May is #mentalhealthawareness month here in the US, so I thought I would write about my own diagnosis of CPTSD. CPTSD is "complex post traumatic stress disorder," because who doesn't love a good acronym? ; ) There are a lot of generalizations and misconceptions about (C)PTSD, like "you're a berserker" or "you just can't get over something bad in your past." Both of those may be true for some people but are really not it. An explanation that my therapist gave to me once, and I found very helpful, is: imagine that there is a scale from 1 to 10 of how good or bad you can feel. 1 is suicidal and 10 is the highest high like a God has reached into your head and blessed you with the feeling that you are invincible. Most people live at about a 5. They fluctuate a little, but not by much, and that's what makes them "normal." However, if you have (C)PTSD, once you are knocked out of that middle range by the originating traumatic event(s), you never live in the middle again. You are either way down at the miserable bottom or way up in the giddy heights.
This is possible in anyone's brain at all because it's a survival mechanism: imagine you're a hunter and you go out hunting and get mauled by a bear in the woods. This high is that thing that, if it happens, might enable you to run away and get back to people who can help you so you don't die. Whenever you hear survival stories like that, and people are like, "how did you not lose consciousness from the pain??" The person who did it will say something like, they ignored the pain. Not that they didn't feel it, they just ignored it. There is a difference. You still can feel it ...you just don't care. For most people though, if that extreme kind of event occurs, it never happens again; it's the story they tell for the rest of their lives and impress their grandkids with and show them the scar.
If you have (C)PTSD, it's both nature and nurture. You're born with like, a predisposition to it, but if nothing traumatic ever happens, you don't get PTSD. Similarly, if you're NOT born with a predisposition to it, and you go through all sorts of trauma, you also don't have PTSD. It requires both.
The main differences between CPTSD and PTSD are the length of time that the initial trauma/high went on for, and I think, when in your life it happens. Generally I've only heard about CPTSD being a thing most people develop in childhood, but I don't know if that's always the case, so I could be wrong about that part. When people think of PTSD (not CPTSD), they often think about soldiers who go off to war and come back and are never the same after that experience. That isn't the only way to get PTSD of course, but it's a common one that a lot of people are familiar with. Generally PTSD happens in people who are grown (or mostly grown, a lot of soldiers are young), and the initiating event lasted a shorter while - that definition of "shorter" being relative. You could get PTSD from an event that occurred in one day, or an event that lasted several months, or all sorts of things. But generally it's not a huge chunk of your life (though it may feel like it). With CPTSD, the initial event is years of your life, a huge chunk of it, often (always?) in childhood, such that you often (always?) don't even remember what it was like before it happened.
That is the case for me. I was high for the first 18 years of my life (possibly not when I was a baby? But I of course don't remember that). I thought everyone was like me. I didn't know any different. People would often tell me I was weird (to which I responded, "I know!"), or that I was hyper, or they'd ask me how much sugar I ate, so I'd make jokes that I was fueled by pixy stix (a candy that is pretty much, flavored sugar in a paper straw). I just thought, kids are hyper. Adults are always saying that, right? I had no idea that anything was really truly different about how I experienced the world.
I ran on two or three hours of sleep a night, every night, with the only exceptions being when I'd sleep over at a friend's house on the weekends during my teenage years. Why? For one, because being at my friend's house was safe. For two, I didn't have to wake up for school at 5:30 am like I did on weekdays. Since I didn't get to sleep until 2:30 or 3:30 am, that meant on the weekdays I didn't get much sleep, and on the weekends I could sleep in. But it was the same in my younger years; I would be forced to "go to bed," but I'd lie there awake for hours and hours and hours. When I was little, after my mom went to bed, I'd come back out and watch Johnny Carson and David Letterman with my dad, which ended at like 1:30 am, I think. Then he'd send me back to bed because he was going to bed, and I'd still lie there awake. I just thought I was a night owl. I didn't think it was odd that I was still wired on so little sleep.
It might have been a sign to anyone who knew what to look for if they knew HOW I got to sleep. At home, I would exercise or move furniture - yes, at two AM, and yes, I didn't empty the furniture, I would move it full of books and clothes - in order to tire myself out enough that I could sleep, or else it didn't happen. My friends knew if I had been sick if they came over the next weekend and the furniture and the posters on my bedroom wall wasn't all rearranged from last week. At their house, I would tell stories that got progressively more wild and giddy until I abruptly was exhausted and asleep in a matter of minutes. Watching me tell those stories, you would have thought I was the happiest drunk in the world, that's how giddy I was. But I never drank alcohol or did drugs. I didn't need to. I didn't understand why anyone did.
The mad levels of energy and disproportionate strength didn't stop at my bookshelf at two AM. I daily carried a backpack that weighed in at 40-50 pounds. I could pick up people that weighed more than me. In gym class I leg pressed 500 pounds. I was 5'4" and 115 pounds. The footballers and runners in my class all stared at me in shock. I thought it was hilarious.
Yeah, I took on bullies that were twice my size and dared them to fuck with me, too
And then, suddenly ...that stopped. I went off to college just shy of my 18th birthday. My bestie was with me at university. Everything was great. But eventually, my brain figured out, "Hey, you can sleep safely in your own bed? Like, all the time? You don't need this high anymore." BOOT. And suddenly, I was down in the 1-2-3 range on that ten-point scale, when I had never even experienced a five before.
I started spiraling out of control. I stopped going to class. I stopped going to work. I spent all day in bed reading or sleeping. I started self harming. But I still had hard wired into me, "you don't talk about what's wrong," so I said nothing and I smiled and said I was fine, just tired. A friend in the dorm, when I complained about how I used to run on so little sleep and now all I did was sleep, said, "You just used up all your cool sleep points," and I said, haha, yeah, I used up all my cool sleep points and now I'm making up for lost time. I had no idea what was happening. Eventually, I attempted suicide.
That landed me in the hospital, where psychologists argued about what my diagnosis was. One thought I had depression (which is ultimately the diagnosis I got at that age), and one thought I was bipolar, because of how I described being high before and now I wasn't. I did explain that I didn't swing back and forth; I had always been high, and now it was gone. But neither of them thought I had any variety of PTSD.
This cat is me
It wasn't until years later that I finally got the CPTSD diagnosis, and it was like, all the puzzle pieces fit. Everything clicked. Everything made sense. Especially after the one time the high came back for a brief moment in adulthood. It was only maybe 20 minutes, but I immediately recognized it for what it was. It was like coming up for air when you've been drowning for years. It was the confirmation of everything I had been realizing about myself. The fact that my brain could still KAPOW YOU'RE BLESSED BY THE GODS just for a little while like that, was like the cementing of that diagnosis (nothing serious happened, I had just hurt myself, and my brain said, "what? are we in danger? no? ok, I'm going back to sleep." That is also the only time it's ever happened from an injury or illness of any kind).
For a while in my 30s when I was working at the hospital and going back to school to become an RN, my goal was to become an RN just so I could work in an emergency room. Because I thought the stress and life-or-death of it might kick my brain out of its stupor. What I should have done, because it's near impossible to stick to long-term functionality like years of school plus work when you are living in the 1-2-3s all the time, is tried to become a paramedic instead. The schooling is shorter, and it would be even more life-or-death. That might have actually worked. But I burned out, and dropped out, and have been at an all-time-low that gets progressively lower, energy-wise, ever since.
The metaphor I came up with to describe it, is a lamp. When I was younger, I was plugged in to the energy all the time. I could flip the switch and turn it on and "off" (at least, be calm) as I pleased. Playing with friends? On. Sitting still for class? Off. Then at 18, the plug got pulled out of the wall. I could flip that switch all day but it has no effect. Only if something that my brain registers as possibly dangerous (like that injury), does the plug go back in the wall for just a little while, then pulled back out again.
You know how when you read a book or watch a movie you can see yourself in the characters sometimes? I have a theory that both CuChulainn (the warrior hero I wrote a novel about) and Saint Teresa of Avila both had CPTSD. CuChulainn, from early childhood, was essentially a berserker, who was filled with a "battle fury" and would keep fighting even after he was injured, taking on an entire army just he and his charioteer. It was commented on in the writings about him how he was so beautiful and kind generally but would "warp spasm" into a badass, unstoppable force when sufficiently angered. Saint Teresa would mortify her body (so, injury) and then sometimes experience "consolation from God" that she described in The Life as being "pierced with a spear of ecstasy." Yeah, if I didn't know about brain chemicals and the like, I really would literally think a God had reached into my head when the high happens, because that is how profound it is. And the story of how she became a nun is that, she basically threatened to kill herself if her parents made her marry a man rather than join a convent. Doesn't that scream like there is some trauma to you that she would rather commit suicide (which a Catholic would regard as a sin) than let a man touch her? And she was young at that time, because it was the middle ages, when girls were married off really young. Smells like CPTSD to me.
So there's my story about CPTSD. If I ever figure out how to get to a five, I'll let you know. I'm working on it. ; )
