Hi -- I just found this site and spent the afternoon reading through various threads, where I found some helpful things. I was/am in a relationship with someone with PTSD, and I still don't understand enough about the disease. I'm constantly tense and frightened, and any insight that I could gain would be invaluable to me and help settle my mind. I'm at my wits' end, and I'd be very grateful for any help you can offer.
People often mention that there are too many threads along the lines of 'Is s/he an asshole, or is it the PTSD?'. That's not really what I'm asking, which I hope will become clear.
My partner suffered from PTSD for about ten years, during which period it was misdiagnosed several times -- as depression, and at one point as possible schizophrenia. When she and I first met, the doctors had finally caught it, and she had the diagnosis but had not yet entered therapy. We got together during what she's described as the worst period of symptoms that she ever had. During this time she began Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), with a lot of memory reconstruction of the traumatic event. As it was happening, this made things even worse for her, but after many months of this she was effectively cured -- she hasn't had a flashback in several years now, and her personality and our lives together have changed dramatically.
My questions are mostly about the period where her symptoms were the worst. I'll try and describe what life was like … When we met, it was extremely dramatic: I was just getting out of a difficult relationship and suffering some mental problems of my own, so I was quite susceptible to mistaking our drama and intensity for a healthy passion. We were immediately fixated on one another, although she kept me at arm's length (while occasionally bursting into my life with great destructiveness) as she gradually exited from the relationship that she was in at that point. We could barely keep our hands off each other, although often when we were together she would suddenly and unpredictably become very unkind. She could be insulting, condescending, arrogant, rude to my friends, and delusional about her professional status. If she was angry at me -- often over nothing -- she would aggressively flirt with strangers, or mention that she had been unfaithful to several previous boyfriends. I also found out -- she told me later -- that during this period she had stalked me and broken into my place of work. Not knowing about that, and only encountering her negative character traits in between very happy, exciting meetings where we discovered a real, reciprocal connection, I did not understand the seriousness of the situation.
I was very naive, and extremely excited when she found me and said that she had left her boyfriend, applied to enter therapy, and realised that she needed to change her life, and that she wanted to have me in it (given that the therapy did lead to her recovery, this was obviously a positive decision -- although it did lead to a huge amount of pain for me).
I repressed all doubts and sick feelings of dread. After all, this was what I had wanted for a long time. I've realised now that I deliberately played down that painful things that she had already done, in order not to admit to myself that they had happened. I think I thought of myself as a tough, self-reliant person who wouldn't tolerate being abused. So, what happened to me can't have been abuse! I was mistaken, of course!-- Now, at least, I'm closer to being that self-reliant person, for which I'm grateful.
The relationship proceeded on three levels. On one, we were happy and excited to be getting to know each other. On the second, she could be bafflingly insensitive and crass. The third was most serious: in response to very small triggers, most of which were small slights to her self-esteem (jokes, even very gentle ones; constructive criticism; insensitivity to her perceived status by me or a stranger) -- these would bring volcanic outbursts of irrational hatred and rage. She would become violently hostile. She was both rational and irrational during these outbursts. Rational in that she could broadly pursue a line of argument (always directed at blaming me for what was happening); rational in that she would not blow up in public, but come home and blow up at me. Irrational, in that she was often confused about exactly what was happening; in that she was unable to account for herself if I could disprove something she was saying; in that she did aggressive, irrational things like trying to take the dog out for a walk in the middle of the night; and in that she was sometimes visibly frantic and disoriented as they were happening. Sometimes she could be lucid during these episodes, most often she was only relentlessly hostile and malicious. They would end when she fell asleep. When she woke up -- even if it was only after half an hour -- she would not remember that they had happened.
After she woke everything would be different. She would sound different, would be confused and alarmed by the things she had said. Often at this point she would take a very powerful anti-psychotic medication she had been prescribed. She would apologise, and was shocked by the things that had happened. If I did not tell her, she would not have known what happened at all.
Something that's important to note is that during these episodes, she would not recognise that she was having one -- it was always my fault, no matter how delusional the things she was saying. Of course I couldn't suggest that it was a paranoia related to the illness speaking; that always made things worse (and sometimes turned minor episodes into major ones). So, at the time, I couldn't tell what was related to the illness, and what was not. I'll return to this later.
There were other important markers of PTSD. She had a very pronounced 'startle response'. She was extremely afraid of anything connected with the traumatic event she'd experienced, and of anyone who had been present there (at one point she dyed her hair, changing her appearance quite dramatically, which I thought must be connected with this). At points of high stress -- for example the illness of a loved one -- she would sometimes hallucinate things related to her trauma, or feel phantom pain in associated parts of her body. She talked about wanting to die, and about feeling evil and worthless. When stressed she might also 'dissociate' -- becoming extremely vague, sleepy, and distant, unable to focus or articulate words. Sometimes these were connected with abuse directed at me, sometimes they occurred on their own. I had never experienced anything like this before -- needless to say, trying to take care of someone that you love while they are hallucinating, puking from stress and over-drinking, and insulting you, all at the same time, is incredibly distressing.
I was catastrophically unhappy and failing in my job, but couldn't bring myself to admit that this relationship that I had been looking forward to so much was the cause. Ultimately, though, it reached a breaking point: during a colossal argument we broke up. We argued until dawn, when she fell asleep. I sat by the bed, mentally preparing to go, exhausted and numb beyond belief. I said something about it to myself, and she woke up: she had no recollection of what had happened. She'd been triggered by a bullying, intrusive colleague, come back in the grips of a psychotic episode, and taken it out on me again.
It's important to emphasise what I know now, but didn't know then: her responses to stresses and triggers were completely pathological, all out of proportion and directed at completely the wrong things. In the midst of all that emotional violence it was very hard to perceive that. But from this distance it's clear: her thinking was disordered and chaotic, and she was rarely aware of the things she was doing. Of course this doesn't lessen the pain of having been her target.
After that last episode, I insisted that she stop drinking (she often began drinking when she had been triggered by something, when an episode was about to begin; it was also the case that ordinary drinking made her more susceptible to episodes). I also stressed how close the relationship was to ending, and how destructive it had been for me. She continued to work on her CBT, putting in hours each day (when she could bear it) into endless memory reconstruction exercises. That episode was the last she's had -- years ago, now. She remained prone to being bafflingly crude and unkind for a month or so after that, but it was nothing after what we'd been through. After three or so more months her course was completed, and she was a genuinely changed person -- the empathetic, intelligent, caring woman that I'd glimpsed before. I was now able to see exactly what had been caused by the illness, and what was left when the illness was gone.
My problems were just starting, of course! Now that I wasn't being constantly mistreated, I began to look around and see just how extensively my life had been destroyed -- relationships with friends damaged, self-esteem in shreds, ability to work basically wrecked. I've noticed many people on this forum describe having a bad memory as a feature of partners with PTSD. This was certainly the case with her, and because her memories of her episodes were non-existent, and her memory of much of the preceding year quite patchy, she had very little sense of how appalling her effect on my life had been. We started trying to set things right. I tried to fill her in on what had been happening -- because, even at her most delusional, she had insisted that she wasn't ill, I was only just working out for myself exactly what she had done knowingly, and what she had done without being aware of it. She, in turn, put a huge amount of effort into trying to ensure that we had a happy life together, filled with good things. I found it difficult to cope with this.
All of this caused us a huge number of problems. Sometimes I am very happy when I'm around her; sometimes she will say or do something completely innocent -- and, because it's connected in some way with something terrible that she did to me when she was still sick, it will send me into a deep, sometimes suicidal depression, or a terrible rage. Sometimes it won't even be something she said, but rather something at work, or in the media. Sometimes nothing at all will happen and even so I'll lose several days to terrible anger and grief. During these periods I can neither work or relax, and instead obsessively go over the furious things I want to say to her, or to her parents or friends -- anyone connected with that terrible period of my life. I've drifted apart from my friends and colleagues, and I'm still failing at work. I've just entered treatment for depression. Everything that she has tried to do to help me, or to help our relationship, I've prevented from happening. We stopped going on dates, we stopped sleeping together, we stopped living together. I've never felt safe or secure that the period in which she was so abusive is fully behind us, even though she has not had an episode or exhibited a single symptom of PTSD in years. Her psychologist assessed her level of trauma after her treatment ended, and it was no worse than the average -- if it had been, treatment would have continued. But even so, I realise now that much of my life is structured -- to a damaging extent -- around avoiding ever returning to the way things were.
Here's a small coda. After she recovered, I continued to want her not to drink, as it makes me feel threatened (having been a drinker myself before all this began, I'm now extremely uncomfortable around drunk people). From her point of view, she no longer has that destructive relationship with alcohol, and has mentioned several times in the last few years that she'd like to have a glass of wine with me, or of champagne to celebrate a success in work -- never with any intention of getting drunk. But she agreed not to drink, so as to help me feel safe.
A month ago I agreed to meet up with a friend and go to the pub: we ran into her there, out with a friend, both drinking a glass of wine. I felt sick. Her friend and mine both left, and I exploded at her in the street. I said some of the things that I've felt during my periods of solitary anger. I accused her of lying to me, of drinking behind my back, of being a terrible person and ruining my life. She was devastated -- she apologised, said that she knew what she had done was wrong, and explained that the terrible state our relationship had been in for the last couple of years had led her to feel that we didn't have any hope of things getting better.
Since then we've remained separate but spoken in a friendly and affectionate way many times. With space, we've both realised that we care very much for each other, and want to be together in the future -- but on completely different terms. We're not sure how to go about that, and so remain in couples therapy, but are spending the summer in different countries (luckily our jobs give us this opportunity) and trying to work on ourselves. I desperately want to be a happy, productive person. It wasn't happening while we were together. I hope that it can happen while I'm on my own. I'm alternately hopeful that it can happen together with her in the future, and frightened that having her in my life might always mean the kinds of rage, despair, and misery that I've experienced over the last few years.
Now, something that people often seem to say here is 'if you wouldn't put up with it from someone WITHOUT PTSD, you shouldn't have to put up with it from someone who does have it'. I understand that, and I think it's very sensible -- but I already put up with it (I would never put up with it again), and it's my inability to understand exactly what happened that is having a destructive effect on my life. If she had known what she was doing, I would never have stayed with her. But she was confused, chaotic, and not in her right mind -- so I'm stuck with feelings of rage and betrayal towards someone who is, at most, only partially to blame, and who has (incident in the pub aside) sincerely dedicated herself to putting things right.
Having written all this out, I'm less sure of the questions I wanted to ask at the start. I guess I'd like reassurance that other people have been through something similar. Did other people's partners have such terrible rage and hatred inside them? Was it always directed at you? How did you cope? Does anyone have a partner who is so out of control, who is so unaware of what's happening during their episodes? The studies that I've read have suggested that the majority of sufferers of PTSD also experience elements of at least two other personality disorders (mostly Avoidant Personality Disorder); I think my partner had elements of Narcissistic Personality Disorder -- the violent responses to slights to her self esteem, her lack of empathy towards me when we first got to know each other, and her obsessive investment in her idea of her professional status being my evidence for that. (ALL these symptoms went away when she recovered from PTSD, however). Does anyone else have any experience of, or insight into, that element of things? Does all this sound normal?-- I mean, do people recognise all of these symptoms and behaviours from their own PTSD, or from their partners or loved ones with PTSD and related disorders? I often feel very angry that I'm the only person who suffered so terribly -- other than her, I mean -- and that nobody really knows what I went through. I also feel irrationally angry when she becomes upset at the way I treat her (with suspicion, anger, or irritation), because it all basically stems from the abuse that she put me through (even unknowingly). Has anyone else had the same problems?
Lastly, does anyone have any advice for me going forward? Can I feel safe? Neither of us is willing to re-enter a relationship that has made us so unhappy -- but we genuinely love each other, and share interests and goals, and it would be a terrible thing to lose each other, even if we have no other choice. I don't know what to do.
People often mention that there are too many threads along the lines of 'Is s/he an asshole, or is it the PTSD?'. That's not really what I'm asking, which I hope will become clear.
My partner suffered from PTSD for about ten years, during which period it was misdiagnosed several times -- as depression, and at one point as possible schizophrenia. When she and I first met, the doctors had finally caught it, and she had the diagnosis but had not yet entered therapy. We got together during what she's described as the worst period of symptoms that she ever had. During this time she began Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), with a lot of memory reconstruction of the traumatic event. As it was happening, this made things even worse for her, but after many months of this she was effectively cured -- she hasn't had a flashback in several years now, and her personality and our lives together have changed dramatically.
My questions are mostly about the period where her symptoms were the worst. I'll try and describe what life was like … When we met, it was extremely dramatic: I was just getting out of a difficult relationship and suffering some mental problems of my own, so I was quite susceptible to mistaking our drama and intensity for a healthy passion. We were immediately fixated on one another, although she kept me at arm's length (while occasionally bursting into my life with great destructiveness) as she gradually exited from the relationship that she was in at that point. We could barely keep our hands off each other, although often when we were together she would suddenly and unpredictably become very unkind. She could be insulting, condescending, arrogant, rude to my friends, and delusional about her professional status. If she was angry at me -- often over nothing -- she would aggressively flirt with strangers, or mention that she had been unfaithful to several previous boyfriends. I also found out -- she told me later -- that during this period she had stalked me and broken into my place of work. Not knowing about that, and only encountering her negative character traits in between very happy, exciting meetings where we discovered a real, reciprocal connection, I did not understand the seriousness of the situation.
I was very naive, and extremely excited when she found me and said that she had left her boyfriend, applied to enter therapy, and realised that she needed to change her life, and that she wanted to have me in it (given that the therapy did lead to her recovery, this was obviously a positive decision -- although it did lead to a huge amount of pain for me).
I repressed all doubts and sick feelings of dread. After all, this was what I had wanted for a long time. I've realised now that I deliberately played down that painful things that she had already done, in order not to admit to myself that they had happened. I think I thought of myself as a tough, self-reliant person who wouldn't tolerate being abused. So, what happened to me can't have been abuse! I was mistaken, of course!-- Now, at least, I'm closer to being that self-reliant person, for which I'm grateful.
The relationship proceeded on three levels. On one, we were happy and excited to be getting to know each other. On the second, she could be bafflingly insensitive and crass. The third was most serious: in response to very small triggers, most of which were small slights to her self-esteem (jokes, even very gentle ones; constructive criticism; insensitivity to her perceived status by me or a stranger) -- these would bring volcanic outbursts of irrational hatred and rage. She would become violently hostile. She was both rational and irrational during these outbursts. Rational in that she could broadly pursue a line of argument (always directed at blaming me for what was happening); rational in that she would not blow up in public, but come home and blow up at me. Irrational, in that she was often confused about exactly what was happening; in that she was unable to account for herself if I could disprove something she was saying; in that she did aggressive, irrational things like trying to take the dog out for a walk in the middle of the night; and in that she was sometimes visibly frantic and disoriented as they were happening. Sometimes she could be lucid during these episodes, most often she was only relentlessly hostile and malicious. They would end when she fell asleep. When she woke up -- even if it was only after half an hour -- she would not remember that they had happened.
After she woke everything would be different. She would sound different, would be confused and alarmed by the things she had said. Often at this point she would take a very powerful anti-psychotic medication she had been prescribed. She would apologise, and was shocked by the things that had happened. If I did not tell her, she would not have known what happened at all.
Something that's important to note is that during these episodes, she would not recognise that she was having one -- it was always my fault, no matter how delusional the things she was saying. Of course I couldn't suggest that it was a paranoia related to the illness speaking; that always made things worse (and sometimes turned minor episodes into major ones). So, at the time, I couldn't tell what was related to the illness, and what was not. I'll return to this later.
There were other important markers of PTSD. She had a very pronounced 'startle response'. She was extremely afraid of anything connected with the traumatic event she'd experienced, and of anyone who had been present there (at one point she dyed her hair, changing her appearance quite dramatically, which I thought must be connected with this). At points of high stress -- for example the illness of a loved one -- she would sometimes hallucinate things related to her trauma, or feel phantom pain in associated parts of her body. She talked about wanting to die, and about feeling evil and worthless. When stressed she might also 'dissociate' -- becoming extremely vague, sleepy, and distant, unable to focus or articulate words. Sometimes these were connected with abuse directed at me, sometimes they occurred on their own. I had never experienced anything like this before -- needless to say, trying to take care of someone that you love while they are hallucinating, puking from stress and over-drinking, and insulting you, all at the same time, is incredibly distressing.
I was catastrophically unhappy and failing in my job, but couldn't bring myself to admit that this relationship that I had been looking forward to so much was the cause. Ultimately, though, it reached a breaking point: during a colossal argument we broke up. We argued until dawn, when she fell asleep. I sat by the bed, mentally preparing to go, exhausted and numb beyond belief. I said something about it to myself, and she woke up: she had no recollection of what had happened. She'd been triggered by a bullying, intrusive colleague, come back in the grips of a psychotic episode, and taken it out on me again.
It's important to emphasise what I know now, but didn't know then: her responses to stresses and triggers were completely pathological, all out of proportion and directed at completely the wrong things. In the midst of all that emotional violence it was very hard to perceive that. But from this distance it's clear: her thinking was disordered and chaotic, and she was rarely aware of the things she was doing. Of course this doesn't lessen the pain of having been her target.
After that last episode, I insisted that she stop drinking (she often began drinking when she had been triggered by something, when an episode was about to begin; it was also the case that ordinary drinking made her more susceptible to episodes). I also stressed how close the relationship was to ending, and how destructive it had been for me. She continued to work on her CBT, putting in hours each day (when she could bear it) into endless memory reconstruction exercises. That episode was the last she's had -- years ago, now. She remained prone to being bafflingly crude and unkind for a month or so after that, but it was nothing after what we'd been through. After three or so more months her course was completed, and she was a genuinely changed person -- the empathetic, intelligent, caring woman that I'd glimpsed before. I was now able to see exactly what had been caused by the illness, and what was left when the illness was gone.
My problems were just starting, of course! Now that I wasn't being constantly mistreated, I began to look around and see just how extensively my life had been destroyed -- relationships with friends damaged, self-esteem in shreds, ability to work basically wrecked. I've noticed many people on this forum describe having a bad memory as a feature of partners with PTSD. This was certainly the case with her, and because her memories of her episodes were non-existent, and her memory of much of the preceding year quite patchy, she had very little sense of how appalling her effect on my life had been. We started trying to set things right. I tried to fill her in on what had been happening -- because, even at her most delusional, she had insisted that she wasn't ill, I was only just working out for myself exactly what she had done knowingly, and what she had done without being aware of it. She, in turn, put a huge amount of effort into trying to ensure that we had a happy life together, filled with good things. I found it difficult to cope with this.
All of this caused us a huge number of problems. Sometimes I am very happy when I'm around her; sometimes she will say or do something completely innocent -- and, because it's connected in some way with something terrible that she did to me when she was still sick, it will send me into a deep, sometimes suicidal depression, or a terrible rage. Sometimes it won't even be something she said, but rather something at work, or in the media. Sometimes nothing at all will happen and even so I'll lose several days to terrible anger and grief. During these periods I can neither work or relax, and instead obsessively go over the furious things I want to say to her, or to her parents or friends -- anyone connected with that terrible period of my life. I've drifted apart from my friends and colleagues, and I'm still failing at work. I've just entered treatment for depression. Everything that she has tried to do to help me, or to help our relationship, I've prevented from happening. We stopped going on dates, we stopped sleeping together, we stopped living together. I've never felt safe or secure that the period in which she was so abusive is fully behind us, even though she has not had an episode or exhibited a single symptom of PTSD in years. Her psychologist assessed her level of trauma after her treatment ended, and it was no worse than the average -- if it had been, treatment would have continued. But even so, I realise now that much of my life is structured -- to a damaging extent -- around avoiding ever returning to the way things were.
Here's a small coda. After she recovered, I continued to want her not to drink, as it makes me feel threatened (having been a drinker myself before all this began, I'm now extremely uncomfortable around drunk people). From her point of view, she no longer has that destructive relationship with alcohol, and has mentioned several times in the last few years that she'd like to have a glass of wine with me, or of champagne to celebrate a success in work -- never with any intention of getting drunk. But she agreed not to drink, so as to help me feel safe.
A month ago I agreed to meet up with a friend and go to the pub: we ran into her there, out with a friend, both drinking a glass of wine. I felt sick. Her friend and mine both left, and I exploded at her in the street. I said some of the things that I've felt during my periods of solitary anger. I accused her of lying to me, of drinking behind my back, of being a terrible person and ruining my life. She was devastated -- she apologised, said that she knew what she had done was wrong, and explained that the terrible state our relationship had been in for the last couple of years had led her to feel that we didn't have any hope of things getting better.
Since then we've remained separate but spoken in a friendly and affectionate way many times. With space, we've both realised that we care very much for each other, and want to be together in the future -- but on completely different terms. We're not sure how to go about that, and so remain in couples therapy, but are spending the summer in different countries (luckily our jobs give us this opportunity) and trying to work on ourselves. I desperately want to be a happy, productive person. It wasn't happening while we were together. I hope that it can happen while I'm on my own. I'm alternately hopeful that it can happen together with her in the future, and frightened that having her in my life might always mean the kinds of rage, despair, and misery that I've experienced over the last few years.
Now, something that people often seem to say here is 'if you wouldn't put up with it from someone WITHOUT PTSD, you shouldn't have to put up with it from someone who does have it'. I understand that, and I think it's very sensible -- but I already put up with it (I would never put up with it again), and it's my inability to understand exactly what happened that is having a destructive effect on my life. If she had known what she was doing, I would never have stayed with her. But she was confused, chaotic, and not in her right mind -- so I'm stuck with feelings of rage and betrayal towards someone who is, at most, only partially to blame, and who has (incident in the pub aside) sincerely dedicated herself to putting things right.
Having written all this out, I'm less sure of the questions I wanted to ask at the start. I guess I'd like reassurance that other people have been through something similar. Did other people's partners have such terrible rage and hatred inside them? Was it always directed at you? How did you cope? Does anyone have a partner who is so out of control, who is so unaware of what's happening during their episodes? The studies that I've read have suggested that the majority of sufferers of PTSD also experience elements of at least two other personality disorders (mostly Avoidant Personality Disorder); I think my partner had elements of Narcissistic Personality Disorder -- the violent responses to slights to her self esteem, her lack of empathy towards me when we first got to know each other, and her obsessive investment in her idea of her professional status being my evidence for that. (ALL these symptoms went away when she recovered from PTSD, however). Does anyone else have any experience of, or insight into, that element of things? Does all this sound normal?-- I mean, do people recognise all of these symptoms and behaviours from their own PTSD, or from their partners or loved ones with PTSD and related disorders? I often feel very angry that I'm the only person who suffered so terribly -- other than her, I mean -- and that nobody really knows what I went through. I also feel irrationally angry when she becomes upset at the way I treat her (with suspicion, anger, or irritation), because it all basically stems from the abuse that she put me through (even unknowingly). Has anyone else had the same problems?
Lastly, does anyone have any advice for me going forward? Can I feel safe? Neither of us is willing to re-enter a relationship that has made us so unhappy -- but we genuinely love each other, and share interests and goals, and it would be a terrible thing to lose each other, even if we have no other choice. I don't know what to do.
