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9-11: One giant PTSD trigger

September 11, 2010 PTSD
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TriggerToday is the anniversary of the last day of the past. On September 12, 2001, things started changing in America. Seeds had been planted: seeds of ideas, seeds of change, and seeds of terror. The terror seeds put the great majority of us into a damaged state that to looks, feels, sounds and smells to me like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  Like countless PTSD victims, many of us went into avoidance, quickly building up what seemed like walls of defenses to secure us from ever having to live through that again,  and brought entire countries right down with us.

The western medical community mostly agrees now that PTSD is a serious condition brought on by extreme trauma, and it is diagnosed by its symptoms:

  • Intrusive memories, presenting as flasbacks and/or dreams;
  • Hyperousal, presenting as being easily startled, hearing or seeing things that are not real, insomnia, irritability, anger, and/or self-destructive behavior;
  • and avoidance, presenting as avoiding talking about the trauma, emotional numbness or coldness, memory and concentration problems, difficulty maintaining intimate relationships, and depression.

As detailed by the Washington Post recently, our nation built a security infrastructure at rapid speed (visit the entire Top Secret America site for yourself), out of the scraps of our fear, and now we have a web of lies, silos, back alleys, secret technology and laws that have completely stripped our privacy and our civil rights. It hangs over our heads, lurks around us in the shadows and hides in plain sight on our phones, computers and police cars. But like any defense put up by the traumatized mind, it is full of holes, too thin to hold from the very start, and frays.

Complex PTSD (what I like to call the Tackabery variant in my lighter moods) causes psychiatric injury (brain damage which appears in brain scans) and results from repeated exposure to traumatic stress. It’s not just the event–it’s the events. Again, and again, and again. A major marker of complex PTSD is captivity–the inability to escape from the traumatic stress. Abused and molested children and spouses in abusive domestic situations (ding ding ding!) are obvious examples.

It may seem a stretch to some that an entire nation could be experiencing complex PTSD, but I see the signs. Barriers built up via psychological, electronic and other means, which put the bad guys on one side and us, the poor innocent Americans, on the other? Classic avoidance behavior. Just like the vet who holes up in his house with a gun and shoots anything that moves. Which pretty much describes the U.S. of A. right now, if you ask me. And the end of that road? Well . . . for me it was suicide, which I survived. Most PTSD victims don’t survive suicide-by-cop, however.

But, you know, it’s just a theory, and hey, I’m on medication. What do I know?

Without leaving

September 7, 2010 writing
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Hope, a weather beaten boat photographed by Bern Altman

Hope by Bern Altman of Great Falls, VA courtesy stockXchng

I know my own luck. I know how rare it is for a person to be able to do this. And I know more and more what I’m doing it for. I feel a kind of strength starting to happen that is wholly legitimate, that is not some trapping I wear until it falls off. It is though the thing has roots, and seeks the sun with its face turned toward it. And I know I never would have found it without leaving. — Elizabeth Berg, from The Pull of the Moon (Random House, 1996).

Since I’ve been working in marketing writing, I’ve had four jobs, and each job has had something of a dramatic ending, followed by a period of some trauma or painful event, followed by a surge of skills growth and personal development.

So I suppose it should come as no surprise to me that the ending of my fourth and latest job should have been dramatic (soap-opera worthy, complete with tears and walking out with the contents of my cubicle in the biggest empty box I could find), abrupt (my contract was terminated at 7:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, over the telephone–oh the havoc I could have unleashed if I had been in the mood, with all those passwords active and the big Box none the wiser! but I digress), and painful (securing my unemployment benefits took almost 9 weeks).

What is surprising is the flow of speculative project work that has been coming my way, all of it enormously promising to my career in a make-it-now-and-don’t-look-back kind of way. I am working on a killer book project with a college friend; a potential booming new business with an old colleague is in the works; and just today, my sister asks me if I want to, um, I dunno, start a business with some help from an angel investor who looks like my brother-in-law? While I was navigating the perils of an unsteady contract, fearing every day that I would lose my job and oh by the way, starting to hate that place, I was frantically searching for a life preserver in the form of a new job. But if my contract had not been terminated, I never would have seen all those safety rings waiting in the water.

Most of my life I pursued “something else” because I believed writing was never going to pay off.  Now I sometimes mourn all that time I wasted, not writing. I supposed middle age is a fine time to realize I could make the very most of the lots of time left, if I get off my ass now.

Oh, and poems are coming back to me now. Poetry!–something I thought I’d never feel a spark for again! I had not written a new poem in at least seven years, and in the last three days I’ve written three. They suck, but still . . .! Poetry. Wow.