PTSD
At times when PTSD had hijacked my brain’s natural connection to logic, my clarity “... blurred and spun in a feverish whirl ... Anna grew dizzy, her head swimming, her body alive with a crackling heat as if she were feverish ... She ... closed her eyes, letting him guide her, giving herself up to ... the moment ... .”
“Cold sweat doused her feverish skin. Her heart raced until it felt as if it would propel itself right out of her chest.”
Excerpt From
Secrets of Nanreath Hall
by Alix Rickloff
Though the excerpt above has nothing to do with cancer or PTSD, upon absorbing those words while reading a novel, my brain conjured up memories of panic experienced during my youth, which I’d disclosed to no one—inclusive of myself—until an astute therapist, well versed in identifying the main root of current anxiety attacks associated with past experiences diagnosed me with PTSD.
During moments in which a current situation hot wires my brain, jumpstarting a fearful state of mind, my eyes see not that which is right before me but rather flashes of unidentified terrors from long ago, which, having remained locked inside a mental block, stimulate my basic instincts to summon my defense system to bury every one of those traumatizing experiences so deeply into subconscious memory that only two darkly shadowed details, both of which seem utterly unrelated to the life I’ve known as my own, dart into my conscious memory, now and then, only to be sucked back into subconscious storage so swiftly as to dizzy my mind with visualizing him seated on the edge of a narrow bed bending over me while my conscious mind escaped into an all encompassing altered state until suddenly, her angry voice, standing in the shadows of the open doorway cracked through my self protective mental block just long enough for my mind to muffle them yelling at each other in the hallway directly outside of the room I’d been given for the night though these are the only words that have ever emerged from the haze of subconscious memory until and including today—What are you doing to her???
The next morning, at breakfast, we three conversed naturally as if nothing horrific had happened during the dark of night when he had intended to attack much more than my personal sense of safety. And though they may have ‘acted’ as if naught was amiss, I had no need to ‘act’, being that, by my teens, my defense system had become well practiced at locking every detail of a terrifying memory within its own compartment of my subconscious followed by denial tossing the keys into the winds of time ...
As to the second memory that’s related to the first, only three words emerge from subconscious containment, which, even now, 62 years later, remain empowered to slug my sense of personal safety with the weight of a sledge hammer—lock the door ...
What makes me write of yesteryear’s unhealed terrors, today? Most likely the fact that visualizing my body and spirit battling cancer, again, conjured up a series of traumatic experiences suffered and left unhealed, long past, based in the fact that upon opening the door to a recent trauma, I have no control over which raw aspect of PTSD may come barreling out of subconscious storage, suggesting why, yet again, I feel deeply thankful for every session of EMDR therapy, which has empowered my processor to identify, believe in and call forth my hose of personal strengths, which flushes out fearful thoughts that naturally emerge each time fate sets my personal sense of safety afire, anew.
👩🏻Annie
PS
Can you believe that the protagonist within the novel I’m reading (to detour my mind from concentrating upon current events concerning my health) is named—Anna ...
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