Maddog, I just now read your last comment here, and I reread what I wrote here last night. Last night, I was tired and my mood wasn't the best, so when I said that it seems unlikely that those of us with PTSD or particularly with CPTSD may ever be cured, I was feeling much more hopeless than I usually do. Sorry about that!
Most of the time, I really do believe that a cure is highly possible.. and if not a cure, certainly vast improvements are very much within our reach. Lord knows I am vastly improved from where I was at my very worst! At my very worst, I was hearing voices constantly, every waking moment, a multitude of voices, driving me to distraction. At my very worst, I did not know for certain who I was, or what was real. Those days are very far in my past, thank God... more than 40 years in the past. At the age of 14, when I first began to dissociate and hear voices and to not know what was real, when I told my abusive parents about the voices, they reacted by locking me up in a state insane asylum. My BEHAVIOR was perfectly normal, by the way, I did not act out in strange ways, I did not talk to myself, I was going to school every day and making good grades and doing my chores at home, which as the eldest of 6 then living (the 7th was yet to be born), I had plenty of chores to do. No one would have known a thing about me hearing voices, if I hadn't told about them. I told, because the voices frigthened me and I wanted to know how to get rid of them. They had started after some horrific violent traumas. But I had never broken a law (other than petty childhood shoplifting), I had never harmed anyone nor ever threatened to harm anyone, myself included. All I did was go to my mother and tell her that there were "ghosts" speaking to me and I was afraid of them and wanted them to leave me alone, and then my mother told my father, and then they put me in an insane asylum.
That hospital, by the way, where my parents put me in 1967, was huge, in fact it was the biggest building in the state when it was built. Huge, and very crowded, with I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of mental patients. It was a horrible nightmare of a place. That place was closed in 1991, and torn down in 1999. I still can barely believe that it no longer exists, it was like a mountain range to my young mind, something that had always been and always would be there, keeping the "insane" people out of sight and away from society.
I have been psychologically tested many times since I was finally released from that horrible place at the age of 16, and I have been told over and over again that I never should have been put there, and that my initial diagnosis of schizophrenia was wrong. Schizophrenia was pretty much the catch-all psychiatric diagnosis in the 1960s. PTSD, and CPTSD, weren't even know, back then. Not until 1981 did PTSD become an official psychiatric diagnosis.
How much better my path of healing might have been, and how much earlier in my life might I have healed, if only I had not been misdiagnosed, and committed to a nightmare of an insane asylum, where the traumas and abused I both witnessed, and had done to me, were as bad, if not worse, than the traumas and abuses in my childhood home?
When I was set free from that place in 1969, and the age of 16, I wanted NOTHING more to do with psychiatry! I also needed to get away from my abusive childhood home as soon as possible. I met an 18-year-old high school dropout, a couple of weeks after I was released. He was lounging in a small shop I went into, and he thought I was pretty, and asked me for a date. We went out to 2 or 3 movies, and then I thought I should tell him that I had just been released from a 2-year stay in an insane asylum, before he got any more seious about me. I fully expected that he would not ever ask me out again! I was very sad about that, but I wanted to do the right thing, and tell him, since he seemed to be getting seriously infatuated with me.
To my shock he told me he knew all about my mental history, before he had asked me out! I was so overcome with happiness and gratitude that he would be willing to date me, to take me out for a hamburher and a movie and spend money on me, and to kiss me, when he knew all about my being diagnosed schizophrenic and committed to the most notorious insane asylum in the state! I was so grateful... and I mistook my gratitude, for "falling in love." He asked me to marry him, and so I did, with our mother's signatures (my mother always wanted to get rid of me, that's a whole other story, her jealously and scapegoating hate of me).
Approximately 2 months after I was released from the mental institution where I had believed I would spend the REST OF MY LIFE, I was married! Amazing, yes? What I didn't know at the time, was HIS motive for marrying me. He waited until after we were married, to tell me. I thought he married me for love. But when we married, in February 1970, when he was 18 and, as I said, a high school dropout, his draft number was at the top of the list. He was about to be drafted to Vietnam. At that time, if he had been a college student, he could have deferred the draft. But he was a dropout. The only way then to avoid being drafted, besides leaving his life and family for Canada, was to get married, and to have a baby right away. This he told me, after we were married, and after I was pregnant. He only wanted to not be drafted. Now that he was free from that worry, he said, he felt he was much too young to settle down with just one female, and so he intended to continue to date any other female that he could. When I cried and protested... he beat me. Many many many many many times, during our marriage, he beat me.
You see, when you come out of your childhood badly damaged, with no self-esteem, and after having been taught the evil LIE that love HURTS, after you have been taught to accept being abused, and to believe that your own abuse is your fault ~ most healthy normal loving people are not usually very much attracted to someone who is an emotional basketcase, and who has a history of being insane... but when you happen to be a very physically attractive young woman, users and abusers seek such women out like prey. And so I went straight from my abusive childhood home, to an abusive mental asylum, to an abusive teenage marriage, then at the age of 21 I went into my second abusive marriage, then at the age of 25 I went into my third abusive marriage... I was always the one that left, by the way, in every case, when the abuse and emotional pain got so bad that I decided I would rather live in a hole in the ground and starve or freeze to death, than to stay. But there was always another smooth-talking sex-addict who wanted someone who looked great but had zero self-esteem, someone they could use and abuse at will. They were all so different, so loving and romantic and so much "on my side," until the moment the marriage was official.
And always, I believed it was MY FAULT. I was so crazy, I was so overly sensitive, I was so emotional, I was so lazy when I was depressed, I was so stupid, I was nerve-wracking and irritating to be around, that I DROVE people to want to HURT me, just as I had done with my parents. Never good enough, never, no matter how hard I tried.
I look back over my life now that I am 58-going-on-59, and I am astonished that I survived it all!
But I did much more than survive. I also had 3 children, 2 sons and 1 daughter. They are now: 40, 37, and 31. My eldest is a bit of a mess, but at least he is sane and he has had the same steady job for about 15 years. He has a daughter that lives with him, her mother and he never married. The daughter is 14 and beautiful and brilliant. My daughter, the 37-year-old, is dating a NASCAR driver. My daughter is divorced, but she amazes me with all that she has accomplished in her life. She put herself through college after her marriage ended, while caring for her two children on her own, one of whom was born severely handicapped, due to a very rare genetic disorder... my daughter is the BEST mother I've ever seen, for loving her children and handling all the huge care that a very severely child needs. My daughter also has a soon-to-be 20 year old daughter who is now in her second year of college, she is one of the most wonderful human beings on the planet, (I'm not too proud of a grandmother, am I?). And then my youngest, my 31-year-old... he doesn't have a lot of ambition, but he is a steady and faithful worker, and best of all, he has a heart of pure gold.
I am so proud of my children and my grandchildren!
I have also written a novel that was published 12 years ago, and I'm now writing another book. And, after my children were grown, I went back to school and got a nurses degree, AND I was elected class president of my nursing class, AND when I took the final boards for my license, I scored in the top 2% of the whole nation!
So... my life has not been a waste, far from it. I still struggle in many ways with my CPTSD. But as I said, i am FAR better than I was at my worst, and I am getting better all the time! I also believe that if I had known that I had CPTSD way back, over 45 years ago when my symptoms first became bad, and if there had been the help THEN, that there is NOW, I would have so much further along in my healing, many years ago, and I would surely have accomplished even more with my life.
