Running the Course
One thing I have noticed lately is that the more I talk about mental health disorders and counseling, the more people around me open up about their own issues. And you’d be surprised how many of your friends and neighbors are actually dealing with disorders ranging from anxiety to depression to bipolar. Some are seeing counselors, some are on medication, others are trying alternative therapies. Sadly, others have chosen to ignore or dismiss their chemical imbalances. It negatively affects their relationships and their own happiness.
Sharing my own struggles with traumatic brain injury and Adjustment Disorder (a branch of PTSD) isn’t comfortable or easy. It might seem that way because I write about them, but that’s not really true. I don’t like to portray myself as weak or compromised. I think of myself as just as capable as I was before the bridge collapse – and mostly I am – but there are areas that fail to live up to that prior standard. I’ve learned to adjust and find new ways to compensate. I live with the physical restriction, the loss in balance and the tendency to be a little forgetful.
And I practice. I practice noticing things. Things like triggers – what triggers my Adjustment Disorder, what causes that instant flare-up of frustration that is usually linked to control. And I practice trying to notice this sooner, before it creeps up over my shoulders and envelopes me, switches my mood and ruins my day and maybe the day for others as well. I try to break down the walls before I can put them up – protect myself by being insular. I call it preventive maintenance.
In therapy, over the years I have processed through a lot. For a normal person, when a situation arises the brain turns to “fight or flight” mode. When somebody suffers from PTSD due to trauma, their brain can’t do either – it just sits in “stuck”. Therapy sessions include reprocessing the trauma, this un-sticks the brain and allows the person to be able to move forward without the stigma that the trauma created. During reprocessing, the patient takes a thought or feeling and then works through that to determine that thought or feeling isn’t true – it’s a false belief. It’s like a gate opens and the patient is allowed to walk through.
One of my false beliefs has been that trusting in others leads to abandonment. That false belief is hooked to past experiences where trust in a parent has failed me. As a small child, I trusted that my father would always be around, affirming and loving. He pretty much disappeared, due to a host of issues, and that proved to be trauma for me. As an early teen, my mother experienced her own trauma as a victim of sexual assault. Her PTSD closed her off to the family. She put up walls and became frozen. She wasn’t the mom she had been – of no fault of her own. But again, my trust was broken and her trauma became a trauma for me. I formed a belief that the only person I could rely on – really – was me. Fast forward to 2007. The bridge collapses. I’m so severely injured that I can’t care for myself – I couldn’t eat, stand, even roll over. The only person I could depend on – me – was of no help. My coping mechanism was broken. Another trauma piled on.
I was about to get married, yet I couldn’t dare trust my fiancee. That’s a recipe for disaster going into a marriage. Pile on Adjustment Disorder and I was ill-equipped for relationship growth. It was no wonder that Sonja and I would have struggles, and that was just the junk that I brought to the table, let alone what my partner brought. Let me be clear: I’m not justifying any behavior, I just want to let others understand the layers that trauma drapes on a person.
Besting PTSD has been the biggest project I have ever attempted to tackle. I was misled early on to think that it was a relatively easy fix – a little therapy and in six months I would be back to normal. One thing the bridge collapse taught me was that there is no return to normal. Just as traumatic brain injury is about the brain’s nerves reconnecting and rerouting, recovery from mental health disorder is about adapting and finding a new course. It’s a course I’m still running and learning as I go.
