Sufferer Ptsd From Workplace Abuse

[intothelight]

@SabrinaB Welcome to the forum! Congratulations on taking the first step to post here. I hope you find the forum beneficial to your healing.

 

[garden]

I'd worked in hospital management for 20 years and survived some majorly hostile and toxic environments so expected to be able to get back up on my feet after the dust settled, but that didn't end up happening this time. Instead I slowly descended into this hell and have been trying to find my way out since.

I am particularly interested in somatic/ body symptoms because that's mainly what I have been struggling with

I "reinvented" myself because my PTSD symptoms defined my self image and I hated that weak little girl I thought I was.

@Sabrina, your words struck a cord for me. This site amazes me, because we share our stories out of the need to heal, and in doing so we give each other so much comfort. Thank you.

After I left home and began reinventing myself I enjoyed a certain amount of personal success and growth. I was in and out of therapy, I had been diagnosed, and the skills I learned in therapy helped immensely. I was highly functioning and no one had any idea what my struggles were. I walked around believing that I had been misdiagnosed because of how independent and functional I was. I am very disciplined and I took the time to give restore myself regularly through self care, and it really worked. I had few friends, and I appeared to be outgoing, but spent a lot of time alone in my apartment. I basically spent my 20's in survival mode, believing I was perfectly healtlhy minded, and none of the things that happened to me could touch me anymore. I was so mistaken.

My biggest struggles are my somatic issues. I just want my body to regulate itself properly like a body should. My body is uncooperative in this area, but I try to be forgiving with it by reminding myself of how well it has served me in other ways. For example, I had a textbook pregnancy, labor, and delivery with no interventions and no drugs. I was in labor for 6 hours and my daughter was born on the 3rd push (I had only pushed for 10 minutes). My doctor, who retired later that year, told me that he had never seen a first time birth that went so fast and smooth. Even though I had 4 consecutive miscarriages after having my daughter, I try to remind myself that I have created a life, and she's a miracle.

I slowly descended in to this state as well. For me, it was becoming a parent that started it all. Having this wonderful, and amazing experience of becoming a mother shifted something inside of me. I started to think about the things that happened to me in early childhood, and I could not fathom how anyone could treat an innocent child the way that I had been treated. My body began revolting, and I descended into hell.

You and I are not alone, and I thank you for sharing, and helping me gain some comfort in knowing this.

 

[Powder]

@Lewa, 100% total agreement to the above post. I'd like to "like" it 100 more times! Yes, yes, and yes.

My brain says, "Yup. There you were, Muse, thinking that somehow what your parents did was excusable, on some level. You must have been a challenge. Or some such excuse." But then this baby was born. Looking at my children, one a total angel another a right rugrat, neither of them in their worst moment deserves a 1/1000000000th of the treatment I got even one minute of it. Not acceptable.

This throws the trauma into a whole new light, this having a child thing. And how much love there is. So much it hurts. Makes all the unfinished hurt so much more.

 

[SabrinaB]

I am so moved by each of the responses received. The words are exquisitly beautiful and resonate with the part of me that I've lost touch with. I stepped away from the site for a day after posting anticipating a symptom backlash, but so far am doing better than anticipated. My body's response today though confirms that there is a potent force within me that gets activated whenever I try to express myself authentically in speech or with writing. Waves of emotion move through me and then a pressure rises up into my chest to my throat and settles there like a lump or blockage that cannot be bypassed. Not sure if anyone has experienced something similar?