Ugh. It’s just been another day with C-PTSD, but this is what I mean when I say that my baseline sucks. Yesterday morning, I was happy. I woke up early, read from my self-help book, worked on my new blog that I’m still really excited about, and things were fine. Then, as a result of triggers that I might be able to pick out in retrospect but I had no warning whatsoever of at the time, I had a flashback. Usually I just have emotional flashbacks, so I was not prepared for this at all. I could see my surroundings and I knew where I was, but my mind’s eye was seeing a completely different scene from December 2020. I could see every detail of the room. I hadn’t remembered this scene having any particular smell, but I was convinced I could smell it. Most importantly, although I had not thought about the traumatic scene in a while, I could remember ALL the details of the circumstances and my emotions were there, not in the present. Suffice it to say that December 2020 was a time in my life when there were so many rules and they were so rigidly enforced that I knew that at any given time, there would always be a rule that I had forgotten about and someone could jump out of nowhere and tell me off. I tried to return to the present. I was in a group of people, and I knew I would be expected to return my pencil before I left. This was a rule that probably was not as important in the present as it would have been during the traumatic time, but I hatched a plan and returned the pencil discreetly before blasting out of the room. At that point I did my best to calm myself down, but the smell of the traumatic scene was overpowering even from my new location. I sobbed. I couldn’t stop remembering terrible things connected to this particular remembered place. Finally, the flashback seemed to go away. The smell left; I could no longer detect the flashback with my physical senses. But I was greatly changed. Before that, I had been extroverted and optimistic, but after the flashback, I believed in my heart that everyone was angry with me. I hid from everyone and tried not to talk to anybody because I expected that they would respond angrily to anything I said. This went on for the rest of the day. I cried on and off before finally someone asked me if I could provide a single piece of evidence that anyone was angry with me. I named lots of things but to her, they were extremely minor incidents, whereas in my mind, the only solution was to commit suicide. That way, they would only be mad until there was nobody alive in the world who remembered me, as opposed to if I just kept living and making everyone angry with my innately evil nature. I tried to explain this through my sobs and the poor, kind woman listening looked back at me in confusion with deeply sad eyes.
Eventually, I concluded that the initial flashback was followed by a severe emotional flashback (which Pete Walker explains in his book that I referenced in my first post). I could see the first flashback, so I knew what I was remembering. I could not see the second flashback. I do know that my parents thought the most important part of parenting tiny children was to indoctrinate us with the concept of Total Depravity; that I was evil and only evil. When I did anything good, I was to thank God for taking the reins and controlling my body to do something good, even though it felt like my choice. When I did something bad, that was the only time when it was believed that I was executing freewill. I had the free will to choose good or evil, but my nature was evil, so that was the only thing that I would ever choose. When I was in my mid- to late-teens, I read the quote on a friend’s blog that “We are not evil because we sin; we sin because we are evil.” I remember that being the best summary I had read of what I had been taught to believe. This was why God was justified in sending us to hell, where we would suffer infinitely and eternally. All of this was driven home with constant and severe child abuse when my parents felt that I had sinned. I don’t remember being a child and being touched in kindness, ever, except by my “unbelieving” paternal grandmother who my parents fought to keep me away from. But while I don’t remember being touched in kindness except by her, but I remember a hell of a lot of touch by my parents, and a hell of a lot of pain and humiliation. Honestly, the emotional and verbal abuse were probably worse, but the thing with touch is that you can start doing it younger, before kids learn social skills to understand other forms of abuse.
Even now, as I type this, I don’t feel emotional about it. I never feel emotional when I talk to therapists. Usually, the therapist, who has degrees and decades of experience in maintaining a straight face, is much more likely to lose their composure than I am. But when I’m having an emotional flashback (which never seems to correspond to weekly therapy sessions), I’m totally overcome. Often to the point of being suicidal.
I’m trying this new thing where I don’t berate myself for these hours or even days of intense emotion that is unrelated to the present. Instead, I imagine what it must have actually been like to be that little girl. The little girl who could never be anything but “bad.” Who tried desperately to be good but couldn’t remember all the rules. The little girl who nobody loved. Who thought it was her fault that nobody loved her, and grew into an adult who still desperately wants to be cared about. Who would do that to a little girl? I certainly never would! And yet that was my reality. Furthermore, it sneaks up on me when I least expect it. I try to deny that it was really that bad, to shame myself for being dramatic when “no family is perfect.” But this is why I can’t “put the past in the past” despite desperately wanting to. I cannot reorganize the synapses in my brain by sheer willpower. I sure would if I could!
So to those out there who wake up every morning hating yourselves for not being able to hold down a job, I don’t know your stories. But I do know mine, and at least in this fleeting moment, I can see that I was not born this way and I definitely did not choose this. It’s not my fault. It probably isn’t yours, either.
