Raw Nerves – Love – PTSD
Some of you know I had some blogs up about love and PTSD on my last profile, that got deleted along with the profile. I’m going to try to readdress them again here, and I’ll back this blog up to my backup blog at coyotecry.com this time, in case this profile gets deleted, too.
You all know the bullshit with dad. Some of you knew him after he wasn’t so bad, so you may not understand, but alot of you do. When I went to college I planned to study biopsychology, but my own brand of PTSD kicked in and I became a little obsessed with studying it instead. I learned a lot.
They used to call it Shell Shock, but that only applies to war and I think the two most common causes of PTSD are domestic violence and war, so PTSD is a little better label. There is what they call Post Traumatic Stress Reaction and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but they’re really the same thing, just different at different levels of severity. In PTSR, you only suffer the symptoms when certain keys set it off, and the more isolated the keys the less you have the reaction. In PTSD there are so many keys, so many things to set it off, that you suffer it pretty much all the time.
In my case, I’d call it PTSR. My main triggers seem to be love. When I’m not in love, I’m fine. But falling in love sets it off and brings out all kinds of bad memories, and the assoicated bullshit. As long as I avoid love, I’m fine.
Some people are diagnosed with anxiety disorders, or other disorders like agoraphobia, because they don’t recognize what their triggers are.
So let me describe PTSD a little better. It is a natural learned set of reactions to traumatic experience. The stronger the emotions (trying to survive, love, etc.) and the more traumatic the experiences while feeling those emotions, the stronger the PTSR is. It is normal in the setting it was created in, but it can really screw things up out of that setting. We instinctively get that, and that is why many try to recreate the setting so we “fit in” again. In war jumping at the sound of a limb cracking is normal. In your house in the suburbs, it’s not.
…. I’ll have to come back and finish this later, gtg
Well, I put off finishing this all day. I don’t want to go into it all again. You guys know what I wrote before. I just want to go over the triggers again. PTSD is a learned set of reactions. It comes from experiencing strong emotions during stressful circumstances. When you experience similar circumstances later, even if they are no where near as stressful, it triggers the strong emotions. The stronger the emotions, the stronger the associations, and the worse the PTSD.
They key is to see it, to face it, and to know your triggers. My example. I always used to wait up for dad to come home from the bar at night. I’d sit in the window a lot, watching each car to see if it pulled in the driveway. Why? Well, one, I loved him, and two, I thought he was going to kill mom. So each night, I’d wait, and then listen. Sometimes he was in a good mood, and then I could go to sleep. Most of the time he was on a rant, and I’d listen, scared to death that night would be the one he killed her. Or whoever else he was beating that night.
I don’t even want to talk about this shit, because I don’t want to start the shit it did the last time I did, but I’m trying to make a point. Love is my trigger, because love is what I was also feeling those nights. Love and fear. And now, when I feel love, I start to remember, and my emotions go south. I can hear screams so real it is like they are really there, and I kind of get lost in the memories. I’m sure the rest of you have triggers, too, and you have built your lives around them and how they made you act later on.
That’s normal. There’s nothing wrong with it. Look into what is called classical conditioning. That is how PTSD is created, and it is how it can be undone. But it is harder to undo than it is to make. The triggers can be weakened, and they can slowly become associated with other things. And you can find people who understand, and who can help. But it is not something that just goes away overnight.
A lot of times people with PTSD or PTSR’s instinctively know there is something wrong with them, and they think they’re crazy and it is bad. But it’s not. That feeling that is it bad is a defense mechanism that keeps you form facing the pain. What you have become is a normal part of the way humans learn, and it can be fixed. You can’t start getting to that point until you look at yourself and start to face what your triggers are, though. That’s the start, and the way out.
And no one should feel any guilt over things that are past and gone. It’s all over, and it’s time to move on. What are your triggers?
Published by CoyoteDKM on October 27th, 2007 | Filed under Personal
March 26th, 2009 at 12:19 am
I think this is a wonderful description of how you feel about the love and difficulty you have disassociating it from pain. I would love to read more about this. Have you written anything else about it that I could read?