Journey Through Trauma

I’m sitting here reading a book about paranoia and terrorism. I wanted to share a quote from the book that really struck me.

“At this point [after 9/11], for many Americans, a fire alarm in a public place… can access “stuck” memories established in a time of great fear, in a way similar to what the backfiring of a car, or holiday fireworks… can do to the brain of a shell-shocked veteran…We feel and behave in ways that are somewhat more anxious and suspicious than our usual reactions… To varying degrees, the emotional systems of our brains were overwhelmed, and our minds became more cluttered than we knew with unprocessed fragments of emotion, image and fear-laden sensation. These chaotic shards of memory soon started to be triggered , and to ambush us at unpredictable times, altering our feelings, our moods, and our behaviors.”

-Martha Stout, The Paranoia Switch

This is one of the best explanations of flashbacks that I have come across.

I have been dealing with nightmares and flashbacks since I was 13 years old, possibly earlier. I bought this book because I thought it might be interesting to learn more about paranoia, since I’ve been dealing with it for a few months.

Traumatic experiences alter our behaviors. They cause us to become anxious. My experiences have caused me to be paranoid.

When I was abused for 7 years, I was overwhelmed with fear and terror. That’s why I have 10-20 flashbacks a day.

Martha Stout talked earlier in the book about the fact that people have flashbacks because of unprocessed memories. I think that’s why I’m still dealing with complex PTSD. Many years later, I still haven’t been able to fully process my memories of the abuse. It's too confusing. Broken pieces.

I often wish my paranoia, psychosis, flashbacks and nightmares would just go away. Just like that. A wave of a wand and woosh! Everything goes away.

But life is not that easy.

It’s a journey.

And journeys mean that we have some ups and downs. All stories have to have conflict, or else it’s not a story. And some of us have more conflict than others. That’s just life.

No matter how much conflict you encounter in your life, you can always have hope because we have a God who loves us very deeply.

When I was abused for many years, I often thought that God was not listening to my prayers. I often felt desperate and unheard.  But God listens. My pastor said in a sermon a few weeks ago something that really helped me. She said “God journeys with us in the seeming answered and seeming unanswered prayers.”

No matter what, we are not on this journey alone.

Want to be Normal Again

My paranoia and psychosis is really bad again. I see people sticking out their tongues or licking their lips everywhere I go and I think it's aimed at me. They look at me when they do it, so I know it's aimed at me. I don't know what I did to make them do it but I feel like someone spread a rumor about me.

My mom thinks that I'm hallucinating them sticking out their tongue, but her disbelief in my reality is just making things worse. It's making me question whether it's really happening and it's making me feel hopeless because I see them do it. I don't want to have hallucinations if that's what this is.

Point blank. I want to know if what's happening is real or not. And I want it to stop, because it's not funny if people are purposely making my paranoia worse. It's triggering my depression and making all my symptoms worse. I cry at several points during my day because it hurts. I've tried my best to avoid people in general.

I wish that more people knew that mental illness is not a joke. Yeah, I may do funny things but having mental illness can be devastating, especially when you have multiple illnesses. When I was in the hospital with psychosis a few months ago, I thought my oldest brother had faked his suicide and he was still alive. It took all of my strength when I realized that my oldest brother really is dead. My mind believed that he was alive.

I just really want this chaos in my mind to stop. I want my depression to go away. I want my flashbacks to go away. I want my paranoia to go away. I want to be "normal" again.

I'm trying my best to move forward in my life but there's still a lot holding me back. It's taking all of me to press on, but I know that things will get better. I have faith that they will.

Defeating the Past

I watched the movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World last night. At first, I thought it was just one of those strange and awkward films, but the more I watched it, the more I saw how relevant it is to my life and life in general.

Without giving too much away, Scott Pilgrim wants to date a girl named Ramona Flowers. In order to do so, he has to defeat her seven "evil exes." What stood out to me as I watched the movie was how the past intruded the present. The past haunted both Scott and Ramona. It was something to defeat. Something to overcome. Their past was always "just around the corner," waiting for another fight. You never knew what was to come in the next scene.

In the same way, I am trying to defeat my past. The past haunts me through flashbacks and nightmares. Each and every day I relive traumatic experiences from my past. My past is something to overcome.

I had therapy this morning and to say it was difficult is kind of an understatement. I am exhausted from therapy, especially today. I talk about the extreme abuse, the details that nobody wants to hear, the details that I have held in for so long, the details that invade my mind at various points during the day. It kind of feels like opening Pandora's box. 

But in order to move on from the past, I have to go through it and deal with it. In going through it, we can overcome it in a way that it no longer has the power it does. That's exactly what Scott Pilgrim did. He courageously fought the past and even himself.

At one point in the movie, someone says to Scott "If you want something bad, you have to fight for it." He was referencing Ramona but I believe it applies to anything that we truly want in this life.

What I strive for each day is to feel freedom in Christ. I do not want my past to intrude into my present anymore. I want to be free from my past. And that is what I'm fighting hard for. I'm fighting to get rid of the shame. I'm fighting to get rid of the paranoia. I'm fighting to take back control. That's why I continue to go to therapy and talk through some of the most difficult things one can endure. This life is not easy sometimes, but if we want to move forward, we have to fight through the darkness and chaos.

At another point in the movie, Scott says to Ramona that he doesn't care about her past- that he still loves her even after dealing with her past exes. I believe that's how God looks at us. He doesn't see our pasts. He sees the present and the future. He wipes away every mistake, every regret and helps us to move forward.

This movie helped me to understand what it means to face our past headon. It's scary. It can be difficult. It can take all of our energy and can feel like it takes all of us to defeat it. But we can do it if we set our eyes on God and move through those deep, dark places.

Reflection on Today

I don't really know what I want to talk about today. Today is one of the roughest days for me by far all year. I am triggered much more than usual, making things much more difficult. I have been trying to avoid Facebook. I am happy for those who have good fathers who treated them correctly, but today is a reminder of how awful my father is.

I don't hate my father, though. I hate what he did to me. I hate that my life is full of difficulty because he abused me for years. He did everything opposite of what a father should do. I have spent most of my life trying to recover from his abuse. I don't like to call him my father, because he never treated me like a father should treat his daughter. My brother even calls him by his first name because we can't bear to call him our father.

I don't really know what to talk about because I'm being triggered more than usual and not really in the mood to write. I've had a ton of flashbacks this morning. I just pray for those like me who don't know what it means to have a father, whether their father abandoned them, abused them or just isn't a part of their life. I hope you know that you're not alone. I hope you know that you can get through days like today.

I think that it's okay to be upset today. I think it's okay to be upset about what my father did to me. I think it's okay to be angry. This year has been extraordinarily difficult but I am finally healing from my father's abuse. I'm taking steps that I didn't know I would take or was scared to take. I'm moving through the trauma and moving forward.

Moving forward can be a big thing.

Most of all, I am glad to know the love of God, my real Father. It is His love that gets me through each day and His support that keeps me going. I would not be anywhere close to where I am without Him.

Today, I am thankful for God.