Someone sent me a writeup about what PTSD can do, related to speculations that the anon arguing with me the other day might be having a PTSD breakdown. For those who don’t know, PTSD is an anxiety disorder that occurs when a traumatic event is experienced but not properly coped with within about a year of the initial traumatic event. The event doesn’t have to happen to you to be traumatic, and each person’s PTSD will vary in severity depending on factors like overall mental health, types of coping mechanisms, duration of the traumatic event, time spent in counseling or therapy, and time passed since the initial event. It can also be affected by how often the traumatic memories are triggered. Triggers can be anything from sights, smells, sounds, specific locations or types of locations, proximity to an object or person, someone’s name, etc. Usually, the more severe the trauma, the more intense the reaction when the memories are triggered. Personally, I have a severe form of PTSD called Complex-Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). This means that instead of having just one set of PTSD triggers tied to a singular traumatic event, I have multiple trigger sets, each from one of multiple distinct traumatic events. When one PTSD event is triggered there is a high probability that it will trigger a secondary PTSD event from a different traumatic memory. This secondary PTSD event can trigger a third one, and so on and so forth. As each successive trigger event occurs the physical and psychological reaction (and duration) intensifies, so that what was once just a feeling of discomfort that lasts for a few minutes turns into full out panic and an altered state of reality that can last for over a week (or more). How do I know this? Because I’ve been unfortunate enough to experience that latter scenario. I call it the PTSD Hell Week. The Hell Week started one night when I was watching tv with mom before bed. She hadn’t slept well the night before, was already staying up later than usual, and was overall tired and not thinking with full clarity. She also did not yet have a very good grasp on just how severe PTSD can be. For my part I had experienced a pretty bad PTSD trigger event only a few hours before and was still jumpy and in the jeopardy period for a secondary trigger event to occur. So when our program ended and mom asked for a hug before bed a metric fuckton of shit hit the fan all at once. To the best of my knowledge the following happened near-instantaneously: Mom asked for a hug I refused Mom begged for a hug I interpreted this as an attempt at coercion I started to back away My brain picked up situational triggers tied to coercion from the environment: the couch, the dark room, the light of the tv as the primary illumination, the proximity of another person to me I started going into a secondary trigger event Mom reached out to me to get a hug I interpreted this as an attack mimicking several traumatic events at once I went into, at least, a third, fourth, and fifth trigger event I entered full out panic and fight/flight/feign/freeze mode I’m not entirely sure what happened next. I remember lots of screaming at her. Accusing her of terrible things. The kind of things you hear about in only the most chilling of horror stories and abuse records. All while running at full-tilt into my room. I remember locking and barring the door. I remember looking for crisis shelters and low-income apartments. I remember screaming at her through the door when she tried to talk to me to find out what the fuck had just happened. I remember her sounding like she was trying to hold back tears as she, finally, left me alone and went to bed. I remember her ever so gently asking me the next day if I would be willing to talk with my shrink in an emergency appointment. I remember accusing her of using it as an excuse to get me out of the house, vulnerable, so her mafia contact hitman could assassinate me while I was in the car. Yes, you read that right, I accused my mother, a preschool teacher, the woman who saved my life when someone else threw me into a river to drown, the woman who left her (now ex-) husband the very same day she found out what he was doing to her child, of not only having mafia contacts, but of using them to hire a hitman to murder me. I was in an altered state of reality so far removed from anything real or factual in this world that I might as well have been on the other side of the galaxy. I don’t remember how she finally convinced me to see my shrink but she did. I do remember it was one hell of an uncomfortable car ride, for both of us. I was so far removed from reality that not even my shrink, who I trusted and appreciated and knew for a fact had saved my life, could convince me my mom wasn’t trying to kill me. Instead she tried to focus on things that would help me feel safer, mostly ways to get out and live on my own. Even she was at a loss for how to help me return to reality. Towards the end of the week, the universe itself intervened. I came down with an extremely painful medical emergency. I thought I was dying. I could barely stand up, much less drive myself to the hospital. For some reason calling for an ambulance never crossed my mind. I was out of options. So I asked my mom to take me to the hospital. In that moment I figured I was going to die either way. At least by asking I had a chance to live. And I did. Even though the medical emergency was the most painful thing I had ever experienced it wound up not being life-threatening. But while I was in the middle of it something amazing happened. I started to come back to reality. Between the intense pain grounding me in the here-and-now and my mom not only taking me to the ER, but sitting with me the whole time the staff were trying to help me, even going so far as to hold my hand when the pain became so bad I was sobbing, I started to realize that the past week was not as I had thought it to be. Mom was, in fact, not trying to kill me. Had never tried to kill me. Had no intention of killing me. Everything I had thought for the past week had been fiction. Almost as if it happened in a different reality. And as I thought more about it, what I had said, what I had done, I found myself filled with abject horror. If PTSD could do that to me (and to everyone around me) even once, it could do it again. To this day my mom and I live in terror of me ever experiencing a PTSD event this severe again. I’m almost tempted to consider it a PTSD trigger in and of itself. I know mom still asks me sometimes, when her self esteem is already low, if I still feel and think the things I accused her of back then. And it still hurts to know I've hurt people I care so much about so severely. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Even if a secondary occurrence would provide information on how to reliably stop such events in their tracks. Its that traumatic.
