What lies beneath

When I am explaining what I'm going through to my husband, I often compare it to a physical injury that he can really visually imagine. Often this comes off more dramatically than I mean for it to. For instance if he were to wake up, come downstairs and ask me why I'm crying at the computer right now, I would tell him that I feel like someone slashed the sharp blade of a hatchet across my forehead and used a staple gun to patch up the open gaping wound. Pretty dramatic right? I would take physical injuries over my mental struggles any day. If someone saw me with an injury like that, they wouldn't ask me why I look upset. They would understand the hell I am going through without explanation. Instead, they look at me, seemingly normal. They think, "She looks fine to me, I don't get what she is so upset about.". 

Frequently, when I am having a tough day, I browse the internet looking for souls like mine. I search for people who remind me that I'm not the only one living like this. Today it didn't help as much as I would like. When you search for a PTSD community, 90% of the time you are going to find war veterans. I find it difficult to relate to that community because I wasn't in a far away place where I had been told what I would encounter. I was in my own home, my place of work, places where I lived under the illusion that I was safe. I'm not saying that being attacked in your own home is harder or more difficult to deal with than what veterans go through by any means. The struggles they deal with are similar and they have to deal with them in their personal space when they come home. It just isn't something I can relate to. I wasn't out to fight a huge battle, I was just trying to live my normal life.

I wonder how the men who have victimized me in the past would feel if they knew the lasting affects that were created by their actions. Would they apologize? Would they feel any guilt or remorse? Would they wish to take it back? Maybe they wouldn't care at all. Victims walk down the street seeing their attackers face in every stranger they pass. Do attackers ever think of their victims? Do they wonder where we are, what we are doing, and worry about an encounter with us in the future? I don't think they do. I imagine that they rarely give us a second though. 

It is a lonely feeling. I know I have an army of people who love, believe in and support me. But when I leave the house, I don't take that army with me. I'm alone, open, vulnerable. 

My past is proof that I don't have the strongest luck on my side. In the past I have heard people say that while what I went through sucks, the odds of it happening again are slim. It happens again and again. Wrong place wrong time. They say I'm too nice, too friendly. I wish I could be nice and friendly. I used to love striking up conversations with strangers. I simply cannot conduct myself that way anymore. I've been burned, boiled even. 

I know this is long, I know that it is late. I had to vent, get it out of my head. I had to try to calm the static noise buzzing in my head and calm the crazy. Sometimes it feels like I can literally feel the crazy stirring in my head. Most of all I am just scared to fall asleep. No good comes from my dreams. I just have to face it, it is time for bed. Thank you universe for giving me a place to release my mind. Goodnight Neverland.

The first..

This is where I have to say that the twelve steps of PTSD which I believe to be true, don't always happen at separate times. You can experience several and even all of them simultaneously. This is the story of the first time I experienced what that is like. I have to warn you, it is graphic and may not be easy to read.
 Shortly after that first incident with my father my parents divorced and I moved with my mother.
Life wasn't easy after the divorce, my dad moved to Arizona with my five older brothers and I stayed in Utah with my mom, two younger brothers and my younger sister. I had suddenly gone from middle child to oldest in the house and I wasn't prepared for the expectations and responsibilities that came with that.
It is hard to keep exact facts straight at this time because I was young and while my siblings and myself usually stayed separated with the parents we initially left with after the divorce, there was still a lot of going back and forth that went on.
I can't always trust my memory these days because my mind likes to play tricks, but I believe I was about 14  when the next and probably most traumatizing event happened in my life.
In the little town I grew up in there was a water park with a yellow slide that we would spend a lot of our time at in the summer. I went with my friends, family and often the families of my mom's friends.
We were at the midnight session at the park and everyone was having a blast. We hiked up the stairs, sped down the slide and splashed around in the pool. There was one local guy there, the son of one of my mom's closest friends. He had been giving me extra attention that night and I was loving it, I had never really been a recipient of attention from boys my own age and this guy was cute and older than all of them. His name was Jesse and he was twenty at the time.
We had been laughing and joking around for quite awhile when he caught me off guard by asking me if I would show him my breasts. I was very self conscious about my appearance at the time and had no desire to remove my bikini for him, but I was afraid that if I said no he wouldn't want to hang out with my anymore that night. Instead I told him that if he could catch up to me in the waterslide then I would show him, knowing very well that no one was as fast as me at going down the slide.
We hiked up the cold, wet staircase. It smelt strongly of chlorine and an old musky smell from the aged carpet. He kept his hand gently placed on the base of my back, just above my bikini line. The contact made my skin buzz and I felt my face flush red every time we made eye contact. As we came closer to the top of the tower I started to doubt how wise it was to make the deal I had. I felt dizzy, my mouth wet with excess saliva caused by the uneasy nausea stirring in my stomach.
We walked to the mouth of the slide and without saying anything I thrust myself into it with as much speed as possible, determined to keep distance between myself and the man following closely behind me. As I burst out of the end of the tube I felt the cool water rush over me with relief.
The relief vanished with the color from my face when there were suddenly hands around my waist, pulling me close to the large man behind me. I felt a hardness against my back that made my entire body freeze. Jesse turned me around and stared down into my eyes, his face looked like stone in the dim light reflecting off the water.
With one disturbingly sharp move he grabbed my hand and slide it into his shorts, I felt the same hardness that was against my back seconds before suddenly brush the palm of my hand. My insides turned into knots, I wasn't sure what he was thinking but I was sure it was something I didn't want to do. Before I even had time to react to where my hand was, I suddenly felt his slide into the back of my bikini. My fight or flight immediately kicked in and I pushed him off and rushed away without a word.
As painful as these memories are, the events afterwards were much harder. You can read about what happened then in my post "What You Don't Know Can Hurt You".
What I carry with me the most from this time is the pain that came from the absence of support from my family and the indescribable anger and resentment it created.

Under lock and key

I had another nightmare last night. That isn't something as unusual as I would like. I think my nightmares are the hardest part of what I'm going through. I lay in bed at night, exhausted but too afraid to fall asleep. I don't know much about what happens in our brains when we sleep but somewhere along the way the part of my mind that reassured me when I woke that it was only a dream has vanished. When I awake, I'm never certain that the pictures and images from my dreams aren't really part of my reality. The light from my window hits me, my eyes flutter open and I lay there paralyzed. I spend my mornings crying over the friends I have never met who lost their lives in the flurry of my unconsciousness. I have mourned the death of a child I loved with my entire body that has never been born. The line between imagination and reality has dissolved, I can no longer trust my own mind. I have been certain of conversations I have had, memories I visit often and found later that they never existed in reality. I have spoken fondly to a friend of a day we spent together in a park only to be humiliated when I am corrected, and learn that it never happened. It confuses me. I'm not sure which of my memories I have actually experienced with others and which ones were created in my dreams, branded into my mind and sold to me as truth.
Since I have exited the world of employment my days blur together. I try to fill them with chores and hobbies. All within the safety of the walls in my home. Until I learn to face the two worlds I live in here, the conscious and unconscious, I cannot face the reality of the even larger and more uncertain world outside me. Once I lived a life where the idea of spending a week without leaving the boundaries of my home sounded like my personal hell. Now anything that extends beyond them is a threat. My comfort zone is everything to me. I made a career out of being social with others, serving and entertaining them and feeling excitement listening to the stories of the places the have been and the experiences they have had, sharing my own stories of triumph and pain. Now every stranger is a threat. I don't trust them, I have lost faith in the general goodness of humanity. I have been a victim a the hands strangers more often than anyone should at my age. I have been raped, sexually assaulted, mugged at gunpoint. I can no longer move through life carefree and open minded. call me a cynic but the world hasn't given me a reason to feel otherwise. The risk of pain that comes from being open is too great. Home is where the heart is and I'm keeping my heart and body locked away safely in my home.

What you don't know can hurt you

I started to write a post about the second traumatizing event in my childhood, but I found it to be a lot harder than I had expected. Maybe eventually I will finish it and tell the full story but for now an abbreviated version will have to do.
I was about 14, I was at a water slide park with my family. A man by the name of Jesse, who was about 20 at the time forced himself upon me sexually in the middle of the pool. I was traumatized and humiliated. It wasn't until the next day when I went to confront him about it and he reacted with hostility toward me because of my rejection of him that I told my older brother Alex.
It is only now as an adult that I realize how much the sexual assault has affected me throughout my life. At the time it was the lack of support I received that broke me. My mother and Jesse's mother put us all in a room together and they all proceeded to criticize me, saying I had probably instigated it. He told them that I was flirting with him and I was just throwing a fit because he rejected me. My mom and everyone else believed it.
I felt sick to my stomach as I had to sit face to face with this man who had violated me so clearly and defend myself. Where was my support? Even if I had wanted the attention he gave me the gap in our age made it hugely inappropriate.
To say that this caused me to resent my mother would be an understatement. I felt a hot anger towards her. I was later forced to go to Jesse's mom's house for dinner, and she didn't seem to understand why that was a bad choice. Jesse wasn't there but his siblings had grown to hate me for the accusations I had made at their brother. The entire night made me sick to my stomach.
Without a true understanding of my rage and a healthy place to vent it I became violent. In one culminating moment when I told my mother I needed to get out of the house and clear my head and she told me I wasn't allowed to go I reached out and struck her across the face. That is a moment I will never forget and I'm sure she won't either. She called the police on me, told them she had an out of control teenager and asked them to come handle the situation.
It was moments later as I was standing in my front yard in handcuffs that one of my siblings came out of the door saying my father was on the phone. After a brief discussion it was decided that moving to Arizona with my father would be a better option than placing me in Juvenile Detention.
I eagerly accepted the alternative, feeling a strong desire to run away from everything in that small Utah town that had betrayed me. I had no idea that I would be carrying the darkness from it with me.

Acute Phase

We begin at the beginning. There are two major events that happened when I was much younger than I am now. The first is much more sensitive and I plan to touch on it as lightly as possible. The second is much bigger and I recall it with much more detail, I will get into that one on my next post. As I write I do it so that others may understand me and post traumatic stress disorder itself, but more importantly to help me understand myself. The more I venture into the parts of my mind that are scariest to visit, the more I personally can understand what steered my decisions in my past and how to better control them in my future.

I believe I was in third grade at the time. My home had burned down, an event that I didn't really understand at the time and didn't have too large of an impact on me. My family relocated to another home in the same neighborhood. I still had my own room and lived close to my friends so I found the place to be agreeable. We had rhubarb growing in our backyard and I remember my mom telling me we could make pie out of it which I found to be very strange considering it looked like a vegetable. We didn't stay there long enough for me to find out what it was like. 

I was in my bedroom getting changed out of my school clothes, dancing and singing to Spice Girls on the amazing new boom box my parents had bought me. I didn't notice the level of volume until my dad burst in the door yelling at me to turn it down. Shocked by the sudden intrusion and embarrassed at my naked exposed state I grabbed a blanket and quickly covered myself before jumping at my stereo to turn it down. 

My father grabbed the blanket from me and told me I was too young to have anything I needed to worry about covering up. I was humiliated in so many ways. 

I quickly want to clear up any assumptions that my father had intentions of sexual abuse. This was not a common thing to have happen in our household. My father called me his princess and showed me the type of love that a father should. He struggles with his own mental illness battles and does the best he can. As a mother I know how easy it can be to have one bad day where you do something as a parent that you later come to regret and pray that those moments don't have a lasting impression on your children. It is unfortunate for me and my father that this incident did. 

For a long time after I felt a consistent fear anytime someone knocked on or opened my door. I changed my clothes as quickly as I possibly could and I kept my music just loud enough for me to be able to hear it. I wish I could say that in my life almost twenty years later this is something I have overcome but it is something I believe I will always carry. 

Introducing...me and my PTSD

They say there are five states to PTSD. And when I say "they" I mean Pinterest. Yes I saw this on Pinterest and without any further research decided it is true. I remember going through every single stage that the pin had listed and if it is true for me then that is good enough for me.
The first stage is acute anxiety. I thought about the incident just over a month ago when a man attacked me behind the bar I was working at and how I felt after, the panic and anxiety episodes I felt. I thought that was my first stage. Then I remembered that I had been mugged at gunpoint with my 4 year old son about three months before, my acute stage probably started then. But wait three years before that I was raped in my own bedroom, that was probably what started all of this. No, after multiple therapy sessions, group counselling and self reflection I realized I don't remember a time in my life when I haven't had these symptoms and feelings.
I don't want to be mistaken as being someone who hates their whole life and feels that it has been only bad. I have a great deal of great memories and moments that I cling to like the treasures they are. I have on the other hand had a great deal more bad luck, as my friends call it, than most people I meet. I need a place to vent and express myself, especially on those days that are just harder than others with no real obvious reason. More than that, I want to create a place where other people who have my same problems can go to remember they are not alone, a place where people who don't have my same problems can learn about the effects that traumatic events and mental illness can have on an individual and everyone else in their lives. I'm writing this blog for me, but if it can help you in any way, then I want to write it for you. I don't want to feel alone, and I don't want you to either.
In all my posts to come I am going to be as honest and open as I can because I want to heal. I do not desire to offend or upset anyone but as we live in a world full of people from different opinions and backgrounds I know that won't be possible. All I ask is that if I do, please know it was unintentional, and know that while I am pleased to hear from you I would like you to remember that I am fragile and the words of others, even if they are strangers do affect me so choose your words carefully.
So here it goes, I will let you into my world, show you my fight with PTSD and with a most ideal of goals, shed myself free from the shame and humiliation I have always felt as a result of it. Thank you for reading.