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Terrified By Good Things

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MesaRock

Confident
First, a bit of context for my question - I was diagnosed with PTSD in a 1992 but not treated, after which a million other traumatic incidents gradually infinitely compounded it. My profession for 20 years was as a human rights fieldworker; in 2007 I crashed and became artist and writer making work around trauma which built into an unexpectedly successful career. I thought I was dealing with it all through my work, which built into an unexpectedly successful career. UNTIL. In November of this year my spouse of 15 years and I started (long overdue) divorce proceedings, in February and March I had two major museum exhibitions of my work (around sites of human rights atrocity), in April two major essays were published (also around sites of atrocity) to wide discussion, and in June my first major book was published (short stories around people coping with trauma).

All of these public projects met with completely unexpected acclaim and success. Glowing reviews, huge attention, major press coverage, tons of interviews, public appearances. Beyond that, it means that the humanitarian work I've dedicated my life to is finally reaching an audience where these issues can get attention. Where people care about the persecuted people I care about, and care about what I have to say.

In July I finally crashed hard after the tip of one of my fingers was severed in an accident, although the breakdown had been coming for a long time, but certainly since November. In August, I admitted to the PTSD and started somatic experiencing therapy - I'm having the (apparently) typical experience of the whole PTSD early treatment stuff.

THE PROBLEM: I can't cope with the success or the good things AT ALL. On top of all the ugly feelings I'm having, all the positive stuff - the acceptance and being heard and listened to and even having my work LOVED and appreciated and understood is flooding me out. This morning a glowing book review appeared in a British newspaper and I've now spent hours sobbing to the point of howling, throwing up, and in the bathroom. I'm shaking, and can barely breathe. I'm doing my deep breathing, my morning breakfast, my adrenal supplements, my Klonopin....doesn't phase it. My hands are shaking so hard I can barely type.

Since January, I've been with a new partner, truly the love of my life, who loves me beyond measure and is extremely demonstrative, supportive, and the biggest cheerleader in my recovery and treatment. It's the first time I've ever been truly loved and accepted in my whole life.

Yesterday he told me he wanted to be with me forever as life partners, and forever wasn't long enough - it sent me to bed curled up in a ball sobbing.

Why is this so hard? Why is it so painful to be seen and heard? To see and even feel other people loving me, appreciating me? finding me valuable? it brings out a level of fear and pain that I can't cope with.

each time something GOOD happens, I fall apart completely.
 
Why do you think it's so hard?
Are you so tough for yourself that you don't actually allow yourself to BE happy? Or do you think that it'll go wrong, again? Do you think that you deserve happiness and good things? If that's the case, I can relate. Because I can simply not believe that anything good can happen in my life, so it makes me sob whenever something good does happen.

If this is not your issue, try to ask your inner self, what makes you fall apart when something good happens? Is it fear? Or something completely different. Maybe you find it hard to enjoy good things, while so many bad things happen as well.

In any case, and this sounds so easy, try to allow yourself to be happy when something good happens! Accept it, because you are really worth it.
 
Why do you think it's so hard?
Are you so tough for yourself that you don't actually allow yourself...

I can't figure it out. I know that I'm dealing - to my complete surprise - with enormous levels of shame. But the rest of it...I don't know. I'm so terrified. It hurts to be loved. I can't believe it's real, because I feel like a useless failed person. Then I wonder where all these people were when I was fighting for my life so many times. I remember the years of isolation and fear as I was working on these projects, and the danger I faced, and the internal pain I experiencing in trying to communicate, trying to help myself and others, and that nobody was around to help me. Nobody supported what I was doing. Most of the time I felt disposable - like I wasn't even human. Granted, a lot of the time I was treated that way, and watched thousands of others being treated that way too.

Now this sudden influx of the complete opposite and the cognitive disconnect is too great. The grief is unbearable. I lived in a cruel world and what, now the world decides that I'm worthwhile? that the people they all shat upon are worthy of their time and attention? Hm. Maybe anger is in there somewhere too. I just can't stop thinking of all those decades of being utterly alone and considered crazy for what I was doing, and the human rights sites where I barely kept my shit together because there was nobody there to lend a hand or guide me out of my suffering, and how now the sudden switch to me being some kind of a visionary genius is just pain pain pain.

Meanwhile, everyone imagines I'm happy and egotistically happy at the success, whereas instead I have this secret personal life where I've finally realized my heart is totally broken, and putting love into a broken heart feels like more than it and I can bear.
 
I'm not so successful anymore because I just avoid it. The question you put forth is a good one, but may not reach the real problem. Why? Why do I fear, loath, and physically recoil from success?

My shallow answer is that success is triggering. It brings connections with others that seem to make me vulnerable to trauma. Being recognized for my efforts throws me into panic attacks. I used to isolate to find relief, but right now I can't isolate any more. Life needs me to be present.

I've done a lot of work on this and it is really slow going. It has taken years to accept myself as I am, with all the small successes that happen on a daily bases. New successes are still difficult.

Thanks for posting your struggle. I’m watching for posts like this that I can relate to, and also from people with solid solutions. I have found help here (and other places) with emotional flooding, dissociation and flashbacks, but this revulsion toward success is pretty tricky.

Keep working on it. Once you find an answer or two, please post. I’m looking forward to see what you discover.
 
I'm not so successful anymore because I just avoid it. The question you put forth is a good one, but m...

YES: "It brings connections with others that seem to make me vulnerable to trauma."

I'm also a "solid solutions" person. For a poet, I'm enormously practical and I want tactics, tools, anything to dismantle the internal ideology. Luckily (???) I have a late afternoon appointment with my somatic experiencing therapist and I will put her on the case and report back.

I know it has a lot to do with love. I'm intimately familiar with the opposite of love - sadistic cruelty - that often (but not always) wore the mask of love. Words of love that were not met by actions of love. In my work and my life, I've seen humanity truly at its worst, and I don't trust them. Maybe part of me not feeling human is not WANTING to part of a species that can and does behave so horribly - when I run across strangers who are kind, it puts me into a tailspin.

I think a lot of PTSD is about existentialism - "a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will." PTSD is the encounter with being prevented from being free, or having agency in what happened to us, or determining our own development, or having our acts of will stopped in their tracks. Peter Levine says that PTSD is "an act of heroism interrupted."

With success, we are in a sense fulfilling an act of heroism that's not interrupted. This can feel like chaos, a break in the pattern, going off the map of known outcomes.

I think a lot of gatekeepers of success have little experience with that kind of suffering, because their paths towards power have been largely uninterrupted by factors outside their control (unlike me/us). So there's very little trust in gatekeepers...
 
Meanwhile, everyone imagines I'm happy and egotistically happy at the success, whereas instead I have this secret personal life where I've finally realized my heart is totally broken, and putting love into a broken heart feels like more than it and I can bear.

I think this is what hits you hard. And maybe that's what triggers as well; because now you've experienced that when you have success, you fall apart. So this will happen again. I can only encourage you to allow yourself to feel GOOD about the positive things in your life. After your totally broken heart, you deserve good things to happen. It's frightening, because you never know when it ends. If it ends. How it ends. But, in the meanwhile, try, while falling apart, to see something good in it as well. Maybe you'll fall apart less after a while, because you simply see that good things are still happening, to you.
 
Be careful not to self sabotage, it is easy to do. Living with these illnesses is hard. They bleed into every single aspect of my life; rob me of my self esteem and confidence, steal the joy of having something positive happen in my life, shatter every connection I manage to establish with another human being.
 
I think this is what hits you hard. And maybe that's what triggers as well; because now you've experi...
it's funny - i 100% don't even care if the success ends. I've never been in it for the acclaim, and have intentionally kept myself in the background (i.e. fieldworker not talking head) - when I left fieldwork and became an artist I assumed it would be total failure, which was comforting. A nice quiet place to be ignored but still work on the issues that mattered to me. It was truly a shock to find the art world and the HR world to be more interested in my artwork around trauma.

so anyway, if the SUCCESS fades that's fine. I do worry very deeply about recovering enough to continue to do the WORK itself - I'm currently on a moderate medical leave for a few months. I try to return to the projects I'm devoted to, and I just can barely face it without feeling what we all feel here. I would be devastated if my one true passion in life is curtailed by my psyche failing me.
 
It's mind-blowingly simple: Good Stress fills the Stress-Cup, too.

thanks for the fair warning. mind = blown. Makes sooooooo much sense. Thanks. That chart helps a lot in terms of explaining what is happening in my head when any kind of stimulus comes my way. So now I just focus on getting the PTSD smaller and smaller. No problem. That should take a day or two, right? :) Gallows humor aside, it helps me navigate better how to balance what's happening to me.
 
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<chuckling> to know as well / although you may already know a lot of this... Slightly less simple... It's not just a theory. Your sympathetic nervous system turns on, whether you're running for fun, or running from a bear. When either occurs, the moment your sympathetic nervous system turns on? Certain biological things happen: your immune system shuts off (no good surviving pneumonia if you're eaten by a bear), your digestive system powers down (digestion uses apx 80% of energy left over after ratiocination... Need that to run from the bear!), your sleep cycle cranks over, reproductive cycle slows or stops, fast producing cells (hair loss, stomach lining)... Dozens of non-essential systems get the breaks thrown on... Because the sympathetic nervous system is king. Usually? It's not a problem, because stress is fairly limited in duration. It's the long running duration that becomes a major problem (right along with things that aren't usually stressful -the angle of the sun, a crowded room, a memory- that have become stressors for us). Regardless of how we feel about the stress, the fact that it's there changes the physiological workings of our body.

If you think about it... Too excited to eat/ sleep/ sit still, etc. is fairly well known. It's the effects of the sympathetic nervous system overlaid on top of happy chemicals. Versus too nervous to eat/ sleep/ sit still, etc. Also well known. So, too, too terrified to eat/ sleep/ sit still, right along with too angry to eat/ sleep/ sit still, etc.

Whatever our emotions are about the stress; excited, happy, nervous, terrified, furious? It's still stress. What's causing it makes never no mind to our Sympathetic Nervous Systems. Same processes kick over.

Yep. Frustrating as hell. Not just for PTSD where managing stress is the whole name of the game, but also women trying to get pregnant (excited stress shuts down the reproductive cycle the same as stress from starving, stress from illness, stress from fear), cardiac patients (happy surprises just as likely to trigger a heart attack as unhappy ones), and a whole long list of other people who are sensitive to stress for a very, very wide variety of reasons.

The *upside* to a stress-related disorder? It's very, very manageable. Doesn't feel that way in the beginning! But we can burn off stress chemicals in our blood via exercise & other tricks.... Even ahead of time...which is beyond cool! Setting up our days & our lives to include things that naturally lower our stress levels, so that we're less reactive when stresses do hit (as they always do, both good stress & bad stress). We can also pace ourselves, allowing periods of stress to lower before jumping into the next thing, instead of addin more & more & more. We can chemically "thump" it ;) with meds that stop an anxiety attack in its tracks, but one better even than all of that?. We can literally train our brains into shorter and shorter anxiety attacks, that happen less frequently, and blunt triggers & stressors over time.... Until we're not even affected by many things that used to knock us flat / they are no longer stressful.

PTSD means, in essence, that we're hard wired for survival-mode, now. Step 1? Learning how to survive survival-mode :P Which means learning a whole new way of handling stress. Not by avoiding it (impossible), but by managing it.

Welcome.
 
<chuckling> to know as well / although you may already know a lot of this... Slightly less simple......

oh my. thank you. Going to digest all this. I'm having all these physiological symptoms (lost 40 pounds, near adrenal failure, hormones completely bizarre, hair falling out and turning white in patches, uti infections, digestive demons). I developed adrenaline/repression junkie workflow of getting up at 5am and working til 2am, probably for about 6 years intensely. Relaxation wasn't in my vocabulary. Like love. Whole new vocabulary to learn, with new habits.

Relaxation, huh. I have mah jong games with a friend, playing with my dog, cleaning the kitchen, and epsom salt baths. Need to add about 200 extra tactics to that list. :-/ Being on medical leave means a LOT of time on my hands to, uh, think.

As for sabotaging my success, I'm doing two hours of work a day just so I can keep a shred of self-esteem and not squander the 20 years I worked for this. Ironically, a publisher has asked to review my next book manuscript and now I have six weeks to wait for a YES or a NO. Don't think I enjoy having this much time to think and vomit. Maybe I'll go clean the kitchen. Surely there's a junk drawer to organize? :-)
 
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