My Experience with PTSD (Hanners)

Trigger warnings for description of sexual assault, description of self-harm and suicide methods.

PTSD. Four letters that mean so much. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It’s quite a misunderstood illness. I’ve heard many people ask, “can’t you only get that if you’ve been fighting in a war?” Most people don’t know what the symptoms are, other than the trademark flashbacks, but even then, people tend to think of them as hallucinatory memories. Most don’t think about the anger, the lack of sleep, or the constant watching your back.

Almost 10 years ago now, I was molested. I was 19 and travelling, about to come home 3 days later. I started talking to this man in the hallway of my hotel, when a staff member came by and told us no loitering. Thinking nothing of it, I let him into my room so we could continue talking. He sat beside me, on my bed, a little too close, and felt me up my leg while I sat there, frozen and unable to move. I’m not even sure he was aware I never gave my consent. I don’t know how long it lasted, I lost my sense of time in that moment. When I finally unfroze, I walked across the room, and he eventually left.

The first thing I did after the incident was find an internet café and contact my mom, telling her everything that happened. I got told that it was nothing, and that it was my fault for letting him in my room in the first place. When I said I didn’t want to go back and would find another hotel, she suggested it was a waste of money. When I got home, the thought of being touched made my skin crawl. My family couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to be hugged. My mom took offence to it. The more she tried to force me to hug people, the less I trusted her.

By the time the new semester at university began, I started having flashbacks to the event. I’d ‘see’ the event in my mind, recalling every bit of it. By ‘every bit of it’ I mean all of it, including the emotions, and especially the fear. Oh, the fear was especially strong, just how I’d felt it in the moment when it happened. The flashbacks would hit at random times – at home, at school, with family – sometimes the fear was so compelling I felt the urge to run and hide. One time at school I hid under a table for a good half hour before I got up again. My flashbacks weren’t visual in nature.

This was right around the time I was coming out, and, as I hadn’t yet realized I was trans, a wave of homophobia washed over me. I didn’t trust men, especially gay men. It was horrible, I felt so conflicted because I knew these feelings were wrong. I was ashamed of myself, ashamed of being homophobic, ashamed of being afraid of my own community. I’ve never been the type to be homophobic, I learned to accept diversity in all forms from an early age, despite being exposed to my mother’s homophobic attitude. So to be feeling this fear of gay men, felt really alien and wrong to me.

Later, things just got worse. I’d had a bit of a history of self-harm, where I’d hit myself in the head, or bang my head repeatedly on a wall. I knew about cutting, but hadn’t made the connection to the more general idea of self-harm or self-injury, so I’d never really thought about the head-banging as anything out of the ordinary (as an adult with a deeper understanding of mental health issues, I do now). But now I was thinking about cutting, which scared me. I caught myself trying to cut on my hand with a pencil, thankfully it didn’t do anything but after that I became very vigilant about not cutting anymore – I didn’t want it to become a habit, so I figured if I drew the line there, it wouldn’t. It worked for me, thankfully.

I also had moments where I would just ‘zone out’ for a while – it would be like I was leaving my body, and watching myself from a birds’ eye view. I was completely disconnected from myself, a very unpleasant feeling. The only good thing about it was that for the moment I could get a break from the flood of emotions I was always feeling. I could step away from the anger, the fear, the anxiety. I used to call the anxiety ‘stale adrenaline’ because to me it seemed like it was what it would feel like if you had an adrenaline rush that just never left your body. These would last sometimes weeks at a time. I wouldn’t learn until much more recently that these episodes of zoning out were called dissociation and depersonalization.

I asked my family for help, but I just got brushed off, and told to quit complaining, it could have been way worse. My mom laughed it off when I said I needed to see a therapist. The good thing about being in university, was being able to access a therapist through my school, at no charge. I went to see one, and had weekly sessions. Over time, they helped a lot. It was my therapist who suggested that I was probably dealing with PTSD. The counselling really helped though – being able to start addressing the event and everything I was feeling afterward made a difference for me. As an aside, it was through therapy that I started to address my gender issues – and eventually go on to transition to female.

Anger was a big part of my experience with PTSD. Oddly enough, it wasn’t directed at the man who touched me. I forgave him long ago, not long after the event. I’ve chalked it up to a miscommunication – he never realized I never gave my consent – and I couldn’t speak up because my fear had taken over. I was never angry at him. My anger was directed at my mom, mostly, and some at my dad – for dismissing my feelings like they were nothing, for ignoring my pleas for help. I often wonder if they had been there for me when I needed it, would I have had such a difficult time with this?

Recovery took me over 2 years – and even then, it wasn’t like I was ‘cured.’ The flashbacks became less frequent and less intense following therapy. The dissociation disappeared. The difficulty sleeping and the hypervigilance remained. I have a hard time trusting people, especially men. Dating women is easier for me, as I find I make men work harder to prove themselves to me. Sexist, I know, but I can’t help it. I’ve tried, but old anxieties just come bubbling up to the surface again.

-

A year and a half ago, a conversation with my mom went sour. She’d let her transphobia be known once again, and this time I just wasn’t going to deal with it, so I hung up on her. A few hours later I went to bed. The next thing I know, it’s about midnight and my phone won’t stop ringing. I got up to complain to my roommate, who was looking pretty spooked. He told me there was a woman outside our apartment, asking if this is where Hanners lived! So I checked my voicemails, and sure enough, my mom was leaving a number of vitriolic messages, and demanding I come outside to speak with her.

Now, I know my mom well. When she wants to speak to me, what she really wants is to talk down to me until I have no choice to agree with her. She gives people no chance to argue their side. If they try, she just shouts over them so they can’t be heard. She also has a history of being physically violent with me. And at this point, she was in a rage that I’d never seen in her before – I didn’t know what she might do. I was terrified by her actions. If I go outside, will she get violent? If I don’t, will she try to break in?

I answered her next call, and she started her vitriol right away. I cut her off, and told her if she didn’t leave immediately, that I’d call the cops and have her removed from the premesis. At this point, she said she didn’t give a damn, and that if I didn’t come out, she’d wait until morning and grab me on my way out. I hung up and called the police. The policewoman on the other end of the line was really nice, and did her best to keep me calm. I explained the situation (even mentioned that I was trans) and she tried to talk me through it. At one point, she had my roommate go outside to see if my mom was still around (she was driving around the building, and threatened and chased my roommate when she saw him). She said she’d have someone come by as soon as possible.

It turned out, “as soon as possible” meant over 2 hours. In the meantime, my mom kept calling back constantly. It only stopped when apparently her cell phone battery died finally, around 2am. The cops didn’t show up until about half an hour later, after she’d already left. I made the mistake of listening to all the voicemails my mom had left. In them, she’d made a number of threats – including to grab me and take me with her (presumably to the cabin she was heading to, where I wouldn’t be able to leave), and to have me locked up in a mental institution.

It was the kidnapping threat that got to me. The next morning, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was still out there, waiting to grab me, like she’d threatened, even though I knew she wasn’t (and believe me, I checked – obsessively). This feeling overrode everything else for the next week, and I wasn’t able to completely shake it off until about 3 weeks later. In the meantime, I struggled with sleeping in my own bed, and when I could sleep, I started having nightmares. I’d had nightmares before, surrounding my mom. Around the time I had my SRS, I would have these nightmares where my mom would show up and undo my transition – including one where she grabbed me, pushed me into a van, and the next thing I know I’m waking up in a hospital with my penis reattached! But these nightmares were fundamentally different. These new ones revolved around my mother chasing me and trying to kill me. One was so frightening, I woke up in such a terror, I was convinced I was dead.

At first the sleep issues had an easy solution – I just went to sleep over at my boyfriend’s – especially as it was growing increasingly difficult to sleep in my own room, as the fear that she would come back became overwhelming. I would be easily startled by my phone ringing, so most days I just left it on vibrate instead. I changed the path I took when leaving the apartment, avoiding the open space where my mom stood out in front that night. Any vehicles that resembled the one my mom drove up in freaked me out, and made me suspicious that it was her. I’d check license plates just to make sure it wasn’t her. I began checking locks obsessively, in case she might come back and try to come in. Sleep became more and more elusive, and I began taking sleeping pills just to get to sleep at night.

The sleeping pills didn’t last very long. My doctor didn’t want me to become dependent on them for sleep, so I only took them for a few weeks. At this point, we started talking about PTSD again – this new incident had triggered a bad relapse. But sleep was still a big problem. It was becoming impossible for me to sleep in my own bed. While it helped before to sleep at my boyfriend’s place, it quickly became problematic there too. I was so angry at my mom, for her actions, and at my dad, for not stopping it, and for defending her actions. The anger especially came up at night, keeping me awake. When I did get to sleep, the nightmares followed.

Depression was setting in, too. Within a couple months after the incident, I started thinking about ways to kill myself. I’d look at a tall building and think about how easy it would be to just jump off, if I could just get up to the roof. Or I’d look at a rope and imagine hanging myself with it. At first I could look at myself and wonder why I was thinking these thoughts, but it didn’t take long before they took over. I stopped getting out of bed, except to go to the bathroom, and occasionally, eat.

At the same time, sleeping was getting so bad, I ended up having to give up my apartment. I just couldn’t function in my own home, without anxiety taking me over. I had lived in this apartment for over 4 years, it was so hard to give it up, but in the end, the anxiety won. I ended up moving in with my boyfriend at the end of the year. Even in the new place, anxiety caught up to me. I was always watching my back, terrified that my mom had found out where I was living and would show up again. I’d scan the neighborhood repeatedly to make sure she wasn’t around before going out.

The nightmares continued, too. By this time, the nightmares had shifted again – now they were less about being followed by my mom, and revolved more around memories of times when my mother was physically abusive to me when I was little. Sometimes I’d even wake up, disoriented, thinking I was in my old childhood bed before I’d realize again where I was. I’d cling to my boyfriend in the middle of the night just to keep myself grounded in reality.

What really saved my sleep was melatonin. You can get melatonin supplements over the counter. I had these 3mg caplets that I would take. The first night, 3mg was way too strong, and as I drifted off rapidly to sleep, I saw ghosts floating through my room, really scary to see. After that I opened up the caplets and only took 1mg each night, tapping the powder into a spoonful of applesauce. As I got used to the melatonin, I gradually worked my way back up to the 3mg. I was taking the melatonin for almost a year before I finally managed to wean myself off of it. I tried repeatedly to come off the melatonin, but each time the insomnia returned. It’s only in the last few months that I’ve been able to manage adequate sleep without needing the melatonin, and mostly because the nightmares have started to fade.

I’m not over it yet. I’ve moved twice again, after my boyfriend and I broke up. I’m still afraid of my mom finding out where I live, and showing up again. She’s tried to contact me a couple times now since the incident, and both times set me off into bad panic attacks. The anger is there, as strong as ever, and it makes it difficult to talk to the rest of my family. The anger drives me to obsess about how I can get my family to understand the toxic nature of my mother. I’m always watching my back, no matter where I go. This hypervigilance is very draining.

After the breakup, I started smoking pot for about a month and a half. It helped keep my moods stable (helpful because I also have bipolar disorder), but I also noticed the nightmares finally faded away after the pot. I quit smoking pot after going on a mood stabilizer, and the nightmares so far haven’t returned. Perhaps there was some medicinal usefulness from the pot? I hope so, but continuing to smoke just wasn’t worth it for me, I didn’t enjoy the high, it just reminded me of what I felt like when I was taking my sleeping pills.

I don’t know how long it will take me to move on. I still get the occasional trigger, which brings the fear of the moment back to the surface for me to feel all over again. Most of the time, the triggers make sense – there’s an obvious connection to why it brought up a memory – but on rare occasions, a trigger will make no sense at all. Writing about the experience has been very therapeutic – it’s made it easier to process the events, my memories, and my feelings surrounding it all. The anger follows me wherever I go. I think it’s the anger that’s the most debilitating for me – it just takes up so much energy, and remains stuck in my head. I want to let go so bad, but my head just won’t let me.