Living My Whole Life with PTSD
Well here I am, over 60 years old, finally finding a place of self love, where I can live with myself, knowing peace of mind. Its been a long and frustrating journey but its finally nice to know after all these years, whats been the root cause of my soul battles in this life!
My infant years were, well actually all my life was like walking around in a cloud, always searching for an opening into?? or out of my body. I was never sure but I knew deep inside myself that I had to reach for something better, a self that was loved. The driving soul, the strength in me wanted to reach out of the cloudiness …..could it be my soul striving for inner love.
Finding out in my mid late fifties that I have been living with PTSD. The cloud of my life. For my whole entire life, since I was 6 months old. I had wondered for years, why I felt so different, my emotions running wild with no control, my thinking patterns were not working like I wanted, or as I seen or experience from others. No one seemed to be able to understand me, in fact I found it hard to understand me! I lived two lives, the one I was experiencing and the one deeper inside me, leading me towards I will call my soul self. My mind was always in battle with its self, having had twenty or more others living inside me, all wanting something different from me. It was like every emotion had its own thoughts, life and wanted to control all the other body functions. Constant noise, conflict with self. AS it turned out I was what I call an inside thinker until in my late fifties I became what I call an outside of self thinker.
AS an inside thinker, I lived in a state of confusion, not being able to retain any information, like living with no memories, trying to sift through daily life, being lost in your own body, trying to survive in my mind in a blank world meaning my mind’s eye has no images. The best way to explain it, for me, was living in a black hole, full of darkness, emptiness, and loneliness with no way to communicate. I was living in an inner world that had a loop of horrible and extreme deep feelings and loathing self thoughts, in which I could not break away or escape from, it was an endless loop of pain.
The only way for me to express myself, was in tears, unable to find words, or even a single word to express myself. My school years I walked around aimlessly, because no matter how much I tried, I could not read, write, memorize, understand or retain any information. I also could not hear certain sounds being spoken. This all compounded and made for troublesome learning for me. More on this later.
Later, much later in my life, I found out PTSD controls the bodies minds and body functions, but in my personal experience, thankful, not the soul. PTSD control's or overrides the body natural functions some how forces it into a freeze mode, at any given moment your emotions, sense of smell, well any of the sense’s when they start to change, triggers PTSD. Its the natural fight or flight protection that is installed in our system. What does freeze mean, well the mind goes blank, there is no information going to any part of the body, so one can not speak, maybe even move, one can not find a single thought, or see an image in the minds eye. There is nothing, but emotions running wild inside you, liken to a thunder, wind, hurricane and snow storm all running together in the body. Its overwhelming especially for a child, let alone an adult. I never knew which of the body senses will suddenly trigger the PTSD, because its comes from a deep learnt behaviours response to the original trauma of the body. The trauma connects to hundreds of thousands of places where with in the body stores information.
At times like this, I would just stand a cry, deep sobbing, trying to grasp any sense of life outside myself, but with no skills, or a life jacket, would end up drowning inside. I lived in this state all of my life. Frozen with in myself. How does a child express themselves? AS I sit here thinking, maybe, just maybe sign language might of helped me so many years ago. I guess because each person IS THER OWN teacher of life, or of what life can be, or is to be, what can a child really understand, of how the human body will accept, react, or obtain information, that will be adsorb into your soul, for all eternity? But onward….
What communication skills I developed, I developed on my own, through the lack of self realization, with the exception of my dreams. Dreaming was a whole other world. When one is under the age of 7, the brain just works with what it has learnt but mainly experience. My experience of pain, lack of understanding, with PTSD were not that of an average child. The PTSD also effected my sleeping patterns and no one seemed to know what was going on in my sleep, and well, over the years I might have been told they were nightmares, but I felt the night dreams were just the veracious cycle of PTSD. When it comes down to it with PTSD controlling the mind, there was no difference between asleep at night or awake during the day. I have experienced 7 deep levels of night dreams and have several experiences to share but this will be in a different chapter. It’s every important to understand PTSD in the sleeping stages because the brain never gets a rest and this caused me a lot of turmoil in my life. But more on this later.
Some where in my life, I also lost my sight. I am not sure if I was born with sight problems or it was the result from the trauma. My lack of sight was noticed and corrected when I was in second grade. Needless to say this also impacted my abilities to understand life around me. This complicated my reality around me, my concept of and sense of self was mixed with the unknown. As a child, it was demanding and hard for me to grasp the concepts of life around me. Like for years and even somewhat today, as an adult, I have no understanding of distance, because it changes for me on a daily basis. One mile could be the same as 1 foot. I think this is because sight changes as one can conceive. With out glasses I see next to nothing, everything is blurred there is no deification to anything but with glasses I see everything as short, stubby, closer, and with no defined lines, but with eye contacts, everything becomes, long, defined, narrower, and further away. So vision is comparable to what is perceived by what the eye’s see and how it is translated into the mind. I’ve learnt nothing is what is seems to be. Compound this with PSTD and life because quite unbearable as space, time and lack of knowledge, living inside one’s self, creates unwanted extra emotions, wildly running with no conception of boundaries.
So after several years of intense therapy, I have learnt who I am, why I am who I am, and that nothing I will ever do, can change my life experience with PTSD. When PTSD trauma happens to the human body before the age of speech development, before the age of walking, and as the brains of the body are first engaging in life, no other living experience can change this learnt behavior. Ever.
I learnt in my late 50’s All one can do is a self management, taking every day as a new day and knowing that almost everyone else are unable to relate to your specific needs and that’s got to be OK because it is who I AM. But growing up with PTSD was not like this at all, not at all.