Character traits? Symptoms?

 

Message I received from an anonymous friend addressed to me. RiP, dear friend. – “Do you ever feel like you’re screaming in a room full of people but go unheard? I read your story, twice and then the comments. It seems that very few recognize that your PTSD was related to your childhood abuse and probably existed before your Acquired Brain Injury. Do you ever find that you have a hard time getting people to focus on the other aspects of your life? Listening to anything that happened in your life before-hand. I just wanted to let you know that I heard you. I hope you continue your journey of healing and are emotionally able to continue to help other victims of childhood sexual abuse. Thinking of you.”

My response: “Yes, I feel that way a lot. People have been through a lot as well. It's tough a lot of the time to acknowledge stuff like that. Even that it even exists. People are supporting me in the way they are able. And I am so grateful for that. Yes, my PTSD was terrible. Even as a very small child. I have cPTSD. The injury that happened to me compounded the trauma. By the time I was 15 years old, I was pretty much hysterical. Thanks again for the message dear friend. It's nice to know people care. And especially that my subtle way of illustrating the seriousness of trauma was noticed and appreciated.”

You know what my abusers did to me. There is never an excuse for violence. An act. An act of destruction is always, always worse than an idea of destruction…

The reason I have had difficulty getting back into society, “getting my act together” as they say is because of what people have done to me. I have cPTSD. Because of what they did to me. Because of what they did to me… Because of stuff my relationally close abusers did to me, to form me. I was stumbled from day one. I was reacting from when I was a toddler. Nobody asked why. Nobody saw what I was going through at my living arrangements. Someone could have picked up on these signs. The fact that I reacted is not a character trait of mine. It is a symptom. As is the same for most of us. Let me say very clearly that none of the ways in which I reacted would have happened had truth come out, or had these things not been done to me.

You can try to rationalize as much as you want beating a kid nearly to death. It doesn’t work. You cannot justify an act of violence.

It was not cigarettes that made me flip out. It was an accumulation of stress and feelings and trauma that made me freak. I didn’t know how to interact with the world because the world was always attacking me. It was a war zone. My enemies were those closest to me. I was hysterical and in shock most of the time that year. I was not myself.  

I am not racist. I never was racist. How I reacted was a delirious misplaced expression of anger as a result of abuser’s treatment of me. By the time that happened I was already being raped for almost 15 years. My friends and I were always protesting a changing culture. I was unable to express that coherently. I was unable to express the anger I felt towards my abusers because of the inherent power dynamic in the relationship. So the anger came out when we began to be bullied. To prove that I am not racist, I have spent the past five or six years learning Hebrew and interacting with native speakers. I have read almost all of Dr. King’s books. I have one favorite speech that he offered.