Talking PTSD
April is the month it happened, my head injury. You might think it’s hardly something to celebrate, being beaten to the point you think you might die but I’ve had to fight extremely hard to overcome many challenges to be where I am today. On 19th of this month it will be five years – that’s two-hundred-and-sixty weeks of challenges I’ve faced. This is the year I start to really talk about my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It hit hard a few months down the line. There was of course a trigger. This passage is from Lost Soul: Poetry from a Broken Mind And My Journey Of Recovery.
“When things start going wrong, it’s normally without warning and this day was no different. Suddenly, something hit me on the back of my head and rather than remaining in the moment – within reality – my mind thought it was instantly back in that room, and that I was being attacked. I had no control in that process and no knowledge of how to make it stop. Reaching for the back of my head a man grabbed for whatever had landed on me. As he did so I disassociated. This is one of the memories I re-visited in therapy and have re-lived in order to deal with it appropriately. I have good recollection of this event as a result of that. I can remember looking down at myself as I floundered in the deep end of the swimming pool and disappeared under the water. A scary notion that the very moment my Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) hit me, I was physically and mentally in deep water. I’d lost control and any level of reasoning and I’d done so in public.
Not only had I returned to a memory in which I felt I might die, I’d done so in a situation in which I might have drowned had I not been pulled to safety. This was the start of a new fear and one that I would struggle to come to terms with. Submerging my face under water was not going to happen for a very long time – I couldn’t even stand under a shower. Anyone that has read Betrayal might understand what parts of that novel were so very difficult for me to write as I came to terms with my fear of water.”