Chapter 1: The Beginning

Introduction to C-PTSD and How it Affected Me

What is C-PTSD?

C-PTSD is Complex PTSD. The difference is about how you were traumatized. If you had a sudden event that caused the trauma, you are affected by PTSD. If you have to deal with this regularly, if you are constantly under threat, if you are consistently in a state of fear, congrats, you have C-PTSD. That is where I fit. C-PTSD. I have a broken fight or flight mechanism and that is not a pleasant thing to live with.

I am constantly in a state of scanning my surroundings. No, not just being aware, scanning for threats. I have extremely sharp hearing, because by four I needed to hear my abuser pulling up from work and I needed to hide or make myself small in order to keep out of their way for as long as I could. I also listened for the car when I woke up in order to avoid them before I got out of bed. Once their car pulled away, my window of safety likely began. I could get dressed, grab something to eat, and then go to school.

Constantly listening for danger is exhausting. You also hear everything in the house. I could hear my parents arguing on the other side of the house when I was a kid. I could hear my mom talking on the phone while I was supposed to be asleep, and I could hear every car going down the street regardless of where I was in the house, or what was on the TV that I am trying to use to disassociate from the reality of my life.

Right there, that sounds unpleasant I am sure. I know that there are some people that wish they had my hearing, but would they actually want the price that it came with?

Trust. Trust is simply too hard to give. My parents were people I was supposed to trust and they both really did a number on me, and continue to. I have been in long-term relationships, but I could never get beyond moving in together because of my trust issues as well as the fear that if I do give a person my trust, they may very well use that trust against me. How do you go around not trusting anyone in the world? Or, just a handful and not completely?

Trust is something everyone must have in someone else, but I just can’t bring myself to give anyone that level of trust in my life. It has poisoned relationships. I never married because of it, and still live a lonely existence for the same reason.

Anxiety. Anxiety is part of the constant state of scanning my surroundings, except, this is about worrying about everything. Literally, everything. If it is a subject that crosses my path, I am worried about it, and it is not something I want to do, it just happens. How does that person feel about me? Is that person mad at me for something? Did I rub that person the wrong way? My girlfriend hates me, I know it. My work is eventually going to fire me, it’s just a matter of time. My writing is terrible. My art is no good. I am not half as smart as some people tell me I am. They only like me because…

That is nowhere near the end of the list. Politics, justice, worker exploitation, medical costs, minority hatred, where is my life going, is there even going to be a future, wars, wars, and more wars. Is my family okay? Do they need money? How do I show this person I care about them? Should I ask out this girl or is she just being friendly? How do rich people live knowing they are killing the plant and the general populace is likely to drag them from their houses and hang them in the streets if they keep abusing everything in the world? Should I get something to eat while I’m out or do I have something at home that is easy to prepare? Did I annoy my teacher? Is that why I am getting this grade? I’m in my forties and I have no one in my life and I have no children. Would I be a good father? Would I repeat the abuse that I was subjected to?

These are just the surface things I dealt with over the years. I didn’t have children for the reason above and I feel like I really lost out on a big part of being alive, but at the same time, my anxiety gives me a short-temper when I am overwhelmed. How could I expose a child to the possibility that I would cause their life to be a repeat of mine?

Physical Ailments. At four I have to have my appendix removed, not uncommon in a child. Extra good times, I have a strange metabolism and I woke up in the middle of the surgery. Trauma. Well, kinda. I saw my stomach open and my intestine laying on my stomach before hearing the doctor say, “He’s awake. He’s awake! Put him out, Put him out!” Honestly, that is likely the softest trauma in my memory.

By twenty three I was bald. I do not have the genetic markers for it. The cause was stress. It was because I was under constant stress and heavy anxiety and I could not get away from it, at all. Stress crept up on me in college too, and that took my gallbladder, they are just taking me away a piece at a time.

A big bag of mental illness. SURPRISE!

Here’s the worst bit. Not to downplay the rest because that has been a challenge as well, but this bit here is where I am going to focus on the trigger. You see, I had no idea I had C-PTSD. I was dealing with anxiety in college and I figured that was all I was dealing with. I was dead wrong. The year of 2016 was the year my life stopped advancing forward. I was suddenly thrown on a completely different road from what I had lived in my entire life at thirty-seven.

It was a series of events that finally pushed me over the edge. The first was my step dad, his wife, and my brother all being arrested by SWAT. Yeah. You read that correctly and get a load of this shit.

My step dad has been living as a rebel against the law in a childishly defiant way, his entire life. I want you to hold back your judgment until you finish the book, because he is ill himself and he has no idea that he is. We’ll get to that eventually.

Just before Halloween, which used to be my favorite holiday, the police called my step dad to lure him into the station and arrest him. They did this because he had eighty-three guns at his house, a rebellious attitude, and he used to freely say, “They won’t take me alive.” After slapping cuffs on step dad, they drove to his house, with him in the car, and kicked in his doors to arrest his second wife and my youngest brother.

They took pounds of weed and it wasn’t legal yet. Some meth, guns, explosives, and a bunch of stuff that really had nothing to do with the case. Now. Part of me thought this dude had been dodging the bullet forever and it was high time something bit him in the ass. Part of me wanted to jump in the car and drive the three-hundred miles south to help my “dad” and brother. I hate his second wife and she earned that hatred, we’ll get to that too.

Now what I actually did was feel horrible for them, but that my step dad and my brother should have known better, it wasn’t like no one was warning them and they knew full well the shit they were doing was illegal. There was something in me that also felt like my step dad needed to finally face some kind of consequences for his reckless behavior he has embraced for so long.

Here is the part that started the downfall. step dad was in jail for about a week. He is not a wealthy man. He was able to get bail together and he was released. That didn’t seem like any real punishment when it came down to it. There was the chance he would get nailed in trial, but that wasn’t what I wanted, I wanted him to see the errors in his behavior and start changing those behaviors. That was not the case.

step dad came out of jail playing the ultra victim. Nevermind that everything they wanted him for was something he did and has been doing for over a decade. To him he was being railroaded by a betrayer, some tweaker that he showed too much because he is desperate to be liked. He lost the money from his mom’s death benefits. Poor him, poor him. Where is the justice in that?

The straws were starting to collect on my back and I didn’t even know it.

Soon after that, we were cursed with a Trump presidency and I was starting to feel the weight on my shoulders. This man was going to be bad news and it was more than obvious. I am now under the rule of a bully. Nevermind that he doesn’t even know I exist, but he is a bully and he is in charge of my safety. He is now in charge of my friends’ safety and he is throwing kerosene on the bigotry in my own family as well as emboldening bigots all across the nation with validation that their leader is a bigot too. Yeah, that wasn’t going to be a good time for me and the people I love. Even the parts of my family that loved Trump were going to be negatively impacted and they simply refused to see it.

Shortly after Trump took office I was let go at my job. A corporate job that I had been aiming for my entire life. My security. My welfare. Just gone. Sure there was a severance package, but that didn’t last long. I began my job search with vigor, but no one was biting. Each of these factors hit hard. Each month that I couldn’t find work was harder to face. Then, a Muslim ban. I have Muslim friends that I care deeply for. They are some of the nicest, kindest people I have known in my life and this asshole just put a bullseye on their backs and I can do nothing to help them.

The straws are starting to weigh more with every step I take.

When Did I Start Noticing the Symptoms?

It was after that moron 45 took office that I started seeing symptoms. Depression was setting in, but it wasn’t crushing yet. I had my weekly Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game to thank for that. Honestly it has been my rock all throughout my life and I never really considered that.

Stolen story; please report.

That was probably the first real symptom, depression.

I was more heavily in therapy at the time, because it had been impacting my work and after I had been dismissed, I had to consider depression to be a major issue and I was trying like hell to dig myself out of the hole. The depression ended my then relationship and I don’t blame her for leaving. How could I? I was unemployed, depressed, and a bundle of negative shit that I am slowly working trudging.

My self-esteem is shit, I suppose here is as good a place as any to throw that in.

If I am going to talk about the first time it really impacted me though, that wakeup call of “Holy shit this is something that is going to take a lot of time to deal with.” Well that moment came when I was being evicted from my home. I was renting and the owner had suddenly decided he wanted to fix it up and start renting it for more. The man was awful. Just awful. I was dealing with his renovations while working through my issues, freaking out about having to find a new place to live, freaking out about not having the money to store my things, trying to stay in this dude's good graces to possibly buy me more time before I need to leave. I had a friend call me during Thanksgiving while in the middle of this nightmare so they could vent their issues for hours and when I attempted to talk to them about my own, their advice was thus, “It sounds like you want to die. Maybe you should embrace that.”

The owner was in the house and I happened to walk by them at eight AM. His workers had been there since six and when he spotted me he said, “Well if you’re going to be here I may as well put you to work.” and then he started giving me instructions and to my horror I was doing it.

Who has a fawn response? This guy!

The fawn response. Fawning is a trauma response where a person develops people-pleasing behaviors to avoid conflict to maintain a sense of safety. Easy concept to accept. You want to know something else? Sometimes you can’t stop it at all. You are just a zombie to some asshole that bullied you into doing something. I have been a people-pleaser my whole life, I wasn’t allowed to be anything else. I was programmed. Extra empathy, dismissive of my own needs, etc. but this was something else entirely. This freaked me out.

This dickhead told me to work around the house, that I had paid rent to live in, and I did it. I did it from eight AM until five PM. On his way out, this piece of shit, tells me to finish doing a task and then I could stop. He left and I worked until I finished the task. It was only once I was done with that task that I suddenly discovered I had not eaten or drank anything all day. The entire fucking day. Nothing. I paid rent to be there, I worked without stopping, for the man who was evicting me.

My body was suddenly screaming for food and something to drink. I started toward the refrigerator in the garage and then… I woke up on the kitchen floor. I had blacked out. It was night by the time I woke up, It had been dusk before. I didn’t know how long I was out, I was just laying on the floor. It was at that moment that I knew this was something that I did not have the tools to handle by myself and I reached out to my friend in law school. She filled me in on my renters rights. Now, I need to mention. This was not a subject that should have been hard to research for myself, but I could not focus on the task long enough to actually get anywhere and I needed to get this handled so I needed to get help. This man was going to use me and throw me on the street without a sliver of regret for doing so.

That was the start of the fight right there. That was when I knew.

My Initial Reactions and Coping Mechanisms

My reaction was pure horror. I had no idea this could get this bad. It suddenly made me feel so weak and pathetic. I was floored. Literally. I had been floored. I was suddenly afraid to leave the house because I might be forced to do something I didn’t want to do, or I could just pass out, or I could feel like I am having a heart attack, or I could suddenly go blind. Yeah, blinding panic attacks or blinding migraines. Got me a double case.

I felt like I was falling apart.

When this happened I told the rest of my family I was never going to have my step dad in my life again. No one liked that. I was suddenly a real asshole for the crime of not wanting to have the person who cursed me with this insane condition to have the opportunity to make this condition more severe, or the worst thought I had, he knows he broke me and he can exploit it.

My family started to turn on me but I needed to put a vast distance between me and that man. It was a hard decision but a fast one. It had to tear away part of me. The love that I felt for him. The memories of good times. I had to shut that all down and it hurt, but it was very necessary. I reached out to friends. I tried to build a support system before I fully crashed.

The first thing, where the hell was I going to live? My savings were gone. Long gone. My family was out of the question. One friend offered me a place to live. I was crying. I was finally going to have a landing zone to even try to address, and get a handle on, what is going on with me. The friend that offered the sanctuary was on the phone with me and started asking me about what was wrong.

They were interested in my problem and they were offering me a place to land. Things were going great.

Them: So what was the trigger?

Me: There were a lot of things, but the last straw seemed to have been Trump. He reminds me of my abuser.

Them: *laughter* “Trump reminds me of my abuser.” *mockingly,* Then they hung up.

I crumbled apart. I went into a state where I felt like I could just let go and die. Not suicide, just dying. Like I could will it into being. I could tap the power button. I drifted in a space of void. The edge of consciousness. A point where life and death meet and you can just sit on the fence for a bit. Euphoria. The void called. It was warm. It felt like the tightest, warmest hug I have ever felt. It was, release. It was returning to the abstract and not looking back on the failed experiment of life. It was a shit decision to take physical form in the first place.

I came out of that with regret. I really had to pull myself back and the only reason I had to stay was, “The dickhead would not find my cat a new home. I can’t leave my Luna.”

Coping. My cat still needed me. If that was the only thing keeping me here, I would stay for it. It was an important reason. It was good enough.

Remember that law student friend? Well she was the one who finally gave me safety. I flew to New Jersey and I took up a post on a couch. I was suddenly a man in his late thirties living on his college classmate’s couch. I am in my late thirties and a twenty-six year old woman is the only reason I was not on the street.

I felt pathetic. Still do. Nothing can change that until I am better.

I am told a lot that I should cut myself some slack. I really don’t know how. I was never taught that I was important. That was part of the trauma.

My friend gave me a couch and I slept there for the next three years. I did everything I could to keep from being a burden upon her, but the guilt would never let up.

In order to handle my issues with the limitations I have, I was watching a lot of TV. A lot, a lot.

“But Jesse, you could be doing something productive.”

Yeah no shit. I have no idea why my mind would not allow me to get up and do that, but it wouldn’t. I was locked in limbo. In order to relieve my burden, I would cook when I could. I often cook with a crock-pot. The slow cooker allows you to cook in sprints of energy when you have it. When I felt good I would cook more elaborate meals. My friend liked Indian food. I learned to make Indian food. My naan bread got expert. Vindaloo chicken, dahl, rice, and naan with paneer cheese was a monthly dish.

I looked for work here and there, but I couldn’t do anything on demand so that wasn’t panning out. This is where I finally filed for Social Security disability and I have to say this, our Social Security is a nightmare, run by stupid, mean spirited assholes that would rather you die than collect the money you contributed to. That’s it. If we are taking tally, I am now two years disabled and a couple months give or take. I had gotten a few temporary disability forms filed, but hey, that doesn’t count toward the official filing, so skip that shit or do it at the same time, and do it day seven no later. It is easier to say, “Hey I got better, no need to proceed,” than it is to try and pull yourself up for any amount of time, because they don’t give a single fuck how much effort you put into doing that. It does not count as struggle to them, do not hesitate, file. Fuck them. It is going to take forever anyway, may as well get a jump on it.

Where was I? Oh yeah. New Jersey. There is also a month in Hawai’i staying with a cousin as well and I one-hundred percent loved that visit and his family for it, but really, there were some ups and downs and it really shouldn’t be right here. It was helpful in coping, because there were a lot of amazing things there, but not everyone has friendly family in Hawai’i so it is nowhere near a universal coping mechanism. If you can, I recommend it. You will not regret it. Look into local customs first and don’t be an asshole while you are there and you will have a good time.

I keep getting off subject. That is something that this shit does to you. It puts your thoughts on shuffle. You might manifest ADHD-like symptoms. Speaking on that point. I would highly recommend you read Slaughterhouse Five. Kurt Vonnegut had PTSD and the book feels so familiar you may be shocked. The book has a broken structure where the protagonist is living in three different points in his life and they shift randomly. At one point he is dealing with being a POW in World War II being held in a Slaughterhouse and the events that lead up to the USA bombing the small town where the Slaughterhouse was and him surviving being nearly killed by his own country. The other period is him living with the trauma of WWII and attempting to put his life together while he is essentially moving through it numb to everything. The third is where he is in an intergalactic zoo with an actress of the time. It echoes so vividly how I feel that I exist. I am very rarely in the moment. Read Slaughterhouse Five, you’ll enjoy it.

I had to accept my condition. That was hard. How do events that happened decades ago impact my life today? Seriously. It’s fucking crazy. Accepting my condition also means taking medications and knowing I am going to have to learn how to be in this condition in order to get out of it. I had been on a career path that was finally starting to manifest a difference in my life, before this breakdown. I can’t work in-person at the moment so I have to recast myself or die. I am lucky that I had my friend because she saved my life, without a doubt. It wasn’t just the couch when I needed it. She listened to me. She helped me understand what was and was not something that happens in a healthy family.

How can people who don’t know how to be healthy, raise a healthy family? I needed to relearn what family meant, to rebuild myself and my line of thinking. The foundations needed to be repoured.

I suppose here is a great place to say, I started smoking pot once it was legal in California. I had been around it all my life but I didn’t want to break the law or taint my piss for the work that poor people are qualified for. Once I was breaking down, I started smoking. Rather convenient that the two happened around the same time.

Marijuana is what turns off the nightmares.

If you are like me, you might be suffering from deep, elaborate, second life-like dreams. I have had those as far back as I can remember. I would wake up feeling exhausted. It was like living two lives. Marijuana stopped that and now it is likely going to be in my life for the remainder of it. Even if it is just a bowl before bed, if it can keep those dreams away I will pop an edible every night. I don’t remember my dreams anymore and that has been a real gift. I call them dreams because they were very long and they were every night, but really they were nightmares. It was me reliving shitty parts of my life. It was me trying to grasp onto another reality that was more pleasant than the one I lived in. It was like rerun after rerun. I have replayed grandparent’s visit and all of us going to watch Star Wars: A New Hope, when I was four, over and over. We were going when three were being replayed at the nearby theater, I remember my grandmother talking to her husband and saying, “That aunt and uncle, they took in that bastard and all it got them was killed.” Of course I had to ask what that meant and guess who found out they were a bastard at four? You guessed it!

Those dreams are well gotten rid of. Smoke pot.

After the dreams were taken care of, other new mechanisms started taking root. Breathing exercises were always a part of my life, but I was doing them uninstructed, so the practice needed fine tuning. Masturbating, yeah… that was always part of my anxiety treatment and it continues. We have a lot of available sources on YouTube for grounding techniques and you can scroll through those all day long and a lot of them work well. These are all the most basic ways to begin addressing how to cope.

Medications other than pot. Look, get used to the idea that you are likely going to be on meds, for a time at least. There is no shame in this. Everyone needs something to help and self medicating with street drugs or booze is just going to make things worse. Get a good therapist and keep them. If you are poor, this is going to be one of the hardest steps to handle. You are going to need a medical verification to get any real assistance, so make sure where you go has someone on staff that will do that. Do not get self conscious about it. You are making sure they can supply your full needs, that is all. There are a lot of places that won’t, so don’t waste your time and effort on a lemon. Get where you need to be immediately without the drama of having to do it last minute.

Primarily, your coping is going to need a lot of support from the outside and it is going to be a lot harder to put that support system in place if you try to fight this on your own.