In my daily journal, I have been trying to figure out just where I lost my focus and how to regain it. It's been a lot of soul searching and a lot of uncovering ways that I have the past effecting the present. It may be apparent that I am a survivor of some seriously ugly stuff in some of my past Morning blog posts. The way I live with it is I try to forget it happened. I tell myself that my past doesn't matter and that today is more important. I tell myself that the best things are always out ahead of me. When my brain chemistry cooperates, this method tends to help me push through the days where my complex post-traumatic stress disorder tries to run the show.
In the course of my journal work over the last several weeks, I have come to two conclusions. I don't like these conclusions, but they are logical and it is hard to argue with logic. First conclusion is that trying to ignore trauma just makes it more likely to pop up in unexpected places when you have a boatload of triggers, like I do. The second conclusion that I have reached is that I have to directly address the way these traumas interact with my present life. I have been using my fiction writing to process some of them and some of them I have been using the Morning blog posts.
I don't have a therapist. I can't afford one out of pocket. And I can't find one who takes my insurance. I live in a rural area. I'm lucky to have found a psychiatrist who takes my insurance and is actually pretty good. So, what do I do for my processing of trauma and handling the stress of being disabled due to the combination of c-ptsd and bipolar II? I have my trusty notebook and pen. I write it out. I was in therapy for the better part of a decade. I have a pretty good idea how it works when it comes to talk therapy. So, I ask myself questions and explore the answers.
The questions about my writing, art, and attempts to run a business reading tarot cards are not getting happy answers. Probing them, I find that down beneath the block to posting on my blogs and finishing my incompleted manuscripts are traumas from when I was younger lurking. I find that the psychological scar tissues from being gaslighted for about half my life by people who were authority figures in my life during that time is really hard to cut through. I doubt myself and my skills a lot. Being depressed triggers these massive periods of self-doubt and terror while I am depressed, not to mention this feeds being depressed.
It was only recently that I realized that this self-doubt and terror that I am wrong about everything I know about myself and have experienced goes right back to the psychological and emotional abuse I suffered in my teen years and through my early twenties. Being depressed is triggering emotional flashbacks. Emotional flashbacks are a bit easier to handle in the moment than the ones where I am not in the present. But, those types of flashbacks are starting to creep up again as I am trying to press forward and make my dreams reality.
Emotional flashbacks are where you are reliving the emotional response you had to the traumatic incident because of some kind of triggering event that bears some manner of resemblance to the traumatic incident. "Regular" flashbacks are where you are reliving the traumatic event itself because of some triggering event that bears resemblance to the trauma. In those flashbacks, you may hallucinate being back in the place where the trauma happened. In those flashbacks, you may have a response that looks like you've got the thousand yard stare as you stand/sit there and relive it. Or, in those flashbacks, you may be semi-aware of your present situation and take action to get away or out of the potential danger zone of where the traumatic incident seems to be about to happen. Then there's the especially ugly ones where you are hallucinating the event happening again and you're attempting to defend yourself from the attacker, but in reality you are self harming. I have had all of these different responses.
There's nothing quite like going catatonic in the middle of sex and then coming out of it screaming in terror, confused as to where/when you are, and your partner is left feeling like they've harmed you some how. Fortunately, my marriage is rock solid and we've figured out what my triggers are as a survivor of a relationship when I was much younger and I was sexually assaulted multiple times and we work around them. The problem now, honestly, is tracking down what is triggering my difficulties writing and figuring out how to deal with them. See, sometimes a block is not what it seems. Sometimes a block is your brain attempting to protect you from something horrible that happened to you in the past. I'm working on chipping away at that block and as I do so, I am finding ugly things coming to the surface. So, if my Morning blog posts get weird, please bear with me. And be aware, there are things that I am not posting here not because I am hiding out of shame but because the people who harmed me are still out there and could stumble on to this blog. And they know where I am and how to get a hold of me. Discretion is the better part of valor as some might say.
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