PTSD is not for sissys

Do you know what PTSD is? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I bet you think you do.  You might say something like "ya its what people that go off to war have" true. You might say "It's when people see really terrible things" true. A few really smart people might say "ya my friend watched her beloved husband die and now she has it" very true. If you are a mental health professional you might say "ya a child who all of a sudden has a dad who dies will have it" also true.  I was telling a friend once about how life is now without Dan and she said "wow it's almost like you have PTSD or something." No not almost, we do. But what exactly is it?

Well it's complicated. I can't describe it for baby girl because I am not in her mind (unfortunately) but I can try and describe it for me. I am hesitant to do so; it's not an easy thing to talk about, But if we are going on a the point of this blog is to be therapeutic for me and help people understand grief a little better then this is important. I would guess (you know in my very professional opinion of having no actual medical knowledge) that most people in grief have some level of PTSD. Death is traumatic stress. Really it is.

I watched Dan, the love of my life die. Just watched him die. You all know that. It was awful and traumatic. You all know that. If you don't know that feel free to read my blog about the night he died, but I warn you it's awful and traumatic. Before Dan died I could very easily say hands down the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to me was giving birth to my daughter. Before that the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to me was when I was 10 I accidentally spilled a pot of boiling water on my legs. That's it, three things, the other two are almost laughable compared to the dead husband one. I had a good life, I've never broken a bone, I've never been in a serious car accident I was trauma free.

Did you ever have something embarrassing happen to you and then for days afterward you keep replaying it in your head, like someone making fun of you, or you falling in public, or you saying something stupid. After a few days the sting fades and you stop recalling that. PTSD is that but literally times a million.

I imagine it's different for everyone but this is what it was like for me. The memory of the night Dan died, the awful sickening memory of watching him die played through my mind 24/7.  like a video on repeat. It was always there, The whole world was still going on but that memory was with it. like if you put a transparent screen across your face, you can see what's going on around you but there is something else too. Like a transparent screen, you can see what the picture is but you can see through it too.  On this screen was the night Dan died, All different scenes over and over and over on repeat. So your driving down the road and you can see what your doing but you have to look through this screen of this awful movie while your driving. Or while your having a conversation with someone, you can be looking right at them and even talking to them and this movie is playing in front of your eyes.  But it gets better, so along with real life, and your transparent screen  at the bottom is a news real ticker tape. You know the things that play at the bottom of the news with the top stories. Can you guess what this tape says "Dan died, he died, he's dead. Dan died, he died, he's dead. Dan died, he died, he's dead" it's the only story.  So you have real life, your transparent movie screen playing the death scene, and your ticker tape highlighting the story. But wait there more. There's noise. lots and lots of loud noise. Nothing specific just noise. Like if you go to a bar and your trying to listen to a conversation, but there's loud music and clinging glasses and 100 other conversations going on around you, chairs moving, people dancing. That was all in my brain. All in my brain while all the while trying to get through real life. Basically my brain was complete chaos. It sucked just a little bit.

My brain had never been chaos before, my brain is usually very organized, so I knew this was wrong and I knew there was no way I was going to make it with all this chaos in my brain. I had to fix it. My therapist mentioned doing EMDR. Dan had actually taken a class on it once and went on and on about how awesome it was. So I had heard of it. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing which is a very fancy way of saying reprogramming your brain. It sounds scary but its not. There is lots of stuff about it just google. What you do is go to a therapist trained in EMDR. Then you close your eyes and retell the story of your trauma. It's awful but hey your already doing it anyway so what's one more time. The therapist will stop you every so often and have you open your eyes. Then she moves her finger around in a funny pattern and you follow it with your eyes. Yes this reprograms your brain. It takes all the memories that are stuck in the front of your brain and moves them to the back of your brain, to long term memory. That is exactly what it did for me. It took my movie screen and rolled it up and put it away. It's still in my head I can get it out if I need to but it's not in front of everything now. the ticker tape went with it (although it likes to sneak it's way back in a lot more) All the noisy chaos went silent. Now when I remember its like watching a silent movie, the chaos is gone. It was like magic.

That is only part of PTSD. I'm sure I'll talk about other parts eventually. I have some advice (I know it's bad form to give advice in personal blogs) but I truly hope you take it. Again I am not a medical professional, but if you have PTSD in any form please go do EMDR therapy. Obviously trauma is different for everybody and it won't work the same for everybody. It may not work like magic for you like it did for me, but isn't it worth a try. I could not live like that and I don't think you can either.

I wrote a book about my grief, you can read it here: Carry on Castle