Tag: PTSD

Auld Lang Syne

I finally caught up with an old friend last week after a number of false starts. Hung up with mixed feelings.

Full disclosure: I have been under an enormous strain these past few months for a number of reasons. I have lived with a PTSD diagnosis for a long time. Some of the strain in my life has been deeply triggering. I am trying to navigate and resolve those feelings. There doesn’t appear to be a quick fix.

Here’s how triggered PTSD manifests in me: I talk my fool head off and mostly about me. I can’t fully explain why I do that or what that feels like. It is as if I am fighting for my life. It feels like I MUST make my position and feelings known and clear to whoever I am talking to. I desperately seek validation and reassurance.

That is compounded as I am terrified of not being heard. I am terrified that some crisis will happen because I didn’t warn someone strongly enough about what I see is about to happen. Not that I have ultimately been listened to anyway. To the listener, of course, it comes off as self-absorbed poppycock.

The listener isn’t wrong. Especially when they have no idea of the strain you are under or have been out of your life for a while. Life intervenes. Stuff happens.

So it was an odd phone call where the dynamic quickly shifted from “girls catching up.” She transitioned into “counsellor” mode and I was relegated to being “the patient.” It felt icky.

No doubt it was discomfiting on her part to engage in a phone call you thought would be a cheer-filled catchup only to find you are faced by a barrage of well-worn, existential complaints. And not for the first time.

I have had to navigate this dichotomy my whole life. Raised without solid boundaries or a clear and solid sense of self, I have erred on the boundary crashing front in extremis. I have had to identify and learn for myself what most of my peers picked up just by living at home.

Nowhere has this been more troublesome than in intimate relationships. I used to have a no-fail relationship management strategy. Before things got too close and intimate, I’d blow the relationship up. I’d break it off or create an irresolvable situation. By so doing, I was able to keep the pain of self-disclosure and exposure at bay for years. Sure, it was lonely. but it worked.

So I am on the phone with this old friend and desperately hoping she can sense and hear my pain and I spew my inflamed and irritated feelings all over the conversation. In a healthy and reasonable response, she backs off, shuts down and changes gear.

I am no longer the “old friend.” I am the supplicant. A problem to be solved. An object of pity and sadness. The Margot that drives her crazy. I gotta tell ya, that summary sucks.

And yet I clearly see how we have evolved into this place. We have hardly talked but a few times to catch up in recent months (years?). She has walked with me through a dozen major and minor crises in my life (largely self-created) over several decades. Her comparatively stable upbringing is the calm and centering counterpoint to my chaotic upbringing.

But I am a peripheral friend. An artifact of our college days. Outside her core of sensible and compatible friends who are calm and centered like she is. She has been a good friend nonetheless but time is having its way with us.

No longer the easy and familiar camaraderie. No longer the unspoken understandings that write the shorthand of longtime familiarity. Not much idea either of what is going in each other or in our lives that makes conversation fluid and empathetic.

I’m not grieving exactly. Our friendship is not finished. I am having to adjust to how it has altered. And why it has altered. My self-absorption and rumination would be part of it. But also our lives have changed in ways neither of us can fully appreciate. How could we? We haven’t seen each other face-to-face for years.

The loci of her life and of mine have separately shifted to the point of being unrecognizable to each other. I have not visited or even seen the new house she and her husband moved in to over two years ago. Even members of a kaffeeklatsch are more intimate.

I love her dearly and have always been profoundly grateful to have her in my life. But there have been periods of strain between us (some longer than others). Sometimes I marveled that the friendship held up at all.

i’ve always harbored the nagging feeling of being on the rim of her life as something of an interesting oddity. But trusting she found me bright and engaging enough to make a continued friendship worthwhile.

We talked about the weirdness of our last phone call. She found it weird, too. She identified an old and objectionable pattern in me where negative emotions took me over and ruled the day. I will try not to make that mistake again.

She is to be forgiven for not wanting to tolerate how pain manifests in me as it can be contagious. And it’s pretty self-absorbed. She likely has no idea how humiliating and upsetting it is to know my childhood deficiencies still manifest inappropriately.

I was heartened a year or two ago when she sent me something of a personal manifesto in an email. She wrote about carving out her own space and reclaiming her soul after a life devoted to serving others. She wanted to figure out how she wants to be and what she wants to keep in her life moving forward. Right on, said I.

My old saw: nothing in life is constant but change. She is now a long-married, happily retired professional woman who gallivants about North America and the world in her retirement while she and her husband still can. I am happy for them. It is a well-deserved coda to a good woman’s life.

Our friendship will continue. Most probably not apace. I received no signals that I’ve been kicked to the proverbial curb (yet!) in her emotional and psychic sorting process. I will try to be more careful and considerate in times of personal stress and strain. She is quite right. She doesn’t need that in her life.

It is an old and valuable friendship that has been through many shared experiences and challenges. The friendship is still there and still valuable. It has simply changed. Which was inevitable and up to me to adjust to. I’m learning the adjustments just keep on coming as we spend more time on the planet. Such is life.

Love you, old friend.

Never, Ever Give Up

Giving up can be so tempting. Chucking it all to free up your calendar, your head and your peace of mind. Easier said than done in some cases. Too easy in others.

The advice is age-old and profoundly wise. Necessary, too, if we are to keep moving forward. We recommit to life every single morning. I have found it easier when there is an endgame at play. A specific goal to work towards that would take me somewhere I wanted to go.

I also found that the motivation to keep going was intimately tied to how I felt about myself. It was also tied to who I was living for. I think that goes for everyone.

What we do every day shapes our daily activities and our self-image. Choosing to engage with life is a decision that we make over and over again.

The harsh truth is there really is no lasting form of escape, save death. And even that is debatable and creates consequences we cannot fully determine after we are gone.

The thought of inflicting mortal emotional and psychological wounds on our loved ones should be enough to dissuade anyone from making rash decisions. But it does happen and its outfall can be hideous.

I once read of a hapless son whose life was upended when his relatively young mother died through assisted suicide against his deepest wishes. He appeared incapable of surviving her loss and, worse, that he had been helpless to prevent how she died.

His tirade was leveled at the administrators of her assisted death and how they acted in spite of the impact of her untimely loss on her loved ones.

I have been deeply emotionally distraught and felt helpless and hopeless to change my situation. I don’t believe I was ever in the type of pain that would have justified choosing death when there were other options to resolve my difficulties.

It was not enough that my situation seemed unresolvable to me. It was more that I was not fully compos mentis or mature enough to make that determination.

Life sheds many souls who can no longer bear their circumstances or the chronic despair they cradle inside. I can only imagine the mental agony that drives them to self-annihilation.

A soldier who watched his best friend rent asunder by an IED. A woman trying to make sense of why the “good guy” she knew casually raped and humiliated her. A terminal stage ALS patient who is on the brink of losing any capacity to function independently. The list goes on ad infinitum.

Staying the course through the worst physical pain imaginable or by carrying unbearable emotional agony changes us. It can soften us and lead us to a deeper level of empathy with our fellow human beings.

The gritty and painful parts of life are as much a part of the whole as the good bits. Integrating its’ agony and ecstasy not only offer the opportunity to become wiser and deeper human beings but more capable of relating to others.

Of course, it is only by hanging in and staying the course that we have a chance to apply the lessons of the pain we’ve survived to the life we create moving forward.

And to belabor the obvious, we can only do that if we are still here. Never, ever give up.

99 And Counting

Superagers. People who live to 110 in relatively good health. The hype around pushing the “normal” chronological lifespan of most humans is high these days. Many new companies are devoted to unravelling the secrets of living a longer than average lifespan.

In 2022, I underwent something of an anti-aging program myself though my motives were more complex. AVIV Clinics in Wildwood, Florida offers a three month hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) program designed to combat a host of aging-related and other medical conditions.

HBOT has been commonly used in health care for years as an aid to healing stubborn wounds. AVIV is using the technology to “refresh” our aging bodies and brains which may have been damaged in the process of living. Participants like me engaged in five-days-a-week HBOT sessions for two hours a day.

I signed up for the program to address the impact of PTSD on my brain and years of cumulative emotional trauma. It is said that emotional trauma presents on an MRI in the same way as physical trauma does, just like concussions or other head injuries.

That intrigued me. What intrigued me more was the difference between my brain’s MRI after the program compared to when I started. Blood perfusion increased. Areas of my brain where there was diminished blood flow were quite evidently revived.

The most noticeable impact was the calming effect of the HBOT protocols on me. As a PTSD survivor, I was never really able to fully relax and often lived in a state of hyper-vigilance in what were otherwise normal social situations. Which is exhausting.

I suppose the feeling I would describe in the parlance after HBOT was that I felt more “grounded.” A year and a half later, a sense of calm and inner stability has persisted. That alone was worth the price of admission (admittedly high and not yet covered on any health plans.)

So I am naturally drawn to the promise of the new anti-aging movement that is developing. Living to 110 plus would only be worth it if the body plays along and stays healthy. That has never been more possible than it is today. People these days talk more about “healthspan” than “lifespan.” I am already a convert.

CNBC correspondent Dan Buettner investigated the habits of 263 centenarians around the world to see how they’ve done it. There are sensible prescriptions in here for all of us at whatever age we are.

Read Buettner’s article to learn about the “non-negotiable” rules for living that he discovered in 263 centenarians he talked to. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/24/i-talked-to-263-of-the-worlds-oldest-living-peoplehere-are-their-non-negotiables-for-a-long-happy-life.html

Good advice for any time of life in my view.

Working on heading in this direction myself.

So, This Happened

The draft post I’d originally written for today was eaten. I changed a page before the text was saved and voila! The post vanished. Unrecoverable. Unsaved you see.

So this is an event I suspected might happen long before this. And it is telling.

My post was about how my nerves are bowstring taut with the incessant demands of moving house. A process that started in earnest several months ago is now in process in earnest. If you catch my drift.

So this type of mistake was inevitable. Annoying as hell and time-consuming. But it is the very thing that happens when the mind and body are overloaded. The message is that it is time for a time out.

I have a small, handmade banner in front of me while I work on this blog every day. It asks: “What do I need right now?” It is more helpful than I thought it would be when I taped it on my bookshelf.

Reading it forces me to check in with myself and take a minute. Make a cup of tea, maybe. Pop outside for a breath of fresh air. Basically, anything to move and change my position.

Stress always did a number on my body. My shoulders would creep up to somewhere just below my ears. My back muscles would become tight. I remember an exam period bursitis that cropped up as regular as rain under my scapula.

The bursitis presented as a hot and painful spot midway down my right scapula after sitting in exam rooms for days. That likely seems quaint. Writing exams in the days when we actually “wrote exams.” No multiple choice tests or computers allowed. Take-home exams always amused me but they were not as easy to muster as I originally thought.

The research problem I always had was “”When is enough?” If that wasn’t enough pressure when writing papers, it was hydraulic trying to cram all you knew into an exam you had to hand in 72 hours after receiving the questions.

I was about 6 or 7 when my Nanny tried to teach me knitting. After working away at knitting and purling on her scrap balls of yarn, the stitches would get so tight, I couldn’t continue my square. Nanny would have to take the needles away from me to loosen the tension so I could start again.

An early symptom of the what I’d later come to understand was post-traumatic stress. Stress management has been a lifelong obsession. Years of yoga, meditation, deep breathing exercises and talk therapy have helped. Somewhat.

But like most humans, I have limits and I am encountering them full-on lately. Part of a healthy stress response is knowing what to let go of and then learning to let that go. That is so much easier written than done.

So what I need right now is to chill. Have that cup of tea. Maybe go for a short walk. Bye bye for now. The next few weeks are going to be a bit of an uphill slog. As I’ve done countless times before, I’m going to hold on and see where this adventure in moving lands me.