Thursday, August 15, 2019

LETS DEEPEN OUR UNDERSTANDING OF PTSD

 Sometimes emotional reactiveness swirling around inside our brains is too overwhelming to think straight ... and that is definitely true of those who experience episodes of PTSD, most especially when sneak attacks of PTSD remain undiagnosed over most of one’s life.

Being that some of my self perceptions, concerning subconscious expectations, are still perfectionistic, I tend to feel much more angry with myself than with those who have wronged me, and that dichotomy creates swirling sensations of inner conflict so overwhelming as to spin my processor’s connection to logic into a state of dizziness that disrupts my think tank’s hold onto mental clarity.  I have come to call episodes of PTSD ‘sneak attacks’, because they sucker punch my processor without so much as a hint of warning that my inner strengths, having stretched beyond human endurance, are succumbing to spiking anxiety that feels so darkly fearsome as to knock out any conscious connection to logic before I can acknowledge that, once again, mental exhaustion releases ghosts, long repressed, which blindside my awareness to the fact that yesteryear’s unprocessed terror has been freed to emerge from subconscious repression, casting my brain into no man’s land where my smarts are overwhelmed by the sudden descent of childhood’s unresolved depression as if I’ve stepped off of a sandbar only to feel myself sucked into a riptide so swiftly as to feel unable to stop myself from floundering, breathlessly, feeling utterly unmoored —drowning in a downward spiraling mind maze—yet again  ...

The first time that this subconscious spinning sensation of drowning sucked my connection to emotional safety into the depths of the dark side of my brain occurred two years after my father’s death when I’d unconsciously begun to relive the daunting nature of haunting experiences, which were based in my repressed belief (at the age of three) that any time my mother’s frown appeared, I was somehow at fault for not meeting her needs, and therefore I’d felt subconsciously unworthy of her love.

Over recent years, time well spent in therapy has offered me insight into understanding many emotional triggers that stimulate an episode of PTSD to suddenly erupt, though there are times when I have no conscious clue as to what has stimulated a mind swirling episode of PTSD to arise from within the depths of my dark side, striking down the vibrancy of my spirit so spontaneously as to suck all of my think tank into yesteryear’s unprocessed, dark house of horror, yet again, as was the case, early last week ...

So, if, beginning at the age of three, my self worth has depended upon my taking care of my mother’s needs (evolving to include the needs of everyone I loved) by denying the very existence of my own and if, during recent years, I’ve been choosing to love myself, vulnerabilities and all, then perhaps my current challenge is to identify, voice and meet my needs without worrying, subconsciously about feeling so selfish as to find myself unloved and alone whenever my needs and those of my loved ones conflict—I mean, I wish anxiety would not spike as soon as I feel need to say:  Truly, I wish I could say yes to your request but I can’t—so deep runs my fear of disappointing anyone so as to feel as adrift and alone as had proved true of a deeply confounded, terrified three year old child, who’d had no clue that human emotional reactivity knows no bounds during lengthy times of intense grief,  and thus does today’s train of thought reveal a lot about the emotional pressure that I’d mistakenly absorbed to be whomever my birth family had needed of me beginning at the highly vulnerable age of three, when the development of a child’s self worth is determined by voice tones and facial expressions that shine or scowl in his/her direction before the undeveloped nature of the young think tank can even begin to fathom the emotional complexity of irrational human interactions ...

As I’m just beginning to emerge from the self protective cocoon that my defense system felt need to weave around my whole being during last week’s spiraling descent into the dark side of my brain (no light sabers in sight to offer my power of intuition spotlights of insight concerning why my processor felt so suddenly, utterly engulfed within an emotionally suffocating depression until yesterday), I’m planning to publish trains of thought that my think tank felt compelled to write, over these past few days, though my power of intuition did not feel ready to reveal these thought for public consumption until my descent into PTSD began to lift, today.  Why not?  Thus far, Insight has offered me no conscious clue ...

I’m not planning to publish these thoughts in any order, because most of my processor was still feeling swamped within a darkened state of subconscious disorder when one string of insights after another seemed to filter out of my depths on its own ...

The human brain, having suffered early life trauma, remains as mysterious a phenomenon as is true of the magnetic attraction that pulls one person toward another though strangers they may be ... offers me reason to believe that feeling intuitive need to seek out deeper truths, which we do not know that we’ve hidden anxiously from our conscious selves, will always feel more fascinating than fiction can hope to be ...


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