Recently Diagnosed With PTSD, Now My Head's A Real Mess

[freakofnurture]

I haven't either, and I don't see that as a negative. :) My home is my sanctuary, it's the one place I can feel safe because I control all the variables within it (well, most of them anyway).

I've been living in this city for 8 years now, and there is no one, not a single person here, whom I'd even call an acquaintance. And the truth is, I don't miss anything.

I forgot the questions I wanted to ask you, anthony... Maybe I'll remember later.

 

[femaleveteran]

freakofnurture write:

I've been living in this city for 8 years now, and there is no one, not a single person here, whom I'd even call an acquaintance.

I am really sorry you do not have anyone freakofnurture. (I wish I knew what else to call you because I feel sort of bad callign you "freak" of anything since I do not feel you are a freak at all) I am back in my hometown after being gone many years (I have not even visited here since just after 9-11) and all the people I know are either gone or they, and I, have changed so much that we no longer have anything even remotely in common. I think one of the main problems and one of the primary reasons I stay away from many of them as well is the fact that the drug problem in this little rural community got really really horrible over the last10-15 years. I have been thoroughly amazed that it is now as nbad as it is here. Alot of the people I grew up with who never made it out of here are hooked on one or more drugs. Some of them I have heard are in prison and doing time. A few of the people I graduaed High School with who went to college are doing well I guess but they live in the bigger cities closer to Charleston and places like that. The ones who stayed who did not get good jobs working int he coal mines or working any other decent job have wound up in some pretty bad ways. It is so sad because many of the girls I played soccer with in High School and ran cross country with and all that, they are now mother to several children and have really not taken care of themselves and many of them have gotten involved with men who do not treat them well at all....most of the men are the ones doing the drugs while the wives are the ones who make sure they go down and get on the dole to keep a roof over their kids heads. Ihate to specualte but some of the husbands/boyfriends I think almost in some way force the women to have more kids because the more kids they have then the moer money they get from the state each month. One girl in particular who I played soccer with, she just had her fourth child and I have seen her at the gas station a few times since she had the littel boy and I ask her how things are going and I can tell just from the look in her eye that she probably did not want to have to child. But her husband is a worthless sack of crap who quit high school and has never worked a real job a day in his life.

Anyway, I kind of undersand how you feel about not really missing being around people. Most of the people I could be around here I would not really want to be around. I mean I do not see getting doped up and wasting my life away as something fun to do in my spare time with friends, know what I mean? So, even though I feel a sense of crushing lonliness alot of the time, I am not all that anxious to go out and get a bunch of friends either because there are really none that would be quality friends to be had.

On a positive note, one of the Vietnam Vets who is in the group I go to at the VA, he and his wife had me obver to their house right before Christmas for dinner. I remember not really wanting to go because I feel so weird around other people but I had a good time. Now he calls me every week, even though we see each other in group every week, and his wife calls me too. I have been able to talk to both of them a little bit about my Mom and what happened with her and I even told him and his wife about reading some of the stuff my mom write about me in her journals and all. They have not judged me in the least and have just been compassionate and empathetic. I think they feel a little bit close to me too because their own son is now deployed to Afghanistan and he will be coming home for leave in March but he has been gone the whole time I have known them. However, they do not ask me too many things about my own deployments or anything which is nice. I apprecaite that they do not ask for a lot of details. Then again, the veteran himself has been in many other PTSD groups and is alot more knowledgable about this illness than I am so I guess it makes sense that his boundaries are pretty good. Plus his wife has gone to spouse counseling to learn how to help him and how to deal with her own issues as they regard his PTSD. So tehy are both a lot more advanced in the whole healing process I guess you could say.

My point in tellling you about them is just to say that when my ex- left I thought I would just be content to not have anymore friends ever in life and that I would never care if anyone ever bothered to try to get to be my friend and I sure as heck was not going to put my self out there and try to be anyone else's friend either. However, when this guy invited me to his home around XMas, and I ended up getting to know both him and his wife, I find that I do care about the both of them. I look forward to group actually now because I know that I will get o see hima nd talk to him and I look forward to talking on the phone with them each week because then I also get to speak to his wife who is one of the nicest people I have met in a very very long time. I even talked with them this morning and they have already invited back over to their home to go camping....they own a bunch of land over in the neighboring county and they said I can come over and go camping by the river any time and I can also go fishing and all that. Plus they have a couple of horses so I can pack everything on the horse and get as deep into the woods as I can get if I want to. They have given me an all-access pass you might say.

I do not know if I will be horse back riding this summer over there if I get my last surgery but I know that it feels daggone nice to have at least two people in my life who know what I am going through but do not feel a need to have that fact alone be the basis of our friendship. They have shown an interest in getting to know me personally and I only hope they do not want anything in return. I mean you never really know with people these days but so far getting to know these people has been a good thing for me.

I sincerely hope that you will eventually find someone who you can talk to and who you really WANT to spend time around and all that. I know you say you do not miss it and I know I did not necessarily miss it but now that I have at least a couple of people in my life that are approaching me being able to define them as friends.....I know it feels prety daggone good. Like I said only time will tell, if they are legitimate friends or not but so far it is looking pretty good. Whenever we have even had a major snowstorm they have always called to make sure that i am okay and that I am not freezing if the power goes out (My House only has electric heat right now as I need to get the fireplace unsealed....My Mom went and had it sealed shut while she was living here for some reason so when the power goes out from a storm or something I do nt have any heat other than a little porpane heater I have). Mike, the veteran, has even called and offered to pick me up for group when the snow has been really bad and the roads are not great. And I mean it would be like 60 miles out of his way for him to come and pick me up. I have not had him do that but just the fact that he has called to offer feels really nice you know?

Again my point is that it might feel like you do not miss it right now but let someone special come into your life, and you will realize that you might be a little starved for some freindship. I think they nature of PTSD means people like you and me will always, at least in the back of our minds, be questioning what that "someone specials" motives might be for wanting to get to know is, but I personally have just tried to shove those suspicions otu fo my head when they come into my thoughts. It is not always easy because there is a big part of me that detests the idea of getting close to anyone, but these are good people I think and I do not want to really mess it up.

Anyway I hope one day that you will have some people you can spend time with and who understand and accept you for you. You seem to be a very kind and good person and from what I have seen from your sharing on here, it seems like you genuinely want to get better. So you deserve to have soe good people in your life. Heck, we all do to be honest. All of us deserve to have good people around us and to have people aroudn us who willl not hurt, betray use or abuse us. It is my wish that every single person on here finds someone/some people who are decent enough to be allowed into our lives. After a lifetime of getting kicked around and having tragedy to deal with, we all deserve some good right?

Anyway I don't know if much of what I said made any sense but I thinkk you re cool and I just was a little sad to knwo that you have lived somewhere for as long as you have and you do not feel like you have anyone at all. You deserve better'n that and I hope one day you get a chance, as well as give yourself a chance, to have someone good around you. it is not easy but I know if I can start becoming friends with two people I did not even know until just a few months ago then anything is possible. I mean I think it was easier to allow myself to get to know them because I have been in group with the guy but it still is a huge thing for me since I have not made any friends at all since getting out of the military. So do not give up hope that there are good people out there. It might take a while to find them but they are there. I personally have to believe that there are good people out there somewhere ebcause I am afraid that if I gave up that one hope then I would probably commit suicide....I mean if there really are no good people left in the world then it is surely doomed and what would be the point in continuing to live at that point? I don't know...that is just one hope I have to keep having some faith in no matter what.

Anyway sorry for such a long post. I just wanted to let you know that I understand how you are feeling but I also want you to know I think you are more than worthy of having people treat you right as well. I think I am one of the least lovable people in the world and if I can have even two people who seem to care about me then there is no reason why you should not have the same thing and even more.

 

[freakofnurture]

Dawn, thanks for your long, insightful post. It's nice of you to care so much :)

(Now follows a rambly post because I am too tired to edit it. I'm sure I have forgotten to adress some of the points in your post; I'll make up for that after some sleep.)

I never had more than one friend at a time and from 5th to 11th grade I had no friends at all (funny how my parents never noticed that...). There had been opportunities to make friends but I didn't take them. I remember feeling that spending time with people my age meant to waste that time. You know, for show and tell in 5th grade I read a passage from my then favourite book, 'Hotel Paradise' by Martha Grimes, and got into trouble with my physics teacher for reading 'The Name Of The Rose' and 'The Perfume' under the table in 7th grade. I consciously decided to not even try to fit in, because I knew I'd never succeed and I was disgusted by the superficial rules these children used to decide who's okay and who's an ass (namely clothes brands, knowledge of daily soaps and boy band fandom).
There's one childhood scene which kind of says it all: I had a friend in third grade, who, when I told her I wanted to cut my hair short, said: "If you do that, I won't be your friend anymore." The next day my hair was short because wtf is someone doing, calling herself my friend, if obviously my hairstyle is the only thing making her like me? She was the leader of the team who later mobbed me. I never saw the connection until recently.
So, I am used to being alone, and I have a long history of looking down on other people and snobbily deciding not to mix with those superficial plebeians.

My oldest friend E. kind of mirrors what you write about your home town. She's not doing drugs (working on her PhD, actually) but she's giving a lot of parties and mostly talks about how she had to invite that girl who she doesn't like because that other girl who she does like likes that girl and would be offended if she was not invited. When I ask her why she invites people to her parties who don't respect her right to have and act according to her own preferences in company, she just replied "Well, it's complicated..."
After that, she starts to gossip about the girl she doesn't like. I'm not completely opposed to gossipping, since I like to know what's happening around E., and I find it interesting to think about the motives of other people, their interaction and relationship styles etc. But E.'s gossiping has gotten more and more derisive, even malevolent, over the years, and I find it really hard not to explicitly point it out to her. I really, really, really do not like it at all when people badmouth others. I criticise people, I make fun of them, I look at them in arrogance or disgust, but I do not ever badmouth anyone (except maybe my abusers...). I just don't like it. It's a shabby thing to do.
So, E. feels increasingly strange to me. I mean, we never were that similar to begin with, but our differences were compatible or even complementing. We were a great team and I feel that I'm losing her to diverging personal growth.

In fourth grade I lost my best friend because she was angry with me for choosing to go to Gymnasium alone instead of going to Gesamtschule with her (I knew I wanted to go to university and I wanted to get the best preparation for that).
I lost another friend (around half a year after that) when she moved away with her family. I visited her a few times, but it just kind of... trailed off. When we saw each other again some years later on a parental birthday party, we had nothing to talk about. She's now living in Japan, studying to work in international economics.
Then there was the (99% online) friend with whom I wrote ~1500 pages of fanfic novels, only to realise later that we actually have nothing in common aside from writing and our particular fandom, and that she can be quite bitchy when she doesn't get the attention she wants or is forced to bear my stupid interest in science and philosophy. It was a total pain in the ass and it literally took me years of careful withdrawal to get out of that relationship without losing the stories we have written and still intend to publicise, once we've gotten around to proofreading them.
My current (online) friend appears to be in the process of becoming estranged, but I am not sure. I actively try to be accepting, since whatever bad decisions she makes in my opinion, they don't affect me at all. This uses up all the ressources that are left after the ones I need for my marriage are put safely aside.

I lost friends to my decisions and I lost/am losing them to differences and time. With exception of the friend who's now in Japan it never bothered me (her moving bothered me, the trailing off didn't). I just don't do that funny 'bonding' stuff that you humans keep referring to.
Information and evaluation of my perceptions/ideas, that's all I want from other people, and it's so much easier to get that on the internet than in meat space. I stare at people when they talk, can't hold eye contact while I reply and I recoil while uttering mid-level volume gutturals of disapproval when someone other than my husband dares to touch me. I feel out of place and threatened when I'm with other people.

tl;dr:
Maybe I'd want to have one or even multiple friends who I actually know in real life if I could see the use in putting up with all the conflicts that neccessarily come with social stuff.

BTW, my name is Christine. But since I feel kind of comfy here, everybody is allowed to call me Tiny, which is my nickname in real life. *officially announce*

 

[femaleveteran]

Well nice to meet you Tiny. I doubt any of us do that weird "bonding" thing very well. The military is not conducive to alot of bonding for many people because they are so transient in that they will move most people every couple of years. However with me having been airborne qualified and started out at Ft. Bragg and the 82nd ABN DIV, I was able to do all my time in that division in one unit or another for 15 out of the 17 years I was in the Army. I think the more specialized thhat you are in the military then the more relationships you are able to form.

Kids can definitely be cruel there is no doubt about that. I take it you are from Europe somewhere right.....if you have mentioned it in a past post and I am not recalling it please forgive me. I slept only for about two hours and just woke up with a headache and cannot get back to sleep. Anyway, I thought that maybe bullying in school was an American thing but I guess it is sad to see that it might be a worldwide phenomenon. I am sorry you had to go through that as a child. Things are hard enough for kids, especially when they come from abusive backgrounds without school and other children being one more tough thing for them to have to deal with.

I care about everyone who is on here and who has helped me. Like I said you have also helped me so I would like to think I can help you. However with some of these more difficult stories I really do not know what to say or even what advice to offer as I am still so new to this recovery process myself. I am sorry I do not have anymore insightful words to offer other than to say that I hope, as I said before, that one day you will find peope who do care and give a crap about you.

What has been amazing me every since watching that other guys video online here at this forum and now hearing that you are an aspiring published writer is the level of creeativity among those of us with PTSD. there are some really creative minds at work in this place and that is really cool to see. I hope that maybe your writing is some kind of positive outlet for you to indulge in?

Anyway I am going to go for now as my head does really hurt a bit and I need to take something for it and I know I wont make any sense if i try to write to much, but I say again I hope that you will find some people in life that you can trust who will treat you with the respect and dignity you deserve. We all deserve that in my opinion.

You take care tiny and I will look forward to hearing more from you soon.
Dawn

 

[freakofnurture]

I doubt any of us do that weird "bonding" thing very well.

That's surely true.

Kids can definitely be cruel there is no doubt about that. I take it you are from Europe somewhere right... ... Anyway, I thought that maybe bullying in school was an American thing but I guess it is sad to see that it might be a worldwide phenomenon.

I'm from Germany. And it's okay to have missed that ;)
Sadly, teenagers are teenagers, no matter what cultural background they come from. Cruel group behaviour is a feature of this age; the ongoing neurological development in the teen years allows the kids to soon develop strong opinions and values - just like adults - but they don't yet think analytically/critically enough to really evaluate these opinions and values. And they especially lag behind in empathy (for example: teens can't identify fear on adult faces) and they're more on the level of five year olds when it comes to the quality of their emotional processing.
Teens aren't as bad as their reputation, though, I want to stress that. They're good and often active people who care deeply about the people who are part of their in-group. They're just not finished at becoming empathic, accepting and productively self-critical, so you reeeally don't want to be part of a teenage out-group.
I really hope that this fact will be reflected into school concepts some time. There's nothing you can do about the succession in teenage brain development, but outsiders could be protected a lot better from the social effects of it.

I am sorry I do not have anymore insightful words to offer other than to say that I hope, as I said before, that one day you will find peope who do care and give a crap about you.

It's okay :) Thank you.

I hope that maybe your writing is some kind of positive outlet for you to indulge in?

My T doesn't think so, but I find it rewarding to use my knowledge about how it feels to live with PTSD/CPTSD to build life-like traumatised characters and promote understanding for people like us.
Writing also gives me a very good reason to really carefully look at how other people experience things, how the inner logic of their emotions works, how they reason with themselfs etc.
The most fascinating parts for me are the inconsistencies in the inner life of people. It's never completely stringent, never quite following rational logic, and there are so many exceptions, special conditions and so on... To make a character really life-like, you have to reproduce such inconsistencies inside the inner logic, but tailored to merge with the overall workings of the character.
It's great social practice for me, because by now I can fake empathy pretty well and ask helpful questions when my husband or my friend comes to me with confused emotions.

Anyway I am going to go for now as my head does really hurt a bit and I need to take something for it and I know I wont make any sense if i try to write to much, but I say again I hope that you will find some people in life that you can trust who will treat you with the respect and dignity you deserve. We all deserve that in my opinion.

Thank you. I hope your head got better :)

 

[femaleveteran]

Dont worry about what your therpaist thinks so much.....I am one to talk though. I am seriously going through some doubt tonight as to whether to continue posting and learning (Especially learning) from this forum... I had a long talk with the facilitator of the groupI go to at the VA today about this forum and how much I think I am learning from it even questioning her a bit because of the fact that I have several diagnosis on my mental health record and according to what I have learned here they all (Major Depression, being at least "half" diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder as she put it because I am so socially isolated....i dont have the lack of feeling or empathy towards others that schizoid personality disordered people apparently have but I am extremely socially islated so the VA docs threw that on there a few months ago too, along with Acute Anxiety Disorder) fall under the scope of PTSD. She said that was not right and that multiple diagnoses are common and that they do not all fall under PTSD. So she said that what I am learning on here to her frame of mind is more what she termed as "Pop Psychology" and she said I should not be taking it all so seriously and all that.

I have been thinking that maybe I should not be posting on here or reading so much from here. I must say that with the wealth of information I have found since coming to this forum and also to the Combat forum, my mind has been racing quite a lot but more with just trying to figure out some things and not wiith "bad stuff" necessarily.. However I do not know....maybe she is right and maybe I should not be on here so much. But hey it is getting me out of my shell and I should think that would be half the battle....but like I said I do not know. Some of what she said made sense. Maybe I am so starved for human interaction right now that I have viewed this as a viable solution to that problem. I mean I never thought I would ever have been the type of person to have formed such an attachment online with any type of forum. The only place I ever really cruised on the internet was a place called cheaper than dirt because I used to get stuff for the field from there when I was in the military. Other than that all I ever did before was play chess and poker on line and check my email.

Now I find I am popping in to this forum or the combat one several times a day to check things out and see if there is anything new to read and all that. She says I should try to focus only on one modality of therapy for now and that should be the group I go to and that I run the risk of allwoing myself to become too overwhelmed by information that I might not be able to handle it all. that made me feel like a total mental weakling. I have always been a curious person by nature and I guess maybe she is right that my curiousity is in a dangerous place (if that is even possible....I never thought being curious about ones own situation could be detrimental....but again now I am not sure) and I could get overwhelmed but I thrive on learning too.....and I especially want to learn about this PTSD because they are not teaching me much about it in group .....not as much as I am learning through this place.

Again I dont know. I too feel like I have begun to not feel so slef-centered with this illness as a result of coming here and to the other forum because I am seeing that I am not alone in my experiences with this illness and with the trauma that caused it. However maybe I am too fragile or something. Again and I HATE being repetitive but I do not know if maybe she is not correct.

Plus I told her I was not sure about my meds and that is in large part due to reading more about medications on here and on other random sites that talk about psychiatric meds. that really frustrated her. However I feel that the VA relies to much on psychopharmacology to address us veterans when we come to them "broke". I feel that they want more than a large percentage of their own work to be addressed by just giving us a pill so the minute that you tell them that the meds might not be working or that you might need more than just a pill, then they get a little bit ansy because then I think they feel like you want them to actually make room in their already overburdened schedules for you. I do not expect that from them. I learned a while ago that I should not have any expectatioons of the US government at all much less any department or agency representing any part of it.

Sorry, I have just been thinking about this alot tonight and I finally decided to write something abotu what happened today when I saw that your therapist does not agree with you about what you think might be working for you either.
I will shut up now.

Yeah my head feels a little better thanks for asking.:rolleyes:

 

[freakofnurture]

... I am extremely socially islated so the VA docs threw that on there a few months ago too, along with Acute Anxiety Disorder) fall under the scope of PTSD. She said that was not right and that multiple diagnoses are common and that they do not all fall under PTSD.

Just a quick reply because I am supposed to sleep now; I'll reply to the rest tomorrow.
1. *schizo high-five* I got that diagnosis, too, once upon a time :D Combined personality disorder with paranoid, narcissistic, depressed and schizoid components. Like a boss!
2. As a psych minor: Psychology isn't a 'hard', exact science like physics, but rather a 'soft' science - sometimes even bordering on the humanities - that deals with propabilities rather than fixed numbers. And when it comes to finding diagnoses, psychology is even more problematic than medicine. The research is working out its definitions of disorders while being in constant interaction with convoluted social concepts of what constitutes a psychological disorder and a number of opposing schools of psychological thought; and the application of these definitions in practice... don't get me started.
So, don't be too hard on that lady; I'm sure she's doing her best and doesn't intend to confuse you :)
3. However, a correct diagnosis is neccessary for you to get the right treatment. You have to be able to identify with your diagnosis, and if PTSD 'feels' better, go with that.
There are standardised questionnaires designd to do a differential diagnosis of PTSD. Maybe you can find out where such test psychology (I translated that from the German term Testpsychologie for which there are no entries in my trusty dictionary) is conducted in your area (hospital maybe). Some short forms can be found online, too, but I wouldn't trust these too much.
4. And that concludes tiny's hour of 'Well, I think you should...' :D Good night, and rock on.

 

[freakofnurture]

Dont worry about what your therpaist thinks so much.....

:) Nah, I'm a rebel.

I am one to talk though. I am seriously going through some doubt tonight as to whether to continue posting and learning (Especially learning) from this forum...

Maybe you could focus on chatty threads that are not so heavy on the PTSD and information aspect?
If this is one of the places where you can get out of you shell, as you said, I feel it would be sad to give it up completely.

that made me feel like a total mental weakling. I have always been a curious person by nature and I guess maybe she is right that my curiousity is in a dangerous place

Too much reading and thinking about PTSD can trigger me. So, I object to the term 'weakling' in this context ;) I try to listen better to my body to stop reading before my symptoms start acting up.
If you don't feel any negative consequences of ingesting so much information, I think it's not that likely that it's too much for you.

I learned a while ago that I should not have any expectatioons of the US government at all much less any department or agency representing any part of it.

Oh, but don't you know that it's evil socialism when a government actually is of service for its people? *sarkasm drip drip drip*
Are you still on your first med or have you tried several? I had to go through three useless ones until one finally worked.

Yeah my head feels a little better thanks for asking.

Glad to hear that :)

 

[seedling]

FV,
I, too, have questioned being on the forum. Especially at first. I read like a maniac and my head was spinning trying to digest it all.
I've found it to be helpful in addition to therapy. It fills a spot that therapy doesn't.
I find now that I am on quite a bit sometimes (like this weekend) and other times I'm not. I go with how I feel about it. I find that I can get right back into the flow if I am off for a few days.
I know that there are people on here who had their therapists recommend this site. I think that people have a knee-jerk reaction when you say you are getting info on line. Like it's a rant and rave session all the time.
A therapist should be able to discuss different points of view with you and accept your need for what you find useful.

 

[freakofnurture]

I was out in the city on saturday to have my public transportation abo terminated. This was my first outing that week and everything went really well with me not having forgotten to load my iPod's battery and all. Standing in line wasn't particularly pleasant but for once the 'visualise your personal bubble' exercise did actually help and I could easily distract myself by working a bit on the design of the little guardian demon that I picture sitting on my head and hissing at people. Still needs a name, that beast. I thought, maybe Hisser, but that sounds a lot like Pisser ô.o

It's frustrating that I can deal okay with having people around, just not on two days in a row. Or more than two days a week. Why do I need so much alone time to recover?
I should get used to being around people. My out-patient T tried a long time to get me to practice going out so that I don't 'unlearn' bearing other people. So when I was in in-patient treatment, I forced myself to go to every group therapy, even after they allowed me to skip some of the sessions if I didn't 'feel like' attending. I only ever skipped the courses led by nursing staff and used that time to sleep. Actually, I slept nearly 18 hours on some days. But I didn't get used to the group situation in any way. My in-patient T there acted surprised when I told her that.
I guess it's because I don't see that nothing bad happens while I'm exposed to the objects of my phobia. In fact, everything that I fear happened: People were alienated by me, interpreted my neutral behaviour negatively, I had to explain and justify why I seemed so scared and why I wasn't hanging around with them all the f*cking time, and thus made people think about me, not to talk about the emotions of irritation, anger, alienation, pity etc. that were directed at me.

Thinking about it I came to the conclusion that, before I can begin to get rid of my fear of people, I have to learn how to act more socially competent and adjusted, how to avoid conflict with its dreaded forced closeness and how to resolve situations that I feel are threatening without making myself even more vulnerable.