Thanks
@ladee, truly, if I am strong, I am because of everyone here, Lord knows there are few actually here who cheer me on anymore. If i'm having a rough night and I post on fb, my sister usually posts some meme about not letting the past ruin your future...(I don't see that as being supportive, I read, snap out of it.)
Today I'm a little p'd off about the suicide/ptsd thing. Yes, I know people can get PTSD from witnessing their spouse or child or someone they knew commit suicide (and yes, I say "commit", I'm not going to bow to pressure and change it to "completed") and I thank God I didn't have to witness my husband's suicide or find him after he'd done it. I can completely understand how that can generate PTSD in someone but those people who didn't witness the suicide and were estranged from their loved one at the time of their suicide claiming to have PTSD as a result? It just burns my butt. It just propagates the misunderstanding about what PTSD really is. You know, just because being reminded of the suicide makes you "upset" does not mean you have PTSD!!
There is a woman who claims PTSD because of her boyfriend's suicide - they were broken up at the time of his death for like a year, she was dating someone else (several someone else's apparently) and she heard about his suicide from his parents who called her because they thought they were still together. She went to the funeral and took on the role of the grieving spouse because he wasn't currently seeing anyone. She sat with his family. She began to embody the grief of his loss - and her then boyfriend couldn't deal with it so he left. Now she claims she's been diagnosed with PTSD because of his death but every time I question her symptoms they are vague and consist of crying and "feeling upset". She can't describe any PTSD symptoms but she tries, "It reminds me of that day when they called me and my whole world was shattered." ; "People want me to start dating someone new and every time they say it, I think of him and get triggered and go into a PTSD crying episode."
I'm sure if she truly had feelings for him but their relationship didn't work out, she can have some grief about his death but seriously? There are other women I've talked to that truly have re-experiencing symptoms, anxiety triggers and can describe their grief reactions as distinctly different from the PTSD symptoms. Like, crying jags and feeling intense loneliness, those are grief reactions. Hyperventilating and seeing the body or the point of death in their mind, those are PTSD reactions. Many of these women have had to uproot their entire lives and move because of the suicide, just plain and simply, the inability to be in the house their spouse died in, the gruesome reminders alone. Moving didn't cure their symptoms; didn't make it easier to just carry on with their lives. They use the same words we do - "broken", "something is not right", "angry all the time", "jumping at shadows", "can't stop seeing that day", "knocks the wind out of me" - and many of these are months and years after the suicide, so yeah, PTSD.
If you really want to see that PTSD is not a guarantee after a traumatic event, not every woman who witnessed or found their loved one has PTSD - one would think that seeing someone you loved take their own life in front of your own eyes is pretty much a guarantee but it actually isn't. I'd say that every single one of them had PTS but not all developed PTSD. Some of these women have been able to continue on grieving and having normally complicated grief reactions, but not PTSD symptoms. Tons of empathy on that page. Tons of support there too for me. I really appreciate the online support I've had for both my PTSD and this suicide loss, both here and on that page. Honestly, I would not be surviving if I didn't have a place where I felt safe to talk about anything and everything in this aftermath.
My therapist said that she thought my reactions were becoming a little PTSD-ish because I described being reminded of the day of his death, being on that scene and I start to hyperventilate and I get into the hysterical crying, heart pounding, feeling like I want to fall to the floor thing but I know the difference. I'm not afraid. I'm sad, overwhelmingly so. The crying is different even, the silent screams come from the very core of me. I'm still able to make audible moans but they are different from the PTSD trigger ones - in the trauma trigger situations my throat clamps shut, the groans are gutteral if anything comes out at all; with this the moans and painful, deep, a completely different tone and air passes over my vocal cords fine...I feel like I'm forcefully exhaling over a long period of time, trying to squeeze the pain out of my body. In the PTSD related triggers my body feels like it's clamping shut and trying to keep things in. I don't know, there's a distinct difference to me.
The traumatic aspects of his suicide are the things like time slowing and time passing but the time-slowing effect was because I already had PTSD at the time and I went into dissociating mode on scene, I guess in a way it protected me. The time passing thing I can't explain. It feels like it's only been a month in my mind but it's been a year and a month already, and time seems to be flying past me, like my mind isn't really registering the true passage of time itself and that is a trauma reaction. It almost seems like this trauma is actually being "coded" differently, like on a different level than my first trauma was.
I went into hyperventilating mode during the television show where the woman was shot last night because of the blood. It was the blood pouring out that was the trigger. The frantic efforts to stop it and pleading, those were just peripheral reminders that enhanced the reaction. In my mind I didn't actually picture my hubby dead because I don't know what that looked like but I did think of the day he died and that he was shot and possibly his blood poured out of him that way. But that too wasn't enough to cause a trauma reactive trigger and then this morning it hit me - blood pouring out, my initial trauma and the bloody water pouring across the floor, the possibility that I could lose the mother to a hemorrhage I couldn't see....blood pouring out. A double trauma reaction but at the heart of it was the initial trauma from years ago at work.
It's almost like my work now is to pull the two apart and disconnect all of the webs that string the two of them together. I have to go through each episode I have now and dissect them so that I can see where the distinction is between the original trauma and the second trauma. His suicide was a trauma, that is fact, but it is a different type of trauma, if that makes sense. It's more insult to injury, not to diminish it's effect on me but it's not the same kind of trauma that the original one was. The mind loves to make complex connections to things doesn't it?
I have memories of this past year. I remember the months after his death. I don't recall all of the details but I have a running play of the year. It doesn't seem like a year to me. The odd thing is that, since my first trauma, time has seemed to be skipping along without registering fully on me. It's been 9 years (in a week) since my initial trauma but to me, it feels like only two years. The memories of events since then are jumbled and non-sequential. I can't sequence my events in terms of guessing what year from now they'd happened but I can pinpoint that day without hesitation. This is how time is being recorded on me since my husband's suicide...another distinct waypoint along this timeline but everything before it seems jumbled and everything after it seems jumbled. When I'm 70, will I look back and remember my life at this point as trauma one and trauma two with nothing in between or more like, X happened but I'm not sure if it was before or after A trauma or B trauma...and how far apart were A trauma and B trauma.
Is that how life looks to everyone anyway at that age?
I woke up holding my hubby's "hand" this morning. I must have needed him at some point during the night. I miss him being there beside me. I can't believe I'm already a month into my second YEAR of living without him. In my head he was just here. He was just here. I don't understand yet. I just don't get it. How long until I can see him again?
