trauma Archive

The Dirty Road

When I was 23 I lived in Calgary. One day I was driving down the highway as I was headed up to Edmonton for the weekend. I was picking up this horrible smell. I couldn’t pinpoint what it was but it smelled something like a sewer had blown up. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. I certainly hoped it wasn’t me. About 10 minutes passed and I saw the cause of the stench. There was an accident and a huge manure truck had tipped over. All the shit spilled out over the highway. The police and firetrucks were there, as were a couple of hazmat trucks. It was a filthy mess and cars had to be navigated through the mess.

Living with panic attacks

When I panic, it feels like my heart is stopping, or that my guts have been turned inside out, or that some sort of massive steam shovel or something has pulled out all my insides and rearranged them and dumped them into random places in my body. Sometimes I feel like the walls are falling in on me, and I can feel the space I am in (or at least my perception of it) going dark. Sometimes I start self-harming by punching myself or slapping myself or punching walls or hard objects or hitting my head against them. Sometimes I become dissociative and do not remember the incident. Sometimes none of these things happen and it manifests quite differently.

My Experience with Dissociative Identity Disorder (Lily)

Trigger Warning: Self-Harm, Abuse, Rape, Human Trafficking

I’ve been half-aware that I’m multiple since about the age of fourteen, when I started to realise that it really wasn’t usual for people to experience severe blackouts and time loss and memory issues (lasting hours, days, weeks, months and even years); that it wasn’t usual for people to so routinely and constantly be addressed by a completely different name by strangers who will insist that you have met them and that your name is something else; that it wasn’t usual for moods and personalities and tastes to change so drastically and so constantly. I had no word for what I was experiencing; I had no knowledge and no understanding and after about a year of being so, so aware of this I finally told my (then) therapist about those experiences. The result? A long lecture about self-diagnosis and “making up more lies to make my supposed PTSD more believable” followed by being asked about where I had researched Dissociative Identity Disorder and that I did know that it was made up and not real and that nobody would ever believe me. So, for almost ten years I hid it except from a very close friend online and one of my partners (he lived with me so it was very difficult to hide).

Group Therapy – Panic and Anxiety, Session 1

Trigger Warning: mention of rape, sexual assault

This is the first of an 8 week series reviewing panic and anxiety from a group therapy point of view. It is based on the group therapy services available through Langley Memorial Hospital. Feel free to follow along and answer the questions posted in each section.

Session 1: Exploring Anxiety Disorders

My Experience With Recovery (Breyonne)

Seven years ago I got tired of living my life the way I was. I couldn’t stop drinking, smoking, eating or doing drugs. I was sick constantly. I was living in harmful situations with toxic people, and each and every day was exactly the same. My only respite was to go out and get loaded again.

How to be an Ally to Disabled & Neurodiverse Folks in Activist & Academic Communities

This is based on my own experience as a Disabled, Trans, Queer, Autistic activist. In compiling this list, I consulted other Disabled activists as well. Most activism I’ve been involved with has taken place in Queer, Radical, & Academic communities. I’ve been both a grass-roots activist and a student activist. I do not claim to speak on behalf of Neurodiverse or Disabled folks–or any group for that matter. Here are a few ideas I’ve compiled on how to be a better Ally to folks who have been left out of social and political movements/communities:

Checking Out, Letting Go: On Acceptance of Dissociation and Depersonalization

Trigger warning for discussions of dissociation, depersonalization, hallucination, society treating mental differences like shit, abuse and trauma, and reactions to trauma, etc.

I dissociate. Depersonalize. It’s sort of like when everything becomes so intense that everything I am, takes one step (or a few) back from my body.

Demons and Other Monsters

I’ve always known that monsters were real.  When I was five years old I asked my father to tell me a scary story, so he told me about the first house he lived in alone, down the road from his parent’s farm in Springport County, Indiana.   Daddy heard a “clip-clop clip-clop” on the tin […]