Sourceress
New Here
I am 56, a woman who has just recently discovered there is a name for what I have been experiencing. I was abused violently as a child, sold into the sex trade when I left my violent home as a young girl, shot 3x in the head at 22. I had children at 30 and 36 and turned my life around with a series of relationships and then I completed my education and got a Ba degree while raising 5 teenagers, 4 girls and 1 boy. When the last child left and I remarried, I immersed myself in getting my husband to his dream of being an Anglican minister so it was astonishing to me to discover that he had been cheating on me the entire marriage. I left him, totally unprepared. Homeless and broke, my world crashed down around me and I could hardly walk. For a year I couchsurfed, carcamped and finally when the ex took the car back, I had to go to assistance for help. I had heard that PTSD was a blanket term for someone like me who had suffered numerous traumas and started to learn that I was able to get help, to quit feeling like a failure and to stop feeling like I had to 'find a job'. I was a wreck!
I moved to a small rural community, realizing the city holds too many loose cannons to trigger me, got rid of my tv and started a walking/cycling regime that got me down 8o lbs and restored me to mobility at least once a day. I still spend my evenings too stiff to move much, but I work diligently to make sure that I do weight bearing movement daily to keep my immune system optimal and to not slide out of where I am vis a vis core strength. I am now getting medical help in the form of Seratonin Reuptake inhibitors that have put a muzzle on the horrid negative critical voice in my head that runs an never ending dialogue of how useless I am, and that has cut way back on the extreme responses from being triggered. (Bursting into tears unexpectedly is the most common response, followed by stiffness/head ache/ nausea or a combination of all of them)
I have started in therapy as of yesterday. Imagine my relief when she says 'Stop taking care of others, be good to yourself, quit trying to do so much. Be gentle.'
Imagine my amazement when my new therapist asked me what kind of books I was trying to read, when I told her that the mere act of trying to read a book made me nauseous within seconds. I told her feminist literature mostly. She said 'It doesn't surprise you that you have spent your life in the worst belly of the misogynist beast, and you don't make the association to exposing yourself to the inequities of gender disparity in our culture as being a trigger?' Then she went on to say that when we are triggered, we can release a chemical into our gut that makes us feel sick to our stomachs. I already knew that being startled causes me to stiffen as if my joints flood with lactic acid or worse, sand... and sometimes that stiffness sinks into my back and extremities, and lasts for days. Sometimes the booming in my ears is enough to begin the triggering as the carotid vein snakes past my eardrum in uneven undulations, unsettling at best, triggering at worst. I also knew that my fight or flight endorphins flood my system when I am triggered and when unable to turn the phenomena off, I wind up with a descent into vulnerability that almost infanticizes me but I did not know that even though I try to protect myself from being where triggers happen (loud noises, city traffic, gunshots, loud video games, tv shows), the triggers sneak in from unsuspected places.
In hindsight, I also realize that my more dysfunctional relationships, which I clung to out of need, were with men who in their own ptsd, would trigger me deliberately so that they could keep the upper hand and control ME, especially in ways such as 'feminist baiting', terrible loud programs on the tv and yelling where accusing fingers and swearing is directed at me.
So glad to be acquiring clarity. I'm not in the belly of the beast any more.
I moved to a small rural community, realizing the city holds too many loose cannons to trigger me, got rid of my tv and started a walking/cycling regime that got me down 8o lbs and restored me to mobility at least once a day. I still spend my evenings too stiff to move much, but I work diligently to make sure that I do weight bearing movement daily to keep my immune system optimal and to not slide out of where I am vis a vis core strength. I am now getting medical help in the form of Seratonin Reuptake inhibitors that have put a muzzle on the horrid negative critical voice in my head that runs an never ending dialogue of how useless I am, and that has cut way back on the extreme responses from being triggered. (Bursting into tears unexpectedly is the most common response, followed by stiffness/head ache/ nausea or a combination of all of them)
I have started in therapy as of yesterday. Imagine my relief when she says 'Stop taking care of others, be good to yourself, quit trying to do so much. Be gentle.'
Imagine my amazement when my new therapist asked me what kind of books I was trying to read, when I told her that the mere act of trying to read a book made me nauseous within seconds. I told her feminist literature mostly. She said 'It doesn't surprise you that you have spent your life in the worst belly of the misogynist beast, and you don't make the association to exposing yourself to the inequities of gender disparity in our culture as being a trigger?' Then she went on to say that when we are triggered, we can release a chemical into our gut that makes us feel sick to our stomachs. I already knew that being startled causes me to stiffen as if my joints flood with lactic acid or worse, sand... and sometimes that stiffness sinks into my back and extremities, and lasts for days. Sometimes the booming in my ears is enough to begin the triggering as the carotid vein snakes past my eardrum in uneven undulations, unsettling at best, triggering at worst. I also knew that my fight or flight endorphins flood my system when I am triggered and when unable to turn the phenomena off, I wind up with a descent into vulnerability that almost infanticizes me but I did not know that even though I try to protect myself from being where triggers happen (loud noises, city traffic, gunshots, loud video games, tv shows), the triggers sneak in from unsuspected places.
In hindsight, I also realize that my more dysfunctional relationships, which I clung to out of need, were with men who in their own ptsd, would trigger me deliberately so that they could keep the upper hand and control ME, especially in ways such as 'feminist baiting', terrible loud programs on the tv and yelling where accusing fingers and swearing is directed at me.
So glad to be acquiring clarity. I'm not in the belly of the beast any more.
