Our Happy Birthday with Complex PTSD
A bit of our journey with complex PTSD, dissociation, triggers, and healing
Content Warning: birthdays, traumaversaries, child abuse, suicide—no specific details given
Please note: Crystals Multifaceted uses singular and plural pronouns to refer to herself/themselves.
June 27 is PTSD Awareness Day, this month we bring awareness to this condition. In addition to single incident trauma, I especially want to note the effects of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or CPTSD, which is the result of repeated, ongoing, trauma often beginning in early childhood often including neglect or abuse from a caregiver.
Yesterday was my birthday, which is one of the few instances where I have actual memories of traumas that happened on a specific day of the year. My birthday also often falls on Father’s Day and near other holidays that are connected with difficulties for many survivors.
One of the hardest things about having survived complex trauma is the re-experiencing day in and day out. This can be a combination of vivid flashes of memories, severe pain in the body, and overwhelming emotions that sometimes feel worse than the trauma itself.
Yet, what happens when you have no memory of trauma? What if there’s seemingly no reason for your reactions or responses? This is when things may become especially challenging. You may think “if there’s no memory, then there’s no reason for me to be struggling”. Through many years of healing I’ve learned that there’s always a reason we feel what we feel, we just don’t always know what it is. This has brought me comfort and hope for healing. I’ve had to hold onto this type of knowing even for what I did remember, because these memories were not always accessible. It wasn’t until I was 19 and had been out of my parents’ house for a year that I started to piece together some of the difficulties of my childhood.
Many who’ve had memories come as an adult know the confusion and the debate that can happen and the challenge of wondering whether or not one can trust their knowledge and experiences as real. I spent 10 years wrestling with this. When you can’t trust your memories, it can seem like there’s no end in sight.
When you experience complex trauma as a kid your survival responses can get switched on and then they can get activated easily. Your brain and body don’t know the difference between past and present. As a child, if you were hurt by a parent or caregiver, your survival responses may have been telling you to run away, but the larger human response of needing to stay attached to a caregiver may have allowed you to stay in connection with someone who was hurting you. This can carry on into adulthood, even after someone is capable of finding new people to build attachments with and able to get their needs met. Those primary attachments, are well, primal.
Children can develop the skill of mentally separating the trauma, also known as dissociating, from the rest of their lives. When this happens the fullness of the memories or experiences get pushed out of conscious awareness. This allows someone to maintain their emotional connection to their caregivers, even when they are hurting them. In some cases, another part of the person, or another person develops, who holds the trauma. If the situation is extreme, several parts or people may hold varying aspects of the trauma. For example, one person might hold the physical pain, another the narrative, and still another the visual memory. No wonder it can be hard to piece together what happened.
Today, might be a hard day for many who’ve been through horrible situations. I found myself extremely tired, yet unlike years in the past, I am safe. I am physically safe because I am no longer being hurt, but I’m also psychologically safe, as in I’m not in such a state of pain that I feel I cannot go on. This is huge. This took over 20 years of therapy, over 13 years of working on my substance use recovery, and many, many hours of working to understand my inner people and provide care to those inside who are really hurting. I say all of this, because if you are struggling I want you to know that healing can happen, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Struggling doesn’t mean you did anything wrong or that you aren’t trying. It may just mean that you are at a deeper stage of healing. It may mean that where things were numb before, now you can feel them. Also, I’m doing okay today, but I don’t know where I’ll be next year. I could be struggling, for real, next year. I want to extend grace to my future selves that if that is the case, it doesn’t mean we failed, it means we have differences in circumstances that need tending to.
Another difference this year, is that in the past I threw myself a birthday party. After many years of being alone, I learned that this was a way to take care of myself. This year I was burnt out and not up to it. A wonderful friend of mine had me over for lunch on my birthday and invited a couple of my friends over. She put up streamers, blew up balloons, and made everything special. Each person took time to share how much I meant to them. Then after that some of my family zoomed with me. Another friend came over and helped me in my house and still another had a long phone conversation to honor my birthday. It doesn’t end there. A friend brought over tamales for dinner along with a gift. The morning started with my therapist in our session telling me that she was glad that I was born. This felt similar to when people have said that they were glad that I’m still alive. Yet, there’s a profound difference, it rang deeper somehow. Something else, for today, I too am glad that I was born.
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