• 💖 [Donate To Keep MyPTSD Online] 💖 Every contribution, no matter how small, fuels our mission and helps us continue to provide peer-to-peer services. Your generosity keeps us independent and available freely to the world. MyPTSD closes if we can't reach our annual goal.

It Turns out Getting Arrested Is Super Triggering

Status
Not open for further replies.
Hell, when I had my car impounded for expired everything
It’s weird what a salve it is to know the people you respect most and consider excessively capable also struggle with things that are so often framed as a basic adult responsibility/task everyone should be able to tackle all the time forever with relative ease.

I was particularly anticipating getting arrested and otherwise being insanely screwed because for the past 13 months, I’ve had a car that just... doesn’t officially exist. I say I own it, but titles need to be notarized here. Then registered. Then tags. Then inspected. But my life has been a nonstop complete rampaging shitshow on fire with toxic fumes since before I needed a new car because mine spontaneously burst into flames right before I got married, and it just leveled out. We were so broke we ate out of the kitchen we worked in for the better part of the last year. And then the insurance... that’s been 10 months past due, because the pandemic meant an insurance adjuster never came to complete my claim and salvage the old car, which meant I was charged for it in spite of it being actually toast. And that combination has been SO overwhelming. So I had it coming, driving a luxury sports car with no tags I don’t technically own without insurance. I mean I was definitely doing, as I told my lawyer, “An incredible amount of bullshit.”

In retrospect, after talking with him, I might have actually gotten a better deal with the DWI than if I’d not blown hot. Between the speeding and everything else? The fact that they’d rather drop everything but the DWI if I plead might actually be preferable.

Life is ceaselessly absurd.
the officer offered me a ride back to civilization and I sat in the back
I realized after hearing others’ experiences—I actually think the officer did me a solid? He put me in the passenger seat.

Something about small miracles.

Thanks my dear friend.
 
When I was suicidal and had a mental breakdown with a massive knife, I actually felt safe when I was arrested. It was a relief.
 
Agree. Next time, eat the tacos before driving onward :). Glad the in the big scheme of things, you're OK.
I add that I am glad everyone was OK, I know that we develop a tolerance for alcohol, like all drugs, and 2 beers is nothing for someone and too much for another so the arbitrary line is drawn and you crossed it. Heres to hoping you don't cross it again-cheers
 
I know that we develop a tolerance for alcohol, like all drugs
Yeah, I will admit no longer drinking like it’s my job but still having the synergy of taking clonopin has dramatically changed my ability to drink at all.

I went to a Halloween party. I made it through ONE beer... in six hours.
 
taking clonopin has dramatically changed my ability to drink
Klonopin keeps my drinking at a minimum too. I can't remember the last time I drank away from home, and the last time I had enough to keep up with my own kids on a weekend visit is a fading memory. My past doctors gave me a zero tolerance for any alcohol with the benzos, this time around is more accepting but I too have been scared straight, I don't stray too far into the out of bounds.
Hope you can find a way through this without too much additional pain, it has to suck to deal with the legal system over such a small amount. Pretty expensive beer.
 
I actually think the officer did me a solid? He put me in the passenger seat.
Yeah, I think that's pretty much unheard of. This sounds like a weird version of a best case scenario. And, I'm thinking you might give yourself credit here because there ARE things YOU could have done that would have made it worse. I hope that things just continue getting better from here!
 
Glad about this thread. Seems that I’m very likely going to be arrested in the near future. I’m participating in non-violent civil disobedience, and it’s all very well organised, meaning, there will be people taking care of each other, making sure everyone’s comfortable and supported etc. So, it can’t be compared to a regular arrest. But still, it kinda makes me nervous. There are some old bells that those kinds of situations might ring, and old buttons to be pushed. But activists are generally treated well by the cops here, and there’s nothing to worry, really.
 
Update: I did end up getting arrested on Saturday. (Extinction rebellion blockage) Everything went really smooth, the only thing I wasn’t comfortable with was how the cop held my arm while walking me to the police car. But other than that, the whole thing, including five hrs in jail, went well. I did use my symptom-management tools, and it was nice to notice they worked in a high-stress situation like that.
 
Last edited:
Ditto Anthony. I’m still a hot mess. Not that what I would have to say would be in any way useful/meaningful, but I’d very much like to know how you are.

Whether kicking ass, or on your ass.
 
have you got your symptoms under control with the rational side of all this?
No. Nope. F*ck no. I do not.

@Friday I would say on my ass, but then how is it getting kicked so hard? That’s a thinker.

Yeah I’m absolutely not okay at all. I wish I could say much more than that. It’s very difficult to compare this, uh, symptomatic *kerfuffle* with any other time in my life, because it’s reminiscent of me about seven years ago, except I don’t have the double edged sword that is constant daily dissociation to numb me (goddamn am I feeling my feels all the f*cking time), and I also lack the support network I then had, but, on the other hand, there’s some stuff I have available to me now that I lacked before, like, uh, money for food and gas and a psychiatrist.

But there have been some seriously aggravating variables, and I don’t just mean the shit from a few months ago that I never coped with nor recovered from in any sense. No, there’s been just heaps of new stressors. I would mention them if I had the energy, but, not having it, I’m keeping the thread more on topic at least?

It’s all compounding and synergistic and exponential. Not trying to alarm anyone here: do not mistake a statement of fact for suicidality. It’s not. But as I told my partner, “This is exactly how people with my background end up dead.”

So I’m trying my best to manage. I’m keeping my eyes on the real goal. Do whatever it takes to see the other side of this peak, and arrive alive in the symptomatic valley I know awaits me eventually. Use the coping strategies. Do the things that work. Cut out anything that isn’t useful. And do *not* mistake this moment, a relative blink, for reality, because it isn’t. This is PTSD and its pack of lies about how nothing gets better or ever was good etc.

The thing about living with this shit for so long is you accidentally get good at surviving it.

In my favorite show, The Magicians, a character encounters a sort of illusion that is depression made manifest. It’s identical to him, only he can see it, and it exists to make him suicidal, essentially. The character, Quentin, has a history of depression and suicide attempts. He tells the illusion the same thing I keep telling the thoughts that haunt me.

You and I both know I have a blackbelt, so come at me.
 
I did the hard thing that was the correct thing to right my mental health ship. I gave my notice at my job, which started out as a “This place is a fixer-upper worth my energy” and quickly devolved through losing 20% of our staff into “This is an unsafe environment that is leveraging emotionally and verbally abusive tactics to pressure staff into working.”

I started feeling like I was correct that my fellow leadership was using toxic strategies to guilt and gaslight staff when everyone started calling me instead of management for everything, when I’m just a clinical lead, not a supervisor.

Last week, on Tuesday, I had a complete breakdown and called out. Nobody called me the rest of the week to work. A staff member texted me at 1am Friday night. I called her. She was throwing up in a trash can and crying. She was scared to call out. We work in healthcare with medically vulnerable people. It’s our obligation to stay out when we’re sick. Yet she was terrified to call her manager. I had recently witnessed the manager in question scream, belittle, and mock burnt out staff who were pleading for help.

I talked to her for over two hours. It was 3:30am when I hung up.

I told her to run. I had just recently sent home staff for being sick; the manager compelled him to come in two days later. It turned out he had COVID. Now two more staff and maybe me are infected. I slept through my test Monday. Today is the first time I haven’t slept 18-22 hours since Sunday.

What’s funny is I haven’t gone to work in almost two weeks, and they just called me today asking me to please work at a different location, as I already put in my notice four weeks ago with a TBD regarding moving elsewhere in a lesser capacity.

Anyway the thing about it is all my symptoms deflated like a balloon starting last Friday, and then I spoke to that poor girl and knew I was right to say weeks ago that this is a culture I am ashamed to be associated with at all.

f*ck your other location, folks. I did my goddamn best, and you refused to listen over the six weeks where I expressed mounting concerns. I retained staff, improved morale, answered my phone 24/7 to help. But I am only one person in a sea of toxic practices and understaffed facilities.

You got my notice. You didn’t hear from me for two weeks. But you can’t just let me go, because you’re just plain out of bodies, and you know I work my ass off. Bite me. I’m done with your bullshit.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top