Hey guys, I'm Gabe. I've had PTSD for about the last 4 months now, and it's all a bit new to me. Before the age of 18 (i'm 22 now), I had never even known what anxiety felt like until i had to ask my girlfriend why i couldn't breathe so easily and why i was worrying about everything while this was happening.
What I didn't know was that back then, that was my anxiety in its infancy. I had no idea that severe anxiety or panic attacks were so crippling and debilitating, until i started experiencing them about 4 months ago, with the added bonus of vivid flashbacks, and on occasion, i feel like my mind and my body become two COMPLETELY separate entities, and i will lose track of time for up to 5 hours (that's the longest so far).
My own personal journey to get to therapy wasn't easy. 4 months ago, I felt like my mind was fractured. I witnessed (what i consider to be) police brutality while on the job as a security officer. The incident itself was fine at the time, and it wasn't until about 2 or 3 weeks later when i started to think about what happened, and then what happened 10 years ago resurfaced. At that point, I had already quit my job, citing health reasons, but the absolute truth was that I felt like I was being mistreated there. If I asked for a day off, they would be very nice about it at first, but then they would put me on shift rotations that are 8 hours on, 8 hours off, for days at a time, and they would hold the fact that i asked for a day off against me. So I left.
It took a solid 3 months of mentally training and retraining myself to understand that I needed help. I've been in a "slump" before, and that's what my mother (abusive, btw) described my mood as, and told me that the solution to this was to just find another job. I had a very hard time articulating to her that I couldn't actually physically work. I have WAY too many triggers that are WAY too common in the every day world that send my anxiety to an 8 or 9, or in the worst cases, full blown panic with flashbacks and dissociation. That's what I rank as a 10.
The catch with my PTSD is that my trauma happened 10 years ago. I'll be honest, I can't remember anything before the age of 14 due to a different trauma, so there are a lot of memories that have been buried. Only recently have I been able to find out that the trauma that my PTSD is mostly caused by a trip i took to Pakistan when I was 12, to visit family. I'm extremely embarrassed that what happened is still affecting me 10 years later, so it's kinda hard to talk about.
I have a running list of triggers that i wrote down on my phone, and i'm finding new ones on an almost daily basis. I feel incredibly frustrated with myself at almost all times, because I can't do things that I want to do or need to do. Sometimes when I shower on a bad day, I exit the shower almost screaming (i can't vocalize when i panic), because getting my feet wet is a trigger on bad days.
I play (or used to, at least) a TON of PC games, but I can't really bring myself to play the majority of them anymore. At first, it was because I simply lost interest due to the depressive aspect of PTSD, but then it became something more. I noticed that I had a hard time with games with two teams, and a winner-loser outcome. For some reason, I see this as a moral issue (the inevitable outcome of a winner and a loser throws a logic bomb at my brain, and I can't play anymore). It extends to more than just video games, obviously. The constant thought of right and wrong courses through my mind and body, and my morality just feels damaged in general.
To explain that a bit further, I wanted to be a police officer out of high school. Ever since I was 13 or so, I had an attraction towards jobs that operated on justice and fairness. Seeing those officers kick that man so many times made me completely lose faith in the justice system, and now every time i see a police officer, my whole body gets cold, i feel a surge run down my neck and spine, and the room seems to get 100x smaller.
I understand and appreciate the fact that not all officers are like this, and I do respect the LEOs out there who are just trying to do their jobs. I recognize that these feelings are irrational, but unfortunately, I have lost the ability to regulate what I think and what I feel. When I had my bouts depression, it would mostly be solved by a retraining of my thinking and general mentality. I had to go through that entire process of retraining myself just to GET to therapy this time. I've never had to fight myself as hard as I do now.
But hey, one cool thing about this whole thing is that I spent about 20 minutes this morning laughing because what's been happening to me sounds like the origin story for a poorly written marvel villain: "i'm a man who has flashbacks to Pakistan, with a broken sense of morality" lmao.
What I didn't know was that back then, that was my anxiety in its infancy. I had no idea that severe anxiety or panic attacks were so crippling and debilitating, until i started experiencing them about 4 months ago, with the added bonus of vivid flashbacks, and on occasion, i feel like my mind and my body become two COMPLETELY separate entities, and i will lose track of time for up to 5 hours (that's the longest so far).
My own personal journey to get to therapy wasn't easy. 4 months ago, I felt like my mind was fractured. I witnessed (what i consider to be) police brutality while on the job as a security officer. The incident itself was fine at the time, and it wasn't until about 2 or 3 weeks later when i started to think about what happened, and then what happened 10 years ago resurfaced. At that point, I had already quit my job, citing health reasons, but the absolute truth was that I felt like I was being mistreated there. If I asked for a day off, they would be very nice about it at first, but then they would put me on shift rotations that are 8 hours on, 8 hours off, for days at a time, and they would hold the fact that i asked for a day off against me. So I left.
It took a solid 3 months of mentally training and retraining myself to understand that I needed help. I've been in a "slump" before, and that's what my mother (abusive, btw) described my mood as, and told me that the solution to this was to just find another job. I had a very hard time articulating to her that I couldn't actually physically work. I have WAY too many triggers that are WAY too common in the every day world that send my anxiety to an 8 or 9, or in the worst cases, full blown panic with flashbacks and dissociation. That's what I rank as a 10.
The catch with my PTSD is that my trauma happened 10 years ago. I'll be honest, I can't remember anything before the age of 14 due to a different trauma, so there are a lot of memories that have been buried. Only recently have I been able to find out that the trauma that my PTSD is mostly caused by a trip i took to Pakistan when I was 12, to visit family. I'm extremely embarrassed that what happened is still affecting me 10 years later, so it's kinda hard to talk about.
I have a running list of triggers that i wrote down on my phone, and i'm finding new ones on an almost daily basis. I feel incredibly frustrated with myself at almost all times, because I can't do things that I want to do or need to do. Sometimes when I shower on a bad day, I exit the shower almost screaming (i can't vocalize when i panic), because getting my feet wet is a trigger on bad days.
I play (or used to, at least) a TON of PC games, but I can't really bring myself to play the majority of them anymore. At first, it was because I simply lost interest due to the depressive aspect of PTSD, but then it became something more. I noticed that I had a hard time with games with two teams, and a winner-loser outcome. For some reason, I see this as a moral issue (the inevitable outcome of a winner and a loser throws a logic bomb at my brain, and I can't play anymore). It extends to more than just video games, obviously. The constant thought of right and wrong courses through my mind and body, and my morality just feels damaged in general.
To explain that a bit further, I wanted to be a police officer out of high school. Ever since I was 13 or so, I had an attraction towards jobs that operated on justice and fairness. Seeing those officers kick that man so many times made me completely lose faith in the justice system, and now every time i see a police officer, my whole body gets cold, i feel a surge run down my neck and spine, and the room seems to get 100x smaller.
I understand and appreciate the fact that not all officers are like this, and I do respect the LEOs out there who are just trying to do their jobs. I recognize that these feelings are irrational, but unfortunately, I have lost the ability to regulate what I think and what I feel. When I had my bouts depression, it would mostly be solved by a retraining of my thinking and general mentality. I had to go through that entire process of retraining myself just to GET to therapy this time. I've never had to fight myself as hard as I do now.
But hey, one cool thing about this whole thing is that I spent about 20 minutes this morning laughing because what's been happening to me sounds like the origin story for a poorly written marvel villain: "i'm a man who has flashbacks to Pakistan, with a broken sense of morality" lmao.
