When you’ve been through a
traumatic situation, it isn’t like the
movies. Your mind doesn’t mercifully delete the memories only
for them to be later unearthed by
a particularly insightful therapist
puffing away on a cigar. I know that
I’m traumatized. Yet, that didn’t do
anything to calm the flood of emotions I battled while I reread the diagnosis line for the fifth time. Yes,
it’s true, I (officially) have Complex
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, but
what do I do now?
One gut response may be to immediately jump into therapy, and
that isn’t a bad inclination. However, you don’t need a formal diagnosis to be a candidate for counseling. In fact, I started therapy when
I was in my teens, and that was how
I was eventually able to secure my
diagnosis in the first place. (Protip: your insurance is more likely to
pay for testing if you have a referral
from a therapist first). Of course,
this is also neglecting how difficult
it can be to find a therapist in the
first place, let alone how cost prohibitive it can be.
I’m lucky, I do have a therapist
that works well for me and that I
have the financial means to afford
it. The question still remains, what
now? What am I supposed to do
with myself as a traumatized adult
going to college? By a lot of metrics,
I could be considered a success. I
have a handful of close friendships,
I do well in my classes, I hold down
steady employment, and I haven’t
cried in an on-campus bathroom
in more than 16 months. In a clinical sense, perhaps that would
qualify me as “in recovery,” yet
that term is just as nebulous as the
next. I still have my bad days, days
where I’m terrified to leave my
house, days where my heart races
in my throat for hours without any
cause, days where I have to spend a
lot of my energy simply reminding
myself that the danger has passed.
At night, I still can’t sleep without
medication.
The thing that happens when
you’ve been living with trauma for
over a decade, been in therapy,
been on medications, the whole
nine yards, is that it does get better,
but it doesn’t go away. Then, when
you finally receive that formal paper, impersonally written, stating
that medically you are damaged
goods, you find yourself contemplating a terrifying answer: that
this may be as healed as you’re ever
going to be. I mean, it is called trauma, not “mildly unpleasant memory disorder.” On some level you
have to come to accept that you’re
never going to work quite the same.
Ask anyone who’s broken a bone if
their limb starts hurting right before it rains or ask the old lady with
a pacemaker if it’s still comfortable
for her to sleep on her stomach.
As you drag yourself out of the
contorted jungle of trauma there
are moments where it’s not hard
to understand why it will never
fully go away. You’ve had a whole
chunk torn out of you; some scar
tissue is inevitably going to help
fill the gap. Yet, for those of us who
had to suffer young, the issue at
hand stretches beyond the scope
of a battle wound. The person
who had to cope with the violence
wasn’t an adult, she didn’t have
the tools to protect herself, she
couldn’t run away. That thing that
was taken belonged to that child,
not me.
Now, I survive for her sake. On
those horrible days, those days
where everything feels like a latent threat, I try to think of her.
I remind myself that her fear
helped her to get this far, but that
it has served its purpose. The danger is gone. What trauma takes is
worse than what it gives; your very
identity as a person is stripped
from you. I can never be that little girl again, nor will I ever be
able to guess what her life would
have been like if she hadn’t been
hurt. Instead, I will carry a childshaped hole in me for the rest of
my life.
Trauma may be a life sentence,
but it is better than a death sentence. It is better to have survived
long enough to even be struggling
with the question of how to move
on, as opposed to dying before I
could ever get that far. That fear,
that I will never get better; I have
no way of knowing if it will come
true. During the journey of our
lives, none of us is so privileged as
to understand its ending. We look
backwards with the advantages of
hindsight, but the same cannot be
done with the future. At best, we’re
all just guessing. I wish I had a better answer than that, however, I’m
only one, admittedly pretty traumatized, person. What am I going
to do with myself now that I officially have PTSD? The same thing I was
doing before; keep living.