PTSD

What it feels like for him:

It is annoying! It feels like I am different from everyone I know. It does not feel like I am the same as other kids and often feels like no one understands me. It´s lonely to not feel understood. It is hard to explain this to others but I am going to try.

When I am triggered, it feels like I am reliving the terrible memory. Like I might as well just be back there because that is how it feels. It is crazy real! My mind gets stuck in the past and I can´t get out. The best way I can describe it is like VR. I can see it happening all over again. I can hear it. I can smell it.

I hide, usually in my closet or some uncomfortably tight corner behind furniture or something. I am aware that this is kind of ridiculous. I do it because I try to run from the memories. It doesn´t actually help anything but I just keep doing it anyway (his facial expression here was priceless). It makes sense if you really think about it. It is a habit because in my childhood when there was abuse or screaming or whatever terrible thing was going on, I would hide and it actually helped me. It worked then. It protected me. Because the memory feels so real, my mind thinks that hiding is going to help again. I hide. Only now, it doesn´t help, because life doesn’t actually suck anymore. I forget that it doesn´t help because I ¨lose my head.¨ My therapist says, “you lose your head and you can´t rationalize.¨ You aren´t using the front part of your brain where you can think and problem solve. In short, my mind says ¨run¨ and then… I do. I run by hiding.

If I am mad, I want to hit things; not people, just things. I want to break things. Stupid things. Weak things. Often I break cardboard and tear apart plastic. It makes me feel strong or something. My brain is just like ¨break something¨ and I am like ¨okay brain¨ and I do it.

This movie, on repeat, plays over AND over AND over AND over again. I get to a point where I just want to die to make it stop. My mind feels like it would just be so much easier to not be here. Crisis.

My mind is complicated. PTSD is complicated.

Sometimes I like help and sometimes it makes it worse. It is random, so it is really hard for my parents or my crisis team. When I am triggered, I am stuck in the past. The past feels like reality, even though it is not. Since I am in the past, in my head, I can not talk in the real reality. I am not really able to listen to what people are saying, so I shrug or ignore everyone. It makes it impossible to tell people what I need and everyone just wants me to tell them what I need. How much I can communicate all depends how deep I am in the memory. I guess to everyone else it looks like I am pretending to sleep or frozen or just ignoring them.

When I am deep in one of these PTSD episodes, it feels like I am going crazy because I just can not be rational. It is so frustrating.

When I am being rational and living in the current moment, I know life is worth living and I really do want to be here. I try to think about my little brother. That is what helps me the most to get back to reality. I want to see him grow up and be here for him. He is amazing! Or drumming. Drumming is my outlet. When I am not triggered, I can understand all of this and think rationally and then I just want to help other people like me.

You aren’t alone.

What it feels like for me:

Secondary trauma or vicarious trauma. You are at a greater risk for this if you are a therapist, social worker, first responder, work in the medical field, or are a primary caregiver. Basically, I take on some of my child´s trauma for myself. And for me, in a real way, I have PTSD about my child´s PTSD. It is mainly his struggle with suicidal ideation that makes me feel this sense of hyper-alertness all. of. the. time. I am always watching for his signs of distress. I am his mom. I have this primal instinct to keep my children safe. For a while, the sound of a text message, which has been turned off, would make my stomach hurt and my heart race, out of fear that it would be my child in crisis. If he is slumped over on the couch because he is a teenager, who is growing, and is simply exhausted or bored, I can feel my heart beat a little faster and my mind starts jumping to conclusions. I have to pause to be mindful and remind myself that I don´t need to have this sense of paranoia that he is heading into crisis every time he looks unhappy. Mindfulness. Breathing, Prayer.

About a year ago, we had to check our sweet boy into an inpatient facility. It was the only bed available in Washington and it was two hours away from our home (more on this another time). For me, this is when my mental health was really impacted by all of this. Parenting a child who is suicidal is scary. It feels isolating. It is often not taken seriously. I feel helpless because there is nothing I can do to take the pain away for him and as his mom, that is what I want to do more than anything. I just want to erase everything that hurts him. The hardest thing I have had to do is accept that this is not something within my control. I cannot guarantee he is going to be okay. I can do my best to keep him safe, organize therapy and services, and love him unconditionally, but I cannot own it and I cannot make it go away.

In the text Transforming the Pain, Saakvitne and Pearlman (1996) list the signs and symptoms of secondary trauma in three categories. Here is the list, and to help my kiddo break the stigma of mental health, I will be transparent. I have bolded what I experience(d). (I copied this list from tendacadamy.ca)

Physical Warning Signs

• Exhaustion
• Insomnia
• Headaches
• Increased susceptibility to illness
• Sore back and neck
• Irritable bowel, GI distress
• Rashes, breakouts
• Grinding your teeth at night
• Heart palpitations
• Hypochondria (The opposite for me, I ignore everything until I’m a hot mess)

Behavioural Signs

• Increased use of alcohol and drugs
• Anger and Irritability at home and/or at work
• Avoidance of clients/patients
• Watching excessive amounts of TV/Netflix at night
• Consuming high trauma media as entertainment
• Not returning phone calls at work and/or at home
• Avoiding colleagues and staff gatherings
• Avoiding social events
• Impaired ability to make decisions
• Feeling helpless when hearing a difficult client story
• Impostor syndrome – feeling unskilled in your job
• Problems in personal relationships
• Difficulty with sex and intimacy due to trauma exposure at work
• Thinking about quitting your job (not always a bad idea by the way!)
• Compromised care for clients/patients
• Engaging in frequent negative gossip/venting at work
• Impaired appetite or binge eating

Emotional/Psychological Signs

• Emotional exhaustion
• Negative self-image
• Depression
• Increased anxiety
• Difficulty sleeping
• Impaired appetite or binge eating
• Feelings of hopelessness
• Guilt
• Reduced ability to feel sympathy and empathy towards clients or family/friends
• Cynicism at work
• Anger at work
• Resentment of demands being put on you at work and/or at home
• Dread of working with certain clients/patients/certain case files
• Diminished sense of enjoyment/career(i.e., low compassion satisfaction)
• Depersonalization – spacing out during work or the drive home
• Disruption of world view/heightened anxiety or irrational fears
• Intrusive imagery (You can read an excellent description of this in Eric Gentry’s Crucible of Transformation article).
• Hypersensitivity to emotionally charged stimuli
• Insensitivity to emotional material/numbing
• Difficulty separating personal and professional lives
• Failure to nurture and develop non-work related aspects of life
• Suicidal thoughts

Now what…

I will admit my naivety in the beginning. My thought process at the time of fostering was: He needs a healthy environment. He needs consistency. He needs love and nurture and connection… And everything will be fine.

Try again mama. Yes, all of this is important and critical in the healing process, but love is just not enough.

Therapy. Lots of it. EMDR seems to be the best fit for my son. Time is a big component and the HARDEST part. His therapist says that right now, in a way, we are “buying time.” Time to heal, mature, process…. We have a crisis team, a crisis plan that is revised regularly, and a growing village of amazing people. We play, what I call, “the medication game”, which I hate (maybe another post). Plan B parenting (Ross Greene) has been the most successful. We cannot parent him how we were parented. Trauma has wired his brain differently. I have heard, “you are doing everything” and have been praised by therapists and various people in our lives numerous times. While you want to hear that you are doing the “right” things and the praise should feel good, you also kinda hope you are doing something wrong. So that YOU can fix it. There is nothing for me to fix. There is no magic wand, but I will keep looking for it. We are constantly reading and researching. Above everything else, A ton of prayers and leaning on our faith.

I have become a much stronger person through all this, I have grown stronger in my faith and I have learned to savor the moments that are easy to take for granted. I am really grateful for this. You can find joy even in the hardest day.

As we work on breaking free from complex trauma, our family has learned to focus on the joy. That part is a gift.