievable journey.  I watched and modeled myself after her in strength, dedication, work ethic, and passion for people.  I realize now that her sacrifice and dedication to us, my siblings and I, is the foundation that taught me that bad things happen but they don’t have to define you.  I draw from her strength daily. I was always successful, primarily because of this drive inside of me to prove myself.  I had HIGH expectations of myself and was determined to accomplish my goals, period.  I am super social and a performer at heart.  I could always go into performance mode and escape there.  I think I lived there for a long time.  I always had a determination that came from somewhere deep inside.  That determination was good in that it made me successful and independent.  However, I didn’t realize until the past few years that not all people fear imperfection to the point that their worthiness is tied to their performance or to such an extent that all emotional, spiritual, and physical signals tell you to stop, but you can’t for fear of the shame that would follow.    I didn’t put that together until recently.  At that time I just knew the level of panic that would set in if I stopped, and that was worse than any amount of exhaustion.

This performance driven lifestyle was doable in high school and college, and even at the beginning of my marriage.  But as the responsibilities of motherhood, career, marriage, and building a business piled on the expectations were so far out there that I found myself exhausted, with a failing body, and an even more chaotic, self sabotaging mind.  I failed in my eyes constantly, this brought a sense of panic that I had never experienced.  After my first child, I experienced what I call “post partum anxiety on steroids.”  Now not only did I have to achieve all those unattainable expectations, I had to do so with my crutch of performance mode crippled by anxiety.  I managed to pull it off or so I thought.  Enter the second child……the struggle to keep up got even harder, I managed, but not without beginning to destroy my body and my marriage.  My self hatred was so hard to control.  It is hard to love well when your mind is constantly belittling you.  FEAR………fear dominated my thoughts.  I could no longer hold together all of my responsibilities, so as many of us do I let go of what I could.  I couldn’t let go of my performance mode completely so I became an OT and a mother, and my husband got what was left which was very little.  I disconnected from regular interactions with friends and family as well. At this point I didn’t understand the why to all of my struggles.

You see, I had become my father’s primary caregiver at 18 years old.  I knew the stomach aches I would get when he called, the fear/anxiety and anger that I felt when I had to take care of him in the hospital or nursing home, but I couldn’t place exactly why it was so extreme.  I knew that when my parents divorced, he started replacing my mother with me, viewing me as his wife and owing him the attentiveness that he thought he deserved.  He was very inappropriate with me but stayed just under the line of what I considered sexual abuse.  In my eyes he was creepy and wanted from me things that a father should never want.  I struggled as he got sicker because the guilt for not taking care of him was just as bad as the feeling that I had if I did.

This sent my ability to hold my world together to a whole other level of impossible.  My marriage struggled even more, my self concept hit rock bottom, and performance only lasted when I wasn’t home and if I was home I was ASLEEP.  Sleep became the escape, performance no longer provided an escape-it was just REALLY hard work.  Sleep became my goal.  Then came the guilt that I was avoiding living, my kids were suffering, my marriage was as low as it had ever been.  My husband never gave up on me and continued to help me build my dream-my business even though he was not getting much in return for that generosity.

Then it happened……my father was finally dying, something I had felt guilty for praying for for years.  My brain subconsciously decided I was ready to know the whole story.  I started having flashbacks, lots of flashbacks.  His death was only a few weeks away when the memories flooded back.  The feelings when I had visited and cared for him finally made sense.  He had sexually abused me throughout my childhood.  I barely brought myself to attend his funeral, my mother and my sister did all the work with the death and all that goes with it.  I didn’t visit him in his last days.  I couldn’t.  I was shocked that the mind could really hide things from you.  My therapist says that once the medical side of me knew his death was eminent, my mind was able to release the memories.  I never would have been able to care for him without being blinded to those memories.  I had heard of repressed memories but I wasn’t sure how much I really believed this could happen.  I believe now.

Through the last 2 years I have spent hours upon hours healing.  I have an amazing trauma therapist, a supportive family, an amazing husband, and two little girls who gave me the motivation to heal, truly heal.  I no longer have flashbacks and I have found a joy that is deeper than anything I have ever felt.  I also have purpose, a new purpose not dictated by outrageous expectations, but a purpose that gives me energy instead of robbing me of it.  It is because of this new joy, this new life that I have started this blog. This blog will be a place where I share my thoughts, breakthrough moments, and the internal work that was needed to move past Complex-PTSD and regain hope and joy in my life. My hope is that I can be of help to others experiencing a similar journey, for I have been learning that sharing my story is a huge part of post-traumatic growth. I want to scream from the mountain tops that HOPE CAN BE MENDED.