Today
I've decided to just jump head first into this blog and post a little bit of the
writing I've been doing as part of my recovery.
A harrowing childhood of abuse left me with a variety of physical and
emotional scars, the results of which have been the downward spiral of my life
to its current nadir.
Right
now I have no steady income, no permanent home, have virtually no money, and I
lost the few close friends I had because of divorce and the subsequent
self-imposed social isolation of the past couple of years. I’ve also recently lost my girlfriend who
essentially broke things off with me just recently because she couldn’t bear
all of the stressors with which I have to deal.
There wasn’t any problem between us at all. In fact, we were a great match for each
other, but the timing couldn’t have been worse.
She had to bail to save her emotional self from bearing the weight of my
problems… that’s how sweet she was.
This
is just some of what Complex PTSD does to a person, but these challenges can
all be temporary if I lock down and continue the difficult recovery work I
started over two years ago. I know, I
know… two years of therapy and I’m just now at my nadir?! The first 3-4 months were spent dancing
around the issues, the next 7-8 months were spent pulling out all of the dark
demons down inside of me, and since then I’ve gone from one false recovery to
another. Let me back up for a moment,
however.
Physical
and psychological abuse was the ever-present guillotine hovering over my youth
until I was struck for the final time as a 20-year old sophomore home from
college for a holiday break. This long
chapter of my life story is the single most problematic and complicated truth I
have confronted, privately or not, to this day.
I was not sexually abused, however.
I
bring that up immediately because the media and society in general give
relatively no attention to the men who have endured repetitive significant
trauma but were neither molested as boys nor maimed physically and/or
psychologically as adult combatants in armed conflict. There’s a litany of resources for men who
were young sexual-abuse victims or those who developed war-related debilitating
psychological challenges. However, I’ve
been quite frustrated over the comparatively few opportunities for help
specifically dedicated to the untold number of men who were “only regularly
abused” as kids.
I'm
in a great position to provide at least a few more resources out there for men
like me. I'm slowly and carefully
constructing a multi-faceted social media presence to that very end. I began writing months ago, have already
started by dipping my toe ever so gently into Twitter (@men_helping_men), and
now this blog. I'm not too concerned
with display, layout, professionalism, etc. at this point. I'll get to all of that eventually.
It's
the information that's critical to the success of my endeavor. I'm NOT very well acquainted with
manipulating social media tools. I write
this for men like myself who’ve been too “tough” to ever ask for help with the
problems they don’t like to admit even having because of a past that they don’t
want to discuss.
For
the record, I've been diagnosed with C-PTSD, Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia,
General Anxiety Disorder, and ADHD. I'll
go into greater detail in future blogs.
I
hope that my writing primarily for men with C-PTSD doesn't turn anyone else
off, however. Anyone wanting a fairly
expansive first-person perspective, along with helpful details and resources,
should find this blog and Twitter feed very helpful (unless I fail miserably,
which I don't intend to do).
Don’t
come here for sappy feel-good nonsense, either.
I'm putting nothing but reality (or at least my particular version of
it) into this. Be prepared for different
reads depending on the post and my mood of the day. One day I'll be writing as though it's a
scholarly article for peer-reviewed publication, and other times I'll be very
laid-back in my writing style.
It’s
important for the regular guy to "get" what I'm saying, and sounding
like an academic is not the way to go.
Sometimes I'll just talk about what's happening with me that day because
it's been very helpful to me to hear the stories other men have. I've learned so much from the experiences of
others, and I hope to pass along this knowledge to others. If I'm fortunate, then I will accomplish 2
things with this:
1)
Other men with experiences remotely similar to my own will come across this and
realize they’re not alone. They will
understand they should not be ashamed of how their adult lives have suddenly or
repeatedly been twisted up, even though the actual abuse may have ended years
and even decades earlier.
2)
The all-important loved ones of these men will read this and begin a path
toward understanding why the guys they love so dearly repeatedly act as they do
or suddenly seem to have become someone else entirely. True recovery has a much greater chance of
success if they develop a sense of what he's previously endured, how those
experiences currently manifest, why they are unable or unwilling to adequately
express it to you, and (most importantly) that this need not be a permanent
state. Maybe this blog will initiate the
early stages of repair and end with eventual enrichment of your relationships.
I
AM NOT A CLINICIAN AND DO NOT PROVIDE ANY CLINICAL ADVICE TO ANYONE. I do have a Master's-level education in Public
Health (and an MBA, for whatever that’s worth here), so I've been trained on
researching and understanding medical issues.
This allows me to digest a wide variety of information about childhood
abuse and CPTSD, in both academic and first-hand fashions, and then reframe in
ways accessible to virtually anyone. I
want to encourage people to seek the help of a psychologist, therapist, or
maybe even a psychiatrist to overcome the traumas of their past.
The
thing is that I'm just now lifting myself off rock bottom... so the upshot is
that anyone regularly following this blog can see the ups and downs of real
recovery. You've missed much of my
opening phases of recovery, but I'll reference them from time to time.
While
I’m a very cognitively-oriented guy, this isn’t about thinking my own way out
of having these problems. This is about
emotions which hijack my ability to function properly or at all. I might be the smartest guy in the room most
of the time, but I still won't recover unless I'm willing to confront, accept,
and process those emotions effectively.
It
sucks, I won't lie. At the outset of
recovery, you'll unearth some ghastly shit that will frighten you, and then
you'll realize it has been there all along seeping poison into the various
parts of your life. Just realize that
this is not a permanent state of being.
Once you avail yourself of the support from your loved ones, follow the
guidance of a professional clinician, maybe join a group, and you'll be on a
solid path to recovery and living the life you deserve.
Finally,
recovery will happen only if you truly commit to the difficult work while
availing yourself of every source of assistance you can find. Since you’re still reading, I’ll make the
assumptive leap your life has imploded and is completely littered with the
fragmented pieces of your former world and future dreams, and you’re desperate
to reassemble them immediately.
Let
me disabuse you of the notion that there are any shortcuts to true recovery…
believe me because I’ve tried just about all of them. The path you’re peering down is plagued with
potholes and straight up roadblocks. Yet
so many others have successfully traversed these obstacles, as I continue to do
myself, so there's no reason you can't as well.
What
you find on my blog is NOT a blueprint for recovery. Everyone’s recovery path is just as unique as
the person. What you see in my recovery
as it's recorded here is not something you should necessarily follow. Maybe it's something for you to bring into
your sessions with your therapist, maybe it's discussed with your partner or
best friend, or perhaps it’s just some place you can go to see there’s somebody
out there even more screwed up than you are! 
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