more recovery notes

[jamesG.1]

been a while, so a mind dump of sorts.

recovery still on track, though of course, being C-PTSD, its a very windy path, much of it alongside, swamps, cliffs and through unpleasant neighbourhoods.

Most recent thing for me has been listening to Derren Brown's audiobook "Happy" which is superb. I've also been listening to his "Bootcamp for the brian" a podcast also on audible.

A real penny dropped listening to this, especially the section on Cognitive Dissonance. For a long time, it's all been about PTSD, but at some point I think I slipped free of that and ran into something new as the classic PTSD symptoms waned. This was more of a deep unhappiness and dismay, bewilderment even. Now, having cognitive dissonance explained to me, it's obvious what it was. To have it explained really well, this vid does it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVR4n8NbSBs

So, the clash for me, the pull between opposing views of what I believe about the world, relationships and myself and what happened, what I did and what I had to do to escape are classic CD. My own moral compass was so defined, things I believed in regarding how people conduct themselves were totally overturned. The behaviour of all the significant people in my life was shockingly bad, lamentably inept or just so selfish that it shocked me, very deeply. This is below the C-PTSD, but it's a huge component of it. The idea that your "loved ones" can not just abuse you, attack you or undermine you, not just once, but for years on end is a shock at a very deep level in the brain. On one level the shock hits your animal brain and just causes panic, despair.. flight and fight instinct kick in and with nowhere to go PTSD is the result. But what of your reasoning brain? What about the poor prefrontal cortex, your modern rational thought centre, hard-worked, trying to make sense of it all as your animal brain runs wild?

Well obviously it fails, and yes, PTSD is the result, but what happens when finally te animal brain calms down? Well for me it seemed to be a depression. Very sharp bursts of sadness as the very clear daylight fell on the story and I could see what happened and why with no swirling chaotic thinking surrounding it. It's not pretty, is it? Seeing your abuse, neglect and isolation as if you were watching it not in a drama but in a documentary. I think this is where the CD kicks in.

Think of it like this. You watch a documentary on the second world war, and you find yourself wondering  just.... why? What is wrong with humanity that these things could happen? Now obviously its an important question, but you can't answer it can you? You wander around the town afterwards, and see people shopping, kids playing, friends talking and normality happening and you try and reconcile the difference, But you can't. That feeling is cognitive dissonance.

For someone with C-PTSD this point has to be reached through a wave of other emotions. You have to get to the big reveal through a chaotic stream of distracting symptoms and thoughts that are very different to the reasoning rational thought we need from the prefrontal cortex. We have panic, shock, fear, hypervigilance... anger.

Well, the thing is that if you do remove the source of your abuse, chop off the poison arm and go, and if you give it time, the animal brain WILL calm down and the prefrontal cortex will finally step in and start to work again. But, and this is my experience, the change back to the prefrontal cortex will enter a phase where the pull between what we believe the world should be and what happened to us will enter a phase of cognitive dissonance as we pass the torch from the animal to the reasoning brain.

You can't reason it, that's the point. In my case all I can ever really say, once I've stripped away the horrible flashback friendly moments and the nuanced memories or those awful nights fighting to stop my life sliding off the table is that I had an alcoholic partner, I had an abusive sibling, I had a sick mother and I had far too much work. That's the simplest version. Each of those categories contains all you really need to know to assume the rest. On their own they'd have been enough, together and for 5 years at their worst, they gave me a very serious mental illness. The mental illness is C-PTSD. C-PTSD makes you behave in ways that can make you feel depair at your own actions, not because they are bad in the grand scheme of things, but because they are not "WHO YOU ARE". That's the cognitive dissonance right there.

So taking all that on board, 1. you have ideas of what the world should be. 2. Something else happens that contradicts that on an industrial scale. 3. The brain tries to make those two things co-exists and fails. 4. Dissonance.

Now I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm sure it's not a weak guess to assume that the many symptoms that came with C_PTSD were in themselves a target for abuse. Fatigue, minor ailments, muddle headedness, temper issues, bad personal management, as your grip on life weakness, the abuse hots up because narcissists are drawn to anything they can use to sure up their flagging self-image. It's like a shipwreck, your ship begins to drift onto the rocks, drawn to the shore by this sociopath with a lamp, and as you begin to smash against the rock, he's using the broken timbers to build himself a shelter.  My decline was a gift for the people around me, they needed me to fail because I'd taken a moral stance over the care of my mother that they felt affronted by, but could not attack directly. If I'd succeeded, then they'd have looked immoral, so the better option was to cut off my means of decompression and any form of support and then watch me drift on to the reef. It's shock upon shock upon shock. A rolling contradiction to the world I thought I lived in.

That's where my dissonance resides. Do people really behave like that? Really? Do other people witnessing this say nothing to help you? Am I, someone who was always ready to run towards the fire and to catch the baby, so undeserving of even the smallest amount of help and validation?

Sadly, the answer is that yes, people can and do behave like this, and the saddest realisation is that all of our abuse, all the grim stories we hear in here, none of us are unique. That's a bitter pill to swallow in many respects, because when something so extreme happens in your life, you want it to be unique in some ways, you want your outrage and bewilderment to be contagious in the face of such shoddy extremes. You want the cavalry to rock up, bugles calling and reason to be restored.  But no... that just wont work. People can't or won't give us what we need, forget it.

We have to process it alone.

Unlucky is a terrible word. Who do you bring to account for an unlucky fate? It is all chance where we end up, where we are born and to who. Stuff happens. It's deeply unfair if it's you, deeply unfair if it's me, but the justice we need and the actions we want taken will most likely never materialise. That dissonance between the reality we want and the reality that happened is cognitive dissonance, a terrible feeling mixing rage, despair, bewilderment and just sheer pain, but it IS in our power to address it. As the stoics say, you cannot change things, but you can change how YOU react to them, that's a power you DO have. It was fate, it was bad luck, the cards landed against us, that is all. There is no why, there is only ahead, there is only you, getting better.

It takes a lot of thinking to get there. You cant expect a recovering brain to flick from one state to another, it's reeling, injured, inflamed and it won't work the way we want or need it to. We have to show it compassion and understanding, and we have also to be firm and realistic. The abuse was never our fault, but the aftermath can be owned by us and the life we are owed has to be fought for. Don't ever forget that life is yours, and yours alone.

Life cannot be perfect, but it can be normal.

All we need is normal.