So much to say. So much to connect. How will I do it? Bits at a time I guess. Some now, some later.
For a long time, for years, I had been struggling to get help and treatment for my ADD symptoms. I was trying to find someone who would help me. Finally, I have. Before moving about ten months ago I had gone to a therapist for about 1 ½ years. She was wonderful, but sometimes I felt I couldn’t trust her. I’m pretty sure this has less to do with her and more to do with my actual diagnosis. After moving, I didn’t see her and I tried to figure out my life on my own. I tried to find help for my ADD.
I was referred to a Psychiatrist who should not have been one. He told me, “Congratulations you have stumped a psychiatrist.” The man had talked to me for 45 minutes. He had never met me before that. He sighed and talked as if he were irritated with me, pinching the bridge of his nose between his eyes with his thumb and index finger. Asking me to give an explanation about a traumatic, personal experience that I had said I would avoid talking about as it felt irrelevant, and then when I decided to trust him and try and summarize, he cut me off mid-sentence and didn’t let me finish, speaking and motioning with his hands that he clearly thought I was just about the craziest person that he had ever met.
I walked out of there planning to return to see him again, thinking that maybe I really was crazy after all. I felt I might be crazy. I had abusers before who told me that I was psychotic. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps this was proof that I was. After signing up to get a free piece of pie at Shari's, and eating it along with a juicy burger and fries, sitting alone, I decided that I wasn’t going back to that man. That he was a jerk who I wasn't going to talk to again. I wasn’t going to trust a man to diagnose me that couldn’t even emotionally regulate himself. I ended up getting in touch with some friends who I hadn’t seen in years, before a lot of my “crazy”. These friends happened to be trained counselors themselves. They made me feel better about my choice to not go back to see that guy. I will not call him a Psychiatrist—he was really just an irritable man who gained more access to my personal information than I would have liked.
After a conversation with these friends, I ended up emailing my therapist who I hadn’t talked to in half a year to ask her what she personally would have diagnosed me with were she to have given me one. Sometimes it is best not to tell patients what their diagnosis is. Sometimes it’s best just to treat the symptoms. This is why she hadn’t told me before. Now, I had the courage to ask her.
Prior to emailing her, I had happened to just finish reading a book called Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I hadn’t agreed with everything in that book, but I didn’t feel that I needed to. The book was written by a psychiatrist that was a concentration camp survivor of World War II. He talked about finding a meaning for life in order to get through terrible situations. He talked about how he had decided during captivity that he would focus on perceiving and analyzing the minds of the prisoners around him, and himself, in order to be able to write about it in future. And I read what he wrote in future. That was inspiring to me.
As I read this book, there were parts that I really related to. He talked about the feelings of paralysis that many prisoners faced. In several previous blog posts, I had tried explaining these feelings of paralysis that I had had. This was before reading this book. As I read Frankl’s description of that feeling of paralysis—of not wanting or knowing how to take initiative for one’s own life or whether one should live or not, whether if presented with the opportunity to escape one would feel free to take it, etc…, I felt that I was reading a description of the paralysis that I currently felt myself. I could not have described it better, though I had tried. Yet, I wasn’t literally imprisoned, and I had never been in a concentration camp.
About a week or so after reading the book, I received an email back from my therapist saying that the diagnosis for me was Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD). She told me that this diagnosis was not in current diagnostic manuals though it was a recognised disorder and some people were hoping to add it to the next edition. She advised me to be careful and discerning with looking elsewhere for a diagnosis and help, because likely, I would not get a diagnosis that would fully encapsulate and describe the complexity of what was really going on for me as many psychiatrists are not properly trained in trauma, and they may not be helpful for me.
I googled CPTSD and immediately felt a connection to the symptoms described. I also saw one symptom labeled as “paralyzed initiative” and on a different site, saw that on a list of things that could cause this type of disorder to develop, at the top of this list was “Concentration Camps”. In connection to the book I had just finished reading, I found this significant. Since then, I have started medication for my ADD symptoms thanks to a referral to a psychiatric professional from my counselor friends, and have begun skyping my previous therapist, and am very thankful to have found someone as helpful as she. It took years and several counselors (one of which participated in a full-blown yelling fight with me) prior to her to find her. I also decided to move back into my parents’ house for now (something that is challenging), I had a job interview with a local library, have been hanging out and reconnecting with a friend from high school, have begun learning about recycling opportunities and limitations in the area, have been trying to get myself organized…and avoiding, and freaking out, and calming down, and having epiphanies…and freaking out and avoiding and calming down some more.
One very frustrating thing about my diagnosis is my constant doubt of it. There is this nagging in the back of my mind that tells me that I cannot trust it because I shouldn’t trust myself. I was not in a concentration camp. I was not so severely abused in any other long-term situations that I would develop this disorder…right? I still don’t have an answer to this question. I have been told by someone that I am fragile and that that is why I have been effected so deeply. I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer is. I’m just starting to accept what is, which is important for the recovery process.
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I emailed my therapist about a week ago in fear, and shame, and in need of comfort. I had found an old post of mine on Facebook from 7 years ago. It freaked me out. I thought I had been being super depressed and manipulative at first sight of it again, and then I thought back to the mental-emotional place that I really was at that time in my life. I was depressed, but not that depressed yet. What made more sense was that I must have been mocking my own feelings in the form of hyperbole. Don’t get me wrong, hyperbole can be really hilarious. Have you ever read the book Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh? I love it. Thanks to my older brother for buying it for me for Christmas a couple of years ago. It made me laugh out loud when I felt like crap. Few books actually make me laugh out loud. And it had wonderful illustrations. Anyway, the hyperbole that I was expressing in my post was in no way hilarious to me now and I was horrified. It was complete self-mocker, though I recognize now that it must not have been interpreted that way at all. What I was saying was very serious, and I didn’t know how to take myself seriously. Even interpreted the way that I had meant it, it looked off, and I began internally freaking out and viewing my old self and myself now as a crazy person. I must have been crazy all along.
I contacted my therapist, sending her a screenshot of the post, and analyzing myself in a massively long email. My email was extremely complicated and I told her that I felt I had completely ruined my reputation and that I must be a psycho. Her response was different than I had expected. I was expecting her to tell me that perhaps I really was nuts. Instead she told me that she was seeing signs of Complex Post-Traumatic Disorder both in my old post, and in the current email that I had sent her. She reminded me to practice my breathing exercises, etc.
She told me to remember that even though my reactions to things might feel crazy, that they are actually very normal given what I have been through. That CPTSD is different than most other disorders in that it is by definition actually a normal adaption to life experiences, and that it would actually be abnormal for me not to have these reactions.
My fight to accept my disorder and validate myself has been rough. Mental illness is not something that should be shamed to begin with, but it’s particularly frustrating to not feel that I can trust myself because I have been viewed as crazy…and unfortunately I internalized that message.
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I emailed my therapist again a couple of days later. She’s been getting lots from me recently…I had a moment of epiphany earlier this week after I had been messaging a friend who now lives far away from me after I moved. He was saying some things that understandably upset me. He was listing the things he thought were wrong with me before reading the list of symptoms from the diagnosis I had been given. He was interpreting my behavior in ways that were inaccurate, and not believing me as I told him why I had done what I had done.
That alone made me upset, but the particular instance he had recalled (a “small”, insignificant incident [to me anyway] about a McDonald’s Mcflurry cup), or rather the fact that he was bringing it up as something that either hurt or annoyed him, triggered intense feelings in me. At the time, I didn’t realize that the volcano now rumbling inside of my chest that threatened to erupt, was the result of the past, but I knew that I was about to blow. Instead of blowing up, I sent a prayer to God, took some long deep breaths, and I made a choice. I remembered to use communication techniques that I had learnd like not using “you” statements, and instead saying things like “I have perceived”. As I felt threatened, I remembered not to threaten. I had to step back several times while talking to my friend, but I managed it. I calmed the volcano.
I told him that what he was saying was really just his interpretation, and that the outside world remained unchanged despite his interpretation. My friend ended up saying that I had made a great point, acknowledging that I might be right. And right after talking to him, I put my phone aside and closed my eyes to sleep. I hugged myself. I remembered to do my exercise of “talking to myself”, validating myself, being comfortable with myself—comfortable with being alone. This time, I actually looked into my own eyes. I imagined that a clone of myself was looking into my eyes and telling me I was proud of myself. (To read more about my clone selves, read this previous blog post.) And for the first time, I felt like I really truly looked into my own eyes without fear. I could look myself in the eyes now for some reason. Not because of what I had just done, but something small had just clicked.
I couldn’t stop thinking about my conversation that I had just had with my friend. Why was I triggered so much by what he had said? What had I needed from him in the situation? I had managed to acknowledge to myself and express to him, after he had asked, how he had made me feel. I had felt like he was all too eager to fix things that he perceived as wrong with me rather than to help me cope with my CPTSD. And as I thought about that, I thought about that particular instance that he had referenced. And it occurred to me: what if what he was complaining about really was just his interpretation just as I had said to him it was? What if I believed that 100% to my core without a shameful self-doubt that I always experienced in every moment of every day? What if it really wasn’t something about me that needed to be fixed at all? And suddenly I saw the connected theme between what I felt and a traumatic memory I had twelve years prior as it popped into my head. I suddenly felt all that I had felt in that traumatic, unfair moment. The moment that was really only one of many, but a moment that really struck a chord with me, and shaped part of who I came to be. I realized that what I had felt in that moment, I had been reliving again as I spoke with my friend.
I began to think of what I had needed in that moment instead of what I had gotten. What if instead of anger, I had been treated with respect and kindness and understanding? What if the small thing that had been turned into a big thing, had still been treated as a big thing, but in a totally different way? What if it had been respected, empathised with, and responded to acceptingly rather than with impulsive displaced rage toward me? What if my "small" preferences were worth paying attention to and respecting?
I imagined in my head for a moment, to the best of my ability, that someone loved me and treated my individual preferences as just a part of me and didn’t take them offensively or as annoying. I realized that that was what I needed. All of a sudden, for once in my life, the shame that I felt 24/7 disappeared and I felt free. I told myself that someone treating me with that kind of acceptance was wrong because it was enabling me—that is what I had been taught to think—that my preferences didn’t matter. I recognized before that I had treated others in the same way, but I still didn’t know how to be more accepting of others without distancing myself from them. And shutting down is what I have done, particularly in adulthood and my teens.
Now, I challenged the push-back against this unfamiliar self-acceptance, and I told myself that it was okay for someone to respect my wishes--even the tiniest, smallest of preferences. It was as if for once I glimpsed, through an imaginary interaction in my head, what it might be like to have a loving, stable relationship. In that moment, I realized that my therapist was right about my diagnosis. That for whatever reason, for whatever cause, I was traumatized. I had never had a relationship where I had felt that safety. I tried on, like a new outfit, what it felt to give myself the freedom to have quirks and supposedly demanding preferences (I’m still challenging my beliefs about supposedly being demanding about wanting someone to not lick my personal chocolate pudding, and for them to be straightforward and honest with me about whether they had. Yes…seriously…that’s not something I should have to feel guilty about…I shouldn’t have to be afraid that someone is going to flip out at me for having preferences about honesty when it comes to chocolate pudding…That is not the sort of thing that should warrant an attack.).
It was as if something clicked in my head. I was surrounded by freedom that I wasn’t sure what to do with. I emailed my therapist. I soaked in the safe, confident, loving feeling I felt. I wondered what it would be like to learn how to allow others the same freedom I was trying to allow myself. I wondered what it would be like to have a relationship where I could trust someone to take care of me in that way. I wondered if I had had those people in my life before, and if I had not felt safe enough to get closer to them because of past experiences. I wondered what it would be like to shed old wounds. My heart filled with hope and understanding for a moment. I understood. There is a difference between knowing something, and understanding it in your heart. I knew that the next morning I might wake up chronically anxious again, but I felt I had glimpsed the beginning of true freedom. As I told my counselor, “I am tired of being mocked and mocking myself.”
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A couple nights ago, I actually freaked out to myself more than I had in years. I had found a book at Goodwill called Healing the Shame that Binds You by John Bradshaw. I sat down in a local coffee shop and noticed that there was Christian music playing in the background. I read the Preface to this book that I had asked my therapist about. She said that it was one that she recommended to clients. I expected good things as I began to read…only to find myself being turned off by blatant Biblical references.
Perhaps it is a good book. Perhaps it would be helpful for some. Perhaps it will be helpful for me in future. I don’t know. But I reacted in my head by imagining a personified God standing before me next to Jesus, and me throwing the book at God’s face, because I didn’t want to throw it at Jesus. I began to say (in my head), “How dare you? Just let me die. I would rather die. Please, just let me die.” I left the coffee shop and drove to a park. The volcano that rumbled in my chest this time was huge, MASSIVE, and it steadily grew the more that I raged about God and Christianity. I said that I piss on God's "grace". That God was at fault for anything because wih greater power comes greater responsibility. I was tired of being told to take responsibility for myself when I had had no control over being perfect in the first place.
I emailed my counselor at least 5 times, though I did not get responses (sometimes me venting to her is good because then she can see what I’m going through when my situations are the most intense and we can talk about them in session). I felt that I had no control over the volcano inside this time. It felt like the volcanos I had felt a couple years ago when I would scream at the top of my lungs while driving or sitting in my car, waiting for a noisy train to pass. The screams of the deepest darkest agony I had ever experienced in my life emerged once more.
The volcano erupted, and I let out two screams as I drove to a gas station to put gas in my car. Two, blood-curdling, shrieking screams from the very top of my lungs, as I maintained control of my vehicle. I took deep breaths. I reached the gas station, a scowl on my face. I paid for my gas inside the building, put the gas in my car, and drove home, stressed as hell for my job interview the next day that I had avoided practicing for out of anxiety, and telling myself that I did not have to be a Christian.
In my last email, I told my counselor that I was going to trust myself that that book and religion were not what I needed right now. That they were doing more psychological damage than good at this point. I had fought against saying that for so long. I had been taught since birth that Christianity was right. That Jesus was my friend and had sacrificed himself for me. How could I turn my back? Even when I had doubted the existence of God, I had been unable to say, “I am not a Christian.”
I remembered something that I had said once to a person with a Mormon background who still attended the Mormon church, but expressed that he no longer believed in God. I had asked him if he found it harder to stop believing in God, or harder to leave the Mormon community. He had said it was harder to leave the community. I felt that that was a sign of brainwashing, considering that the Mormon church claims that its primary purpose is to point others to God. I haven’t attended church in years except for Christmas Eve with my family. I don’t read the Bible. I still pray, but that is it. Illogically, I still pray to “Jesus”. I am so indoctrinated that I have a hard time seeing God as anything but Jesus, though I try. Remembering what I had said to this Mormon person, I realized that I was just the same. That I had wanted to completely leave Christianity for the longest time and that I had not felt the freedom to. That night, emailing my therapist, I claimed that freedom for myself. I am not a Christian…
But I still pray to God. I still believe in God. I said to him/her/it, whoever God is, that I'm sorry if I'm a fool who doesn't understand, but that I am not a Christian. I believe that there is a God there. I believe this because of different times when God must have shown Godself. Earlier this week, days before the volcanic eruption, I was peeing on the toilet. I have no idea why, but a person I know who I’m not really close to anymore, who I knew from forever ago, popped into my head and I thought I should message her. It could have been intuition. Some sort of connection between all things in the universe. It could have been God. I don’t know what. But I messaged this lovely woman who I knew was in a rough spot, and I asked her how she was doing and told her about something that I had remembered from long ago about her that I thought was wonderful. Turns out this person really needed help. Though I couldn’t provide it, I sent a prayer to the Lord of the Universe, the Good of all Things, whoever God is, and messaged the woman that I had prayed. That day, someone provided the help that this special woman needed when she felt that she had been abandoned.
Over Skype, I told this story to a different lovely Christian friend of mine who lives far away. I also told her that I wasn't a Christian. I was afraid that she would judge me, but she told me that all she wants is for me to be happy, and that she loves me whether I am a Christian or not. She accepted me. She didn’t accuse me of listening to the devil’s lies. She didn’t tell me that I was an illogical idiot. She didn’t mock me. She didn’t tell me that I was “full of crap”. She didn’t quote some shallow Christian cliché. She didn’t tell me that she would pray for my faith to be restored. She didn't shame me for my lack of joy. She actually acknowledged that everyone goes through hard times and happy times. She didn’t tell me that I just didn’t understand Christianity properly. I didn’t feel like she was trying to manipulate me or save my soul. She was just being my friend, and told me that she would always be my friend. I have met many a Christian person throughout my life, and I was surprised at her response, and it felt special that she acted the way that she did. I was thankful to her. I am so blessed to have her as a friend, though she lives so far away, and I am blessed to know her better.
I don’t know what's really out there, but there is something more than we understand. There is some force at the very least. There is something that connects us all. There is something that will make me think of a person who needs me at random when I am peeing on the toilet. There is something there. And with the acknowledgment of the true feelings in my heart, I now feel freer than I ever have been to discover it. And I hope to become freer still.
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