“PTSD is a whole-body tragedy, an integral human event or enormous proportions with massive repurcussions.”
– Susan Pease Banitt
It wasn’t me. Except it was. To anyone who saw anything that happened it was. It was my body, my brain, my actions, me inflicting harm and fear. my face is what they see and remember. And I struggle, with huge memory gaps and reconciling what I’ve done I how I got there, I have taken a deep dive into learning about the psychological and physical affects of CPTSD, and how combining it with alcohol addiction is a path to conflict, pain and destruction.
One of the hardest parts of this, is having 2+ years of really good times discarded in one night. To reconcile doing something so awful that the person who loves and you love, more than anything can’t even speak to you. The person you thought would pick you up and help you through the dark is so hurt and traumatized, they have to remove you from their life entirely, via email. It hurts, bad, sucks the life out of you and makes it hard to see the light ahead most days.
So first of all, as hard as it is for me to accept, I respect and understand that each person must walk the path they think is best for them and I have no say in it. No matter how much I love her, how much I work to heal, change and develop better tools, she may never see fit to speak to me. It’s a terrifying prospect but one I must respect.
If you know me, you know I like to know as much as I can about any problem or challenge in my life. I will research every angle, read books, take online courses, visit and talk with professionals to understand the challenge ahead. Tackling addiction and PTSD has been no different. I’ve probably read more books in the last 5 weeks than the previous 2 years. I have taken a deep dive into the physiological and physiological changes that occur with PTSD and different ways they manifest. I’m not going to get into them all, but here’s a great article that highlights some of the changes that occur.
So…. take a person me, in a heightened state of grief and without proper tools or understanding of how to manage it, add hours of heavy drinking and a trigger, it’s a recipe for disaster.
THE CLIF NOTES SCIENCE VERSION OF LOSING CONTROL
I am in no way trying to shirk responsibility or accountability. I am owning everything I did, known and unknown. I’m just working to make some sense of how I did something so out of character for who I am. I see no, that once these things were set in motion, there wasn’t much I could do to stop it, I needed someone strong and knowledgable to intervene, to step in and stop me. No one capable was there, and that is partially my fault, I have done such a good job of convincing people I was fine, of stumbling along but never crossing the line, that I could manage another bender, I have no doubt anyone saw anything different that night. Jake was going deep again, he would stumble home, pass out and be there, on time ready for work the next day. So I’m going to attempt to break this down.
I had already lost control. Days, maybe a couple weeks before this occurred. I was clinging hard to other people and other things, distractions and work to get me through each day. The multiple deaths in both mine and my partners life seem to be the trigger, maybe it was something else I haven’t seen yet, but I think grief, grieving and unresolved grief pushed me down the hill. I was like that kid on a skateboard at the top of a steep hill and now I was in for the ride and didn’t see a way off.
I don’t know, maybe I will never know, if there was an additional trigger that night. But let’s look quickly at how my brain wasn’t working right:
The Amygdala (sometimes called the reptile brain) already in a hyper stressed state of fear and survival it probably didn’t take much. I was operating in a fear zone where parts of my brain that make survival not logical decisions take over.
The pre-frontal cortex, the part of your brain that helps you think through decisions, observe how you’re thinking, and put on the “brakes” when you realize something you first feared isn’t actually a threat after all, wasn’t working. Both trauma (physical – I’ll get into my TBI’s at some point and mental) and alcohol impair this part of your brain and it’s ability to keep the amygdala in check. We lose the ability to make sound, reasonable decisions and act out of fear and survival.
An overactive amygdala combined with an underactive prefrontal cortex creates a perfect storm. It’s like stomping on your car’s accelerator, even when you don’t need to, only to discover the brakes don’t work. This might help you understand why someone with PTSD might: (1) feel anxious around anything even slightly related to the original trauma that led to the PTSD; (2) have strong physical reactions to situations that shouldn’t provoke a fear reaction; and (3) avoid situations that might trigger those intense emotions and reactions.
brainline.org
Alcohol – I’ve talked about it already in other posts. But Alcohol basically took a bad situation from a 2-3 on the scale of 1-10 to a 9-10 in a matter of hours. It was like pouring unleaded onto burning house, it went from manageable to fully engulfed in minutes.
SO WHAT
I have been cast out. It hurts. I mostly understand the pain I caused. I also understand the pain that I have endured. The things that have been said and written to me, the perception people have of who I am and what I did. I needed a life preserver, I got thrown an anchor.
I am sick, but getting healthy. I was in a state of extreme mental distress, my therapist calls it a crisis. My brain had already taken me to a zone where I was no longer making sound decisions. Everything I did was reactionary, I was in survival mode. I have made a career of surviving austere environments and situations, I teach people these skills. The Marine Corps trained me in a set of skills and unhealthy coping mechanisms as well. So forget alcohol for a minute, I was already compromised. I was hanging by a thread and I had at least a few cues in the days prior, but I brushed them off. My ability to make rational decisions and behave in a reasonable manner was highly compromised.
Add alcohol and the fuse was lit. Once the trigger occurred, I was on a path I couldn’t stop or control, that was no longer me acting out, I was no longer a thinking, loving, reasonable human. I was an animal, controlled by the most primitive parts of my brain, the parts who saw everything as a threat to survival, the part that was falling back on years of previous experience, except I had no previous experience, I had never been here, it had never been this bad and so I just reacted.
And it scares me. Scares me so much that quitting drinking has been easy, all I have to do is think about the sorrow in my gut and any thought of ever picking up alcohol again is immediately gone. As I’ve said before, being and staying sober is the easy part of this and I am starting to enjoy having clear thoughts and vision again. The struggle of sobriety is emotion. For the first time in my memory, I am feeling and experiencing emotions I have kept bottled up and suppressed. It’s good and bad. The highs (memories of good times with my partner, some walks in the woods with the pup) are better than ever, and the lows are as awful as anything I have ever felt.
I realize the blackout is a double whammy, both the alcohol and trauma have made sure my brain never wrote these experiences into my hard drive. No amount of therapy will change that. It scares me too. To think about how much worse this could’ve gotten makes me physically ill. It is the second motivator. I know how I have been trained, I know what I’m capable of and I know that I cannot ever allow myself to get to this place again.
EMDR and some other memory reprogramming has been helping. Having professional help to both understand and change the trauma response has been an absolute life changer. I stopped carrying knives and guns everywhere I went, I sat in a restaurant with my back to the door, at ease and calm for the first time in years. I can speak openly about previous trauma without shaking and sweating. I will continue this path on some level for as long as I need, maybe forever if that’s what is required. I won’t tell anyone what to do, but if you have suffered a traumatic event or events in your life, I cannot recommend this path enough. I am exploring some other, less traditional modalities as well and will speak about them when and if I have some first person knowledge.
HEALING
I’m no expert. But I’ve learned a lot. I’m healing everyday and I know I have miles to go. I also know that open, honest and safe communication are an incredibly powerful tool. There are at least two sides, two experiences in every human interaction, and even though one side or one reaction may be severe or unwarranted, often both sides contributed to the event. I hope to have those conversations one day, because I believe they would help all sides heal.
Check on your friends, don’t offer them advice or hollow encouragement. Just let them have a place to share their pain without judgement or interjecting yourself or your experiences. Let them hurt. Let them process. And don’t be afraid to just give them a hug.
