Chapter 3: Progress and Setbacks

The Ups and Downs of my Journey with C-PTSD

I suppose looking back, the damage was always there, I just didn’t know it. When I was younger, I had a flash temper. I would talk over people, I would invade space, I would enjoy making people uncomfortable. There were a lot of times I did shit that I regret now. It has taken me decades to understand what my trauma has done to me, but the damage was obvious looking back. Inflicting my trauma on others just felt better in some way.

There is a lot that I hate about myself then, but I am learning to forgive that broken person now that I am healing. I had to realize that I am not the same person as I was then. I take more time to think about what I am dealing with instead of just reacting. I now vent rather than explode, most of the time. I try to see what my mistakes were back then and know in my heart that they are not mistakes that I am continuing to make. Forgiving yourself is going to be key to healing. It is necessary to remove that shame. You can apologize to those you hurt as best as you can and you can accept if they aren’t willing to forgive you, but you tried.

I would lash out at others through junior high. I was quick to fight those who didn’t intimidate me, like a bully. That changed in high school after my parents divorced.

My parents divorce was nasty. I mean viciously nasty. Bridges weren’t just burned, they were nuked and the land salted.

One day in school another kid decided he was pissed at me and I still have no idea why. Now remember, I used to get into scraps. What kid didn’t? This kid dogged me out of computer class giving me grief and shoving me. Then, he spun me around and punched me.

I froze.

He wasn’t bigger than me. He wasn’t imposing. He should not have been a threat. But, I froze. This wasn’t some, “shit I didn’t get the first hit” freezing either. This was full lockup and inability to protect myself. This kid just whaled on me. The kids who gathered around seemed as confused as I was as he kept hitting me until I hit the ground in a state of complete confusion. I could not react.

A girl got between us and told my assailant, “You win. Leave him alone, you can see he isn’t going to fight back.” I have no idea who she was. I cannot remember her face, but I remember my attacker’s, down to the placement of his acne. I wish I had thanked her or tried to find her later and give her some appreciation for the defense that I couldn’t muster for myself.

That was humiliating. I could not understand what happened. The worst part? This was not going to be the last time that happened. I attempted to tell my mom and get some kind of comfort, but her new boyfriend was there and he decided to tell me that, “You just need to learn how to defend yourself.” Yeah, no shit Scott. Fucking scumbag.

This issue should have been a big glowing neon sign that something was busted. Even if I realized something was deeply wrong, how exactly was I going to get help at fourteen, living in an environment that was toxic, with other broken people who don’t know they are broken either?

Following that incident, I started ditching school. How could I face that classroom again? That boy was still going to be in the seat ahead of me because the seats are assigned, he was likely to find another reason to attack me, and I would likely not be able to defend myself in any following incidents. Nothing about that sounded appealing. Wandering the neighborhood with my pals did.

Later on, I had a lockup when a friend picked up a former classmate. I was around twenty and I had said something that I thought was funny but the former classmate didn’t. When we got out of the car he sucker punched me in the gut and started cussing me out. My other friend didn’t do anything at all. The walk home felt like it was going to take forever and I felt like the most pathetic person on the planet. You know what is worse than that? It happened a second time. Same friend, same former classmate, same lockup. Apparently I was now a target for this little asshole. I had to stop hanging out with that friend, eventually they were going to expose me to that asshole again and next time he might not stop with a simple punch in the gut or face.

Eventually I ended up in a long-term relationship and I did not know how to be a good partner at all. I would blow up and shout when I was stressed out. I was angry over the dumbest things. My insecurity made me think she was always going to leave me. My need for time alone had put stress on our homelife. Eventually I cheated on her, then she cheated on me, and then we broke up and honestly, we should have never been together in the first place. I was a damaged thing making shit choices. We both deserved people that were healthy for us, that meant we needed to work on issues that we were both dealing with, especially me.

Did I mention being a people-pleaser?

When I was growing up, there was a constant requirement that I tend to the needs of others before my own. I was doing chores throughout the house by five. My first younger brother was born when I was four and he was a handful. The attention that I was getting from my parents was nearly all negative. I was not allowed to fight back when my sibling attacked me, and when he was two, his favorite thing to do to me was dig hunks of my skin from my arm with his sharp little fingernails.

This became a pattern. My siblings had the power to get me hurt for anything that they wanted to complain to their dad about. I had no choice but to do my best to keep them happy, in order to keep myself safe. My life was less and less in my control. If I failed at chores, I was going to be hurt. If I made my siblings unhappy, I was going to be hurt. If I don't have my homework done, hurt. If I don’t eat what I was fed, hurt. If I happened to be in the room when my step dad was upset, hurt. Pain was my constant companion. The only way to lessen the pain was to anticipate everyone’s needs around me and meet as many as I could constantly.

Sadly, I am now currently living in my mother’s house and I have discovered something.

She was likely the one who instigated my pain the entire time.

How's that for a mindfuck? Before step dad, there was my aunt and uncle across the street. I would get the belt if I had bad marks, if I didn’t do my homework, if I wasn’t doing everything exactly how I was told. This was an on and off thing from two years old until about four, because that is when the step dad became the constant in my life. My mother was pressured to marry him by my grandmother because, “You already have one bastard, don’t do that to another child.” Yeah, a gem that one.

After the divorce, my mom recruited other men to keep me in line. Mom now says, “You were a really difficult kid.” Yeah, but still a fucking kid lady.

Since I have been here, I have been told by my family they want me to leave. Literally all of them. My mom keeps up the attempts to get me hurt or to keep me in line by telling my siblings about what I do that upsets her until they drive over to yell at and threaten me. I have asked her one simple thing, “Hey, if you see something that you want done, ask me to do it before calling my brothers. The same goes if I am doing something that upsets you, talk to me, don’t tell other people about it, you are going to get someone hurt.”

I didn’t realize until pretty recently, that that was the whole point. It isn’t about me not helping, it’s about me being unwelcome. My place in the family is the bastard. I am not a member of the true family. Every single one of my siblings, other than my 23andMe sister, has told me at one point or another that I am not their real brother. Children don’t just say that. Someone of authority needs to put that out there for them to pick up.

Now here I am, unwanted in a house that is falling to pieces, with taxes that are so delinquent they are likely to seize the property, and wanting nothing more than to help my mom, even when it is clear she would not do the same for me, and then to escape away from this area. I simply cannot heal while I am still being hurt, how can anyone?

I had spoken to a friend the first few months I was here about all this and I mentioned what was going on and that I have been hated since I arrived, I have no way of making my mom happy, I can’t focus well enough, or feel better enough, to get work and it seems like my mom is trying to get me hurt.

Their reply?

“Your mom has hated you as long as I have known you.”

I have known him since I was fourteen. He has more than enough experience to draw from to arrive at that conclusion.

Armed with this realization I began talking it through with my therapist and other trusted friends. The conclusion given was thus.

Mom was knocked up by a man in his thirties when she was eighteen. This put her life on hold. She didn’t have much of a support system, so the struggle was hard. I spent the first month in the hospital because of spinal meningitis, by the time I got out, her milk dried up, so we never bonded properly. Because my first month was in the hospital and she was told, “Don’t get too attached, we don’t know if he will live through this,” that lack of a bond was even more obvious.

She was alone and with a child that she didn’t likely care about. How was that supposed to work? I ruined her plans for the future. I was not likely to survive, so when I did, she had likely already disassociated from me to some degree that wasn’t easily reversed. Take in that she moved from Northern California to Southern California to get away from her own abusive step dad (sexually) and her abusive mother, the strain just kept growing.

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Can I blame her for hating me? Not really.

Boy isn’t being an empath fun?

I once told a therapist all of that, along with the details of the abuse, the fact that my grandmother was left on a doorstep as a newborn and her mother walked into San Francisco traffic, that my grandmother married a man with another family and he abandoned my mother and her to move across the country, that my grandmother hated my mom and would regularly make her feel so bad that she wanted to offer to kill herself to free ol’ granny, that her mother set my mom up to be raped by her step dad and his friend, that when mom made it clear she was really having a hard time dealing with that event, my grandma threw everything my mom owned on the lawn and threw her out at twelve years old over the whole mess, she ended up in her friend’s house living as a squatter to some degree, people-pleasing to keep herself safe, that she once got so sick she was likely to die and that my grandmother wouldn’t sign the authorization to let the doctors help her, and when she was informed of the severity of my mom’s condition, my grandmother responded with, “Then she dies,” that it took my adopted uncle threatening to hurt my gran before she finally signed the papers for treatment, that mom was promiscuous to fill her need to be loved, that when my gran saw mom in her later teens, she told my adopted aunt, “I don’t know why you are friends with my daughter, you can do so much better,” that on my mother’s wedding day, a wedding my gran pushed her into because mom had the man’s child, gran told my moms new in-laws, “I am really getting the better end of this deal, you are just getting her.” Not once, but twice because no one laughed or acknowledged her “witty” insult.

How do I blame my mom for being broken? How can I blame her for not knowing how to love or to create a loving home when she has no idea what love really is?

The story of my trauma began well before I was born. It even started before my mother’s mother was born.

Celebrating Small Victories in Recovery

Everything above is what I have been climbing out of. This is the mess I inherited. This was the generational trauma that lives in my body and mind. A legacy of torment that has been passed down for generations.

The fact that I stopped that cycle with me is a major victory, even if it means I don’t have children of my own, this stops with me. Today, I spoke to my sister and I told her how proud I am of her for being protective of her son. She too is trying to end this trauma from continuing on in our family.

I am aware of my temper. I am vastly more in control of it now, even if I slip and allow it to boil over periodically, however I now apologize. This is rare in my family. The common practice is to just be distant awhile and then hope that it blows over eventually. Whether or not anyone likes it, I am cutting people out of my life. Those who fall away do so of their own doing, if I have to cut them loose, that is my choice for me. I am taking back my power. I am not going to allow the hatred of those around me to allow me to feel terrible about myself. Or… at least that is the goal.

I am asking myself the big questions I was never allowed to ask of myself for myself.

“Who am I?”

“What do I want?”

I am forty-three and I may have to completely rethink my life, but at least I am actively doing it now. I am focusing on pleasing myself. I have to embrace the need to stop thinking about pleasing everyone around me, while forgetting about myself and my own needs.

Socialmedia might have its flaws and those are many, but one thing it does better than anything else I encountered in my life is, you will find your tribe there. When you are in a toxic family pre internet the only contrasts that you had were on TV or in your neighborhood. If you are in a clannish toxic family, you don’t get a lot of friends with family that are not like your own. If you’re in a toxic family, it is going to attract more toxic families to it.

The internet started giving us a long reach to find our people. You can talk to friends across the world. You can have a friend you have never met in person that you love as dearly as family. I personally have many. The more people you encounter, the more you see the differences in your family, your upbringing, your experiences.

The other thing you learn when you have such a wide reach of various direct observations is, people are all people. The further you allow yourself to reach out and interact with people that are supposedly different from you, the more you realize we are also very similar. Our wants, our needs, our desires are almost universal across the board. We want to be loved. We want to love. We want to feel like we matter. We all want what we do to matter. We want to be remembered fondly. We want to bring people into our lives that make us better people. We want to help the people we care about.

If there is something I am missing, please let me know. I would love to have that constructive conversation. There is nothing for us to debate here. There is no conflict. This is just the observations we all get to make as we go along.

Once you start to heal, you want to heal more. I imagine it to be like the runner's high. You feel good about your achievements and you want to feel that again. You want to feel like you achieved something big, for yourself.

Days are going to get easier. That is inevitable. Ominous positivity. You are going to feel like you again, I promise. You are just going to have to do the work and keep on it as much as you can. You might not have the spoons today, but you might have them tomorrow.

I started a daily activity report for each day. In that report I make marks and count up my points expended, my spoons, my spell slots, my whatever connects best with you. For me, I use spell slots. I can see progress objectively through the reports. It’s no longer the abstract expectations of my everyday life that I can question or debate about whether progress was made at all, the spell slots I spent on my day gave me an objective total that I can measure. I started this when I realized I was going to need to keep full detailed records in order to support my disability appeals. I don’t have the inexhaustible energy I had growing up anymore.

Each hash mark gives me confidence that I am making strides toward the goal.

Having to rebrand my life has not been easy, but I have to admit to myself that my days of hourly wage labor are over. I have a bad back, a double hernia, I have a neck that is constantly in pain, I have the stress shoulders and back that a lot of people with anxiety have. I am not going to be able to lift fifty-pound boxes of apples anymore. I am not going to be able to do the physical labor that I had done, while breaking my body.

This rebranding has been long in coming, but I am seeing the difference in my mindset. This book would have been a challenge that I ho-hummed about for the next two or three years, just a year ago. I have a fictional novel that I have not been able to pull the trigger on to release for the last three years. I am seeing the paths forward now taking form.

We live in interesting times. There are horrors of plenty, to be sure, but there are wonders too. I'm a dyslexic mess, but I have a knack for telling stories and creating things. When I was a kid, it was more than a little intimidating to think that I could ever actually write and express myself with any kind of confidence.

Now though, now I have a free voice to text application. I have spell and grammar checks, I have friends who were my classmates while we were pursuing degrees in English. I have professors that I respect and who take enough of an interest in me to help guide me in steps that I am unsure of my footing. I can access these all from the internet. My therapists and doctors are not inaccessible because of the distance. This has been invaluable in my healing process. I have been able to keep the same therapist for about six months now, and my caseworker and therapist have been a great support system. My new prescriber is a veteran who worked with PTSD sufferers for forty years. He has been amazing. He actually does care about my progress and not just pushing me back out into the world.

My therapist tells me that they see my efforts and they see how hard I am trying to get better. These people see me. They see my efforts and they are not judging my failures or setbacks. If I had these people on my case from day one, I am confident I would not have been fighting this long and hard to gather the evidence for my application for disability or appeal, had it failed the first time. They have given me faith that there is hope for someone like me within that random deck of cards that government help consists of.

Today. I am feeling extremes of good and bad.

Dealing with Setbacks and Triggers

What a great place to switch gears!

I have had the perfect terrible day today to actually reflect on right here.

Setbacks.

I just wanted to die today.

Yeah. Seriously. My mother is a victim of trauma, of physical abuse, of a terrible mother, and of the opioid epidemic.

I have nowhere else to go, so I am staying with my mom. With that comes this broken woman lashing out at me for no reason. She poisons my siblings against me and she very likely hates me. This is not a healthy place to recover on a good day. On a bad day, it can knock you back a few steps.

That was today.

The insane weather we have had has made this area a mess. Boulders fell onto the highway last week and the major artery into this remote area had been closed down. That made my mother getting her medicine impossible and she has been out for a few days. Each day she is out, she gets meaner. Each day she focuses her hate onto me for existing in her home. Today, I had to drive eighty miles the moment the highway opened to get her oxycodone and I do mean the moment it opened.

I am currently borrowing my brother's car, or one of my siblings would have been making the trip instead. I don’t mind that. What I mind is the sheer focus of hate on me daring to exist in a broken state within my mother’s home and that I had to rush out on a highway for this woman who makes no secret that she hates me.

I get in the car. Because the car is a wreck, something in the car was knocking around like the wheel was going to break off. I had to stop by my brother's house to ask him about the car and if it does this normally. His girlfriend stares daggers at me when I pull up, I have no idea why. Pulling up there is a crapshoot. If they have been drinking and getting supercharged by a neighborhood redhat, then they might tell me how much of a terrible, liberal, cuck, waste of life I am. If they are sober, they will start drinking and start getting shitty about me wearing a mask.

The bother was pretty sober and pleasant. That was a good thing. The wheel keeps making noise, but when it comes down to it, I actually don’t care if the wheel breaks off and I plunge into the canyon, so ultimately I just drive the canyon, the same canyon I wrecked in about fifteen years ago.

I eventually get to my sister who is at the mouth of the canyon and we start talking. I try to keep my cool and tell her just the most surface things because she really doesn’t need to feel like I am any worse than I am normally.

I am already in misery, so I tell her that I am asking all the siblings if they want me to force my mom to take her medicine only as prescribed. My brother with the car and I have been talking about it recently and seeing as I am the one living here, and as she already hates me, I suggest that I take control over her medication and ration her appropriately. I tell them both, I am not going to even try unless all of us are in agreement. My sister flatly says no. I get it. That is why I wanted everyone to agree. This was intervention, not bullying. I can’t be alone in this.

My sister says, “Mom was talking about doing something like that, but she said that she would only do it if it was me,”

“Just you?” I ask.

“Yeah, she doesn’t trust you.” She replies.

She doesn’t trust me. She doesn’t see my value. She hates me. She sees me as a parasite. She has never loved me. I am a disposable kid.

I feel myself growing cold in my stomach. I tell her how much that hurts, even though I know I shouldn’t take it personally. My mom is a sick woman, in pain, a victim of numerous traumas, and does not know how to love… but it hurts.

I tell my sister that I just want to die. I give her the PIN to get into my phone in case anything should happen to me. I tell her that I want my college friend to take Luna in the event that I am gone. Let my friends know what happened.

She tells me that the only reason she is here is because of her son.

We hug. We tell each other, “I love. You matter. I am glad you are here.”

The words were heart-warming and heart-breaking. Neither of us really know the joy of life.

I drove the canyon home hoping the wheel would snap off and throw me from the highway and into the river below.

I get home and tell my sister I made it. I told my brother the car and I made it. I remind my brother not to talk to my mom about the discussion of rationing her pills, because I can’t really handle much more hate at the moment. He wants to talk. I don’t. I tell him as politely as I can that I need to be alone for a while. He wants to call. I tell him no.

I set the pills outside my mom’s door. On the little snack wrack that I made to keep her snacks just outside her room, because the house is cold and she hates walking to the kitchen in that cold. I knock and tell her that her medicine is here. I hear a muffled and begrudging, “thank you.” I don’t reply. I go into my room and I turn on RRR. I need to hear the joy of justice and rebellion. I need to hear Nacho Nacho. As I write Ram is beating Bheem at the whipping post. My eyes are welling up in anticipation of Bheem’s defiant song. I am tapping both of my arms with my fingers slowly. Binal tapping. I am savoring the joy of standing up for your beliefs and not allowing a bully define who you are.

I start to cry and I know the cortisol overload in my brain is about to release with these tears. As I cry I see Ram’s tears mixing with Bheem’s blood that was splashed across his face.

I am not going to break. I am going to stand tall in defiance. I am going to get through this.

Just you watch.