More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
But that’s exactly the problem. I’m tired of pulling. I don’t want to pull anymore. I want a dumbwaiter, or an escalator, or a floating rainbow drug cloud. Anything to lift me toward emotional stability. To fix me.
/relatable
My friends got one thing right, though: I’m so tired now. Thirty years on this earth, and I’ve been sad at least half that time.
/relatable
I hadn’t understood how far the disease had spread. How complete its takeover of my identity was. The things I want. The things I love. The way I speak. My passions, my fears, my zits, my eating habits, the amount of whiskey I drink, the way I listen, and the things I see. Everything—everything, all of it—is infected. My trauma is literally pumping through my blood, driving every decision in my brain.
/relatable
Hatred, I learned quickly, was the antidote to sadness. It was the only safe feeling. Hatred does not make you cry at school. It isn’t vulnerable. Hatred is efficient. It does not grovel. It is pure power.
/relatable
One of my suicide letters read: Father—I bet I’ve been gone for over 24 hours before you found me. You don’t deserve a goodbye.
/relatable
What we might think of as emotional outbursts—anxiety, depression, lashing out in anger—aren’t always just petty, emotional failings. They may be reflexes designed to protect us from things our brain has encoded as threats. And these threatening inputs are what many people call triggers.
/relatable
And here’s what makes complex PTSD uniquely miserable in the world of trauma diagnoses: It occurs when someone is exposed to a traumatic event over and over and over again—hundreds, even thousands of times—over the course of years. When you are traumatized that many times, the number of conscious and subconscious triggers bloats, becomes infinite and inexplicable. If you are beaten for hundreds of mistakes, then every mistake becomes dangerous. If dozens of people let you down, all people become untrustworthy. The world itself becomes a threat. —
I started counting some of my obvious triggers. Whenever I saw an angry man, I’d get intensely pissed at them—my boss, my boyfriend, Joey, a random guy in the street. Whenever Joey chewed the inside of his cheek or set his jaw a certain way, the exact way my father used to clench his, it enraged me. I’d snap, “What? What’s wrong? What’s your problem?” Often, he would look at me in surprise and confusion. “You’re mad,” I’d insist. “I’m not mad,” he said, mad. “Why do you think I’m mad?” “I’m intuitive! I’m good at reading people,” I said.
/relatable
But unfortunately, I do not have one foundational trauma. I have thousands. So my anxious freak-outs are not, as the books say, “temporal.” They don’t only occur when I see an angry face or someone pulls a driver out of their golf bag. My freak-outs are more or less constant, a fixed state of being.
/relatable
complex trauma created a consistent set of defensive traits—of personality quirks—within its victims. And these were uniquely terrible even within the PTSD community. It seemed to suggest we had our own culture. Americans are individualist. Chinese people are oriented toward the good of the collective. The French are romantic and love cheese. And people with C-PTSD are drama queen self-saboteurs who are impossible to love.
/relatable
there was that one book that described victims of early childhood trauma as “a burden to themselves and others” and “a minefield many would prefer to avoid.”
/relatable
I came to these books in search of hope. But they provided so little. There were days when the only hope I could see was that I needn’t worry about the pain lasting too long. At least I was going to die soon.
/relatable
Traumatized brains tend to have an enlarged amygdala—a part of the brain that is generally associated with producing feelings of fear. Which makes sense. But it goes further than that: For survivors of emotional abuse, the part of their brain that is associated with self-awareness and self-evaluation is shrunken and thin.
was mostly upset because I didn’t know why I was upset. Everything was fine. Nothing was wrong. And yet I still felt like I was full of a purple angry porridge—everything was so mixed up and sloshed together that I couldn’t begin to pull out a single thread of why. I
The literature says this is normal for traumatized people. Experts say it’s all part of the three P’s: We think our sadness is personal, pervasive, and permanent. Personal, in that we have caused all the problems we face. Pervasive, in that our entire life is defined by our failings. And permanent, in that the sadness will last forever.
I allow myself a moment to feel pride for that teenage self, the way she harvested that emo-pop angst into a rocket that blasted her out of this goddamn town. Then I shiver a bit, wondering what she would think of me now, driving back of my own volition, still sporting blue hair and combat boots fifteen years later.
Since reading about damaged PTSD brains, I’d been losing faith in my own mind. Every time I tried to touch a memory, doubts and questions multiplied around it, preventing me from being able to see my own past.
But still, he must have had the sense that there were amends to be made. Because months later, he asked me, “What can I do to be closer to you?” “I don’t know,” I said. “Make a list,” he replied. “Make me a list of what you want, and give it to me, and I’ll do it.” I never made the list. I didn’t make the list because I was confused about what to put on it. What would fix things? Was there really anything that could make up for what had happened? Remember my birthday? Be there for me when I’m falling apart? Come visit me one time? Decide that for just one Christmas, shit, even one minor
...more
Dads
And, I’m ashamed to admit, I didn’t make the list because I was afraid. Afraid that even if I wrote out everything I needed, and he gave me all of it, spent all of his time, money, and energy trying to make things right, I would still be too afraid to love him back. I wouldn’t be able to forgive. And then it wouldn’t be him who was the real asshole. Not anymore. Then it would be me.
As adults, Dr. Ham told me, the process of repair is a bit more complex, more transactional. But no less satisfying. “See, for people who are traumatized, all they know is rupture,” Dr. Ham explained. “They always have to come to the abuser with an apology. But it’s never about them having their own needs. It’s not a mutuality thing. It’s a one-way street.”
Being part of an oppressed minority group—being queer or disabled, for example—can cause C-PTSD if you are made to feel unsafe because of your identity. Poverty can be a contributing factor to C-PTSD. These factors traumatize people and cause brain changes that push them toward anxiety and self-loathing. Because of those changes, victims internalize the blame for their failures. They tell themselves they are awkward, lazy, antisocial, or stupid, when what’s really happening is that they live in a discriminatory society where their success is limited by white supremacy and class stratification.
...more
I’ve learned that the beast of C-PTSD is a wily shape-shifter. Just when I believe I can see the ghoul for exactly what it is, it dissipates like a puff of smoke, then slithers into another crevice in the back of my mind. I know now it will emerge again in another form in a month or a week or two hours from now. Because loss is the one guaranteed constant in life, and since my trauma reliably resurfaces with grief, C-PTSD will be a constant, too. Rage will always coat the tip of my tongue. I will always walk with a steel plate around my heart. My smile will always waver among strangers and my
...more
