- spontaneous or cued recurrent, involuntary, and intrusive distressing memories of the traumatic events
- recurrent distressing dreams in which the content or affect (i.e. feeling) of the dream is related to the events
- flashbacks or other dissociative reactions in which the individual feels or acts as if the traumatic events are recurring
- intense or prolonged psychological distress at exposure to internal or external cues that symbolize or resemble an aspect of the traumatic events
- physiological reactions to reminders of the traumatic events
- Persistent avoidance of distressing memories, thoughts, or feelings about or closely associated with the traumatic events or of external reminders (i.e., people, places, conversations, activities, objects, situations)
- inability to remember an important aspect of the traumatic events (not due to head injury, alcohol, or drugs)
- persistent and exaggerated negative beliefs or expectations about oneself, others, or the world
- persistent, distorted blame of self or others about the cause or consequences of the traumatic events
- persistent fear, horror, anger, guilt, or shame
- markedly diminished interest or participation in significant activities
- feelings of detachment or estrangement from others
- persistent inability to experience positive emotions
- irritable or aggressive behavior
- reckless or self-destructive behavior
- hypervigilance
- exaggerated startle response
- problems with concentration
So, I have had PTSD since I was six. (BTW thank to the Anxiety And Depression Association Of America for supplying me with this long list). It's very difficult for me to talk about it. Even now my stomach feels sick, everything is tense, and my fingers are sort of shaking. So what exactly happened to six year old me. Well, I'm already not sleeping so I might as well explain. Hopefully I will be able to raise more awareness for PTSD. For one, my dad was definitely emotionally abusive to me when I was a kid. Well, until I stopped visiting him. But I don't think that's why I have PTSD. I might have turned out okay if it had stopped at the first event. But it didn't. So my dad and his parents were watching a horror movie. I was a curious kid and wanted to watch to so I would sneak into the living room watch a bit and when it was getting to scary I would leave the room. My dad got sick of this. At some point he picked me up and made me watch it. When I say made me watch it I don't mean he said "Watch this" I mean he pinned me down so I couldn't escape, held me held still and forced me to watch it. If my eyes wandered from the screen he would shake me until I looked back. I remember him telling me "You wanted to watch it so now your going to watch it" and "Don't worry it has a happy ending" as I was watching people get their limbs torn off and horribly massacred. It is important to realize that at this point in my life I didn't know movies were fake. I thought I was really watching people die. Now I am literally shaking and my teeth are clenched, it is getting hard to write this. On Sunday when I came home I freaked out my mom. So I got home and my mom welcomed me back and eventually told me to get ready for bed. I didn't want to got upstairs alone which I was usually fine with. Instead I used the downstairs bathroom. As I was using the toilet I suddenly became paralyzed with a horrifying thought. What if the zombies from the movie came to kill me? I couldn't move and kept imaging the zombies coming from the floor and killing me. According to my mother who was at the time on her computer I started screaming and crying hysterically that 'they' were going to get me. My mother couldn't calm me down and called my father to yell at him. When she couldn't get him to tell her she finally talked me down and got me to more or less tell her what happened, then she yelled at my dad some more. Finally she handed me the phone. My father was very angry that I had told her what happened and told me that if I ever told her what happened on a weekend with him again the zombies would kill me. Then I started hysterically screaming again. My father wouldn't tell her what he said and there was no way in hell I was telling her anything. She calmed me down again and showed me videos of actors getting makeup put on them to show me it was fake. The nightmares started anyway. If it had ended there, who knows. But it didn't end until I was about ten or eleven. From that time forward, any time he watched a scary movie I had to watch it to. My paternal grandparents didn't help much. My grandmother (paternal) would point out if I wan't looking at the screen and my grandfather (paternal) would do nothing. By the way, doing nothing is as good as doing something. This is why I have trust issues. Anyway this scary movie thing went on for years eventually getting to the movie that I can't even hear the name without going borderline anxiety attack. I hope you'll forgive me for not talking about it. Oh, my step-mother also helped in what I basically considered to be psychological torture. Helpful hints BTW, just because it is a cartoon does not mean it is for children and if someone doesn't want to watch a movie don't make them. I remember one time I went to the movie theater with Papa (my maternal grandfather) and a commercial for the movie that triggers me came on. Even though we were going to see a childrens movie and that was not a children's movie. As soon as i realized what it was which didn't even take six seconds I ran out of the theater in a blind panic. At the time I didn't remember running. I was going faster than I had ever gone in my life. By the time I realized I had moved I was standing outside the theater looking around confused. Papa did find me but I refused to go back inside the theater even though the commercial was over. That was ten years ago, to this day I still refuse to watch commercials for movies. I usually wait in the hallway or bathroom and have my mom text me that it's safe. It took me a long time to trust movie theaters again though. Once when I was a kid, my dad took me and my cousin to see one of the Alvin and the Chipmunk movies in theaters but the repressed memory from the theater incedint lingered in my mind as a fear of theaters. I refused to go inside. My dad got mad at me and asked me, well what if I got a boyfriend one day and he wanted to take me to the movies? If I start dating and someone wants to take me to a scary movie and they don't accept that I don't like scary movies and have PTSD then I'm not dating them. I don't want to be with someone who doesn't respect my boundaries. The event that made my father and step-mother stop forcing to watch scary movies was the time when I ended up scaring them. They decided that I was going to watch Alice In Wonderland (Tim Burton version). BTW I don't truly hate or loathe many people. Nor do I wish suffering or death on anyone but Tim Burton. I hate and loathe him, he is the most disgusting wad of human refuse to crawl this earth and I hope he suffers an eternity in hell. If it weren't for him and his stupid movies I might not have anxiety attacks. Who knows, I might not have PTSD. (Insert uncharacteristic rage and hate). If I ever meet him I will either avoid him or trash talk him to his face there is no in-between. Anyway. My first move of panic was to call my mom because i recognized the directors name. My dad moved my new flip phone out of my reach and told me I wasn't allowed to contact my mom while i was with him (which is illegal BTW) and you might have guessed it, pinned me down so i couldn't escape and employed the same methods of force he used when I was six. But this time he told me if i didn't like it halfway through he would stop. My step-mother took on the role of my paternal grandmother, telling him when I looked away from the screen. They went more than halfway through. They offered me to stop however during a part where Alice sliced her arm open, inner elbow to wrist. People harming other people, okay for kids apparently (NOT). But they drew the line at people harming themselves. I guess they didn't want me to get ideas. They offered to turn it off but I was transfixed by the novel idea of the harm being administered by the same person receiving the harm was such a new idea that i asked to see the rest of the movie. They were happy but unsettled because they knew something was wrong. What was wrong was that the last straw in my ten or eleven year old brain had snapped. I became obsessed with death and murder. I bought a book about how famous people died I would spend way too long pondering all the ways people could die. I really scared my step-mother one day (okay I was probably ten, not eleven when all this happened) by telling her that people were really easy to kill. That scared them off scaring me. I must have looked like a psychopath when my cousin was watching the scream movies during a sleepover (she understood my fear of scary things and let me watch her twilight movies on a portable DVD player) I looked up occasionally when her movie was to loud and I saw the bad guy chopping a woman in half in a hospital bed. My poor cousin was paled and cringing in fear and i thought the ridiculous blood splatter (also the way they would cut between the axe and the woman screaming) was hilarious and i started laughing. My cousin looked at me in horror like I was about to whip out an axe and murder her. BTW, I would never murder someone. I feel guilty killing spiders even though I have arachnophobia. So the movies stopped and i eventually got enough courage to tell my dad that i wasn't going to visit him anymore. I haven't seen him since I was fourteen and my mom got custody of me when I was fifteen and almost sixteen. I almost wish he had fought for me a bit more. But I was glad to get away from. Not so glad to move away from the remainder of my family and my friends. Except for some cousins, my dad's side of the family disowned me. When I was fourteen they even sent me a Christmas present so passive aggressive i cried for like ten minutes and my mom started checking all my mail and packages from them. My PTSD has gotten better over the years and I would like to say that it took years of scary movies being forced on me to get this bad. I've met people who saw scary movies as a kid and are fine. Everyone's brains are different and so are peoples circumstances. Usually when people think of PTSD they think of people who have been to war. Yes PTSD is rather common among people who have served in the military, but other people get PTSD from lots of different things. You don't have to be in battlefield to be traumatized. Symptoms that I have are nightmares (really bad ones, more like night terrors, they were worse when I was a kid), when I was a kid I could hear voices (hallucinating can happen to people with PTSD), I'm constantly paranoid, and anxiety attacks when I get triggered. And of course there are other things. I still won't watch commercials in movie theaters, I won't watch scary movies, or scary books, and I if I don't see an immediate exit for whatever room i'm in I will start to panic. Also I hate being touched. I only let my mom hug me and I pet my cat. Anyone else, I hate physical contact. I have gone to therapy. That's how i know I have PTSD, because (in case you haven't believed me, because one time my mom told her friend I have PTSD and her friend seriously thought my mom was making it up to mess with her) a real life psychologist diagnosed me with PTSD and prescribed me medication for my night terrors. Which I stupidly didn't want to take because i read the side effects. I wish I had some now. In case you were wondering it took me a couple years before I started telling my mom what happened on weekends with my dad because I stopped telling her. At some point my mind started repressing what happened. I remember one time I came home and my mother who was worried asked me what happened over the weekend and I honestly couldn't remember. Before therapy I honestly couldn't remember most of my childhood. After therapy I've been able to remember, even the unpleasant parts. It can be difficult sometimes because I want to remember but I'm terrified of what I might find searching my memory. And sometimes something I want to forget pops into my head and I can't help it. I have had anxiety attacks at school. I've had quite a few and I'm usually not somewhere private so I've had to do this explanation a few times I just I have never done it to this extent. Sometimes people go quiet and don't know what to say, some people once they get over the shock of someone they know having PTSD (especially someone their age) they ask lots of questions. I don't mind answering questions, I want people to know more so they can help other people and spread awareness. If I could help someone by explaining what PTSD or by answering questions I would love that. The best reaction I have gotten was when I started to explain myself after curling up and covering my ears muttering "no" over and over until the trigger stopped, the guy held up a hand and said that he understood, that I had been triggered and that, that was okay. Nothing quite beats being told it's okay because they understand. Everyone reacts to trauma differently. There are different symptoms and different causes. My PTSD is different for example from the PTSD of a fifty year old war veteran. Also, trauma happening at an earlier age can affect the child's mental and emotional growth. When I'm freaking out I kind of turn into a kid. I cover me ears, i curl up and rock or sway. I cry and occasionally if the person doesn't shut up I scream. Remembering some of the movies I saw has explained some of my irrational fears. Like how I hate showers (I take them anyway but i put them off and hate every second of them) because of the movie 'Psycho'. Long hallways, well lit or not scare me because of the movie 'The Shining'. Some of you may be weirded out or grossed out but i'm doing my best. I would like to remind everyone my mom isn't letting see a real therapist so this blog is my therapy. I think this is it for now. I might update this if i think of something else. I don't want to end this because I don't want to get ready for bed like my mom told me to do hours ago. Sometimes i don't even like me mom or the cat touching me. Sometimes I just want to feel completely safe. No paranoia, no anxiety, I want to be able to get a hug and not want to run away. I only rarely like hugs which mystifies some people but not everyone likes hugs.
I have to finish this at some point but go ahead and ask me questions if you have any!
Comments
Post a Comment