Recovery...

So, June was not my last court date. How nice if it had been. In two months, I will have been in the criminal court system for two years for a crime I did not commit.

I had the ambitious idea of writing a blog about the experience while I went through it - describing each step, including what led me there. But writing about mental illness while mentally ill turned out to be rather unrealistic.

Part of the issue with complex PTSD is triggering- it causes flashbacks, for one thing, and for the first 8 months after the trauma that finally knocked me over, I had to be medicated to stop them with a drug called Seraquel. So attempting to write about the very things that were making me worse, generating my sense of powerlessness, perpetuating my sense of hopelessness, and leading me to plan and attempt my suicide, was just a bit triggering (to say the least).

One of the things I have learned from this experience is that I never adequately understood my own emotions - actually, I didn't recognize them. I didn't even know what they were - was I angry? or actually feeling ashamed? Was I frightened? Or sad? I couldn't even identify primary emotions let alone the secondary emotions based upon my primary feelings. It's a problem most of us who have experienced early childhood abuse have - if we could feel our emotions life would have been pretty crappy, so we learned early on how to ignore them for our survival.

Anyway, so there I am in little moments of clarity and ambition thinking I am going to write a BLOG on this sh*t and tell my story, completely overlooking how I actually felt, and how I might actually feel writing it. So, in a little mini example of what happens when you have no idea how you feel about something, I set myself up for failure and failed to write a thing.

Good decision making must be made based upon good information- if you ignore key data points, like, oh, how you actually feel, nothing will be good about the decision. I think they call this in the research world, "garbage in, garbage out."

On a positive note, I've spent the last 2 years learning how I feel- not really by choice, because how I felt overwhelmed me like a tsunami and I was not able to shut it down, but the outcome is the same: I am learning how to recognize and name my feelings. Hurrah. I believe despite how awful this is, that when I can identify my feelings, and then actually observe them and use them as important information, my life might hopefully be different in the future.

I'd like to insert here that Seraquel is amazing. I was physically shutting down from flashbacks, which in some can look like narcolepsy. I simply fell asleep wherever I was because my brain just shut down the whole system in reaction. There I was sitting on the couch writing a list of things I might do that day - laundry, try to vacuum my room, or at least, put the vacuum cleaner in my room (baby steps), and the next minute, I was asleep. I started Seraquel and the flashbacks stopped. Absolutely, 100%, stopped. AMAZING. it was amazing. It brought back some functionality, or at least the ability to finish the list. I was grateful.

There is one drawback, and that is there were some very useful flashbacks, such as things I had actually completely suppressed as a child. Unpleasant discoveries, but helpful in explaining a few things.... But I couldn't handle the consequences of those flashbacks let alone the flashbacks of the final trauma, so it was a matter of health to decide to allow the rest of those memories to stay hidden. Maybe another day.

The Break/ing/down

"To be a spiritual warrior, one must have a broken heart; without a broken heart and the sense of tenderness and vulnerability, your warriorship is untrustworthy." – Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche


Well, my heart is broken. I broke it, and then everyone and everything followed suit. I think I have been breaking it my whole life, or maybe, others broke it first, and then I picked up a carving knife and made sure it never healed. The final break happened last summer, last fall, last winter. A series of events, betrayals of the most egregious kind, culminated in a real old fashioned proper breakdown.

A man, a system, and of course, my self betrayed me, and everything changed: who I thought I was, what I believed about our legal system here in the US of A, but most importantly, my sense of safety in our world- my naiveté that justice always won out eventually, that I could always tell good from bad, that people naturally gravitated towards doing what is right in the end.

I thought after all this breaking there was nothing left to heal. I'm not convinced otherwise yet. But I thought if I do decide to leave this world, I should write about it - tell a few others, if it would help. But there's no real way to prepare oneself to be broken. It's not something you'd ever really think could happen, let alone expect. That's the whole point about losing everything all at once, including your very self, it's not something we can conceive of until it happens.

So, I'll put this out there. I go back to court on June 11th, probably for the last time. It's my expectation that nothing will change. This seems to be the only way this lesson comes - hard and brutal, no letting up, no grace.