Dealing With Nightmares And Anxiety, After Current Partner Yelled At Me.

[St.Maybe]

I had a nightmare about my ex.

I looked at him and felt this intense annoyance. “Aren’t you dead? He said you were dead…” I was confused, and I don’t remember what happened in the dream but I woke up filled with anxiety.

The night before, the “he” in question, the man I love, had lost his shit and was yelling at me, and I went straight into this hellhole of symptoms for around a week.

Nightmares are among them… I remember dreams of fearing for my life, but not in ways that I truly have. The dreams were a lighter, stranger series of frightening events than have marked my actual life.

Anyway,

He’s gone. And I don’t recognize myself when I smile about it, and don’t feel guilty. I wonder about that, but then I shrug it off.

But the argument…

I dissolved into this mess after the argument and struggled to eat or do much until the grip of panic let up.

I felt guilty, laying on the couch, dazed while he cleaned the absolute mess I’d made the night before just wandering around like a zombie.

I’m embarrassed thinking of how I put a chair in front of the door when he has never harmed me and was not coming, because I told him to stay away.

A week lost to one argument.

I worry about this relationship. I know I don’t react to things like a “normal” person but even without PTSD I’m not okay with being spoken to like that.

I worry about the way he communicates… I’m tired of having my heart broken.

And I’m glad the man who raped and stalked me is dead and gone and that I can finally f*cking breathe, and I resent that he infringed upon my nightmares.

And it was the yelling that triggered it.

I never wanted to see his face again.

And I never want to feel this way again.

I just had to get this off my chest, I guess, so I came here because I don’t think there’s anywhere else I can do so comfortably. The end.

 

[Friday]

A week lost to one argument.

I worry about this relationship. I know I don’t react to things like a “normal” person but even without PTSD I’m not okay with being spoken to like that.

Have you two had a chance to talk, when you’re not triggered &/or recovering from a symptom spike, about what’s going on?

Because there’s the hardline of not making other people responsible for our triggers & stressors, and then there are the boundaries involved in what we will/will not tolerate, and best ways -for each of us- to manage episodes.

Figuring out the line between reasonable/rational boundaries & triggered = overreacting by definition … can be super easy or really freaking difficult.

 

[St.Maybe]

We talked about it, and we’ve never blamed each other for our triggers. But I wont mince words; I lost a week of reasonable health during a high stress time because he acted in a way that resulted and has always resulted in making me sick.

The fact that I do get sick as a result of being yelled at a certain way, means I don’t react like a “normal” person but PTSD or no, that behavior resulting in such terrible anxiety or no, being yelled at and called outside of your name, being belittled and dictated to, it’s not cool.

At the end of the day we are responsible for how we behave, and we also bear responsibility for the consequences of our actions, particularly when we act in full knowledge of what those consequences will be.

His own stress and trauma isn’t lost on me in the least, or I’d have treated him very differently both in the moment and afterwards. It’s just hard navigating things between two people with their own traumas and trauma responses. None of that is a pass for mistreating each other though.

I have to work on my communication as well but if I’m the one getting sick to the point where I’m spending days unable to eat as a nursing mother I know what my priority is.