Hi Riven,
One more comment on your most recent post. Generally, I see my psychiatrist no more than once every 2 - 3 months. He basically asks how I'm feeling, I say great and then I make the next appointment. I haven't taken the mood stabilizer since Thursday morning. I seem to be doing fine without it.
Another friend who knows about these meds says they generally take days to start working. I suspect my initial reaction of feeling 'my moods had been flattened' was, therefore, more a result of being exhausted.
He has warned me, though, to be very aware that hypomania is a serious condition and not to ignore symptoms. Should I really have that I need to be very careful that I do get it treated.
On to your response on post traumatic stress disorder. My assault took place in 1984. I'll just say a little more about it here than I've mentioned before. The people that assaulted me were poor folks, and a friend of theirs, that my ex-wife and I were trying to help through a program run by the city we were in at the time. As I've mentioned elsewhere, there was so much blood left all over the place from the assault that
Danya (imported) wrote: Mon Dec 31, 2007 7:03 am
the police thought someone had been shot.
They also later told us that they would never go into that neighborhood without a partner AND a dog.
I could have easily been killed, I was later told by a doctor, by the types and severity of the blows I received. The therapist I was seeing at the time wanted to hospitalize me because of my really bottomed out mental state. I refused, being concerned about what that would do to my career! Really stupid of me.
I was terrified of going to bed and trying to sleep. I wished someone would tie me down, I was so afraid I'd get up, go to the kitchen and get a knife to kill myself. I was also having some aural hallucinations.
If this had been a simple assault, I don't think I would have had nearly as much trouble dealing with it. I'm not saying I would have never had PTSD, though. The fact that the people who attacked me knew us made it far worse. Even with that addition, though, I think I might have dealt with it better if it hadn't been for the additional piece that I'm not prepared to go into here, at least not for now. This last part was far worse than being physically assaulted and to me seems more like being psychologically assaulted. It went on for 6 weeks. That missing part left me feeling totally abandoned, helpless and unable to defend myself. I know this doesn't make much sense without knowing what happend. It's intensely personal, though, and I'm not prepared to discuss it. BTW, my ex-wife was always much stronger than me in these kinds of situations. She stood by me with tremendous emotional support through all of this.
Occasionally, I'd even get angry with her during this period, though. She hadn't been physically violated so she couldn't possibly understand what I was going through, or so I rather cruelly told her. The fact is, she was also undergoing the same 6-week psychological assault just as I was. So it wasn't at all easy for her, either.
The thing is, Riven, I wound up dealing with my initial experience by totally repressing everything that had happened. I did feel abandoned and helpless but there was no way I could continue living while feeling that. As I've mentioned elsewhere, 5 years after the assault I experienced PTSD for the first of 3 times. What triggered it was the murder of a young college man who was on spring break just across the Texas border in Mexico. He'd been abducted in front of friends on a busy street. The abductors were drug traffickers who thought human sacrifice would protect them from the police. They were mass murderers. Sorry, I can't discuss more details about that now, I'm in tears. The thing is, my therapist at the time told me that my reaction was really about me and my own assault. Of course, I didn't want to believe him at first. What I was doing was relating my own feelings of abandonment and being violated when I was assaulted to what I assumed were this young man's own feelings. I can't go into details now, but it turns out his family and the police have evidence that he did indeed feel abandoned. He was kept alive for twelve hours.
So, for several months I was working through my feelings on this. At first, I was so distraught for the first time in my life I passed out from drinking way to much liquor. Normally I'm not a heavy drinker at all. I was extremely angry and, very uncharacteriscally, I physically displayed this anger. Not by hurting anyone (I've never laid a finger on another person) but by slamming my fist into the wall, screaming, slamming metal rods into stone-topped lab benches at work.
For the first time, I totally lost faith in any kind of Creator. Earlier, I'd wondered if there really was a God and things like that. That was mostly a mental exercise. Now, I was totally convinced on an emotional level that there was none. This was really devastating. I was feeling just as abandoned as when I was assaulted, maybe even more so.
I wound up doing something my therapist did not recommend at all. He later was impressed, though, because the end result was very good and it led to my recovery. I contacted the young man's family and helped them some financially with work they were doing to set up a foundation to help find runaway kids (although their son hadn't been a runaway). I became and outspoken supporter of their petition for the government to do more about the drug trafficking problem in the US. I spoke at churches and to Tough Love groups and similar organizations about the petition so I could get signatures. These types of activities and everything else I did at this time were very new experiences for me. I arranged to get their story, which had been international news, retold on a local morning TV show. The station even wanted me to speak but I couldn't do that. I dealt with the mayor's anti-drug task force on a regular basis. My ex-wife and I donated a copy of the book they'd written, describing their search for their son, to 32 junior and senior high schools in the city where we lived. The profits from the book went entirely to the foundation for runaway kids. His family treated me like I was one of them. This meant a lot to me because I'd been an emotionally abandoned child. I did other things, too, in support of their work. The thing is, there was nothing I could do to produce any kind of positive outcome when I was assaulted. I'd have to go into a lot more details of that time for your to understand why that would be. I can't do that now.
In the case of this young man, though, I helped enable many positive things to happen. I couldn't bring him back, but good things still occurred and I was part of some of those. That's what got me through the PTSD.
I subsequently had two more episodes of PTSD. Right at the start of each, though, I now knew that I had to take immediate positive steps or I'd get into a really serious emotional mess. By taking positive action right near the start, each of these episodes was much less severe than the first.
The thing is Riven, until last Saturday night I hadn't experienced any feelings related to my assault in roughly 15 years. I don't know exactly how many. Saturday was the first really negative emotional response I've had while taking Androcur. Feelings of being violated were coming back. They were triggered by what was likely mostly an irrational construction of events in my mind. So this case was different from the first three. In those, there was something that happened to another person that triggered PTSD. I was always able to get something positive to happen in those, which is what saved me. Saturday, there was no one else that had been hurt so there was nothing I could do in my usual way of turning at least a small part of something really bad into something good. I was feeling really desperate because I couldn't see that my usual coping mechanism would work. For several days, however irrationally, I was feeling under attack. Fortunately, and probably because of the distance from the last PTSD time, I was able to talk myself out of this by the middle of the week.
This is far more than I ever intended to discuss. Even this doesn't describe the worst of what happened to both my ex-wife and me. Your post prompted me to write more about my own experience, which is actually a good thing. In part, that's because I need to be very aware that in my new emotional state I may be more susceptible to assault flashbacks. After Saturday's episode, though, I feel I'm at least aware that this can crop up. If it happens again, I think I'll be able to more quickly and effectively deal with it. I'm also very open to the idea that I may need to discuss this with a therapist given my new way of responding to things. I will make an appointment with a really good therapist I was seeing earlier in the year who specializes in PTSD. That wasn't what I was seeing her for at the time, although we touched on my experience. I'll also do some research on EMDR.
Despite the fact that it was really difficult for me to write a lot of this post, I'm feeling better now. I very much appreciate you willingness to share your own experience, Riven. That's helped me a great deal today.
I don't know that I can proof read this without starting to cry again. Please understand that if it's difficult to follow.
-todd
. I think what I was experiencing was a sneak attack of 'eunuch humor'. Seems like it could be a really good thing.