This is my brain. This is my brain after abusing silence.

Wed, 04 Sep 2013 18:11:21 GMT

I think someone who was reading things here was "ace" a few years ago, and confident enough to mention it. So it's a memory lapse issue as well as a privacy one since I intend this to be a public post.

You might really like this: http://ysabetwordsmith.dreamwidth.org/9139725.html

I have been loving Avengers fanfic lately. Every single story is how to go on with your life and doing what makes things seem worthwhile when you've lived through the worst things possible. Even the humorous ones are tinged with "but.. PTSD" and jokes don't seem to go as far past the pale.

I am. actually. getting there. I don't consider myself in the same category as war veterans or superheroes who staved off an alien invasion. But there are elements of those issues in that I lived in a life and death situation for years with very little support. I'm finding that. most offensively. my ability to talk about it at all minimized people's understanding. There's not only a culture of silence, but an understanding that if you can talk about it, it didn't happen.

I have an analogy. The Coffee Woman, if she bumps her head at all calls it a "concussion". Since concussions are from broken blood vessels and bruising in the brain it seems really unlikely that she can tell 2 seconds after hitting her head. Maybe she does concuss that easily and has been warned by neurologists. But I think she found the biggest word in order to exaggerate how she feels. I know it's childish to say, "I bumped my head." but "Ow." works. Or "Ow. I need to sit a minute, that rang my bell." But pretty much, to me, concussion is "I need to go to the hospital to make sure I don't have brain damage." So when she says, "Omygod I have a concussion!" I say, I'll drive you to the hospital or do you need an ambulance. Then she replies, "It's just a concussion! You really need to stop overreacting." By doing this, she's made me feel stupid for caring, demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of scaled nouns, and attempted to make light of other people's actual brain injuries.

I can talk about it. Being told that I need to be able to distinguish (by looking) the difference between a tremor and a seizure. So I get whalloped at night (this is years ago now) and am expected to be instantly awake enough to determine if someone else is having a medical emergency. If it's a seizure, then someone might die. If it's a tremor, it will cost $5k at the emergency room since nothing will be covered by insurance. The support I got: "You're a smart woman." So I'm living in a situation where violence toward me is not only irrelevant, but the precursor to live and death responsibilities. But if I talked about it, I got back, "If someone hits you, that's not right." Yes. And. moving on to the part where you help me figure out how to cope. Because I don't have a lot of respect for those presidential candidates (Newt Gingrich and ~~was it John Kerry? dunno.~~ John Edwards) for abandoning their wives when they got sick. Do you know that no one actually bothered to show me the difference?

No one hugged me and said they were sorry I was dealing with that. Everybody thought I'd bumped my head and was calling it a concussion. Somehow being able to talk about it inherently minimized what was actually happening. I recently had a therapist who second guessed my medications because I could talk openly to her. Like no one needs psychological support if they can talk? Talking doesn't reduce the experience of trauma. There's a process to work through trauma and it differs. Some people who can't talk about it might get there through learning to talk about it. I needed help to make it stop haunting me. Talking about it didn't exorcise any ghouls. In many ways talking about what happened repeatedly (because I'm going in to see my dozenth therapist today, it's been an over-and-over type thing) made things worse.

No one has acknowledged the sense of failure I have. Everyone says my husband dying isn't my fault now that he's dead. But 3 of his doctors told me I was responsible for keeping him alive with my best judgment as to how much medical attention something needed. I know I did everything I could. I don't blame myself for failing at an impossible task that shouldn't have landed on me to begin with. But I did have it. It was my task. And I definitely failed at it. I can't get anyone to help me understand how I can think both those viewpoints at the same time. I literally hate myself for doing the best I could have done.

Someone died and I couldn't stop it.

And the system is failing me now since the only treatment anyone seems to have is, "If you can admit the problem, then you're probably okay. It's only the people who can't talk who struggled."

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seryn

This is my brain. This is my brain after abusing silence.