Friday, December 12, 2008

#4 Have I had a breakdown?

Well.... yes. And it's not quite over yet. But is it a mental breakdown? No. A nervous breakdown? No. Both of these are connected with mental illness. I am not mentally ill (although - this is the confusing part - this is an issue of mental health).

What then? This is called a Stress Breakdown. A stress breakdown is 'a psychological injury (operative word) which is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation'. My psychologist also likes to call it, in positive terms, a 'psychological breakthrough', which suits me just fine.

To explain a little further, in the words of Suicide and Mental Health Assocociation International:

'A stress breakdown is a normal and natural conclusion to a period of prolonged negative stress. The body is saying "I'm not designed to operate under these conditions of prolonged negative stress so I am going to do something dramatic to ensure that you reduce or eliminate the stress otherwise your body may suffer irreparable damage; you must take action now". A stress breakdown is often predictable days - sometimes weeks - in advance as the person's fear, fragility, obsessiveness, hypervigilance and hypersensitivity combine to evolve into paranoia (as evidenced by increasingly bizarre talk of conspiracy or MI6). If this happens, a stress breakdown is only days or even hours away and the person needs urgent medical help. The risk of suicide at this point is heightened.'

Their site is one of many that provides an overview of Complex PTSD and how it differs from single-trauma PTSD. It goes into detail with symptomology and the many facets of the disorder.

For my story to be understood in context I have to tell it backwards, starting at the age of 45. After ten years of relatively peaceful country living, I, with my husband and children, moved back to the city where all of my childhood abuse had occurred (abuse which had long been lost to my conscious memory). I was extremely, irrationally reluctant to move, yet powerless to come up with a better alternative to suit our circumstances at the time. And so I suddenly found myself daily immersed in a sea of faces and places and triggers and memories that had been pushed into the darkness for far too long.

My whole system began to collapse. Firstly my knee gave out, and ultimately required surgery. My whole body seemed to be protesting at being alive. I couldn't bear to be in my own skin. I started walking, sometimes for hours at a time, but it was more at attempt to get away from myself than to improve my health. My mind seemed to be constantly running on fast forward. It might be more accurate to say it was on fast rewind.

Flashbacks relating to a difficult birth with our twins 18 years previously began to haunt me again, but of course I didn't know that they were flashbacks, then or at the time of the birth - I just knew they filled my head and my body with confusion and pain and horror. This had been happening on and off since I was 27 yrs old. How much self-torture and self-hatred had I gone through, blaming myself for not being able to simply 'get over it'? Why must I constantly dwell on something that was yes, horrible - but I had lived, and so had both the babies. Why couldn't I just put it behind me and get on with my life? There were no answers then - I suppose I was too busily involved in raising my family and keeping my head above water. Now at the age of 45, with my kids finally all adults and out of school, the flashbacks were back with a vengeance, and impossible to pass off as anything inconsequential.

Regular visits to physiotherapy for my debilitated knee would sometimes do my head in. Just the physicality and proximity of a young man 'doing things to me' - extremely painful things -set me on an emotional roller coaster. After my knee was fixed we started some work on my back, and things got really strange, and I would drift off into deep space. I know now that it was dissociation I was experiencing. It was terrifying and yet strangely compelling. The physiotherapist was the sweetest, most inoffensive guy you could meet, and great at his job, with a reputation for arms of steel - but feeling so out of control with my head would unbalance me for days. There was 'something going on' and there was no way I was going to be able to rest until I could come up with an explanation. I was like a volcano about to explode - but it was all internal. On the outside I seemed much the same as ever, except that I became more and more withdrawn and manic about researching things on the internet. I didn't know it - but I was heading into full-blown PTSD.

After several weeks of rising anxiety I finally started googling in the right places, and discovered how frequently PTSD could be linked to traumatic childbirth - although it has only been recognized in the last few years. Wherever I found a list of symptomology for PTSD I found I could tick all the boxes, and then some! It began to dawn on me that I had been suffering from a verifiable, explainable disorder for no less than 18 years, and had never been diagnosed. This both helped and infuriated me. Helped because it explained so much, and gave me a light at the end of the tunnel I had long given up on ever seeing - that there could actually be some help 'out there' that could explain me to myself and give me a way out - but there was also such a feeling of loss, of being let down by 'the system' - so many 'what if's' and 'if only's'.

Determined not to waste any more time, not prepared to live another day without the treatment I knew I needed but had no clue what it would involve, I tracked down the Birth Trauma Association, and began communication with some very helpful people there.

It didn't take long to realize that my problems didn't just end with PTSD as a result of childbirth trauma. In my readings I had also noted that many women who suffer trauma while giving birth also have an unresolved history of childhood sexual abuse. In the beginning I chose to skim over this little bit of information, but then one day I found myself 'zoning out' in physiotherapy again, and I went home feeling absolutely dreadful, and with a dark and forbiding and familiar feeling that I had experienced that same distancing, or detachment, at other times in my life - long, long ago. And I began to rethink some of the things that I remembered had happened to me during my teenage years. Things I had never forgotten, but had never been able to find peace with.

By this time I had chosen a clinical psychologist, Anna Lamberton, from the list of people that the BTA had recommended to me. As I discussed these teenage events with her, and really laid it all out on the table, it became glaringly clear that these were not merely 'unfortunate events that I was too stupid to handle at the time'. They did in fact add up to a dark and ugly list of sexual abuse incidents, with a number of different abusers. No wonder the PTSD kicked in so hard when the childbirth started to go pear-shaped.

That gave us quite a bit to work on over the next year. Woven in and out of the birth issues, Anna and I also began to pull apart my teenage years. I started to write. Document after document started pouring out of me. As more and more memories and insights came to me, the thought of sleep seemed completely irrelevant. I had so many epiphanies, I was just staggering from one day to the next trying to get it all out of my head and down in black and white so that I could run it all past Anna for her professional feedback and hawklike insights. (During the second year I paused one day to do a quick calculation of what I had amassed, and there were over 200 documents on file. I have since discovered a condition -not a disorder - it's not necessarily a bad thing - known as 'hypergraphia' : an 'overwhelming/compulsive urge to write, which is often triggered by changes in brainwave activity in the temporal lobes, which are connected to the limbic system, said to regulate a human being's need for communication'. The term 'lobal warming' comes to mind. I might have to copyright that...)

Things have slowed considerably since those days, but at the time - Ohmigoodness, did I ever need to communicate! And of course, you can't spill your guts to just anybody about this sort of thing. People start to run when they see you coming.

And Anna, the Angel, rather than complaining about my name constantly appearing in her email box, was only ever supportive, encouraging, and delighted that I was willingly working through so much challenging material. She would greet me excitedly in her office week after week, having already followed my progress online, ready with answers to my questions, assurances for my insecurities and cognitive disputations for all my negatively-effected thinking. And perhaps most importantly, she offered me more understanding and compassion than I had ever felt from any other woman on the planet. I have never left her office not feeling better and more hopeful than when I walked in.

There were still many miles to go and surprises yet to come, but after several months I began to feel the terrors of almost dying in childbirth, and simultaneously almost losing one of our twins had begun to lose their grip. And I was seeing my teenage life in a whole new light. I began to feel that I had a bit of head-space again.

I had been severely molested in a powder-keg of a situation when I was 15 - and that person continued to be a presence in my family, abusing and harrassing me many times over the next few years. Just a few months after the 'powder-keg affair' I was raped while on a group date with some friends. The details are just horrific. Looking back now with a rational, adult mind, I groan to think how I hated and blamed myself for such a long time for getting into that situation. I know now that I was not to blame - not in the least. It was engineered and it was brutal. And what I endured at that time, and was left to live with and believe about myself and the world afterwards - there is just no way to measure that kind of damage, except perhaps in years of pain and mental anguish, and money and time spent on therapy and recovery. It doesn't take into account the secondary victims - the people that I love who have suffered and been short-changed over the years as a result of my inability to function with a fully cognisant and efficient brain! But of course I need to forgive myself for that as well. Just be happy that I am able to heal now and do better 'today'.

At the end of the first year of therapy, things weren't looking too bad - I seemed to be emerging out of that initial shock/crisis state - until I started to have peculiar dreams. Nightmares. Waking dreams. Visions of people as they were when I was just a little girl, people doing very peculiar things, in very peculiar places, and saying the most bizarre things to me and to each other. Another huge puzzle was landing in my lap, piece by piece. Bits of conversations, strings of words, visual stills, sensations of the sun rising and setting overhead in just a matter of minutes, while I was locked in a dark shed with two uncles - one my mother's brother, one my father's. They had become good friends over the years. And as more and more memories returned and pieced together, it became clear that there were some unspeakable and sinister reasons for their comraderie and their quiet jokes behind cupped hands holding ever-present cigarettes.

One event involving both uncles occurred when I was 5 1/2 - just a couple of weeks before I started Grade One. I seriously believed I was going to die. It's a story beyond the scope of any Special Victims Unit show I have ever seen. After that one uncle left me alone, for the most part - but the first uncle had found a number of opportunities both prior and subsequent to that occasion to get me on my own and do things he had no right to do. This filled in some mysteries for me between the ages of about 3 and 9.

If only it ended there. Unbelievably it doesn't. My more persistent uncle had grown up in a state of abuse himself, it seemed. My paternal grandfather was also an abuser. And he had also found opportunities to abuse me, causing fear, trauma, damage and confusion. The earliest instance of abuse we have traced back to when I was 2 yrs and 9 months old. It has taken quite some period of adjustment for me to let that fully sink in and comprehend just how many mysteries it explains, and why I have continued to come up against so many immovable blocks in my head throughout my life.

This is both the end and the beginning of my story. I am now 49, and learning to live my life backwards.

4 comments:

  1. w-hoo! not the most appropriate thing to comment after something like that usually, i am sure.. but it really is so clarifying to be able to see everything in a condensed, succinct form. I have found all of that most helpful.

    Would still like to know more detail about your day to day life now.. what things you find challenging, how you cope specifically with those challenges.. what is your vision for how your life will be in the future?

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  2. I LOVE the slideshow of artwork - it's great! And aren't you clever for figuring out how to do it?

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  3. I think it's amazing that after all you've been through that you're still here, that you've always been a loving, caring person and friend, that you never gave up or gave in to suicidal thoughts. My life is so much better because you're in it.

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  4. Thanks Zan - I was very selective about the works I chose to include in the slideshow - about time I made a few more, hey?

    Deanna - it made me gasp when I read your comment. I appreciate you so much. I haven't mentioned the 's' word much, but I can't deny the temptation has been there from time to time, when there just seemed nothing but tunnel, and no hope of light, and I was so numb that I was convinced no-one would miss me. I understand now that those sorts of thoughts and feelings are only ever temporary, and as I get stronger, they are less frequent. Now I am determined not to leave this earth with things undone!
    hugs
    Barb

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