Living with PTSD - Bleeding
© Melina Magdalena 2006
Once upon a time, it was unthinkable for someone to survive rape. Of course, women survived, but it was kept a shameful, silent secret. A woman who was known to have been raped, was automatically labelled “victim” and treated as a worthless used up slag who would have been better off dead.
Rape is considered to be one of the worst things that can be done to a person. In our legal systems, to be charged with the offence of rape is supposed to be equivalent to being charged with murder. Like murder, the crime of rape has suffered from linguistic filtering and legal permutations so that circumstances can be twisted to diminish the legal seriousness of whatever act is alleged to have taken place between a perpetrator and a victim.
One of the things that really got to me when the man who raped me was being fed through the legal machine, was the way in which my experience was assumed by the Court to be known and understood. In my Victim Impact Statement, I wrote at length about the many ways in which being raped had affected my life and impacted on my ability to function as a woman and a mother.
By this time, I myself had already been fed once through the legal machinery when I applied for Victim’s Compensation a year or two before. The police had no idea who had broken into my home and raped me, and as there seemed to be little possibility the man would ever be brought to any kind of justice, I applied for compensation and was eventually awarded a small sum of money which improved my opportunities and quality of life. It enabled me, for example, to purchase a second-hand computer and printer, to get my driver’s license and a car. These are things I may never have attained as a single mother on a pension. They enabled me to pursue my studies and my writing, and gradually, to become less home-bound.
As part of my application for Victims of Crime compensation, I experienced a baffling interview with a legally-appointed psychologist. Baffling, because she judged that the impact on me of having a strange man break into my home in the middle of the night and threaten to kill me and my children unless I allowed him to rape me was minimal, since this occurred just a few months after I had fled my marriage, while I was still also having to cope with the legal ramifications of custody battles and the Family Court, not to mention the Magistrate’s Court, which I had to attend when my ex-husband opposed the imposition of a Summary Protection Order against him, nor the stresses of bringing up two very small children alone, with no income support save the pension.
I am so glad that this is all behind me now, thirteen years later.
However, I remain bemused by my memories of this interview, years of counselling sessions, and the construction of my Victim Impact Statement. In particular, the physical aftermath of being raped is something I still feel is ignored and is widely misunderstood.
This is not the first time that I’ve tried to write about this, and I think I understand where part of the difficulty lies for me. While following media reports of the inquest into the death of Dianne Brimble aboard a cruise ship in 2002, I’ve talked to a number of survivors abut why the men who filmed each other raping her as she died of a drug overdose of the date rape drug ‘fantasy’ were never charged with rape. Their cabins were cleared of all evidence before the police could board the ship and commence their investigations. The video footage and violated body of Dianne Brimble are all that remain as evidence of what happened to her. This doesn’t seem to have provided sufficient evidence of wrongdoing.
Today when I logged into my email, I saw articles on the web about the reduction in the sentences that some gang-rapists in Sydney had received. I looked at the article and my eye was caught by one particular line “In sentencing the men in 2004, Justice Michael Finnane said the victim had the worst injuries he had seen in his 35-year legal career - requiring surgery to her genitalia after the attack.”
There was a section in the Victim Impact Statement form which asked me to describe the pain and physical injuries that I had suffered as a result of the crime. I distinctly recall feeling inhibited about what “physical injury” meant in my case. I was still in the process then, of getting angry about the many times I had felt coerced during my marriage, into having sexual intercourse when I really didn’t want to. With my limited and traumatic range of sexual experience, my confusion is understandable.
Like many people, I suppose I had felt as though rape perhaps wasn’t as bad if it only involved penile penetration of the vagina, as it has whenever I had been raped. Since that is the same as sexual intercourse, had I any right to claim that I had been physically injured through this act? And what of pain? Had it hurt at the time? I made myself numb, believing I was about to be killed. There are areas on my breasts that are still ice cold, parts of my body that I cannot bear to have touched, where that rapist touched them.
I found out later that some of the women who were also raped by the man who raped me, had suffered greater physical insult to their genitalia and other parts of their bodies. My understanding however, of the effect of sexual assault, is that the emotional effects and trauma that is induced can be of as great severity whether the actual assault consists of physical penetrations, mutilations, verbal harassment and anything in between.
The only kind of thing I felt justified in writing in my Victim Impact Statement was the bruising I had suffered on various parts of my body that was photographed as evidence of the attack on me, and my fear that I had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from the man who raped me.
Thirteen years after being raped, I can tell you with confidence that the physical trauma continues and has not improved. Furthermore, the trauma is not recognized as such by the medical establishment, and there is no treatment for it. Whenever I raise my physical problems with doctors, I am told that my experiences lie within the range of normal. There is nothing for me to be concerned about. Perhaps I am unlucky, but it’s just something I have to live with unless I want to have a hysterectomy. (Not bloody likely.)
I once presented my doctor with a list of physical symptoms which I wanted to address with her. She asked me whether I thought I might be depressed. (She wasn’t the first, and probably won’t be the last to take refuge in the panacea of the antidepressant.) I go to see a different doctor now, but she has not been able to help, either. I allow her to invade my body every two-and-a-half years and give me the required pap smear, and I get her to monitor my iron and thyroxin levels.
I have been tested for fibroids on numerous occasions. I have the levels of various hormones and minerals in my blood checked over and over again. I took myself to the Women’s and Children’s Hospital one evening, a few years ago, fearing that this time I might really die of blood loss. They sent me home again and told me to buy super-sized sanitary pads. In all these years, it has only my iron levels that have shown consistent stress and depletion. I’ve been blessed with good health, and cursed by the ignorance and apathy of doctors.
The idea of a link between body, mind and spirit is something I’m familiar with. Perhaps the system between these aspects of self is too complex to manage in any useful manner? The body is an amazingly complex network of interdependent systems. It’s obvious to me, that as a result of being raped, something in the systems of my body has been knocked permanently off balance. It doesn’t help to tell myself that I am causing my own symptoms, or that if I chose to think in a different way, the symptoms would necessarily resolve themselves. It doesn’t help to think that if I chose not to label my symptoms as dis-ease, I would therefore no longer suffer them as distressing.
Every three or four weeks, my body launches an all-out assault upon me. I feel as though my insides are fighting to become my outsides. Several days before my period actually begins, I fall into a deep and suicidal depression for a day. This black day affects me no matter what else is going on in my life at the time. It’s only dangerous when life is not going reasonably well. From experience, I know to keep my thoughts to myself. I reassure myself that it will pass, as it always has, so far.
On these days, I try not to react to situations that arise with family members, friends or workmates that will later need to be resolved.
My body begins to bloat. The irritation begins, and intensifies over the next forty-eight hours, as I feel I am surrounded by a swarm of angry wasps. I emanate “DON’T TOUCH ME” vibes, and become clumsy, awkward, impatient and reactive. Nothing is simple, nothing works the way it is supposed to and it’s all my fault.
Then like magic, I wake up one morning and I feel fine. I feel like I’ve lost a kilo or two overnight, and my clothes begin to sit right again. During breakfast it dawns on me that this sensation is what heralds the beginning of the bleed. I leave the kitchen and go to the bathroom to check my supplies. If I’m lucky, I will have bought ahead, but all too often, my period (curiously) takes me by surprise. The irregularity is one factor, but perhaps at some subconscious level I still cling to the hope that if I don’t want to have it, it won’t come!
I often experience cramping for a day before the blood appears. It’s the machinery of my body getting into gear. I go to the toilet often, just to see whether the bleeding has begun. Once it has, it is unmistakable. Floods and fury. I can feel my uterus as it contracts and expands like the instinctive muscle it is, sucks blood from outside its walls and pumps it out again. For two or three days this goes on, though mercifully, the cramping usually ends twenty-four hours after the bleeding begins. I go through six to ten super-sized sanitary napkins each day, and two or three pairs of underpants. I wake up twice each night to find the pad, my thighs and my sheets saturated with blood, stagger to the bathroom, change the pad and crawl back into bed for a couple more hours.
By the second day of bleeding, I can barely crawl out of bed, though I do. Despite feeling so wretchedly ill and drained, I mother, I housewife, I go to work and I do whatever needs to be done. The thing I dislike most about this bleeding is the clots. They vary in size, and they fall out of me like I imagine dead fetuses would fall out of me if I were miscarrying. Every month I feel as though my body is telling me I’ve wasted its capacity yet again, to nourish and bear a child. I feel like my body is punishing me.
The scientific link that has been established between certain hormones and fertility is not something that has been helpful in my situation. I spent a year on the birth control pill to see whether this might help. All it did was give me an insight into when the bleeding would begin again, every twenty-eight days without fail. I didn’t require birth control, so I went off the pill after a year. I spent a different year on another medication whose function was to prevent my uterus from sucking up the blood outside itself. This did help a little, but I still clotted and flooded and wept. When the pills ran out, there seemed little point in getting the prescription renewed.
Since being raped, the disruption and malfunction of my menstrual cycle has had a severe impact on my quality of life. This impacts on me far more than any sexual ‘dysfunction’ I might otherwise care to report. The fact that I’m not interested in having sex with men does have some link with being raped, but it’s tied in with many other factors than the purely physical, such as my distinct aversion to spending time in the company of men, let alone inviting a man to have access to my private parts.
I’ve never heard another survivor talk about her menstrual cycle as having been affected or impacted as a result of sexual trauma, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that many of us are affected in a similar way. All of us have probably been told that many women suffer from premenstrual syndrome; that it’s unfortunate if we have pain while menstruating, but it’s nothing that anyone can do anything about.
I would like to be able to include this information retrospectively on my Victim Impact Statement. I would like to see the suffering that I continue to endure every few weeks be considered in the sentencing of the man who was convicted of raping me, and who will be released on parole next year. I sometimes joke with people that men suffer from menstrual envy, but deep in my heart I know I’m just projecting my own terror and anguish onto the men I sometimes encounter, who find reasons to give me a hard time. No man in his right mind could envy my menstrual cycle.
REFERENCES:
“Gang rapists have their sentence reduced”, Friday March 24 12:30 AEDT ©AAP 2006, viewed online URL http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=87738 [24/3/2006].
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Another Side of Normal
Part One - hearing
Living with PTSD
© Melina Magdalena (24/3/06)
The amazing thing about people who live with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is how well we appear to function in everyday society. Notwithstanding those of us who are so unfortunate as to have been misdiagnosed and so merely exist, drugged to the eyeballs to keep us quiet, most of us remain anonymous, faceless members of the community . We have learned that it’s safer to remain silent about those aspects of our lives that no one seems to be able to do anything about. The traumas that induced our conditions have already happened, after all, and that damage cannot be undone, only lived with. Living with PTSD is a continuous journey towards health.
Having studied Beverley Searle’s analysis of the kind of people upon whom Freud based his theories and diagnoses, I wonder whether a similar analysis could be made of the supposedly wide range of ‘normality’ in terms of the kinds of physical symptoms that survivors of sexual trauma are told are nothing out of the ordinary .
As Searle describes, a large proportion of Freud’s sample of young neurotic women had been sexually abused and traumatized by their fathers, uncles, brothers or family friends. The effect of this on Freud’s scientific output was not to spark outrage and put an end to the damage wreaked by these men on the girls and women they assaulted and violated, rather it was twisted upon the survivors themselves, who were labeled and diagnosed by Freud as being sick, deviant and deficient. These survivors struggled with the selfsame mental, spiritual, emotional and physical symptoms of having been abused, that survivors struggle with today. Today, the scale of normality in terms of mental and physical health which has been imposed upon us through the work of Freud and others, who failed to address the cause of the damage, and only assessed the results, means that we do not really know what normal is or could be, for us.
We have no idea what normal is, for a person who has not suffered trauma. In a way, this is a perfect reflection of the way in which conventional Western medicine functions. It is largely reactive, addressing symptoms as they arise, rather than seeking to prevent their occurrence or heal their underlying cause. The ability of human beings to survive despite all kinds of diseases and disabilities is amazing. It is not just survivors of trauma who exhibit this capacity. In itself, the ability to live and function, to produce, contribute and create within one’s circumstances is proof of the strength and determination of survivors to rise above conditions of ill-health, disability or chronic illness.
Some people might argue that it is precisely the fact that human beings survive and thrive within such a diverse range of possibilities that makes us truly human.
I don’t believe that surviving trauma makes me a better person than someone who has led a charmed and peaceful existence. I do believe it is incumbent upon me to put my life to good use, no matter what has happened to me in my past. That is what makes me truly human.
At the same time as writing this, I am conscious of the empowering belief that I am the expert on my own situation. I know myself better than anyone else possibly could. This is an attitude which I have been encouraged to develop, in order to give me some semblance of control over my life. It is a useful paradigm to work from, but today I choose to focus my attention elsewhere.
This week I went to an audiologist for a hearing assessment. My reasons for having the assessment include a strong family history of hearing loss, the government subsidy that enabled me to have the assessment without incurring a cost, and my auditory experiences which range from the bizarre to the annoying.
Like many people who live with PTSD, my extreme sensitivity to noises is trigger-happy and exhausting. This is something I live with every day and every night, for which I have developed a range of coping strategies which render it almost invisible to anyone else.
Gone are the days when I literally threw myself to the ground and rolled out of danger when a fighter jet roared over the skies of Adelaide as part of a thrilling entertainment spectacle. The spectacle of me having left my body so that I could watch myself shaking with terror on the ground below was enough to convince me that I had to do something to disguise my reactions in future.
I have trained my body not to physically jump in instinctive response to loud and startling noises. Whilst driving, I am able now, to remain outwardly calm, and hold my hands steady on the steering wheel, even when my heart is pounding and my legs have turned to jelly in response to the gunning and screeching of motorcycle engines and tyres behind, in front or beside me.
I work in the city, which means that I am exposed to a great deal of industrial and traffic noise. Walking along streets and waiting for public transport can induce harrowing auditory experiences. So I have learned to attend to a different range of sounds, and to block out those that most distress me.
Of course, this has meant I have to maintain other aspects of hypervigilance, in order to keep myself out of danger. Interestingly, I have developed an exaggerated startle reflex to visual stimuli. When I am dealing with emotional stress, or at times when I am concentrating intently on a single task, I frequently jump and scream when someone comes into my line of vision and startles me. These people are usually around six feet tall, and when their presence registers unexpectedly on my consciousness, I panic.
Unfortunately, along with several of my work colleagues, my sixteen year old son falls in this category. Last weekend I was extremely stressed and preoccupied. Over the course of one day, I jumped and screamed in fright about fifteen times at his sudden appearance, though I knew all along he was with us in the house. His feelings were understandably hurt and he was rightly offended that I was so afraid. My distress had nothing to do with him. This reminds me of the experiences of Shosha and her children, as described in “Soft of Hearing”, broadcast on Radio National in 2002.
There are some noises that I just cannot bear to be around. If I hear loud noises and fighting in our street, I run around the house and turn off every noisy appliance, just so I can hear exactly what might be going on out there. I cannot do anything else until it goes away.
The sounds of sibling rivalry used to be constant triggers, until my children began to explore the world of hip hop. How I hated that music when they first began to listen to it! I had to scream at them to turn it off, or I had to leave the room and leave the house. It was not just the level of profanity and discord, nor just the obscene and degrading lyrics, especially where they pertain to male attitudes to women. It was the various layers of noise that were woven together and somehow came to represent many of the kinds of sounds I find it hard to live with. I still object to the sexism, hatred and violence expressed by much of the hip hop that I have heard over the years, but I have trained myself to be able to listen to the sounds and separate the strands into their layers, thus confining them to limits that are tolerable for me. My children get along better than they used to, but I am now able to tune out their senseless bickering.
I live in an area of a housing boom. When I try to work at home amidst the cacophony of trucks, jackhammers and other building equipment, I know it is going to be more useful to stop what I am trying to write or paint and turn my attention instead, to something repetitive or mundane. The wear and tear on my emotions, from having to keep my reactions at bay whilst attempting to sustain my creative output is deleterious to my energy levels. Amidst such ongoing cacophony, forcing myself to relax and take a nap to recover my strength is also an impossibility.
It is in terms of quality of life, that such sensitivity to noise impacts on how well I am able to function as part of ‘normal’ society. Everyone who has learned to adapt to debilitating or limiting physical conditions, whether short-term, recurring, permanent or chronic, knows the cost of such adaptation can be measured by how much energy one has at one’s disposal, for other things.
Mental and emotional fatigue shows up in my life as a chronic physical symptom of PTSD. It is not my imagination or habit that causes my eyelids to droop around eight-thirty at night, and makes me yawn incessantly from then on. I am simply at the end of my tether. The level of auditory distress with which I have had to cope during the day directly determines my level of exhaustion when it comes to dealing with the noises of the night. Sleep is another matter altogether.
My hearing assessment showed that my hearing in both ears lies comfortably within the normal range. No surprises there. When my home is quiet, I can turn my television down to ‘3’ and still understand every word of dialogue. When I lie awake at night, I can hear the pulse in my wrists. The sound of the sheets as they rustle, when I turn over, trying to get comfortable and cosy enough to fall asleep, overwhelms every other sound around me.
Several years ago, I used to wake at night, believing I had heard gun shots next door. The second time I rang the police about this, the kind woman on the other end of the phone reminded me of the road works that were happening at night as tunnels were being blasted through the foothills of Adelaide, twenty kilometers away. I began to pay attention to the gunshots that I heard. Sure enough, they always occurred on the nights when there was blasting going on up there. I stopped bothering the police with my calls of auditory distress.
It’s funny how well I’ve taught myself to tune out false alarms. The trouble is, that in doing so, I also tend to fade out the noises of social discourse that do not represent potential danger or distress. In order to function socially, I have to consciously switch on my hearing and attend to the sounds that people are making around me. Overstimulation is the most frequent result. In attending to conversation, my hearing goes hyperactive. I overhear so many fascinating and intriguing tidbits, that it’s not easy to tune into the one particular strand of conversation in which I have been invited to be involved. This can be quite fun for a while, but it too, leads to exhaustion.
When I need to concentrate, I’ve learned that multitasking is sometimes the only way to do it. I often have two or three things going on in my head at once. If I am anxious while driving, I will sing a song, as well as counting, or reciting a different set of lyrics in my head. This drives my children up the wall. I’ll also add up the numbers on the numberplates of the cars around me, and make up silly acronyms with the letters.
I can carry on conversation fairly well at the same time as counting and singing in my head, though my retention levels are not high. This is probably what leads me to worry about my memory. It has meant that there are gaps in my sense of time. During the conversations, I appear to be attending and even to be a good listener. It’s later that I obsess about what I did or didn’t hear, and whether I was really there at all.
Creating noise is one of the most effective coping strategies I have developed. When the babble of my extravagant emotion becomes too hard for me to bear, I will take to hammering, throwing things around, and rummaging fruitlessly in my pots and pans cupboard just to drown out my own destructive thoughts. These are the times when I tend to break crockery by mistake, because I bang the plates down on the counter with gleeful rage, and throw them into the sink to be washed. It doesn’t make me crazy. It relieves the pressure without hurting anyone else. I also enjoy slamming doors.
But the best thing of all, I have found, is to put on the kind of music that I like to listen to, and to turn it up loud loud loud!. I love to sing my heart out when I’m feeling bad, because it makes me feel so much better. I don’t care about whether the neighbours can hear me through our paper thin walls. I couldn’t care less about the lameness of the lyrics. All that matters when I’m singing is the glory of the sound itself, and the fact that I am choosing to make it, to the exclusion of all other sound around me.
Living with PTSD is challenging. It’s good to reflect on aspects of what this actually entails. I quite like to admit that I have an extravagant emotional life. I can laugh about my exaggerated startle reflex. These are largely private matters, invisible to the naked eye, so to speak. When asked about my levels of health, I am happy to report that I am relentlessly well. I rarely mention the fatigue that now feels normal to me. This doesn’t mean I am not challenged by living with PTSD, but it reflects my strength and pride in the fact that I step up to that challenge and function very well in spite of it.
REFERENCES:
1. Bambridge, K (2005), “Reclaiming a Life”, pp. 128-131 and Searle, B (2005) “My Experiences of having Dissociative Identity Disorder in South Australia “ pp.178-182, The Reclaiming Anthology: healing our wounds M. Magdalena (Ed.) Seaview Press: Adelaide.
2. Searle, B (2005) ), “The Legacy of Freud“ pp.21-28 , ibid.
3. Aviva Sheb’a (2002) “Soft of Hearing”, adapted for radio by Mike Ladd, broadcast in two parts on Radio National 729 FM, (2002).
Living with PTSD
© Melina Magdalena (24/3/06)
The amazing thing about people who live with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is how well we appear to function in everyday society. Notwithstanding those of us who are so unfortunate as to have been misdiagnosed and so merely exist, drugged to the eyeballs to keep us quiet, most of us remain anonymous, faceless members of the community . We have learned that it’s safer to remain silent about those aspects of our lives that no one seems to be able to do anything about. The traumas that induced our conditions have already happened, after all, and that damage cannot be undone, only lived with. Living with PTSD is a continuous journey towards health.
Having studied Beverley Searle’s analysis of the kind of people upon whom Freud based his theories and diagnoses, I wonder whether a similar analysis could be made of the supposedly wide range of ‘normality’ in terms of the kinds of physical symptoms that survivors of sexual trauma are told are nothing out of the ordinary .
As Searle describes, a large proportion of Freud’s sample of young neurotic women had been sexually abused and traumatized by their fathers, uncles, brothers or family friends. The effect of this on Freud’s scientific output was not to spark outrage and put an end to the damage wreaked by these men on the girls and women they assaulted and violated, rather it was twisted upon the survivors themselves, who were labeled and diagnosed by Freud as being sick, deviant and deficient. These survivors struggled with the selfsame mental, spiritual, emotional and physical symptoms of having been abused, that survivors struggle with today. Today, the scale of normality in terms of mental and physical health which has been imposed upon us through the work of Freud and others, who failed to address the cause of the damage, and only assessed the results, means that we do not really know what normal is or could be, for us.
We have no idea what normal is, for a person who has not suffered trauma. In a way, this is a perfect reflection of the way in which conventional Western medicine functions. It is largely reactive, addressing symptoms as they arise, rather than seeking to prevent their occurrence or heal their underlying cause. The ability of human beings to survive despite all kinds of diseases and disabilities is amazing. It is not just survivors of trauma who exhibit this capacity. In itself, the ability to live and function, to produce, contribute and create within one’s circumstances is proof of the strength and determination of survivors to rise above conditions of ill-health, disability or chronic illness.
Some people might argue that it is precisely the fact that human beings survive and thrive within such a diverse range of possibilities that makes us truly human.
I don’t believe that surviving trauma makes me a better person than someone who has led a charmed and peaceful existence. I do believe it is incumbent upon me to put my life to good use, no matter what has happened to me in my past. That is what makes me truly human.
At the same time as writing this, I am conscious of the empowering belief that I am the expert on my own situation. I know myself better than anyone else possibly could. This is an attitude which I have been encouraged to develop, in order to give me some semblance of control over my life. It is a useful paradigm to work from, but today I choose to focus my attention elsewhere.
This week I went to an audiologist for a hearing assessment. My reasons for having the assessment include a strong family history of hearing loss, the government subsidy that enabled me to have the assessment without incurring a cost, and my auditory experiences which range from the bizarre to the annoying.
Like many people who live with PTSD, my extreme sensitivity to noises is trigger-happy and exhausting. This is something I live with every day and every night, for which I have developed a range of coping strategies which render it almost invisible to anyone else.
Gone are the days when I literally threw myself to the ground and rolled out of danger when a fighter jet roared over the skies of Adelaide as part of a thrilling entertainment spectacle. The spectacle of me having left my body so that I could watch myself shaking with terror on the ground below was enough to convince me that I had to do something to disguise my reactions in future.
I have trained my body not to physically jump in instinctive response to loud and startling noises. Whilst driving, I am able now, to remain outwardly calm, and hold my hands steady on the steering wheel, even when my heart is pounding and my legs have turned to jelly in response to the gunning and screeching of motorcycle engines and tyres behind, in front or beside me.
I work in the city, which means that I am exposed to a great deal of industrial and traffic noise. Walking along streets and waiting for public transport can induce harrowing auditory experiences. So I have learned to attend to a different range of sounds, and to block out those that most distress me.
Of course, this has meant I have to maintain other aspects of hypervigilance, in order to keep myself out of danger. Interestingly, I have developed an exaggerated startle reflex to visual stimuli. When I am dealing with emotional stress, or at times when I am concentrating intently on a single task, I frequently jump and scream when someone comes into my line of vision and startles me. These people are usually around six feet tall, and when their presence registers unexpectedly on my consciousness, I panic.
Unfortunately, along with several of my work colleagues, my sixteen year old son falls in this category. Last weekend I was extremely stressed and preoccupied. Over the course of one day, I jumped and screamed in fright about fifteen times at his sudden appearance, though I knew all along he was with us in the house. His feelings were understandably hurt and he was rightly offended that I was so afraid. My distress had nothing to do with him. This reminds me of the experiences of Shosha and her children, as described in “Soft of Hearing”, broadcast on Radio National in 2002.
There are some noises that I just cannot bear to be around. If I hear loud noises and fighting in our street, I run around the house and turn off every noisy appliance, just so I can hear exactly what might be going on out there. I cannot do anything else until it goes away.
The sounds of sibling rivalry used to be constant triggers, until my children began to explore the world of hip hop. How I hated that music when they first began to listen to it! I had to scream at them to turn it off, or I had to leave the room and leave the house. It was not just the level of profanity and discord, nor just the obscene and degrading lyrics, especially where they pertain to male attitudes to women. It was the various layers of noise that were woven together and somehow came to represent many of the kinds of sounds I find it hard to live with. I still object to the sexism, hatred and violence expressed by much of the hip hop that I have heard over the years, but I have trained myself to be able to listen to the sounds and separate the strands into their layers, thus confining them to limits that are tolerable for me. My children get along better than they used to, but I am now able to tune out their senseless bickering.
I live in an area of a housing boom. When I try to work at home amidst the cacophony of trucks, jackhammers and other building equipment, I know it is going to be more useful to stop what I am trying to write or paint and turn my attention instead, to something repetitive or mundane. The wear and tear on my emotions, from having to keep my reactions at bay whilst attempting to sustain my creative output is deleterious to my energy levels. Amidst such ongoing cacophony, forcing myself to relax and take a nap to recover my strength is also an impossibility.
It is in terms of quality of life, that such sensitivity to noise impacts on how well I am able to function as part of ‘normal’ society. Everyone who has learned to adapt to debilitating or limiting physical conditions, whether short-term, recurring, permanent or chronic, knows the cost of such adaptation can be measured by how much energy one has at one’s disposal, for other things.
Mental and emotional fatigue shows up in my life as a chronic physical symptom of PTSD. It is not my imagination or habit that causes my eyelids to droop around eight-thirty at night, and makes me yawn incessantly from then on. I am simply at the end of my tether. The level of auditory distress with which I have had to cope during the day directly determines my level of exhaustion when it comes to dealing with the noises of the night. Sleep is another matter altogether.
My hearing assessment showed that my hearing in both ears lies comfortably within the normal range. No surprises there. When my home is quiet, I can turn my television down to ‘3’ and still understand every word of dialogue. When I lie awake at night, I can hear the pulse in my wrists. The sound of the sheets as they rustle, when I turn over, trying to get comfortable and cosy enough to fall asleep, overwhelms every other sound around me.
Several years ago, I used to wake at night, believing I had heard gun shots next door. The second time I rang the police about this, the kind woman on the other end of the phone reminded me of the road works that were happening at night as tunnels were being blasted through the foothills of Adelaide, twenty kilometers away. I began to pay attention to the gunshots that I heard. Sure enough, they always occurred on the nights when there was blasting going on up there. I stopped bothering the police with my calls of auditory distress.
It’s funny how well I’ve taught myself to tune out false alarms. The trouble is, that in doing so, I also tend to fade out the noises of social discourse that do not represent potential danger or distress. In order to function socially, I have to consciously switch on my hearing and attend to the sounds that people are making around me. Overstimulation is the most frequent result. In attending to conversation, my hearing goes hyperactive. I overhear so many fascinating and intriguing tidbits, that it’s not easy to tune into the one particular strand of conversation in which I have been invited to be involved. This can be quite fun for a while, but it too, leads to exhaustion.
When I need to concentrate, I’ve learned that multitasking is sometimes the only way to do it. I often have two or three things going on in my head at once. If I am anxious while driving, I will sing a song, as well as counting, or reciting a different set of lyrics in my head. This drives my children up the wall. I’ll also add up the numbers on the numberplates of the cars around me, and make up silly acronyms with the letters.
I can carry on conversation fairly well at the same time as counting and singing in my head, though my retention levels are not high. This is probably what leads me to worry about my memory. It has meant that there are gaps in my sense of time. During the conversations, I appear to be attending and even to be a good listener. It’s later that I obsess about what I did or didn’t hear, and whether I was really there at all.
Creating noise is one of the most effective coping strategies I have developed. When the babble of my extravagant emotion becomes too hard for me to bear, I will take to hammering, throwing things around, and rummaging fruitlessly in my pots and pans cupboard just to drown out my own destructive thoughts. These are the times when I tend to break crockery by mistake, because I bang the plates down on the counter with gleeful rage, and throw them into the sink to be washed. It doesn’t make me crazy. It relieves the pressure without hurting anyone else. I also enjoy slamming doors.
But the best thing of all, I have found, is to put on the kind of music that I like to listen to, and to turn it up loud loud loud!. I love to sing my heart out when I’m feeling bad, because it makes me feel so much better. I don’t care about whether the neighbours can hear me through our paper thin walls. I couldn’t care less about the lameness of the lyrics. All that matters when I’m singing is the glory of the sound itself, and the fact that I am choosing to make it, to the exclusion of all other sound around me.
Living with PTSD is challenging. It’s good to reflect on aspects of what this actually entails. I quite like to admit that I have an extravagant emotional life. I can laugh about my exaggerated startle reflex. These are largely private matters, invisible to the naked eye, so to speak. When asked about my levels of health, I am happy to report that I am relentlessly well. I rarely mention the fatigue that now feels normal to me. This doesn’t mean I am not challenged by living with PTSD, but it reflects my strength and pride in the fact that I step up to that challenge and function very well in spite of it.
REFERENCES:
1. Bambridge, K (2005), “Reclaiming a Life”, pp. 128-131 and Searle, B (2005) “My Experiences of having Dissociative Identity Disorder in South Australia “ pp.178-182, The Reclaiming Anthology: healing our wounds M. Magdalena (Ed.) Seaview Press: Adelaide.
2. Searle, B (2005) ), “The Legacy of Freud“ pp.21-28 , ibid.
3. Aviva Sheb’a (2002) “Soft of Hearing”, adapted for radio by Mike Ladd, broadcast in two parts on Radio National 729 FM, (2002).
notoriety
Is it notoriety, when I check google for 'Mersigns' and the entry comes up reading: Mersigns Notify Blogger about objectionable content. What does ... ?
Has someone looked at my blog? I wouldn't know - I have received no comments! And that's OK, because it gives me a certain amount of satisfaction to be able to publish online, whoever looks at the thing.
It teases me though - "objectionable content'? What is objectionable on my blog and what kind of person would have called it objectionable?
In looking through what has so far been published, I notice my earliest posts have disappeared. They were the ones that graphically detailed my experience of PTSD. These were the entries I trembled to write, let alone publish. They are possibly too long and in need of editing, but still, I've never read anything like them by anyone else.
Maybe one is not supposed to speak of such things?
Maybe that is what makes them objectionable?
Well, having worked on four different computers during the past six months, I shall go back in my files, find these writings and republish them.
If there are readers out there, please do feel free to comment.
m.m.m.
Has someone looked at my blog? I wouldn't know - I have received no comments! And that's OK, because it gives me a certain amount of satisfaction to be able to publish online, whoever looks at the thing.
It teases me though - "objectionable content'? What is objectionable on my blog and what kind of person would have called it objectionable?
In looking through what has so far been published, I notice my earliest posts have disappeared. They were the ones that graphically detailed my experience of PTSD. These were the entries I trembled to write, let alone publish. They are possibly too long and in need of editing, but still, I've never read anything like them by anyone else.
Maybe one is not supposed to speak of such things?
Maybe that is what makes them objectionable?
Well, having worked on four different computers during the past six months, I shall go back in my files, find these writings and republish them.
If there are readers out there, please do feel free to comment.
m.m.m.
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