Got It At 12 And Am Now 50. Certainly Doesn't Seem Temporary To Me

[Ken Haley]

I hear people say it gets better each day, but mine gets worse. I hear people say suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but 38 years doesn't seem temporary. I can say I am not hopeless because I have PTSD alone, but I am hopeless because I have had it since age 12 and am now 50. If I close my eyes and image I am 20 the hopeless goes any, so it is not hopelessness over having PTSD, but rather the realization that I missed out on the milestones of life, have little chance of making the goals of marriage and children happen and have very few years left to build a live and cram a lifetime into it I could snap my fingers and be cured today.

My depression comes from the events I missed out on, but depression does not motivate my thoughts of suicide. My thought about suicide are without passion, derived from logic and not emotion. For me, I am reminded of Red in Shawshank, "When they say life, that is exactly what they take, life, or the part that matters", but in this case it is not a "they" but PTSD. Suicide for me is a matter of subtraction: Each year of illness leaves one less at the end. If you have PTSD from 12 to 75 is there really any sense in refraining from suicide so you can enjoy your alzheimers?

 

[Lionheart]

Wow, Ken, I am sorry that you are having such a rough time of it!

Hopelessness is a real *#@*^#^)! It totally sucks that you/we missed out on some of life's milestones, it certainly isn't fair, and it makes me very angry!!!:mad:

I am a survivor of severe, prolonged, child abuse from the age of 5 on, I am now going on 53 years old. I have been disabled with PTSD for the past 14 years and I can understand about the depression and suicidal ideation.

Fortunately for me, I am one of those people whose life has gotten a whole lot better (and continues to improve). I attribute that to a stubborn determination to not let PTSD/trauma steal all of my life away....it has taken enough from me already and I refuse to let it destroy me. anyhoo,,,,

I am not going to try to tell you how you should feel or what you should do, I have too much respect for my fellow sufferer to do that!!! I only want to say that it is okay to feel defeated or suicidal, but it is my hope that you wont act on it and hurt yourself.

On top of PTSD, I have 4 other chronic illnesses (Major Depression, COPD, FMS and CFS) and this makes me feel suicidal every day. What we are trying to heal from (PTSD) is a very difficult thing to do and it is not the easy way. It takes guts and determination to walk a healing path and it is sometimes a slow and painful process.

If I were to focus on the loss and unhappiness that PTSD/trauma has caused me, I would probably need to be hospitalized for my own safety. This is certainly not fun!!! :banghead: We deserve better!

Anyways, I was just reading your post and thought to myself there is someone who can understand about the :poop: that I've been through. I was hoping that we could be friends and we might could support and encourage one another. If ya want to that is.:unsure:

I apologize, I didn't mean to chatter on so much. I just really hope that things will get better for you and that you will not harm yourself............and if ya need a friend, I am here!!! Just message me.

Wishing you peace and healing,
Lion

 

[Ken Haley]

My trauma was very unusually and its payload was very specific, namely flashbacks and fear. I was very strong at 12 when I was drugged and tried to beat the LSD produced flashback and accompanying terror, but quickly found that while beating fear of heights, for example is possible, beating the sensation of fear itself is impossible and that is actual by evolutionary design. Fear is a completely different nut to crack than depression which I find comparatively easy. If one tried to fight unexplained fear it always results in scarring oneself further and reinforcing avoidance behaviors. Using the opposite tact of not fighting it only gives the added benefit of a shower decline, but it end the same.

I usually do not stay on these site because that make me feel more hopeless than hopeful: For many years I was misdiagnosed, being told I couldn't have it because it was rare. There is also no documented cases of anyone diagnosed before 2000 ever being cured. Now "everyone" had it and people are claiming being cured. The APA is overdiagnosing people so they can claim success curing people who never had PTSD to begin with. That led to the most difficult cases being ignored and pushed aside, me included. People are claiming CBT cured their PTSD, but prior to the redefinition of PTSD in 2000 CBT was known to be ineffective in treating PTSD, so it was not the CBT that change, but what PTSD is that changed. I am no looking for a debate of what is and isn't PTSD, but the result of this reclassification is that I am buried and lost of a sea of easier to treat cases.

I spent some time reading this forum and I cannot agree with the attitudes here. There is too much sentimentality about life: Too much emphasis on quantity of life and existence or quality of life and living.

 

[Hashi]

I've had to deal with extreme fear from trauma, and I don't find CBT, EMDR or any kind of intensive exposure therapies helpful at all. My experience has been that a confrontational approach to fear does cause more scarring, as you say.

What I take from that isn't that there is nothing effective. I don't think the opposite is that I don't address the fear in any way. It's that other things are effective for me to address the fear. In my case that has above all been a somatic therapy (craniosacral therapy), which allowed me to process a huge amount of the fear in a non-confrontational way at the level at which it occurs - within cell memory and the central nervous system. I have psychotherapy as well, I think both are needed when trauma/PTSD is so ingrained.

Other therapies may work for other people, all I'm saying is that CBT doesn't suit every single person and there are alternatives to that.

In your example of fear of heights, I think there's a need to distinguish between healthy appropriate fear that keeps us safe, and the exaggerated, intensified, inappropriate fear that comes from trauma damage. A psychologically healthy person will always have the first kind of fear, and it won't ruin their life. They'll be able to walk or drive across a bridge without experiencing anxiety. It's the second kind of fear that we have to heal from, where we see safe things as unsafe.

Having experienced severe depression for years, I think the same kind of thing is true of depression. Depression distorts our reaction to things, so that enjoying a small thing like watching a movie is meaningless. Without depression, things like enjoying a movie aren't huge meaningful experiences, but they're enough. A life with small things that we can actually enjoy is a life that feels good enough. Again, it isn't CBT that helps me work towards that but DBT (dialectical behaviour therapy). DBT recognises that we won't get back what we've already lost from life. It's about building a life worth living during the rest of the time we have.

I don't think I'm sentimental about life. My reason for not killing myself is that I nearly died in the past and had such a bad near-death experience that I can't ever risk bringing something like that on myself from my own choice. I'm not saying anyone else would have a bad experience of death, but that my reason for staying alive is not a sentimental or even a positive one. Given that I'm here, I feel all I can do is try to improve things as much as I can, to make them more bearable. I think trying to improve the quality of my life is merely emotional survival.

I think it's ironic that with that as my motivation, I actually seem to have much more belief in healing that most other people here. I still have things to do to process trauma, but I've done a lot of healing already. I know that I've actually processed the fear that I've processed. It isn't lying dormant ready to spring back at some future trigger.

Healing from the effects it's had on my life, the "unlived life" as my therapist calls it, is the next mountain to climb, and I hate it. I know I'll go in and out of doubt and despair, I already am, but I know I'll do it step by painful step.

I sometimes wonder if my persistence in finding the things that help me to heal is actually a result of having little sentimentality about life. I have nothing to lose. Working on recovery is grim, but life is grim anyway so I might as well be working on recovery.

 

[BloomInWinter]

I likely got it as a 6 or 7 year old, and am now in my 40's.

Finding out how much of the self I though myself to be is actually defensive structures has been very difficult. Learning to set those down and actually find the real me is an ongoing trek through grief & mourning for what was never mine to be, what was taken from me, and what my traumatized self couldn't participate in all these years.

I do believe in healing. I do believe in trying. I still struggle with the suicidal ideation, but it's not the destruction of self I crave but the relief of suffering.

But every day, something is still a struggle. EMDR is helping but of course it's also stirring the pot every week. Most of the time, my life is worth living.

It's good to have skills and resources for the days it isn't.

 

[keifer]

I've fought depression since I was a teen. It surely isn't temporary and yes I've considered suicide as a solution to this "temporary" problem.

I'm 44 and have put my career ahead of having a family or kids. Now, I have PTSD and those milestones seem far beyond my reach.

I have no idea how I'll ever get to those milestones. I feel it's too late. Hopeless is a good word for it. I want to believe there is hope.

 

[franciemarnie]

When I have felt like this - I am 57 now and have had PTSD all my life though misdiagnosed for years - I have gotten mad in a safe way. I have beat the hell out of two speed bags until they were useless. It isn't just what happened to you and us so it is normal to feel like you missed out. You did. I didn't have kids or friends or significant relationships. I worked and went home to an empty apartment for 25 years. And then for a while I took painkillers to have a semblance of good feeling.

You must turn the anger outward in a safe way. For me feeling suicidal wasn't simply logic, it was the resulting feeling of too much pain for too long. It was unbearable. The trauma is lodged inside. Turn in a different direction. You haven't tried all the ways that can truly help.

I have been where you are. I have said those words. You feel it's too sentimental here because you are in the suicide place.

I am with Hashi. I am seeing a Somatic Therapist now too. It is making all the difference in the world. Once you can feel again - all sorts of feelings - not just numbness and pain, then you can make an informed decision.

I have intense moments or hours of sadness and grief at the immense feelings and thoughts of loss, but also joy. Joy isn't sentimental. It's pure joy and there is nothing like it. Then the past 50 years somehow don't matter.

 

[Justpassintime]

It's about whatever works for you at the time it happens. Hopefully these things will become healthier over time. I have had Chronic PTSD my entire life and I was doing "okay" until I was victimized by a hit and run driver which only served to reinforce to me that the world is not a safe place. I get it. Most of the time (FOR ME) my ideations are without rhyme or reason - it can be a good time or bad, sunny or rain, there is no way to predict or prevent it. I tend to make a commitment to do it in the future. I will literally set a date and say that's the day I will.... Now that kicks my brain off obsessing on it because I suppose it's satisfied. Then when that date comes (and again this works for me) I will say, oh well I can't do it this day because I might let this person or that down and god knows I can't do that. Typically the date is far enough away I will not be in the same place so it is extremely unlikely I will act on. I am very fortunate to not be surrounded by persons who do not over react - being locked up is my absolute nightmare. I've warned them, when I stop talking to you about it is when you need to worry as if I really want to I wouldn't want you to stop.

On the flip side of this, I've tried multiple times and have had many incidents that should have killed me during dangerous behaviors and yet here I am. My cousin shot himself with a 9 mm and lived.....I remind myself that it doesn't always work and I could end up a lot more damaged and incapacitated then I currently am. While not well in the head, I am somewhat healthy.

Most recently what has shaken my being to the core is being victimized again by a hit and run driver who demolished my car, my neck and my back. I will be here every day primarily (excuse my french) while I don't know how to do a lot of things, I am pretty good at saying F U world, you can't have this.

 

[Ken Haley]

Keifer, I can image a scenario were I could find some contentment. First, I could use examples of misfortunes of others to make it through the rest of my life and the depression (i.e., I am not the only one that got cheated: Children die at 11 of cancer). Next my PTSD is gone today. Next I can get out of the US forever. Next, I meet a women, have sons, and live long enough to see them surpass the age of my trauma and though their teens smiling. At least one child must be a son and must be my biological child so I could look at him, see me in him, and see part of me getting what I never got.

There problem with that scenario is this: My PTSD is not going to go away today or likely ever and if it doesn't today I will not live long enough (my family dies young naturally) to see my future children get to their teens. Next, I am very unlikely to find a women young enough to have children with, because while I was in my late teens through 30s, when I was getting around OK and was able to hide my problem from most people, I was constantly rejected.

Personally, I have been trying to get brain scans to identify the fear response and interrupt it was DBS or actual cell destruction for over 10 years. With the right money I believe I could prove this could work. The problem is the research doctors and therapist are in my way and are only slowing me down in what will eventually become the recognized way for cure someone like me. Unlike most people I have no use for these "experts" to set the research path and agenda. They are too slow and not ambitious enough and most of their projects are "clinical masturbation": Feels good to them, but doesn't even contemplate a cure.

They ask me when I was 13 and in the hospital what would have to happen for me to be the way I was before and I said "you'd have to burn the LSD trip memory out of my brain". While I don't think that is possible without destroying unintended memories and brain functions, I knew then that invasive surgery was the only answer for me. Knocking out the fear response surgically is possible today, but no one will even agree to try to map my fear responses with PET, MEG and Radioactive Isotope drugs. If I could map the response, I would try to find a surgeon outside the US and literally sign my life away. If the surgery worked, great. If not, euthanize me; Perhaps this could happen in Denmark.

They let people with terminal physical illness volunteer for potentially fatal procedures. I cannot understand why they will not let me. It is actually two factors I think; one is that it is not the researcher's life ebbing away and if it was, he/she would be the first one demanding such surgery for themselves. The other, is that it is an arrogance where others feel they have the right to control the length of my life by judging that the quality of life is "good enough".

 

[Justpassintime]

Call me crazy but....

Why does it have to be years long life long happy?

I watch normal folks A LOT mostly so I can fake it better, but one thing I've learned, they aren't really very happy. I mean they put on a good show and all but at the root of it all, they are a pretty miserable lot.

I take happy where I can get. If you put me in a crowd of adults and only a few children, I will drop to my knees to talk to a kid in a heartbeat about whatever. They have an enthusiasm for life that is contagious and they teach you things without trying.

I don't mean to disparage your unhappiness. I guess I am having a hard time understanding why it (happiness) has to be so big and so long and have so many conditions?

 

[Ken Haley]

You can still find or feel happiness? Lucky you. I have not felt happiness in 38 years. When something good happens (rarely) I recognize it as good but that happy feeling never follows.

So many conditions? If you poll many people here with symptoms and loss similar to mine I think you'll find that many cannot image being happy at all, which is in fact why I used the word "content", because I could never be truly happy again.. How does one be happy losing out on almost an entire lifetime. I have talk to people who say someone can find happiness after missing out of nearly 40 years, but they have ALL been people who are normal and never lost out on 40 years. I am sorry, but being able to imagine myself content after so much loss is a triumph in itself, As for all the conditions? I am not asking to make gold from lead or fly to Mars. Marriage, children, travel: Those things happen everyday. I don't understand why you feel I am asking a lot. After the loss of nearly 40 of the best years of my life I don't think I'm asking for a lot to ask that in the last 15 years on my life I get to be symptom free and enjoy the things that most people enjoy, or can enjoy their whole lives.

In terms of normal folks I was one of those pre-12 years old. I was unwanted and mentally abused, but all I had to do is leave the house and I was completely happy and while that abuse left some insecurities, it left no debilitating effects. Those were happy years for me and I realize it even then, not just as a comparison to the live that was to follow. Those normal people with "miserable lots" have children, friendship, travel and can feel happiness even if it is punctuated by some pain. Additionally people with true PTSD are found into isolation because their peers are so rare and because people reject them because they are different. At least with the normal person they can meet and marry because they share the common minor miseries and can relate to one another. Comparing normal people's problems and trials (which I had in abundance and still very much enjoyed life), with PTSD seems to show a complete misunderstanding of what PTSD is.

 

[Justpassintime]

I could be wrong, but regardless, I had no intention of offending you which it seems I have. If this is a wrong assumption, then pardon me for that.

I do have chronic post traumatic stress disorder but I guess our paths vary far and wide apart. Probably the only emotion I do "well" is anger. But at the same time, I don't really have a self, which will make no sense unless you have been there. I will "live" whatever moments I can handle and some of them are happy, not all of them - and happy is far different then content. Hell, for that matter happy is the most difficult of all to attain in the sense of a general state. It's so easy to be angry or unhappy - you can always blame that on others, etc. To be happy (to me) means to grab the bull by the horns, wrestle it to the ground, spit out dirt and own it. It's way harder. Content? I do not believe I have been content, but I guess for me the lack of that is easier - I am not really connected to my past at all, I make no plans for the future (which is a fault) and pretty much all I have at any given time is today. I've escaped the borg, my family and I just live.

I suppose I do not have an answer, but then I didn't assume I did, I was just having a hard time understanding your position, but like I said, I absolutely meant no offense. The written medium is tedious and can be easily misunderstood.