Too Damaged?

[OKRADLAK]

I often wonder if there is a point at which a sufferer is beyond relationships.

I always have an impending sense like the end is near. I met a very nice person not too long ago. At first, it felt good just to know them and they seemed to like me, too. I was not even thinking about liking in terms of romantically.

But we clicked and I was feeling bad. My PTSD went up. And then I realized why. Any time I feel a chance at happiness, I feel that it's even worse because my time is short. I start to think how I COULD have been happy and then I end up more unhappy than before.

As many of you know, this is not just in my head, ie attitude. I sustained some damage that is painful. It has to be monitored, etc. It seems i can manage it alone if I just think I can go off to an ice flow and die if they say my time is close,

But when I am threatened with happiness, it is all too much to handle.

Did this make any sense at all? This is what I mean when I say, "Bad is good and good is bad"

How unbearable to have happiness that comes to late, as a philosopher once put it. Better none, than that which comes when it is too late to enjoy it.

So I am just wondering if anyone understand and how a carer would feel about someone in this situation?

 

[Kintsugi]

(((OKRAD)))

I don't tell him.
But a lot of the time when I'm crying,
and my fiance thinks it's for no reason,
it's because I can't stop this feeling that everything is going to end.

 

[curiouser]

I think it's an illusion that happiness is based on our circumstances, I think it's something we can choose to feel at anytime regardless of our circumstances. Even someone who is dying can choose to feel love and happiness or despair and fear up to their last breath.

What is it about the pain and feelings of impending end that make you hold on to it? What purpose is it serving you to feel this way, to believe and think this way? Protection? Sense of identity?

 

[OKRADLAK]

Hi Curious......I am curious! LOL!! I have heard that said before, that people choose to be unhappy.

Who would choose that? Who would anyone choose to be unhappy over being happy? Someone would have to be very weak or very stupid to stand in front of a mirror and choose that. I am neither.

Humans beings have a very difficult time with the notion that things are not in their control. Especially something of such importance as happiness.

Buddhists have a little more handle on it, watching the moods with no judgments. The feeling of unhappiness without any judgements linked to it is.......just a strange chemical feeling.

That is what it is. It is a feeling. I am not clinging onto it. I am not pushing it away. I am just saying how it feels and how it interferes with my ability to connect.

I understand that is a new psycho-pop idea, but most psychologists with higher degrees give human beings the benefit of greater intellect than to want to be unhappy. It is like saying that poor people like to be poor.

 

[Kintsugi]

I'm going into this admitting it may not make sense to anyone but me.

This whole wanting to be unhappy scenario, it makes me think of teaching rock climbing. If the kids aren't falling, they're not working hard enough and should be bumped up to something tougher. If they are falling a lot and... unconvincingly, they are not applying themselves at all. Both sets of students are falling, but half of them are falling because they are trying so hard, the others fall because they aren't working. The idea is that the first group has chosen something that they are not sure they can accomplish but are trying to. The others would maybe fall or maybe make it were they engaged--who knows? But they are not willing to try, and after a while, it seems these kids climb just to fall.

So... I think that some people struggling with PTSD are pushing themselves to heal, sometime failing but trying again. A smaller set of people struggling maybe get themselves into self-defeating cycles. I want to do X. I am trying to do X. But I will probably fail at X, so I should just throw in the towel now and lick my wounds. I honestly think this is part of self-abandonment.

In any case, OKRAD, it doesn't sound like a bad idea to dismantle the associations to "happiness" you have and to just experience it as a chemical reaction. Because if you can dismantle those associations, you can make your own happiness, and perhaps you can destroy these fears better?

 

[curiouser]

"Who would anyone choose to be unhappy over being happy?"

I think that is a great question, I'm not sure we are always consciously aware of our choice. I also believe there are benefits to negative attitudes and feelings. For example (I could be way off here) maybe the impending feeling of the end keeps you safe, a protective way of keeping you from living your life, which could put you at risk for more trauma.

I had a post on my old blog on happiness, it's an interesting read.
[DLMURL]http://www.ptsdforum.org/c/threads/happiness.13589/[/DLMURL]

I think thoughts are usually the cause of our feelings negative or positive.

 

[OKRADLAK]

I can see you have put a lot of thought into this, Curious! Thinking is good!:) I do as much as I can!

I think, personally, if one is not aware of a choice, it's not really a choice, though. If I wake up in Vegas married, well, it would soon be grounds for anullment! haaa.

I DO think, we get into ruts. The brain goes on auto. Like I keep choosing to sleep, but my brain will not let me make that choice. Grrrr.

Also, like Anti said, if I read it right, that we try so hard we just fail!

But at least we are all trying so hard. I am glad we can discuss this and get new ideas. It really can help jar us out of ruts. If this is a ruts, I can get out, if it is chemical, then maybe I just need meds. :(

 

[Poppycocteau]

OKRADLAK - I associate very strongly with this:

But we clicked and I was feeling bad. My PTSD went up. And then I realized why. Any time I feel a chance at happiness, I feel that it's even worse because my time is short.

My PTSD comes from the serious illness of my best friend, and so seems to be connected with his vulnerability rather than my own. We live together, and whenever he goes out, I worry and worry about him being killed somehow, because what I have learned from the trauma is that he could be taken from me at any time, and I am hypervigilant in case of this. Paradoxically, I care so much about something happening to him that we end up arguing more than if I was relaxed, thus ruining the (short, as far as I am concerned) time we do have together. I also have this strange complex about there being a sort of malevolent spirit waiting for me to put a foot wrong so that it has an excuse to kill Adam, which results in obsessive behaviour: "If I don't do this, then The Creature will judge me to not appreciate my life/Adam enough, and ruin it for me" . . . kind of like the 'Saw' movies.

It all really frustrates me too because I feel trapped somewhat in that the trauma leads me not to appreciate the fact that things are actually fine, and therefore I feel intrinsically ungrateful. If I'm honest, Adam himself is in fact a big trigger for me . . . but this is a lot better than it was a few years ago, and I won't let the PTSD win.

 

[incongruent]

"I'm going to die before I'm thirty" is pretty much a line everyone who has ever gotten close to me- has heard. and I have a plethora of reasons why it is likely. It's something I set out on the table- so that they realize that I don't live my life thinking 20 years in advance.

I spent a while just being miserable over it. But recently, a good friend taught me something. "If you don't live to thirty- it makes the time you have left all the more meaningful of a sentimental scale, and all the less meaningful in the 'Think of your future' way." Sometimes I'll get cycling and he'll put a hand on my shoulder and just say something like, "D.... We give you permission to be happy." and that's what it really is. Permission to not worry about whether or not I've saved enough children, and just take a moment for myself before I explode.

Sometimes we have to look at life as a situation by situation basis.

 

[OKRADLAK]

Poppy and Incongruent......wow! Everytime I come on here I cannot understand how PTSD makes us feel so much alike. I am NEVER alone here.

Poppy----you hit it on the head. God! That idea of a curse or something. It's an ancient belief, that of bad spirits. It's also an ancient theory that our mind makes them up, so I have no idea, but I understand. I say to "it" over and over, "You are a f*cking liar" and it keeps lying, telling me to do this or that or something else. It is not an actually voice. It is more like an urge or necessity that becomes a voice in my head.And I ignore it, but not always, It does not tell me to hurt myself or anyone, but tells me, "Do this NOW!" Like drink this tea fast NOW and you will be OK.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!LIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It is a damn liar because I have done what it said many times and sh*t happened anyway, so that is a peak into my twisted PTSD brain trying to get through a horrible life.

Incongruent.......Ever since I was 13 I felt I was going to die before my time. I got sick early and I did hold out for a while, but after my second trauma, my body broke down. Widespread pain and can't eat anything, losing weight, mania, no sleep, platelets started to fall, like it all hit at once.

So the Dr thinks I am on the cusp of a lovely autoimmune disease. I know how it started. It was not random. a LOT of people I know with PTSD get them. The body and mind basically stays in shock and it wears out. It works against us. It wants to die even if we choose to live.

I fight every day, but seriously, when the mind AND body go, it's a b*tch.

I made it through another sleepless night and now must face another day like those people who have that weird prion disease and can never sleep. So I made it through...........to face more pain...........Yes it is worth it for my family. That is the only reason I even try to face this monstrous life.

 

[Tinyflame]

Please try to break it down into 'moments' or each day OKRADLAK. Your family needs you and loves you and some of this will pass.

I agree with curiouser that circumstances alone do not determine happiness or lack thereof.

I'm just wondering, maybe part of what is reinforcing is that to go against it, is as you said in a way OKRADLAK and PoppyC, like tempting fate? Not so much a decision, but a fear based on conditioning. I just know that for myself horrible things happened at extremely happy/ relaxed times, so I cringe at some level waiting for an axe to fall when I am.

And yet, realistically speaking, I can't stop bad things from happening by not allowing myself to be happy or relaxed, either.
(And yet of course to do so actually makes me less relaxed, because of the fear! For now, anyway.)

Also, (just speaking for myself), I fear adopting some new thoughts that are different from what I think (of myself) because I'm afraid that they are wrong/ don't apply to me, and then I will be living and basing my decisions on some sort of ~denial.

 

[Tosh]

For me, unhappiness is just familiar, it's what I felt most of my life. I lived through a traumatizing childhood, then it just continued. I chose an abusive man to be with, it was familiar. It's like I was wired wrong. I thought him treating my badly was love, I felt sorry for him, I thought that feeling was love. I just now for the first time in my life figuring out what happiness really is. Trying new things, is how I found what makes me happy, cause I really didn't get it. It was scary for me cause, when I did feel happy at first, it made me feel guilty, like I didn't deserve it. I tended to self sabotage. I was so scared when I did feel happy at first, scared that it would just get ruined, like someone was going to take it away from me. That's how I was treated when I was young, that's what I was used to. Today, I try my best to just stay in the moment. Right now, I have this moment. I have been practicing pushing away my "what if's......." I've been pushing away those negative thoughts that are telling me I don't deserve it. Instead, there is a new person inside of me. This person is my friend, they love me, I love me, and because of that, I believe I (as well as everyone else) deserves to be happy. I tell myself "You deserve this! Enjoy this moment!" cause that's really all I have, this moment, nothing in this world can be promised. I could have a breakdown and get shipped to the looney bin next week, but I don't know, so I'm gonna stay out of the future and do my best to be in the present. It took me so long, years to get to this point, but it was worth every bit of the struggle. I have a long way to go, but I'm just going to keep traveling my path.