Feeling Guilty For Success

[IvyMillie]

My husband has PTSD from Vietnam and one of the side effects of that is that they are sometimes really hard workers--or workaholics. So I think he is very successful in that way. He is very good at his job. He has some amazing talents and abilities. He is able to do so many things he's been a contractor and mechanic and a jack of all trades.

He had a divorce when his kids were young, and he raised them basically on his own. He is very close to his kids. So he was successful there too. This tapped into his mentality of "buck up" when times are hard.

However, I think PTSD hits people at different stages in their life. For some of the Vietnam Veterans it begins to affect them a bit more later in life. My husband has been struggling more the older he gets. He's had the symptoms of course for years, but on an emotional level they are now bothering him more. I think this is typical and normal.

I know you may feel guilty about your functionality and success, but I would just say embrace it. Some with PTSD may not be able to function as well--but we all handle all things differently. Plus, we don't know what will happen in our future we may be okay today--but tomorrow is another day. So maybe you can just be happy that for now you are doing well.

You also may have the advantage of working on some things now ahead of time. Since you seem pretty aware of yourself and what you have been through.

It may have a lot to do with youth as well. I had a traumatic childhood (I don't have PTSD) but it wasn't until my 40's that it began to affect me alot. Even now I'm dealing with some of it. So I did pretty good for a long time. Getting older is weird you get better in a lot of ways and worse in other ways. It hasn't crippled me, but I'm just now coming to terms with some of the emotions.

I'm sorry this sounds awfully negative, I don't mean it to. You may always do okay and function fine--I don't know, but just be aware that some people do have problems or issues that resurface later. For the time enjoy your youth, it's a wonderful time of life. :)

 

[James B.]

On the surface, I do not seem troubled. I am 24,

At 24 I was able to keep it together pretty well also.

In generalized discussion with other trauma survivors over the years, it seems like sometime around age 30 is the threshold, the time when unresolved trauma starts to really boil over, and bubble to the surface in ways the individual sufferer can no longer deny, or deal with unassisted.

 

[maddog]

Very interesting James, I was 29.

Maddog

 

[doglover]

maddog... I'd love to borrow some of your professional performance. Based on available feedback I'm doing fine or well in that area but little glitches happen - that I plunge into such deep shame over - and I know I could be better. I guess it happens on days when I'm not pretending so well.

Oddly the same side effects of trauma lend themselves to the work I do. The knowledge I gathered and defensive skills I developed happen to fit nicely with my job. The ability to dissociate or numb out comes in handy, as well. A less numb person wouldn't be able to handle my typical day. (Even though I almost lost it in the phase of adjusting to my position... really.)

That is one reason I'm so nervous about facing recovery in earnest. I'm so good at compartmentalizing and splitting that I'm scared of how messy my professional life could get if I face it all more consistently. I'm good at compartmentalizing, but then again not - as when I'm triggered or more stressed, I have a VERY difficult time just quieting that to "put on my work face."

Seems to me my go-to coping styles are either stay numb so nothing gets to me, or collapse into a world of vulnerability where I'm not productive and not easily able to "grin and bear it." Though there's also days where my outward appearance and internal world are greatly at odds.

I, too, feel like I don't fit on this forum when I'm having a "good" day. Which usually means a numb day. And I'm certainly not perfect, hard as I try to be. I'm a mess with true intimacy. Getting close to a human being in a romantic sense, allowing for the possibility of blending my personal life with them - without the numbing effects of marijuana (which I used with my last long-term partner)... is the most terrifying thing I can think of. And I'm not even clear on why it's so scary. I've just got a mountain of trust issues to overcome, as my primary trauma centers around abandonment by a trusted person.

maddog, maybe relationship is also your area where the effects come out more clearly?

I think we all have our own ways of coping and we all have our own areas where we function better or less awesomely. Some, like myself, didn't have the luxury of coping outwardly, had to keep trying for perfection or things would become worse - so I wasn't allowed to feel the effects of trauma. And eventually I set up a pattern where I wouldn't allow myself to feel it either. Stuffed... way down... kind of scary. In some ways I think it would be easier to wear it all more openly. Instead of having a confusing kind of black hole inside.

 

[maddog]

God, DogLover, I could have written your every word myself. Funny how other people can explain me better than I can!!

Relationships are a disaster for me. In some ways they are actually not even that... they are almost nonexistent. The mere prospect of anyone being close to me triggers devastating floods of terror of abandonment and rejection, a corresponding need to run and run and run, a usually squashed-away yearning to cling and cling and cling, and all of the irrational reactive aggressive/submissive, fractured dissociated elements of whatever passes for my personality. I just wish that I didn't feel such intense loneliness at the same time... it would be easier to dismiss the need for relationships as one endless trigger to be avoided, yet something inside of me can't let go of a longing for something I've never known. How is that I wonder, that you can ache so deep down for something you have never known?

There are 2 people in the world who I trust, and only 2. One of those is my T, who probably doesn't count, given that I know his only role in my life is a professional one that will some day end. However close I may feel to him, I know it is an artificial relationship at best that I shouldnt' classify as anything else.

Our jobs may well be similar. The ability to compartmentalise is what is widely recognized as separating those who survive in my line of work from those who don't. On the surface of it someone with my background is a screaming beacon of inappropriateness for the work, and yet in that fateful twist of irony, it is the depth of my dissociation and mask-wearing that has allowed me to function there, sometimes even better the more deeper I am plunging into that dissociation.

Numbness used to be all that I knew, quite literally. It still inhabits my world with me very very often, but can spontaneously give way to the dramatic outpourings of that wounded inner child often without explanation or reason. It's as though I am a passive passenger on the journey of my life, while someone else holds the wheel and steers me in and out of numbness and feeling, almost always ensuring that the external behaviours and appearances are at oddds with the inner subjective world, just enough to keep me feeling as though even on my best days, I have only a fraction of a personality.

How many different forms this trauma can take, and none of them any easier to understand than the others.

Maddog