My Story of Complex-PTSD
I have always struggled to articulate the impact complex-PTSD has had on my life. It isn’t something that’s easy to describe. Recently, I had a Toastmasters speech where the project was on using storytelling and figurative language such as metaphors and similes. I decided to do mine on describing living with C-PTSD. I have included it below to illustrate how C-PTSD has affected me in the hope that it will give you an understanding of its impact on my life:
"Many years ago there was a young girl whose parents badly abused and neglected her throughout her childhood, until she eventually left home to go to university. Unfortunately, even after she’d left home, she was still plagued by the after affects of being abused by the very people who were supposed to love and care for her. As a young girl, she had vowed to herself that she would overcome the horror of her childhood, but as an adult, she found the effects of the trauma still haunted her.
After graduation, the trauma continued to negatively impact her whole life. She found living with unresolved complex-PTSD is like trying to plan your future when your house is on fire. You don’t. You focus on getting out of the house because your immediate survival depends on it. Until she could resolve the trauma, she couldn’t focus on other areas of her life such as work and relationships. This means, for most of her life she was focused on trying to get out of the burning house rather than planning and working towards her future.
Her recovery from the complex trauma was hampered by the difficulty of finding a therapist who could treat it. This was because going to a therapist who generalises in lots of different mental health problems, was like having cancer and going to your GP for treatment instead of a consultant oncologist. Your GP will have knowledge about cancer, but he or she won’t understand the best course of effective treatment for you and your particular type of cancer. He or she could unwittingly make it worse. Complex-PTSD is the same.
To give you an idea of what I mean by this, I’ll return to my burning house metaphor. Complex trauma isn’t your average house fire, it’s more like a raging inferno. She found that if the therapist didn’t have the right tools to treat complex trauma it was like fighting a raging inferno with a handheld fire extinguisher. Handheld fire extinguishers are perfectly adequate for putting out a small fire, such as one in a waste paper basket, and used properly, they will stop a fire spreading. But her trauma wasn’t a waste paper basket fire. The help she tried to enlist over most of her life didn’t help her, because they didn’t know how to fight raging infernos, they only knew how to fight little fires.
Unfortunately, the way trauma affected her brain meant she couldn’t remember anything about what happened so she didn’t know what she was dealing with. This meant she didn’t know to look for someone who knew how to fight that kind of fire. And all the while the fire was getting more and more out of hand. It was destroying more and more of her life.
Her trauma was also a blaze that was invisible to everyone else. To people on the outside, there appeared to be nothing the matter, so no one could understand why her life wasn’t working and why she was struggling so much.
Healing her mind afflicted with complex-PTSD was akin to healing a physical wound to her body. Given the right conditions the lesion will heal by itself. Whereas a festering laceration will be prevented from healing by the disease. Her trauma was like a putrefying wound in the brain; it wouldn’t heal, and like a throbbing, physical wound – it constantly distracted her from being able to concentrate on other things. Give her brain the right conditions, however, and it would also heal. EMDR therapy was like the mind equivalent of cleaning and disinfecting an infected cut. The EMDR cleaned the infection of the brain, the trauma, and thus allowed it to heal.
Even when she found someone who knew how to treat complex trauma, overcoming her childhood trauma wasn’t a linear process – like climbing a ladder – it was one fraught with setbacks even when she did progress.
Before the trauma had been resolved, her brain was like an overfull cupboard, with a door that had a habit of opening of its own accord. When the door opened, the tins - which represented her thoughts – frequently and without warning would fall out and hit her on the head and body. After the trauma had been resolved, the cupboard was more like an orderly stacked cupboard; the tins remained neatly stacked on the shelves until she chose to open the cupboard door and take them out and the faulty hinge had been largely fixed.
All the best stories have a happy ending. How do I know this one has a happy ending? Because I was that traumatised girl and this was my journey to recovery. Having now resolved the trauma, I am slowly building up my life, one brick at a time. The journey until now has been like scaling a mountain and trying to survive the extreme conditions and lack of oxygen, whereas now my life is becoming more like a dance or a song, where the focus is more on being and enjoying the process."