Orglethorp
Not Active
Hello! I'm new to the forums and I just posted my intro thread. I mentioned a couple of these things there, but I wanted to just make a list of a few things I'm wondering about and see if anyone has anything to say about them.
I was diagnosed with PTSD 6 years ago, but I think if the diagnosis had been recognized then i would have been C-PTSD. I'm a survivor of childhood abuse & rape. I've come to a point in my life where I'm mostly moving forward and while every day is still another battle, they're much more easily won. That being said, here are some of the things I've noticed about my own thoughts and behaviour that concern me. I'm wondering if others with PTSD experience these, if they're common, and if they're likely to ever go away.
- I've learned to recognize the warning signs and triggers that used to cause major flashbacks and panic attacks for me, and largely those don't happen anymore, but I do still experience emotional flashbacks at random. By this I mean I re-experience just the emotion from a memory, though I rarely know which memory, with extreme clarity. It's usually very brief, a few seconds or a minute or so at a most before I'm able to mentally talk myself down and stop it, but I rarely recognize a trigger. It'll happen while I'm sitting in a physics lecture, talking to a friend about a book I just read, working on a calculus assignment, etc.
- I'm not a shy person, and I'm actually quite chatty when I get going, but there's a conversation going on that I wasn't initially involved in, I usually can't bring myself to join it. I may want to, but I feel blocked. Similarly, if I'm alone in one room and I hear someone in another room, I avoid making any sound at all. Even if both myself and the other person are exactly where we're supposed to be and doing nothing out of the ordinary, I suddenly have a strong desire to be completely unnoticed.
- I'm not easy to sneak up on. I'm usually so aware of my surroundings that I don't have to consciously think about it, even though I don't necessarily feel that I'm being "hyper vigilant" or anything like that. A friend of mine has been trying, unsuccessfully, for 3 years to scare me. (No, he doesn't know my story.) That being said, when something does scare me, I don't display a startle response that most people can pick up on, but I feel like I have. I feel the surge fear and panic. There are some things that will consistently cause this even if I'm expecting them to happen. For example, when I'm home between semesters I work at a grocery store, and if I'm there for a graveyard shift and one of the stock boys drops an empty wooden pallet onto the pile, the noise gets me every time. It doesn't matter that I know exactly what it is and may have even watched it happen.
- I smile when I should be displaying other strong emotions, but only when I wasn't prepared for it. When I'm unexpectedly presented with bad news and should be feeling sad, or when a friend is telling me about something that happened and I should be empathizing, if I wasn't prepared to hear it, I smile. Outwardly, I'm Cheshire cat gleeful. I can't stop it. This also happens when telling my story to someone who I haven't built up trust with first.
- I'm very aware of the people around me at all times. When I'm out for a walk alone and I'm feeling anxious because of it, I'll either listen to music or sing to distract myself. If I'm not successfully distracting myself, though, and I'm being followed by a stranger, I find myself extremely bothered by it. Rationally I know they aren't actually following me, they just happen to be headed the same way, but it makes me unreasonably uncomfortable, and I find myself speeding up to increase the distance between us. This happens out on the sidewalk or in a hallway, doesn't matter. I experience the same sort of thing if I'm out at night and I see/hear a large group of young people who are being loud, but I'm not bothered by quiet groups, older groups, or single people who are in front of me or across the street.
- Even though I have never been suicidal, and I haven't harmed myself in nearly 2 years, I still see nearly every potential weapon or dangerous environment as a means to harm myself. Every time I see a knife or a pair of scissors, I imagine cutting myself. Every time I see an industrial oven, I imagine being trapped inside it. Hearing the rings of a binder being snapped shut makes my skin crawl because I imaging what those rings might to do a human eye if them snapped shut on one. (Disgusting I know, but that particular thought has plagued me since childhood.) In some cases I actually used to act on these thoughts as a child. I used to pinch my fingers in every closet door I saw, as early as 2 years old. Perhaps even more disturbingly, every time I'm in a store and I see those little pocket sized utility blades, not only do I think about using them to cut myself, I then find it very hard to resist the urge to buy them. I don't want to hurt myself. I don't want these things to happen. That doesn't stop the thoughts.
There are more things, but that's all I can think of now.
What are everyone's thoughts? Are these things common? Are these things I'm just going to have to live with, or does it get better?
I was diagnosed with PTSD 6 years ago, but I think if the diagnosis had been recognized then i would have been C-PTSD. I'm a survivor of childhood abuse & rape. I've come to a point in my life where I'm mostly moving forward and while every day is still another battle, they're much more easily won. That being said, here are some of the things I've noticed about my own thoughts and behaviour that concern me. I'm wondering if others with PTSD experience these, if they're common, and if they're likely to ever go away.
- I've learned to recognize the warning signs and triggers that used to cause major flashbacks and panic attacks for me, and largely those don't happen anymore, but I do still experience emotional flashbacks at random. By this I mean I re-experience just the emotion from a memory, though I rarely know which memory, with extreme clarity. It's usually very brief, a few seconds or a minute or so at a most before I'm able to mentally talk myself down and stop it, but I rarely recognize a trigger. It'll happen while I'm sitting in a physics lecture, talking to a friend about a book I just read, working on a calculus assignment, etc.
- I'm not a shy person, and I'm actually quite chatty when I get going, but there's a conversation going on that I wasn't initially involved in, I usually can't bring myself to join it. I may want to, but I feel blocked. Similarly, if I'm alone in one room and I hear someone in another room, I avoid making any sound at all. Even if both myself and the other person are exactly where we're supposed to be and doing nothing out of the ordinary, I suddenly have a strong desire to be completely unnoticed.
- I'm not easy to sneak up on. I'm usually so aware of my surroundings that I don't have to consciously think about it, even though I don't necessarily feel that I'm being "hyper vigilant" or anything like that. A friend of mine has been trying, unsuccessfully, for 3 years to scare me. (No, he doesn't know my story.) That being said, when something does scare me, I don't display a startle response that most people can pick up on, but I feel like I have. I feel the surge fear and panic. There are some things that will consistently cause this even if I'm expecting them to happen. For example, when I'm home between semesters I work at a grocery store, and if I'm there for a graveyard shift and one of the stock boys drops an empty wooden pallet onto the pile, the noise gets me every time. It doesn't matter that I know exactly what it is and may have even watched it happen.
- I smile when I should be displaying other strong emotions, but only when I wasn't prepared for it. When I'm unexpectedly presented with bad news and should be feeling sad, or when a friend is telling me about something that happened and I should be empathizing, if I wasn't prepared to hear it, I smile. Outwardly, I'm Cheshire cat gleeful. I can't stop it. This also happens when telling my story to someone who I haven't built up trust with first.
- I'm very aware of the people around me at all times. When I'm out for a walk alone and I'm feeling anxious because of it, I'll either listen to music or sing to distract myself. If I'm not successfully distracting myself, though, and I'm being followed by a stranger, I find myself extremely bothered by it. Rationally I know they aren't actually following me, they just happen to be headed the same way, but it makes me unreasonably uncomfortable, and I find myself speeding up to increase the distance between us. This happens out on the sidewalk or in a hallway, doesn't matter. I experience the same sort of thing if I'm out at night and I see/hear a large group of young people who are being loud, but I'm not bothered by quiet groups, older groups, or single people who are in front of me or across the street.
- Even though I have never been suicidal, and I haven't harmed myself in nearly 2 years, I still see nearly every potential weapon or dangerous environment as a means to harm myself. Every time I see a knife or a pair of scissors, I imagine cutting myself. Every time I see an industrial oven, I imagine being trapped inside it. Hearing the rings of a binder being snapped shut makes my skin crawl because I imaging what those rings might to do a human eye if them snapped shut on one. (Disgusting I know, but that particular thought has plagued me since childhood.) In some cases I actually used to act on these thoughts as a child. I used to pinch my fingers in every closet door I saw, as early as 2 years old. Perhaps even more disturbingly, every time I'm in a store and I see those little pocket sized utility blades, not only do I think about using them to cut myself, I then find it very hard to resist the urge to buy them. I don't want to hurt myself. I don't want these things to happen. That doesn't stop the thoughts.
There are more things, but that's all I can think of now.
What are everyone's thoughts? Are these things common? Are these things I'm just going to have to live with, or does it get better?
