Destroyed Relationships in the Aftermath of Recovery From CPTSD

I miss my daughters so much.  My ex-wife is taking advantage of my temporary situation to set the stage for her to steal the 45% custody that I was awarded just 7 months ago.  She says that she’s concerned for the girls because I had two suicidal ideations during a 10-day span. 

On the surface that seems reasonable, but the reality is that she knows that I pose no threat to myself, anyone, and certainly not my own daughters.  I spent 16 intimate years with my ex, so her surprising me with just hours’ notice of the petition to temporarily suspend my parenting time was completely unnecessary.

I’ve provided her with written documentation from both my psychologist/therapist and my psychiatrist, who have seen me for almost 3 years now each, that I pose no threat at all to anyone.  They know that I’m not truly the suicidal type.  I was simply in a state of serious distress without any help from my family and I have spent the past two years in self-imposed social isolation as many with Complex PTSD typically do.

These ideations barely even fit the definition of the term.  They were more of elaborate, if not so subtle, cries for help.  I never made a single plan to actually off myself, and I never would have.  I stupidly reached out to my ex thinking she still had a heart, and the fact that she’s a psychotherapist herself made me completely blind to the idea that any of this would be cravenly used against me.

It’s rough for me, but what bothers me the most is the impact on my 4- and 6-year old daughters.  I got almost half custody precisely because I had spent 2 years as a stay-at-home dad and had almost 50% custody for the 18 months between the split and the official divorce.  We have such a close and strong bond that this sudden disappearance from their life has to be confusing at best and significantly stressful and painful at worst. 

Immediately after my hospitalization I offered to go to counseling and mediation while she could name her conditions for me seeing the girls while I’m getting back up on my feet.  She responded with the combative petition.  She’s not interested in working with me, being cooperative in any way, or co-parenting at all.  She just wants me to disappear and allow her to raise those girls in the twisted manner of her mother.

While watching my oldest play soccer my youngest was telling me how her mother won’t allow her to call me, and then she was physically taken out of my lap by my ex because she was upset about what she was told.  She did more or less the same thing with my eldest while we watched her sister. 

I should have long stopped trying to rationalize the irrational because my ex disagrees with every I say and everything I teach my girls.  My youngest even told me she that she showed her mom how I taught her what a magnolia tree looked like, and my ex said that I was wrong and went so far as to check her iPhone only to realize I was of course correct. 

Why would I randomly tell my daughter the incorrect name of a tree?  My ex knows I basically grew up outdoors with Mother Nature as my best friend.  She has first-hand marveled at my knowledge of nature as I’m the first to take her camping, fishing, and hiking.  The fact that she would instinctively disagree with me regarding nature when she has no earthly idea about nature herself gives me all the indication I need regarding her illogical and emotionally-charged reactions to anything and everything regarding me.

That begs the question: why do I still get bothered so much by what she does to me?  The reality is that it doesn’t bother me so much, but the collateral damage to my daughters infuriates me.  She is a trained child psychologist but has willfully blocked out what she’s doing to them. 

Now you may think I’m leaving some things out, but I’m not.  The truth is that I want the girls to go see a child psychologist to discuss what their mother and grandmother puts them through, but my ex disagrees vehemently.  She knows what the girls will tell this psychologist.  I’m completely fine with anything and everything they say regarding my parenting, but I guess my ex is not.

I’m not nearly the perfect father and have made some fairly substantial mistakes.  I guess the difference is that I’ve owned my mistakes and have worked to correct them.  I’ve not mentioned the fact that none of my mistakes have included neglect, physical man-handling, religious zealotry, or psychological manipulation… all things they are subjected to at their mother’s/grandmother’s home.

Look, I readily admit that I’ve not been in a place to be the best father ever given what has been going on with me.  I’m coming out of the throes of recovery from child abuse that was repressed for 12 years or so and came at me full-throttle in the form of Complex PTSD.  However, I’ve never touched my girls, neglected them to the point they end up in the emergency room, or introduced them to aggressive and scary concepts such as satan, hell, and sin. 

I know that what’s going on with me is temporary as is my ex’s ability to create additional chaos in my and my girls’ lives.  It’s so frustrating, though.  I would like to have focused this entire post on something else that helps me further along in my recovery, for example.  Having to deal with court dates, written responses to her absurd petition, and the stress of not knowing what she’s going to try and pull next.

I’m sure my ex is frustrated that I’m going through this and cannot hold up my end of the parenting bargain right now.  However, it’s completely counter-productive to the peace within her life, our daughters’ lives, and of course my life.  However, I have to realize that I cannot control her nonsense.  All I can do is control my reaction to her nonsense. 

I need to continuously remind myself that this is a temporary state of affairs and that hopefully one day she’ll find enough peace in her life to stop fighting me for control over the girls.  All I can do is do me and my girls will grow up and realize what their mother has been doing to all of us.  Like I said, I’m very content owning my part in all of this. 

Soon enough I’ll be back on my feet financially and be back in a position to effect the parenting agreement I fought so hard for.  In fact, I’ll be in a position to get that last 5% custody so that the girls can spend equal amounts of time with both of their parents.  My ex will fight me on this, but it won’t be too much longer before the girls will make their own desires known.  The three of us will be alright.

Is it CPTSD or ADHD?

After almost three years of treatment, it seems almost absurd to revisit my diagnoses and re-examine my symptomology.  However, my recent self-education in how ADHD can impact adults has been an eye-opening experience, and I have to ensure my recovery takes this into account.  

Determining the differences in symptoms between Complex PTSD (CPTSD) and ADHD, both of which I have been diagnosed as having, is actually extremely challenging.  Even clinicians find disentangling the two to be quite difficult, and this is especially true when there’s child abuse involved in the diagnostic equation... and a traumatic childhood is certainly involved in my differential diagnosis of CPSTD vs ADHD.

I'm going to start from square one to ensure I haven’t been misdiagnosed with CPTSD, ADHD, or possibly both.  To begin with I don’t need a research study to definitively conclude I experienced repeated traumas over the course of my entire life until age 20..  

My previous night terrors, hyper-vigilance, and panic/anxiety problems are clearly linked to that abuse because they became serious problems as I approached fatherhood and began examining how I was parented.  This is not an unexpected development during midlife introspection regarding a childhood such as mine. 

To finally put this question to rest, I bear the actual physical scars and disfigurements from those experiences. It’s clear that I suffered serious repeated childhood traumas and have experienced substantial complications from Complex PTSD as a result later in life.

Chronic and persistent childhood traumas result in long-lasting changes to the brain including difficulty with attention, struggles with creating lasting and close relationships, impatience and restlessness, addictive behaviors, harmful risk-taking, tendency towards distraction, inability to prioritize, and emotional regulation problems.  Sounds a lot like the challenges we often associate with ADHD doesn’t it?

This presents serious frustration for me for obvious reasons, not the least of which is that I’m unsure whether my recovery plan properly accounts for this overlap.  Again, I want to emphasize that I am in no way questioning the capabilities or performance of my psychologist and/or psychiatrist, both of whom I hold in the highest regard... otherwise I wouldn't continue to see them.  Anyway, I noted how CPTSD is so symptomatically similar to ADHD, so I have to question whether I even have ADHD.  

This question is infinitely more complicated because the causes of ADHD have not been conclusively identified by well-designed scientific research studies.  There is a criteria test included in the DSM-5, the diagnostic manual used by mental health clinicians, that I “passed” indicating I have ADHD.  

Furthermore, I was diagnosed at age 4 but never treated in any fashion at my father’s behest.  My present and past diagnostic results seem to clearly indicate the presence of ADHD, but my problem is meeting that criteria could just as easily be due to how my CPTSD presents. 

For example, my father enjoys telling a story from one of my misadventures when I was three years old that, in his mind, was an early demonstration of my intelligence and abilities.  It actually is a demonstration of how early I endured traumatic experiences no child should ever experience, much less one that young.  I was raised by my father during the day as he worked nights while my mother worked days until I went to kindergarten. 

Somehow I was neglected long enough to go into the garage, pull out a toolbox to remove a flathead screwdriver, open a can of paint, and proceeded to paint various parts of our home: the wrought iron fence, the exterior brick work, the shag carpet in the living room (yes, this was the late 70’s!), and generally made a magnificent mess over the course of an extended period of time. 

He ends the story by saying how he beat me “good enough” to make sure I never did something like that again.  While I’m not privy to any other similar stories of beatings, neglect, and maltreatment, I feel it’s safe to say this wasn’t a singular event.  It’s very likely that this was a microcosm of my formative years overall.

So, the behavioral issues with which I was plagued as a young child resulting in an ADHD diagnosis at age 4 could have been directly related to this type of abuse.  There’s another aspect of ADHD which could help me make this determination, though: the hereditary factor.

While not definitively conclusive, there is strong evidence that ADHD is genetically-based according to the American Journal of Medical Genetics.  I won’t go into fine details here, but my father and mother both have behavioral tendencies indicative of ADHD given everything I’ve seen and know about them.  

Maybe the reasons for their behaviors are just as convoluted by past experiences as mine appear to be.  I'm a fairly statistically-oriented individual, though, and this confluence of coincidences is highly improbable.  It's quite likely I have been genetically "endowed" with ADHD, but that's not sufficiently conclusive for me.

After my most recent diagnostic ADHD indication I was prescribed Adderall.  I have intermittently taken it for various periods of time over the past 18 months to essentially experiment the efficacy of the medication.  Fortunately (or unfortunately), the medicine seems to ameliorate many of my daily challenges: it allows me to stay on top of my scheduled routine; I maintain consistent effort on tasks for longer than 15 minutes; and it grants me the ability to be productive in general. 

While it’s true that amphetamines allow virtually anyone to be more productive, I don’t mean productive in the work-for-9-hours-straight-without-blinking type of productivity.   It’s so difficult for me to stay on task, sustain any modicum of attentiveness (unless it’s something I absolutely love to do), or even get started on virtually anything productive while not taking the medication regularly and appropriately.  I don't receive an unnecessary performance-enhancing effect as someone without ADHD typically does.

As a result of the early and recent diagnostic tests, the probable genetic aspect, and the symptomatic improvement Adderall provides,  it seems reasonable to conclude that I do have ADHD.  Awesome.

It appears I am “lucky” enough to in fact have both CPTSD and ADHD, so now it’s time to deal with addressing the symptoms of each.  That will have to wait until I do some more work with my clinicians and adjust my recovery plan.  

Until then, I hope this helps you or your loved one if faced with similar challenges and divining their provenance.  I'm NOT clinically trained and simply present my experiences to encourage you to hopefully work closely and cooperatively with your clinician(s) in determining whether the challenges you experience are from ADHD, CPTSD, or like me a combination of both.  It takes time, a lot of patience, significant research, some deductive experimentation, and a lot of work.  We're worth all of that work and more, though!

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are." - EE Cummings

My Frozen World: CPTSD-induced Dissociation

It’s Sunday night a bit past 9pm, the curfew during “winter hours” at the wellness center I now find myself in.  I haven’t had a curfew since I was a sophomore in high school.  It’s not that I was forced here, however.  I can come and go as I please and can grab my stuff and walk out that front door right now.  Thing is, though, I’m actually glad to be here… to a certain extent, anyway.

I was homeless for a relatively short period of time because I had to immediately move out as I was allergic to black mold which began to spew its spores once the heat and humidity of summer hit.  I had to get everything out and into storage so the spores didn’t infiltrate all of my belongings.

I couldn’t find another apartment quickly enough because of my credit, which was in tatters for much the same reason that I became homeless: a confluence of circumstances sent me spinning into my “Frozen World.”  This is my euphemism for what happens to me when a stressor or a combination thereof induce the fight-flight-freeze response.

My Complex PTSD, stemming from physical and psychological childhood traumas, indirectly brought my Frozen World into existence.  I was cognitively aware of these repeated events from my youth but I never emotionally approached them. 

I chalked them up to “childhood as usual" and unknowingly threw up a psychological defensive barrier against feeling any of the related emotions.  This is my Frozen World, but it existed solely in regards to those childhood traumas until relatively recently.

Outside the context of dealing with my childhood experiences, I never previously froze up except for extremely short-term situations.  I fought like hell to defeat the daunting challenges of my life.  That’s the only way I could have made it as far as I had in this world considering the lack of opportunities due to my original socio-economic status (that would be “white trash”).

Finding out I was to be a father caused me to reflect on what kind of father I had.  This brought out so much internal darkness and pain that it swamped my brain’s defenses and swept away the boundaries of my Frozen World. 

The flood of emotions was such that I only dealt with everything thereafter by freezing instead of fighting or fleeing.  I was never one to run away from anything, but I simply lost the capacity to fight.  My Frozen World had now expanded to encompass my entire life.

I progressively began freezing in a state of denial and inaction whenever presented with any type of significant stressor.  With regard to my apartment, I failed to quickly find a landlord willing to risk my credit score.  I had nowhere else to go and no natural support since my family is 900 miles away. 

I couldn’t live with my girlfriend at the time because she had a clause in her divorce agreement preventing that due to her young daughters.  I stayed in hotels the other 80% of nights and ate at restaurants three or four times daily, all of which quickly drained my finances.

I could no longer keep my own girls for overnights, which devastated both them and me.  It also placed me in my ex’s crosshairs because I just knew she would use it against me in court to take the 45% custody I was awarded.  The stress and frustration of it all was simply too much, so I entered my Frozen World and simply acted as though there was no problem at all. 

It’s not like I went into a deep depression or anything.  I didn’t go on some substance abuse bender.  I was happy with my new girlfriend, enjoyed summertime Chicago, went camping, was hanging out socially for the first time in years, and was more or less free of my ex-wife and her manipulative family.  I simply enjoyed life while completely ignoring all of the problems I cognitively knew about but could not emotionally handle.  There’s no room for emotion on my Frozen World.

I eventually began sleeping in my SUV, but that wasn’t so bad because it’s designed for that purpose when camping.  This became my norm for many weeks, even though I still sometimes stayed in a hotel when my spinal fusion acted up. 

Then the money essentially ran out altogether.  Even still I was safely ensconced within my Frozen World, so I just kept on living as normally as I could.  It was fairly normal actually, and yet also simultaneously de-stabilizing in ways which I only now understand after the fact.

So I’m basically homeless, almost completely out of money, the bond between me and my girls was straining, and then my girlfriend ran for the hills (or Lincoln Park).  She knew about everything, but it became too much for her to handle.  She tried to tough it out, but her heart couldn’t bear the weight of it all and she had to kill our special connection to save herself.  I don’t blame her at all.  It’s what I would have told my own daughters to do.

Once she left me, however, I completely came apart at the seams.  Her resilience was a crutch allowing my mind to continue its presence on my Frozen World.  I almost immediately had two bouts of suicidal ideation within 10 days, but these were little more than elaborate cries for help.  Suicide could never have happened because to kill myself would have been either a fight or flight response.  All I seem to be able to do anymore is freeze. 

Fact is, I love this life.  Even with all the horrific things I went through and how I’m currently reduced to essentially nothing, I am so grateful to be alive.  I need only to think of this past summer in order to reflect on the simple wonders this world provides.  Even if I didn’t feel this way, the fact is that I have two little girls who deserve to grow up with their Daddy.  I could never be so selfish as to willingly abandon them via suicide or any other means.

The social worker at the hospital I checked myself into at the end of my final ideation suggested I come to the wellness center from which I now write this.  I went on the wait list and luckily just a week or so later I found my sanctuary.  This is a place for persons with various mental health challenges to get short-term stabilization in their lives, tame or control the effects of their condition(s), and get back to successfully restart their lives.

In only my third night here I have already developed a sense of safety, stability, and hope I wasn’t sure I’d ever get back.  This has unfortunately been intermittently interrupted by thoughts of that which I once was, had, and dreamed.  

It’s impossible to not be introspective given the opportunities and successes I’ve already experienced.  Yet I need only to look around at the significance of what other residents here face to confirm just how fortunate I am to have the abilities and talents Mother Nature has lovingly bestowed upon me.

I’ve been stripped almost completely of my confidence, pride, and ego.  Yet I consider this to be a positive development.  My life can now be reconstructed in a healthy way and be cognizant of all that which I could never admit or even know about myself before now.  

For the first time in my life I have support from people without any ulterior motives.  They aren’t invested in specifically what I do with my life like the “support” I had before with my family, my ex-wife, and her family.  Now it’s simply about me being healthy and happy regardless of what form that takes.  

It’s akin to being forced to demolish and then rebuild your dream home because it had a poorly-constructed foundation hidden beneath a façade of finery.   I’ve cried a monsoon of tears as my old life caved in on itself, and I will continue to weep on occasion for the wonderful yet irreplaceable parts of my life which were irretrievably destroyed.  

Those tears are no longer ones of regret or shame, though.  Those are feelings which breed self-loathing and can quickly spiral me down back into my Frozen World.  These are tears of grieving and, like all grief, they will diminish over time.

I understand myself so much better and have a deeper trust in what my therapy/recovery can accomplish.  There's no lingering doubt in my mind about whether I'm capable of true change.  I’m no longer on my Frozen World and I endeavor to never return but, if I do, I know how to better handle it.  My second life will be vastly superior because it’s to be built on a stronger and more secure foundation like that second dream home... and I'm finally ready to start pouring the concrete.

A Quest to Help Others Recover From Child Abuse

It's trite, I know, but this really is the first day of the rest of my life.  It’s another chance to shirk the negative consequences of yesterday, learn from those mistakes, and start from this very moment to generate my own positives.  Sharing my story will absolutely benefit me as a cathartic release, and I may just be able to reach and help one or two others at the same time.

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!