Sufferer Lost My Fiance' In A Car Crash And Feel Responsible

[TheSpydah]

Hi all,
I have lost my fiance' five months ago in a car crash.
I was sitting next to him when we crashed. My father was driving the car.
My love was with me, even if I had asked him to stay home, because he insisted on accompanying me to get an MRI for a spine problem I have and that he knew was causing me a lot of pain.
I tried shielding him but I was too late. He died as I held him. I will spare the horrible details.
I have some injuries in my spine from the impact, I am by myself (my whole family and closest family lives in another continent), and I cannot really work.
I have no sense of futurity, and to be honest I do not manage to care.
I feel responsible for his death.
I was already a bit damaged in some ways from a previous illness, from a psychologically manipulative/controlling/abusive ex, from bullying from age 6 to 12, and from a semi-paralized limb that was the result of birth trauma. Growing up I had unexplained, apparently uncausated violent crises of pure terror i which I would scream, flail, and try to hide as if someone was trying to capture me or harm me, even when that was not actually happening. When the crises stopped being so outward, I started passing out as a fear response. No one could ever explain to me why this was, and I spent 25 years of my life thinking I was just crazy.
My fiance' had been extremely important in my recovery from my past. And I saw him die because he was near damaged old me.
I don't really have a network of support, or many people who have the ability to understand what I am experiencing. I feel terribly isolated, even if I know my situation is not unique at all. I don't manage to talk t my family that much anymore, even if they try, I feel like I have lost all ties to them. To be fair, I feel like I have lost meaningful ties with all living people around me.
The worst part is that because I have disciplined myself all my life to "keep it together no matter what," people have a hard time recognizing me as a traumatized subject.
I am aware that none of what I am experiencing is special, and I am aware that it could be worse and should not complain. But I have no one to talk to. Psychiatry isn't helping me much. And I am in the limbo between one health insurance and another so I have only had one psychotherapy session so far (which seemed more useful).
Thank you for listening.

 

[EveHarrington]

Welcome to the forum. :hug:

It breaks my heart to see you minimizing your suffering and pain. While it is true that some people may have it "worse" than you, there are others who also have it "better"-----I guess what I'm trying to say is that most of us are somewhere in the middle and other people's suffering has no bearing on our own suffering. You have a right to your pain, and you also have a right to be heard and to heal.

Your experiences are uniquely yours, and in that case they are "special" and as such I don't think they should be minimized. We're all here to heal and help each other in the process (when we can :))

I'm glad you've found psychotherapy to be helpful so far and I hope you can continue to see this therapist. Psychiatry is much about medication, and medication can be helpful to some while not so helpful to others. It's all about finding what works for you!

I hope you continue to post and reach out for help. I think you can find a lot of support here. :) :hug:

 

[Iwantout]

So sorry for your loss, my partner, who was my rock for 13 years, died suddenly last year and I blame myself.. No, there are no other similarities to what happened to your love, but I wanted you to know I can relate to the grief..
You are definitely not complaining though and yes, although others may have experienced 'worse' that in no way makes your feelings any less significant. What you have been through is heart breaking.
Now is the time to be gentle with yourself and relax on that self discipline. We are all entitled to feel, to hurt and to have our experiences heard and validated. Only then, can we begin to heal. I want you to know that you are special, we all are in our own ways. You have lived through so much and hold no grudges. That is special and rare. Please take great care and except my condolences for your loss and warm thoughts for you..

 

[TheSpydah]

Thank you, Eve and Tawny.
I feel very useless at the moment. Since the accident, I have been stuck abroad and I am not really able to work nor to finish my studies, so I have also been in a situation of financial insecurity and dependence on top of everything else, which intensifies my feeling like a burden for everyone, especially for his family, which is trying to help me. It has been five months and I am not better yet, my concentration is still in shreds and I am not able to study/write, the jobs I was planning to take are out of reach for a set of reasons (some caused by his loss itself), and in general I just feel like I am good for nothing, and even worse because I am so slow to recover.
My beloved was the reason why I lived or did anything, and I feel that I have caused his death. At the same time, I often wonder whether he was happy with me - for all I know, maybe he wasn't, and I have made him miserable all along, and people who know are just not telling me the truth because of my fragility.

 

[Deleted member 12723]

I am sorry that you have lost your fiancee and I understand the grief that comes from sudden loss. I have carefully read what you said and It seems to me that you are under false survival grief. I say false because logically you were not the one driving the car.

To have regrets and such feelings after the loss of someone you loved is normal as I lost my husband of thirty six years of marriage three years ago. I was haunted and tormented with false guilt and regrets a mental construct in my mind.

It takes a long to heal and to recover from this kind of loss and so I suggest that you be kind to yourself and be patient with yourself. I know easier said than done.

I finally have resolution and closure and no longer feel false guilt or regrets except for a few times.

I wish you the best in the rest of this year as you did lose so very much.

 

[Lucycat]

Hi @TheSpydah
Welcome to the forum.

 

[Ka-9]

Welcome..... my humble opinion has been to never judge one's damage based solely on the events alone. Everyone has unique trigger points, or vulnerabilities to certain fears, pains, or events, so you shoul feel just as entitled as anyone else to be here, and realize you have certainly suffered legitimate trauma's over your life.

 

[TheSpydah]

Thank you, KA-9... I think the last part is something I am still coming to terms with. Is it common for people to somehow refuse to fully consider themselves as traumatized? I don't think that until the accident and being diagnosed I had really put two and two together with my past. It never occurred to me that the unexpected "crises" growing up, and then the passing out in response to fear, the refusal to be held/touched (true intimacy was basically impossible until I met my fiance' - up until him, it was always something I tolerated while detaching myself mentally from the experience. None of my previous partners ever really seem to notice/care, but he did: "You used to twitch a lot. Now you don't twitch anymore.") could all be explained and did not mean I was just "nuts."

 

[Ka-9]

Hey Spydah- I think it's not unreasonable for one to deny they are deeply traumatized to the point of being damaged- I did for many years. However, by not seeking treatment, the "damage"? can take far greater hold in some cases. I was terriefied of being labelled, as I should have been- but trauma is trauma, there simply was no escaping it. I wore 3 uniforms at the same time at one point...I thought I was supremely un-damageable lol. No such thing- my opinion is anyone can 'crumble" with the right recipe.

I think you went through a very intimately traumatic event, and no matter what you feel/fear, you DESERVE to be taken care of as best as is possible. Just a layman's opinion.

 

[TheSpydah]

Of course, and I appreciate it. It's like now it's hard for me to fully own the extent of the damage - which others on the thread have also pointed out, and which I find very useful. And before this - to be honest, it just didn't occur to me at all that trauma could explain it. Let's put it this way: it was more my ignorance, I guess, than denial.

I associated trauma only with people who had been in a war zone (either as military personnel or civilians) or on some kind of murder scene/mass killings, or who had been victims of severe physical abuse. Oddly, I knew that I had been physically bullied as a child, and I knew that the reason why I was not comfortable with people moving fast around me and I would shield myself was because of that, but in my weird logic/ignorance it did not classify as traumatic because the abusers were also children? And it was the same with my terrors in medical settings - I knew and said that I has some strange behaviours because I thought I was going to die. I knew something had snapped in my psyche when I got ill five years ago.

I knew all these things had happened, and I knew that memories connected with them were very stressful, but it never crossed my mind that they could be considered traumatic. Even if a psychotherapist had told me that what I described was survivor's guilt, it always felt like it was metaphorical because I thought - I wasn't prisoner in war, so it's not quite real. So nothing was ever really done. I guess for my early childhood it was different because 30+ years ago we didn't think infants could experience trauma, so my parents, too, were totally unprepared for it.