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.