Life Lessons in PTSD
I accept that I have OCD and anxiety. Those disorders were fairly easy to accept. However, PTSD has proven to be a very difficult one to accept. I know that there are veterans who have been in war and seen atrocities that I probably will never have to experience that suffer from PTSD. I just can’t help comparing my experience to theirs and thinking that it just isn’t the same. Yet, I know that anytime I compare my life to someone else’s life it never ends well.
Today, I find that I have PTSD. I keep finding the same thing happening over and over again in my life and if I just recognized the pattern and learned to deal with it, then I would understand the life lesson.
My mother treated me like I was worthless, like I was a non-person. I felt like I never had any control over anything in my life at all because she wanted to control everything. I didn’t realize how I was being treated or who I was for a long time. I did learn that I am a person and I do have control over my own life. I have PTSD from being treated so badly for so many years. When I am in a situation when I feel like I am being manipulated, when I feel like someone is trying to control me, or when I feel like I am losing control, I start to have anxiety and OCD symptoms. They get bad. Whatever anxiety and OCD symptoms I usually have, those symptoms get turned up. One of them is my auditory sensitivity. I start to feel like the volume in my ears goes from 10 to 100. When with all my symptoms it goes from 10 to 100. It is like I am reliving the anxiety of being treated like I don’t have any control over my life, and I am a non-person. The only way for me to get out of the cycle is to recognize what is happening and to assert myself. I may never be able to be symptom free, but I have a voice now. I can say how I feel and tell someone that I need help and why.
I hate to say it, but maybe that’s what all the people who suffer from PTSD need. They need to find their voice, somehow to let someone know what’s going on, so that they aren’t alone in the trauma. I write because I believe God wants me to know that I’m not alone and He wants me to somehow let others know we aren’t alone. In our lives, during the best of times and during the worst of times, God with always with us, He will never abandon us.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
